Balak (Hasidism)

The First Word

As the opening words of prayer said upon entering the synagogue, Mah Tovu (“How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your tabernacles, O Israel”; Num 24:5) are taken from Bilaam’s culminating blessing in this week’s portion, it is appropriate to turn to Hasidic teaching concerning the very beginning of prayer. In this week and the next, I will bring several passages from the collection found in Sefer Ba’al Shem Tov, Amud ha-Tefillah. We shall begin with §31:

A person must guard his mouth and tongue from all speech, and our Rabbis were strict about refraining even from permitted speech prior to prayer, such as greeting others (Berakhot 14a), because even it is harmful prior to prayer.

For it is known that the world was created by thought, speech and action, and that first of all was thought, and then speech which is an offshoot of thought, and then action which is an offshoot of speech. Similarly, when a person rises from his sleep he is like a new creature, as Scripture says, “Anew every morning” [Lam 3:23]. [Thus,] if he first speaks permitted words [i.e., as opposed to words of mitzvah], and all the more so words that are not [i.e., forbidden speech, such as lies or idle chitchat or gossip], even if he thereafter prays and engages in Torah, everything he does branches off and is drawn after that first act of speech. For just as speech is a branch of thought and subsidiary to it, so is the second act of speech subsidiary to the first; for this matter is analogous to what is written in the Zohar (Kedoshim, III:83a) and in the writings of the Ari z”l, concerning respect for one’s elder brother: for the first born receives the main portion [of the father’s power, spiritual essence, etc.], and the other brothers are offshoots and branches of him. Hence a person should take care to sanctify and purify his first word, and to refine his first thought, that it might be attached to holiness, so as to draw after it all of the thoughts that follow. And thereafter, when he stands up in prayer out of joy in the mitzvah, having sanctified his thought and speech, his prayer will certainly be answered.

The Baal Shem Tov stresses that prayer is the very first thing that a person does at the beginning of his day. Whatever allowance he or other teachers may make, or even suggest in a positive way, in preparation for prayer—bathing in the mikveh; study, particularly works of Musar or Hasidism that prepare one’s heart for prayer; reciting psalms or other hymns—are all strictly within the realm of “acts of mitzvah.” Even casual conversation or greetings to one’s fellow, on the way to synagogue or once one has arrived there, are seen as anathema. This is because the first act one performs has a special significance, leaving its mark on all that follows.

The Baal Shem Tov’s approach, is I remarked previously (see Amud ha-Tefillah §39, which I translated in HY IV: Noah), is very strict in insisting that one pray in the early morning—ideally, as the sun rises (vatikin). At times, one has an image of Hasidim as regarding prayer with a certain careless, cavalier attitude, drifting into shul late in the morning. All this is almost diametrically opposed to the Besht’s own doctrine, which sees prayer as the central spiritual moment of the day, to be approached with all due awe and seriousness.

Contra Rushkoff

Parshat Balak is always a good time to talk about the meaning of Jewish being in the world, our Sages having often observed out that the pagan magician-cum-prophet Bilaam somehow captured the essence of the people Israel far better than anyone from within the Jewish nation.

Douglass Rushkoff, journalist, media expert, and self-styled expert on matters Jewish, recently [writing in 2003]created something of a stir in the American Jewish community in a series of provocative articles concerning these issues, including an op-ed in the New York Times. In his article “Suicide Jews: The Self-Imposed Death of Institutional Judaism” (New York Press, 16: 24), he calls upon Jews to open a far more open dialogue among themselves as to just what their Jewishness is all about. In brief, he characterizes Judaism, not as a dogmatic religion, but as ”a 3000-year-old debate about what happened on Mount Sinai and what we’re supposed to do about it.” Sinai itself did same thing for religion that the internet did to media and culture: “leaving behind the idols so as to forge a new way of life… Judaism abstracted God so that people could become thinking active adults.” Monotheism is thus a kind of call for responsible ethical autonomy. (In a way, this is not so different from what David Hartman has been calling for in A Living Covenant and his other books.) In the process, he particularly criticizes the Jewish obsession with “tribalism”—i.e., the Holocaust, its own ethnic survival, and Israel.

