Hitzei Yehonatan

Bo (Wanderings)

2012-01-31T11:02:00.000-08:00

Moses and Aaron

“Whoever says something in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world” In that spirit, I wish to present here some ideas from an outstanding sermon I heard last Shabbat at my local synagogue, Beit Boyer, from Rabbi Michael Melchior, our rabbi, leader of the Meimad movement, and former Knesset Member and Minister who, as a public figure, knows something about leadership, the topic discussed. I bring it below with some comments and elaborations of my own.

He began by asking about an anomaly in Parshat Vaera: immediately following the “four languages of redemption” and God’s command to Moses to go to Pharaoh to ask him to free the Israelites (thereby precipitating his refusal, and the ten plagues), there is a brief genealogical section (Exod 6:14-28), which interrupts the flow of the account of events, after which the Torah picks up where it has left off. (It shows that it is doing so by repeating almost verbatim in vv. 29-30 what is stated in vv. 10-12) The question is: What is the purpose of this passage, which is not a compete list of the offspring of all twelve sons of Jacob, but begins with Reuven and Shimon and then, after listing the clans of Levi and the parentage of Moses and Aaron, ends.

Rav Melchior suggested that the main purpose of this passage is to introduce, not Moses (although it does give the names of his parents, Amram and Yocheved, who in 2:1 are merely identified as “a Levite man” and “a daughter of Levi”), but Aaron. True, Aaron is briefly mentioned in Chs. 4 and 5 as going to meet Moses In the wilderness, as accompanying him to Pharaoh, and as talking to the Israelites with him. Here we are told in detail of his parentage, of his marriage to Elisheva bat Aminadav—who, unlike, Moses’ Midianate wife, was from within the Israelite nation; indeed, from one of the families of Judah—as well as the names of his children.

What is the point? Rav Melchior suggested that Moses and Aaron represent two very different, but complementary kinds of leadership. Moses was a prophet, a man of God, a visionary, one who, according to our tradition, enjoyed the highest degree of closeness to God possible for a human being. He frequently serves as an intermediary between God and the people; indeed, at times it is unclear whether he is more the people’s spokesman to God or God’s spokesman to the people; or, to phrase it differently, whether he is more “at home” among his fellow human beings or in the heavenly realm, almost like one of the angels.

As a result of Moses’ sublime spiritual level, he could not easily relate to ordinary people. He simply was not interested in the same things that they were. Incidentally, I occurred to me that this may explain a seeming contradiction in his character: namely, that he simultaneously extremely humble, yet subject to intense bursts of anger. Anger is often the result of an exaggerated ego, of a sense of self-importance, but in Moses’ case it would seem to stem from the exact opposite: intense devotion to an ideal, so much so that he was unable to comprehend how others could be more concerned with worldly things and less passionately committed than himself.

Aaron, by contrast, was a man of the people. He moved among them easily, he understood their soul, their troubles, and empathized with them, (At times too much so; witness his role in making the Golden Calf). Nor is he burdened by the ambiguities of Moses’ identity, who was seen by Yitro’s daughters as an “Egyptian man” (Exod 2:19), having grown up in the royal palace; unlike Moses, he marries within the tribe. He is described in Pirkei Avot as “loving peace and pursuing peace.” He is a reconciler—even, at times, according to a well-known midrash, telling white lies to bridge the gaps between people. Hence he was able to serve as a kind of intermediary between Moses and the people, as Moses’ “mouth” or “prophet” (see Exod 4:14-17; 7:1).

These complementary (or perhaps opposed?) roles may also be seen in Aaron’s function as priest, as against Moshe’s prophetic–teaching–rebuking role. The priesthood is, in a certain sense, more down-to earth, ministering to the peoples’ needs—for atonement and forgiveness, for reconciliation with God notwithstanding their all-too-human failures, for a ritual that expresses Divine acceptance and ignoring of their faults. There is also a kind of “fellowship” with God and with one another, symbolized by the shelamim, the wholeness-offerings.

In this week’s parashah, we read what is conventionally described as the first mitzvah n the Torah, Kiddush ha-Hodesh, the declaration and sanctifying of the new moon by means of observation, and the laws of Passover that come in its wake, Interestingly, this law is given to Moses and Aaron together: “this month shall be for you’all [plural]…” (Exod 12:1-2). It would be interesting to trace those places in which God addresses Moses alone, and those in which He addresses Moses and Aaron together, to try to discern some underlying pattern. (See my essay on a related point—the staff: is it Moses’ or Aaron’s? See HY XII: Hukat).

Thus, in Moses and Aaron, one might say, we find two complementary types of leadership: the one a visionary, who demands of the people that they excel themselves, that they overcome their natural limits, in pursuit of the ideal, holy society; the other a man of the people, a peacemaker, a solemn, ceremonial figure who softens the harshness and moralizing and uncompromising demands of the visionary. One without the other would be no good. If there were Aaron alone, you would have mediocrity; with Moses alone, life would be unbearable, with his unrelenting tension and demands. Thus, one might say, in all societies one needs these two types; no single individual can be the perfect, be-all leader.

Interestingly, in the Kabbalah Moses and Aaron are associated with the complementary pair of Sefirot, Netzah and Hod (in much the same way as the three patriarchs correspond to the triad of Hesed, Gevurah, and Tiferet). This pair is ess familiar to many people than are the other Sefirot. Art Green, in his Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (pp. 52-54), describes Netzah and Hod as emerging out of Tiferet, “Splendor,” the seemingly conclusive synthesis and harmony of Hesed and Gevurah, which in fact generates a new polarity. Netzah, translated as “Triumph” or “Victory,” “celebrates… the belief that we can be triumphant over all enemies of perfection… that, having subdued anger and allowing love to flow in ways that nurture and do not destroy, wholeness itself seems within our grasp.” Paradoxically, the sense of inner balance and completeness of Tiferet can lead to a kind of triumphalism. Hod, by contrast, is “Beauty,” ”Gratitude,” or even “Admission” “Hod is the admission that we cannot do it all… that we must accept ourselves as we are, be grateful for life as it has been given… Netzah strives for transformation; it is the impatient force … that believes that we can accomplish anything… Hod is the other side of wisdom, the self that bows before the mystery of what is, that submits to reality and rejoices in doing so.” The relation between these two forces and the figures of Moses and Aaron, as described above, seems clear.

Interestingly, this motif is expressed in Western culture as well. The twentieth century composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) wrote an oratorio (later opera) entitled Moses and Aaron (Moses und Aron), in which he portrays the two brothers as holding very different outlooks. In essence, the conflict between the two is seen in terms of that between the idea and the image. Moses speaks of the “inability to grasp the boundless in an image.” In a central scene, Aaron defends his creation of the Golden Calf, accusing Moses: “When you make yourself solitary, you are thought dead. The people have long waited upon the word of your mouth from which rule and law spring, so I had to give it an image to look upon.” Moses, in response, insists that the people “must grasp the idea, it lives only for that.” Finally in the closing words of Act Two, Moses underlines yet again the realization of the idea: “Unrepresentable God. Unspeakable, many-meaning idea. Do you permit this interpretation? Dare Aaron, my mouth, make this image. Thus have I made myself an image—false, as an image can only be. Thus am I beaten.”

Schoenberg himself was a very interesting figure. Both as a composer, as a teacher, and as a theoretician, he was a major figure in modern music, breaking out of the traditional scales, first to atonality, then to a twelve-tone scale. Like many European Jews in his time and place, as a young man he converted to Christianity (what Heinrich Heine before him called the “entrance ticket to European culture”). But Schoenberg formally returned to Judaism in 1933—precisely, it would seem, in reaction to the growing anti-Semitism of the time; in the face, so to speak, of Hitler—an unusual step, for which he deserves much credit. Fortuitously, he was in France at the time of Hitler’s ascent to power, and he fled to the US, where he spent the rest of his life. In addition to Moses and Aaron, during this later period he composed his Kol Nidrei and other works on Jewish themes.

Vaera (Wanderings)

2012-01-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

What’s in a Name?

When I first became interested in Judaism during my teenage years, I used to study the parshat hashavua, like many of my generation, using the Soncino Pentateuch, with the commentary and notes of UK Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz. I remember in particular the lengthy additional notes in which he elaborated on various issues and was wont to polemicize with modernist challenges to traditional Jewish faith and, specifically, a lengthy note “Does Exodus vi,3 Support the Higher Critical Theory?”

The issue is the title verse of this week’s parashah, “And I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai—‘All-Powerful God’—but with My name YHWH I was not made known to them” (Exod 6:3). The difficulty is, of course, that the name YHWH appears innumerable times in the book of Genesis in the context of God’s appearances to and conversations with the patriarchs. How then can our verse say that He was not made known to them by this name? The Bible critics conclude that this verse must belong to a different “document,” a different literary strand of the Bible, so to speak, in which this name does not in fact appear previously.

I will not enter into the thick of this old dispute (in any event I have addressed this issue at length elsewhere). The truth is that, for me, at this point, the issue of the historicity of one or another document is rather less interesting than understanding the text itself in depth and, in this case, the meaning and significance of the Divine Name.