It’s easy to criticize the American Jewish establishment, and Rushkoff does so with a vengeance. His is a sort of pot-luck mixture of some good ideas, a refreshing spirit of openness, honesty, and willingness to open up the discussion, combined with some cheap demagoguery and just plain ignorance about the subject. (But in America you evidently don’t need to really know anything about a subject, especially Judaism, to be proclaimed an authority of sorts and to be invited to talk-shows and prestigious printed forums.)

Let me start with what I think is good in what I’ve read of what he’s written. Since I haven’t lived in the United States for nearly thirty years, I cannot evaluate first hand what’s happening inside American Jewry. However, if it’s anything like what I remember from my youth and what I’ve gathered over the years from conversations with visitors to the Holy Land, he’s quite rightly critical of the American Jewish establishment—the large organizations such as the Federation, the UJA, the ADL, the two AJC’s, etc., run by a small oligarchy of wealthy men, who are the self-appointed friends and defenders of Israel, whose agenda is dominated by “ethnic” rather than “spiritual” issues, and who tend to pay little attention to the interests and needs of the “Jew in the street.” All this has gotten much worse and far more polarized over the past thirty years due to several factors: 1) the Intifada and sharpening of the situation in Israel. Israel has become simultaneously more successful, middle-class and prosperous, and at the same time less secure, since the whole sad progression of events running from the 1977 ascent of the Likud, the Oslo agreements, Rabin’s assassination, the failure of Camp David 2000, the second Intifada, and Sharon’s rise to power; 2) the passing of the old generation, which had a more immediate, almost instinctive sense of Jewishness, who still remembered what it was like to be a greenhorn, or at least the child of a “greener”; 3) the receding of the Holocaust into history, as the last survivors move into old age; 4) the increase in intermarriage, which has greatly raised the level of anxiety about Jewish survival and continuity; 5) the emergence of a strong, self-confident Orthodoxy: largely professional, middle-class, thoroughly at home in America, successful in attracting a certain number of seekers to become “ba’alei teshuvah,” while aggressive and even triumphalist in its religious attitudes.

The essence of Rushkoff’s argument is the seemingly reasonable claim that Judaism ought to focus upon religious issues: the meaning of life, ethics, human responsibility, etc., rather than upon ethnicity. The problem is that his definitions of Judaism, or Jewishness, and his assumption that it ought to be defined as a religion, is all wrong.

While endless discussion about “What is Judaism?” sound to me a bit puerile, reminding me more than anything of college bull sessions or earnest discussions at Jewish summer camps like Tel-Yehudah, in retrospect I realize that in my youth I received certain basic fundaments from my youth movement, a strong dose of clarity about the problematics and seeming paradoxes of Jewish identity. For others less fortunate than myself, these issues need to be rehearsed.

There are three seemingly rival claims:

1) Judaism as nationality: More so than the actual act of bringing Jews to Israel, or even establishing a state, this is the revolutionary insight of Zionist thought. i.e., Judaism understood as nationalism, in a kind of 19th century, non-sacred model.

2) Judaism as religion: but what is implicit here is a basically Western definition of religion as a personal creed, belief system, etc. It is perceived as something essentially individual and personal, given to freedom of choice, association, and definition. The implicit motto (I forget who said it; help, anyone?) is that “Religion is what man does with his aloneness.”

3) Judaism as “a nation by virtue of its Torah,” as the ninth century Babylonian sage Saadyah Gaon put it. That is, a kind of synthesis of the two. This is a very traditional understanding of matters: the halakhah and Torah are the Constitution (which they certainly seem to be in the Torah). Conversion is a process of being adopted as a member of the tribe or, as some would say, reborn into it. Mikveh = womb (or, as one outrageous Hazal has it, a Jewish mother’s womb is a purifying mikveh).

Two side comments: About bar mitzvah, Rushkoff writes: “No statements of faith required—just literacy and an opinion about what you’ve read earn you a place at the table.” I like the sentiment, but the truth is that Bar Mitzvah is not “admission into the covenant” at all. It is simply a marking, a celebration of the milestone, which happens automatically upon reaching 13 years without doing anything about it. Strictly speaking, the statement one sometimes hears, “I’ve never been bar [or bat-] mitzvahed“ is meaningless halakhically. I have no objection to anyone who feels this as a lack to celebrate his/her bar/bat mitzvah at any age, but it does not affect any change in status.