The name YHWH also serves as a central point of attention earlier in Shemot, in the “Burning Bush“ chapter read last week. There, following various other questions, Moses asks God: Once I tell them that the God of their fathers has sent me, and they ask me “What is His name?,” what shall I tell them? (Exod 3:13). Here God answers, rather mysteriously, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (“I am that I am” or “I shall be as I shall be“), and continues, “Ehyeh has sent me to you.” He then adds that he should tell them: “YHWH the God of your fathers… has appeared to me,” concluding with the unique phrase, “this is My name for ever, and this is my remembrance from generation to generation” (v. 15). What seems most significant, both here and in our parashah, is that the name YHWH is used in conjunction with God manifesting Himself as Redeemer. In Exodus 3 the verses about the name are preceded by God stating that He has seen the suffering of His people and come to deliver them from Egypt—and hence charges Moses with the mission of going to Pharaoh as a kind of human mouthpiece in His behalf (3:7-10). In 6:5 this motif is repeated alongside the explicit statement, “And I have remembered My covenant,” followed by the promises, “I am YHWH, and I shall take you out… and redeem you… and deliver you… and take you as My people” (vv. 6-7). Hence, Rashi and other spokesmen of the Midrashic tradition interpret the two related names of Ehyeh and YHWH as “faithful to fulfill His promises.”

What then is meant by this name and its emphatic use in these passages, as if the name itself conveys important tidings? The name Elohim (or El) is the generic name for God, used even to refer to pagan gods; when used in connection with the true God, it refers largely to His abstract, universal aspects—e.g., the laws of nature or universal ethical principles, of the kind that may be derived through reason (e.g., in connection with the Creation or the Noachide Code). By contrast, the name YHWH is, so to speak, God’s “specific,” “personal” name. As emphatically implied in these chapters, it is used to refer to God’s redemptive involvement in history, to his honoring the covenant He made with the patriarchs to their children. In short, through the name YHWH God is conceived as a personality. This notion flies in the face of much that we are accustomed to thinking on the basis of both medieval and modern Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah, viz. God as unmoved mover or as pure intellect. But, as convincingly demonstrated by such scholars as Yohanan Muffs in The Personhood of God and A. J. Heschel in The Prophets, the God of the Bible is a God of passion, of love for His chosen ones, such that even His ethical traits of justice and righteousness are in some sense personal.

Yet, strangely, the name YHWH is derived from the root HVH, “to be.” As if to say: God’s most salient trait is Hs Being, which is qualitatively different from the being of any other person or thing in the universe; or even: God Himself is Being. He is the ground of the very existence of the universe; He embraces and is immanent in all, while at the same time transcending all. How is one to relate these two very different aspects? I do not know whether the following answer is derash or peshat, but it seems to me that the idea implicit here is that God is at once unknowable, transcendent, utterly different from the gods of the pagan pantheons, while at the same time acts within history as Redeemer and Covenanter and Lawgiver to Israel. Perhaps one might say that His personal involvement is, so to speak, only a small part of His being; that history and the covenant with Israel are the arenas through which we may come to know Him, but that His essence, that which He is in Himself, is far beyond our understanding. Hence, YHWH, a mysterious name pointing towards Being; a name composed exclusively of vowel sounds, is if floating in air. The Talmud tells us that, until the future redemption, “Not as I am written am I spoken.” Is it any wonder, then, that the name YHWH is seen as ineffable, a mystery, as too holy to even pronounce under ordinary circumstances?

Shemot (Wanderings) - Supplement

2012-01-31T08:40:00.000-08:00

Kol Be-Isha Ervah—“A Woamn's Voice is Lewdness”

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear…. —Homer, Odyssey, Book XII

The Problem

There has been a considerable bruhaha in Israel recently over the issue of women singing in public. In a widely-discussed incident, a group of religious soldiers, many of them officer trainees who were graduates of Yeshivot Hesder, demonstratively walked out of an event at which an Army troupe, including young women soldiers, sang—thereby, among other things, raising the issue of the authority of the Army vs. that of religious law. Other issues relating to the role of women in society —such as the issue of separation of women from men on bus lines running in predominantly Haredi neighborhoods; the cropping of women’s faces from street posters in Jerusalem; and even the segregation of women and men in separate sidewalks or streets in Meah Shearim during the recent Sukkot holidays— have attracted much attention (and often more heat than light). All these have created a feeling of generally increased militancy and extremism in the approach of some religious groups to feminine “modesty” and its enforcement in the public realm, with a corresponding secularist reaction.

In this essay, I would to explore some of the ramifications of these issues—focusing specifically on the issue of women singing, in its halakhic, sociological and methodological-philosophical (or “meta-halakhic”) aspects.