Secondly, even circumcision, while considered as admission into the covenant of Abraham, does not “make the baby into a Jew.” An uncircumcised Jew is also a Jew, albeit one with a certain outstanding obligation incumbent upon him. (See Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, p. 90, for an interesting anecdote about this.) Approach number three (i.e., “a nation-religion”), while in some ways essentially correct, leafs in today’s context to a type of Orthodox monopoly on the discussion of who is or is not a Jew, and by implication of what Jewishness means. As a result one has the whole process of exclusion, the fights over the issue in Israel wit their implications in terms of legislation, government policy, etc.

My own way of dealing with this is what might be called a “two-track definition.” Religion and nationhood are two components of Jewishness, which can live independently, alongside one another, intermingled with one another, or in whatever symbiosis you can think up. One can never resolve the question by saying Judaism, or Jewishness, is only a religion or only a nationhood. It is somehow both. I say this, not so much as a priori definitions, but quite simply based on empirical life experience observation of what Jews are and how they define themselves.

It is a religion, because there is a Torah, a body of religious thought, etc. Here, I’d of course take exception to Rushkoff trying to reduce it all to iconoclasm = the religion of human maturity = autonomy and freedom. The factors of halakhah, of covenant, of God experience, of the sad but wise awareness of human folly and weakness and propensity to err in the pursuit of the good, all play an important role here. (I will not attempt to summarize my own religious position, to which I prefer not to attach any institutional labels, because every word I’ve written in the present forum over the past four years is in a sense an addressing of the macro-question: What does it mean to be a Jew today? This weekly sheet spells out my ideas to my readers or, perhaps better, allows them to listen in on my own internal debate and ponderings.) I certainly allow much room for accepting the validity of the views and approaches of others—but that does not mean that I won’t argue with them. After all, arguing is the great Jewish all-weather indoor-outdoor sport. And I do have this strange belief that my protagonist should be able to defend his position with arguments that are both coherent and intelligent, and based on the tradition, and not merely on glittering generalities.

The Jews are a people: which I define as an organic body, with a culture, language, territory, history, ethnic components, etc. But not all components are necessary to define peoplehood. For some Jews (in Israel, especially) the territorial-linguistic aspect is very important. For American Jews, it’s more amorphous. But peoplehood, defined as history, culture, a sense of identity, an inter-relatedness of destiny, does exist. The problem is that the Jews in US have become so acculturated, that they’ve lost much of this. Thus, what’s left is often a type of cheap, sentimental, heavily guilt-loaded type of “continuity” and “survivalist” messages, conveyed in ignorant and vulgar ways. But the fact that the arguments are presented in these off-putting ways doesn’t mean that they’re automatically wrong! I suspect, or at least hope, that what Rushkoff objects to here is not so much the content of the messages, but: a) the low intellectual level at which they’re conveyed; b) the power moves of the “gatekeepers,” as he calls them; c) the absence of serious theological - religious-ideological discussion.

Regarding his comment that, “In an era in which spirituality is about breaking the illusion of self, who wants to be part of a religion or a people that is turned so inward?” There seems to be a covert assumption here that Buddhism is somehow the “in” or defining religion of this movement in history, surely not a self-evident fact. But even if so, perhaps Judaism offers an alternative vision? A balance between healthy ego and transcending ego (see , e.g., the Hasidic teachings which have become popular in certain spiritually-seeking elements in Jewry today), between awareness of self and hearkening to the Other (as in Levinas’ reading of Talmudic ethos).

About Israel, he says much that I find objectionable and ill-informed. He raises the red herring of “gun-toting orthodox extremists from Brooklyn.” The settler’s movement was in fact an indigenous Israeli development, based partly, as he says, upon a type of biblically-motivated vision of “manifest destiny,“ among a certain specific group of the “young guard” of the Mafdal (NRP); but in equal measure by a desire for lebensraum, the attractiveness to a certain generation of Israelis raised in 80-square-meter apartments for a suburban house with garden. The leaders of the movement—Rav Moshe Levinger, Hanan Porath, Bentzi Leiberman, Yisrael Ariel, Benny Katzover, Rav Dov Lior, and perhaps most important its spiritual mentor, the late Rav Zvi Yehudah Kook—are or were all Israelis. Nary a Brooklynite among them. Even Baruch Marzel, the leader of the successor to Meir Kahane’s movement, who recently ran a rather hysterical and unsuccessful Knesset campaign, is the son of old-time Yekke immigrants. But why bother with facts when you have such an easy-to-hate stereotype?! (promulgated, incidentally, by Newsweek and other news media not known for their sympathy to Israel). Admittedly, both Meir Kahane was from Brooklyn, as were some of his followers, as was Baruch Goldstein; but until Kahane’s assassination he built a movement with lots of native Israeli elements—poor, frustrated kids, Sephardim, Haredi, from poor neighborhoods—as well as a certain percentage of American immigrants. I challenge the learned Mr. Rushkoff to find more than a 50% majority of Americans (let alone Brooklynites) even in the hard-core settlements of Yitzhar, Itamar, and Tapuah, let alone in the West Bank as a whole. What also rightly annoys him, again a weather change in the US in the last thirty-odd years, is the alliance with fundamentalist Christians: the Evangelical, Moral-Majority-type Republican “friends of Israel,” whom many Jews find quite alienating as friends and political allies. Are there people in the Jewish establishment who are implying, however covertly, that “We Jews should all become Republicans because they’re our natural allies”? I can imagine finding such a view rather disturbing.

But all this is peripheral to the main issue about Israel. The “intransigence” of Israel, the broad support of right wing parties, is less a result of fundamentalist religion than it is a natural consequence of Intifada. There is a sense of betrayal, of frustration, particularly after the sight of the Palestinian delegation packing their bags after the 2000 Camp David summit. It has become fashionable among certain circles to say that Barak set up Arafat for failure (he did say in a subsequent interview that he was interested in “testing” Arafat; but that does not mean that he was not genuinely and sincerely interested in reaching a settlement, and that his far-reaching concessions were not real). But it seems to me—and I don’t want to get into a controversial discussion of Middle East politics—that Arafat does bear at least 50% of the blame for the impasse, and the rejection of Barak’s government was a natural, perfectly understandable, human reaction of Israeli voters, after months of terrorist attacks in the cities and highways. I should note that I have always personally identified with the Israeli peace camp, and am infuriated by many things our government does and, along with the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, I believe that the ’67 occupation was the mother of all sins, and that Sharon is cast perfectly as the proverbial bull in a china shop (he has a long record as the enfante terrible of Israeli politics and military)—but the issue is a complex one, and those who seriously think that Israel could make peace if it only tried hard enough (or that President Bush could impose peace if only he wasn’t so worried about the Jewish vote) are simplifying an enormously complex and difficult situation. There are aspects of Arab-Muslim culture which make their accepting non-Muslim sovereignty over what they consider to be their sacred turf next to impossible. The concept of the Dhimmi is alive and kicking in the Middle East. Perhaps the best we can hope for is what Ha-Aretz columnist Ari Shavit recently described as a “Kissingerian” solution, a make-shift, temporary modus vivendi which enables each side to make workable compromises while saving face, and rhetoric, by pretending that they haven’t conceded anything in the long term.

Finally, about the issues of both Israel and the Holocaust: these are thrust upon us by our history, not a voluntary decision. Judaism has a specific historical nexus. The concern about survival, intermarriage, remembering the Holocaust, caring about Israel, come from there. There is a need to address spiritual, transcendent, “universal” issues, but one cannot fault “the Jewish establishment” for being concerned about these. However coarse and vulgar the expressions and political maneuvering involved, the impulse itself comes from the deepest historical instincts of Jews. To say: “we should create a new Judaism, a religion of human maturity,” sounds good on paper, but is limited and based on historical short-sightedness. To conclude, as a good homilist, with a verse from our parsha: the phrase “a people that dwells alone” (am levadad iyishkon) is as true today as it was over three thousand years ago.