A Weather Change in Orthodoxy

I would like to start with a sociological point. Although these issues have been presented in the media largely in terms of “religious-secular” conflict, my own perspective sees them as equally indicative of internal tensions and conflicts within the Orthodox or religiously-observant world. A small anecdote to illustrate this point: about two years ago I attended a performance of Pirates of Penzance (a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, which includes an impressive bit of coloratura singing by the female romantic lead) staged by the Jerusalem English Speaking Theater group in Jerusalem. Interestingly, much of both the audience and the cast was Orthodox; one of the leading male roles, that of the Pirate Chief, was played by an Orthodox professor of philosophy and ex-yeshiva bokhur whom I came to know during the year we spent studying together at the same yeshiva, many years ago. During the intermission I ran into an old friend, a YU musmakh (i.e., ordained Orthodox rabbi), and asked him how he coped with the halakhic issues raised by attending such events, and whether he had ever heard Rav Soloveitchik address the subject. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that it was a non-problem, certainly in the context of an artistic-cultural event of this sort. I subsequently heard reports that the Rav indeed held a liberal view of the matter, and himself occasionally attended the opera with his wife.

On the other hand, there are circles for whom this issue has become a kind of litmus test of “real” Orthodoxy, and who have tried to make it into a cardinal issue of public policy. Thus, in wake of the current controversy, Rabbi EIyakim Levanon, rabbi of the settlement of Elon Moreh and a respected religious authority within the West Bank settler community, stated that a religious soldier ought rather to stand before a firing squad rather than listen to a woman singing![1] More recently, I heard that a group of rabbis have circulated a call to young men to avoid being drafted in to the Army so as not to listen to women singing! More generally, within those circles which used to be known as Mizrachi, or “Religious Zionist,” which historically sought a synthesis Torah with general culture under the slogan Torah im Derekh Eretz or Torah va-Avodah (“Torah with Worldliness” or “Torah and Labor”), there are many who have begun to take a much stricter view of this and related questions. Thus, there are religious elementary schools at which fathers are not allowed to attend class productions in which their own daughters participate, because they might thereby see and hear pubescent young women—i.e., their daughter’s classmates—singing or acting.

But the issue goes far deeper, and is indicative of a far-reaching transformation within Jewish Orthodoxy—what the American Orthodox journal Tradition referred to some years ago, in a special issue devoted to this subject, as the “weather change” within Orthodoxy. This phenomenon may be characterized in a variety of ways. It seems typified in the following story I have heard time and again over the years: parents who grew up in Orthodox homes, and had lived as observant Jews their entire lives, sent their sons or daughters away to yeshiva or yeshiva high school. At a certain point, the child came home and demanded that the parents change everything in the house, from kashrut, to level of Shabbat observance, to cultural areas—the newspapers & magazines they allow in the home, use of television, the books on their shelves, etc.—to conform to the new standards they had learned in yeshiva. In brief: many of the younger generation seem to have suddenly gone overboard on humrot —religious stringencies.

Or, as an acquaintance of mine put it: religious life, which previously centered around the family and the home, as the institution through which the tradition, the values, the feeling of Jewishness were transmitted, is now centered around yeshivot or Hasidic courts and the rulings and edicts of the rashei yeshivot, gedolim, or Rebbes. Or, as historian Haym Soloveitchik explains it, in slightly moiré academic language: there has been a change from learning via mimesis (i.e., imitation: that is, absorbing what one has seen in one’s home and synagogue) to learning from books and written texts. He sees this process as parallel to a characteristic of the modern world generally, in which one learns from manuals and books, as opposed to the process of apprenticeship to a mentor practiced in the pre-modern world.[2]

Or, to couch it sociological terms: Orthodox (or halakhic/traditional/observant / classical) Judaism—whatever term you prefer—has for many people changed from a “church” to a “sect.” By the “church” model, I refer to a conception of the synagogue as the center of a broad community, in principle open to a wide spectrum of people with differing levels of commitment, and which assumes as a matter of course that people live their lives in the wider world. By contrast, a “sect” is oriented towards a small, select, elite group, characterized by intense commitment and the imposition of maximal demands upon its members; it is often led by charismatic and authoritarian leaders, who expect implicit obedience to their fiat and edicts. One might also mention here William James’ distinction between what might be called world-affirming religion and world-denying religion: whereas the former basically accepts the world and lives within it, the latter sees the world as filled with tum’ah, with impurity and mortal dangers to one’s soul, and consequently erects high protective walls between the realm of the sacred and that of the profane.[3]

Before turning to the halakhic issues per se, one important comment. It is often thought that, from a religious perspective, “stricter is always better”: that is, the more meticulous approach to observance is indicative of greater piety, of more intense religious devotion. Yet this is not always so. There is an important halakhic principle known as koah de-hetera adif—“the power of permissiveness is preferable.” That is, the ability of a rabbi to rule leniently on a given issue—provided, always, that he finds valid legitimate halakhic grounds for his decision—is in fact preferable and indicative of superior erudition. This is so for two reasons. First, that the task of the rabbi, historically, is to lead and guide an entire community, including individuals of diverse and varying degrees of “religiosity”—not just a small sect of individuals who have voluntarily taken upon themselves a rigorous way of life. Life being what it is, there are always exigencies that call for leniency, if at all possible. (A trivial but characteristic example: someone needs to take medicine on Yom Kippur to maintain his health; a serious, responsible rabbi will find a way whereby he can do so without violating the fast, rather than simply saying “No.”) Secondly, the “power of leniency” often requires greater knowledge, deeper understanding of the halakhah, than the “power of severity”: when in doubt, the stricter, negative answer is always the “default option,” the path of least resistance in terms of Torah knowledge. To give a lenient answer, within the parameters of halakhic authenticity, requires far greater understanding. Thus, a ferocious, militant approach like that of Rav Levanon— “It is better to stand before a firing squad than to listen to a woman singing”—may sound passionate and uncompromising, but it is doubtful whether it is good halakhah, as we shall see presently. I find it troubling that such an approach seems to be finding more and more adherents lately; indeed, one prominent rabbi who should have known better recently made the statement that those who invoke considerations of humane values, “ways of peace” and the like, are somehow inferior scholars or even inauthentic religiously.

The Halakhic Issue

Turning now to the halakhic issue of women singing per se: the basic source relating to our issue appears in Bavli Berakhot 24a:

א"ר יצחק: טפח באשה ערוה. למאי? אילימא לאסתכולי בה. והא אמר רב ששת: למה מנה הכתוב תכשיטין שבחוץ עם תכשיטין שבפנים? לומר לך, כל המסתכל באצבע קטנה של אשה כאילו מסתכל במקום התורף. אלא באשתו ולקריאת שמע. אמר רב חסדא: שוק באשה ערוה, שנאמר "גלי שוק עברי נהרות" (ישעיהו מז, ב) וכתיב "תגל ערותך וגם תראה חרפתך" (ישעיהו מז, ג). אמר שמואל: קול באשה ערוה, שנאמר "כי קולך ערב ומראך נאוה" (שיר השירים ב, יד). אמר רב ששת: שער באשה ערוה, שנאמר "שערך כעדר העזים" (שיר השירים ד, א).

R Yitzhak said: a handbreadth in a woman is ervah. Regarding what? Say: that it is forbidden to look at it. But has not Rav Sheshet already said: Why did Scripture enumerate the ornaments worn outside together with those ornaments that are worn within? [viz. those ornaments a woman is allowed to wear on Shabbat in the public domain]. To teach you that one who looks at the little finger of a woman as if he has looked at the place of her indecency. Rather, this [the measure of a handbreadth] refers to his own wife, and for purposes of reading Shema {i.e, that no part of her body may be exposed when he reads Shema].

Rabbi Hisda said: a woman’s calf is ervah, as is said… [he here quotes Isaiah 47:2-3 as prooftext].

Shmuel said: A woman’s voice is ervah, as is said “Your voice is pleasant and your appearance is comely” (Cant 2:14).

Rav Sheshet said: Hair in a woman is ervah, as is said…. [Cant 4:1 is quoted as prooftext].

Matters are presented even more sharply in b. Sotah 48a:

אמר רב יוסף: זמרי גברי ועני נשי, פריצותא. זמרי נשי ועני גברי, כאש בנעורת.

Rav Yosef said: If men sing and women answer, this is immodesty. If women sing and men answer, it is like fire in flax.

On the face of it, it would seem from this that listening to a woman’s voice is categorically prohibited. But several questions present themselves regarding the former passage (the latter, while more severe, is more aggadic than halakhic): 1) What is meant by ervah? 2) To what halakhic areas do these laws apply? 3) How are these laws to be applied today, and what mitigating circumstances might modify their application in contemporary society?

Ervah, in the narrow sense of the word, means “nakedness,” i.e., the genitalia of both sexes; by extension, it is applied to those parts of the body which are customarily covered (in most societies? And, does its definition vary according to the differing norms of times and place?) In the original context, it does not necessarily refer to that which is erotic or arouses sexual feelings, but more to that which is “unseemly.” Thus, the law banning ervah is brought in tandem with the rule that one may not recite Shema in the presence of excrement or other foul-smelling, unseemly things. If you will, there is a certain aesthetic of prayer, a certain squeamishness or reticence that one not recite God’s Name in the presence of certain things which are excessively earthy, which remind us of our purely bodily nature, in the grossest sense, whether related to sexuality or the expulsion of waster matter.

But, through the series of amoraic additions brought here, the definition is extended to include other parts of women’s bodies that are seen as sexually provocative or stimulating. Our sugya brings four categorical statements adding to the definition of ervah: that a woman’s calf (i.e., lower leg) is ervah; that her (singing) voice is ervah; that her hair is ervah (interestingly, this rule is usually interpreted as referring only to the hair of a married woman); and, finally, that the woman’s entire body is eroticized, is viewed as ervah (tefah be-ishah ervah). Many poskim go on to say that these limitations apply not only to prayer, to the recitation of Shema and Tefillah and other holy words, but also to life in general: that is, that men ought to avoid any potentially sexually tempting situations. The concept of ervah is thus extended here from the unseemly and the grossly physical, to the erotic.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to present a complete analysis of this subject in the rishonim and aharonim. For the interested reader I have included an appendix with a selection of some of the most salient texts in Hebrew; in addition, I refer the readers to two excellent articles, one in Hebrew and one in English, summarizing the halakhic argumentation.

Beyond that, I shall note here a few points mitigating towards leniency. First of all, already in the middle of the twentieth century Rabbi Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg of Berlin and Montreux, allowed mixed singing of Shabbat zemirot, particularly in the setting of religious youth movements and the like (see his Seridei Esh, vol. I, §76, p. 214 ff.). It would appear that he considered the problem of kol ishah to exist, if at all, only in the context of a solo female voice, recognizable as belonging to a distinct individual; wherever several voices sing simultaneously it no longer applied—thereby, it would seem, eliminating in one fell swoop the problem of the Army troupes. One of the major commentaries on the page of the Shulhan Arukh, Beit Shmuel, at Even ha-Ezer 21, reads the word ervah as referring, not to the voice but to a person: i.e., the voice of an ervah, of a woman biblically prohibited, such as a married woman or a close blood relation, is prohibited. While this view is not accepted by all, it would also limit the restriction so as not to apply to an unmarried woman (e.g., such as a hayelet).

In modern times, many authorities have held that the prohibition would only apply to a live performance, and not to a recording or broadcast (or webcast) media. Others add that the prohibition only applies where one is personally acquainted with the one singing, such that hearing her voice might conceivably have a seductive effect.

But the most far-reaching leniency relates to the answer to the question as to what kind of voice or song is prohibited in the first place. A concept found in more recent halakhic literature (I have been unable to find the earliest written source) is that of shirat ‘agavim—songs of passion or sensuality, that by their nature are erotically suggestive and even seductive. (see the introductory motto from the Odyssey, which indicates that the ancient Greeks were well aware of the potentially seductive and even irresistible quality of a woman’s voice). This would not necessarily even include every love song, but only those which emphasize the sexuality of the singer in a provocative way, through use of music, voice, words and body language. Thus, while many operas and musicals have romantic themes and include arias or songs in which the heroine declares her love for the hero, more often than not this is done in a stylized way such that it would be far-fetched to consider it as shirat agavim.

On the other hand, it is worth mentioning that women can also react to a man’s singing as shirat agavim—as deeply sexually arousing. Witness the “bobby-soxers” of the 1950’s swooning at Elvis Presley’s singing, and similar phenomena involving the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc.—not to mention the phenomenon of “groupies.”

A number of other sources suggest that the rules governing ervah are not necessarily meant to be applied in a simplistic, literal manner, but take into account the person’s subjective state of mind. Thus, in Issurei Biah 21.2 Rambam states that a man is not allowed to gaze at a woman to enjoy her beauty, but qualifies this in §3 to say that one is allowed to look at a particular woman whom one is contemplating marrying to see if one finds her attractive. But he then adds that one may not do so in a lewd or lustful manner (derekh zenut; in colloquial English: “undressing her with your eyes”). The question that arises is: how does one objectively distinguish between the two kinds of looking? The answer, it seems to me, is that it is impossible to do so in objective terms: one is forced to the conclusion that the man doing the looking must know his own subjective thoughts and intentions.

In the very next paragraph Rambam notes that a man may look at his wife when she is menstruating despite the fact that she is forbidden to him sexually at that time, because “as she will be permitted to him after a few days, this is not a stumbling block.” Again, the halakhah here is clearly cogniscent of the subjective dimension of temptation and arousal, and of a man’s ability to exercise a modicum of self-restraint over his thoughts and actions. (Indeed, elsewhere the Talmud states that a woman should not walk about in her home with slovenly appearance merely because she is menstruating and marital sex is not on the immediate agenda; to the contrary, she should dress attractively, and even makeup and jewelry if that is her usual practice, so as not to look disgusting to her husband.)

Finally, I wish to cite a very interesting passage from Arukh ha-Shulhan—an important and interesting halakhic compendium written by R. Barukh Halevi Epstein in the early 20th century—in which he discusses the issue of women’s hair covering in the modern Jewish setting. His approach there might well be applied to other issues, such as that of kol ishah. He begins by decrying the fact that many married women walk about with uncovered hair, as a breach of traditional tzeniut. But then, after expressing his moralistic–pietistic outrage, he does an abrupt, almost 180o turn: since the practice is common, he says, no one experiences “[erotic] thoughts” upon seeing a woman’s uncovered hair and, in effect, it is no longer ervah. (Orah Hayyim 75.7; Hebrew text below, in Appendix). In other words, social norms and customs are all-important regarding these matters.

Psychological And Meta-Halakhic Factors

Underlying these halakhic arguments, I would suggest that there has been a fundamental change in the modern world in the relations between men and women in society which requires a rethinking of the manner in which halakhot in these areas are to be interpreted and applied. It is this change which lies at the very crux of the matter.

Sexuality is a perennial problem. Men and women are attracted to one another by their very nature, and this attraction, often referred to by the tradition as Yetzer Hara (“the Evil Urge“) can, when not properly reined in and channeled, lead to problems and the commission of serious transgressions—and which, in turn, can carry far-reaching consequences for the family and for society in general. Historically, the tradition dealt with this problem by setting up “fences” and restrictions to limit contact between men and women, based upon the implicit assumption of social norms whereby the two sexes spent much of their lives in separate realms and in parallel, single-gender social networks. So long as these arrangements and norms were self-evident and widely accepted, and presumably provided avenues for personal fulfillment for members of both sexes within their highly differentiated and predetermined roles, things seem to have worked reasonably well. (But I would recall here Rambam’s comment Issurei Bi’ah 22.18-19 ff. that the laws of arayot, of sexual propriety, are the most difficult ones to observe in the entire Torah, and that there has never been a community in history in which this has not constituted a real problem for some individuals.)

In any event, things have changed in the modern world, for better or worse. Men and women increasingly live within the same social and vocational world. They receive similar educations, they work together in the same occupations, and they interact as equals in the worlds of business, the professions, academia, civil service, etc. Whether or not this is a good thing may be open to debate; it is an unquestionable fact of life, with the possible exception of those who build sequestered, ultra-Orthodox communities in which the old ways still predominant (and I question whether this is really the case even there).

Hence, the implementation of traditional harhakot (laws of separation or distancing) imposes limitations and constrictions that modern women find intolerable. Moreover, the traditional approach is seen by many as one which, by emphasizing the temptation represented by woman as a sexual object, objectifies her and thereby dehumanizes her. These issues thereby bring to the fore a conflict between two values: on the one hand, that of tzeniut and the taking of maximum precautions to avoid sexual misbehavior; on the other, kevod ha-adam, “human dignity”— facilitating women’s expression of their full humanity, in the broadest cultural, intellectual and spiritual way possible. (Daniel Sperber has developed this concept regarding the specific area of women reading and receiving aliyot to the Torah.)

This is well illustrated by the question of Kol Ishah. Let me mention here that two weeks ago Yaffa Yarkoni, one of the outstanding singers of the War of Independence, died at age 87. Her death prompted reflections that, without such women as Shoshana Damari, Yaffa Yarkoni, and Naomi Shemer, Israeli culture, and specifically its music, would be far poorer. Acquaintance with their voices and work would seem to be a basic part of familiarity with Israeli culture in general, just as such figures as Marion Anderson and Joan Sutherland are an integral part of Western musical culture in our day—and to these names one could add many others, both dead and living. More generally, when speaking of the pleasure experienced upon hearing a woman singing, most people would think of that pleasure in aesthetic and cultural, rather than in sexual terms.

This new socio-cultural situation requires a different way of dealing with the problem of sexuality and sexual temptations—a “third scripture that mediates between the two.” The solution lies in what those of us in the Ne’emanei Torah va-Avodah movement sometimes referred to as a “mixed but modest society.” The old way of separation through barriers is no longer feasible. The alternative option is what I would call inner control: that a person, or specifically the man (although part of the new world is a greater awareness of woman’s sexuality, her sexual imagination and desires, and even her ability to initiate a relationship—but that is another subject, that takes us too far afield), learns to remove sexual overtones or undertones from situations of everyday interaction with women. I might add that this is perhaps paradoxically facilitated by the fact that, in our day, what might be called the threshold of the erotic is much higher than it was in the past. Again, for better or worse, our culture is so saturated with sexual images and talk of sexuality—e.g., the most explicit sexual scenes are only a click away for anyone with a computer—that many of those things that, in a gone age, might have been considered erotic—e.g., the sight of a woman’s calf uncovered by stockings, or the proverbial “well-turned ankle”—goes unnoticed today.

In fact, Judaism has always acknowledged the role of what I refer to here as subjective controls. Thus, in Ketubot 17a, it is told that Rav Aha used to dance at weddings with the bride seated on his shoulders, explaining that it was not arousing because he saw her as no more than “a stick of wood.” Or there was Rav Gidal, who used to sit at the gate of the bath-house to instruct the women; when questioned about the supposed immodesty of such a practice, he said “They look to me like white geese” (Berakhot 20a). True, such laxity was traditionally only tolerated on the part of great tzaddikim—but perhaps our world is in some ways different.

In any event, the opposite extreme has its own dangers. A small anecdote to illustrate the point made earlier about the objectification of women. A friend of my wife spoke enthusiastically about a certain musar sefer (Hebrew ethical tract) containing spiritual exercises which she found spoke to her very deeply. From discussion of the book, we turned to a discussion of its author: when she mentioned that he, in fact, lived right in her neighborhood, I asked whether she had ever met him. Surely, if she liked the book so much, she would enjoy meeting the author and clarifying some of his ideas personally? She answered that she never did so, because she knew that, as a strictly pious Jew of the old school, he would not look her in the face while speaking with her but would turn his gaze aside—and this, she said, made her feel extremely uncomfortable, so that she avoided such meetings. (I should add that this woman dresses very modestly and is generally what would be called “very frum.”)

Another point: It seems clear to me that many of those invoking the “indecency” or ervah involved in women’s singing (or in seeing their hair, or elbows, or unstockinged calves) know that in actuality these are not really sexually arousing. Rather, because these things are prohibited by the halakhic tradition, from the Talmud through the Shulhan Arukh and beyond, one is obligated to regard them as such, and act accordingly in terms of one’s behavior—even to the extent implied by Rabbi Levanon’s rhetoric. The issue is thus not one of modesty vs. sexual licentiousness, but rather of literal adherence to the written halakhah vs. what might be called a more situational, cultural-contextually-determined approach. And for the latter, I would argue, there is much historical precedent.

I shall conclude with a story that has been variously told about a pair of Hasidism or a pair of Buddhist monks. Two pious men were walking through a forest. At a certain point they came to a river, where they encountered a beautiful young women, festively dressed, who told them that she was going to a friends’ wedding and needed to cross the river without soiling her fine clothing. One of the two men, without hesitating, hoisted her upon his shoulders, carried her across, and put her down on the other side. She thanked him for his help, and they went their separate ways. The two men continued walking through the forest together and, after some time, the other man turned to his companion: “I don’t understand how you could do it!” “Do what?” “Why, touch a woman’s body in such an intimate way—picking her up, placing her legs around your head, and carrying her!” The other answered: “I put her down hours ago. You’re still carrying her around in your head!”

Notes

[1]Rav Levanon’s statement, if not intended as hyperbole, is presumably based on the argument this issue is one of cardinal religious importance, falling under the rubric of יהרג ולא יעבר . The presumption would be that this category includes not only actual acts of giluy arayot, improper sexual acts, but also אבזרייהו דעריות—that is, those acts which are adjunct to sexual prohibitions, and as such are also subject to the law of “die rather than violate them.” (I saw this idea developed, for example, in a pamphlet by the late Rav Unterman on the above concept.)

But if kol be-ishah ervah is not an integral part of the laws of arayot, but simply a Rabbinic seyag, and at that not even adopted by the Sages as a formal takkanah, this argument is greatly weakened. In this context, I would note the distinction between those things to be avoided as kirvah—as intimacy which gives pleasure and which might lead to actual intercourse, defined by Rambam in Issurei Bi’ah 21.1 and Sefer ha-Mitzvot, lav §353 as prohibited by Torah law—and those defined as harhakot—distancing oneself from excessive closeness, which are classified as Rabbinic.

[2]His paper is quite possibly the most important study of the changes in Orthodoxy in the post-World War II world. See Haym Soloveitchik, “Rapture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28:4 (Summer 1994), 64-130; reprinted in Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader, eds. R. Rosenberg and C. I. Waxman (Hanover NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999), 276-320.

[3]Saul J. Berman,”Kol ‘Isha,” The Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Memorial Volume, ed. Leo Landman, (New York: Ktav, 1980), 45-66; David Bigman, “’Iyyun mehudash be’kol be-isha ervah,’” Kolekh, at www.kolekh.org.il/show.asp?id=28988/. In addition, I would mention a paper by Tamar Ross, “The Feminist Contribution to Halakhic Discourse: Kol Be-Isha Erva as a Test Case,” Emor 1 (2010), 37 ff., dealing primarily with methodological and other issues pertaining to the contribution of women and feminist consciousness to halakhic discourse.

Appendix: Hebrew Sources

בבלי, ברכות כ"ד ע"א

א"ר יצחק: טפח באשה ערוה. למאי? אילימא לאסתכולי בה. והא אמר רב ששת: למה מנה הכתוב תכשיטין שבחוץ עם תכשיטין שבפנים? לומר לך, כל המסתכל באצבע קטנה של אשה כאילו מסתכל במקום התורף. אלא באשתו ולקריאת שמע. אמר רב חסדא: שוק באשה ערוה, שנאמר "גלי שוק עברי נהרות" (ישעיהו מז) וכתיב "תגל ערותך וגם תראה חרפתך" (ישעיהו מז). אמר שמואל: קול באשה ערוה, שנאמר "כי קולך ערב ומראך נאוה" (שיר השירים ב). אמר רב ששת: שער באשה ערוה, שנאמר "שערך כעדר העזים" (שיר השירים ד). בבלי, סוטה מח, א אמר רב יוסף: זמרי גברי ועני נשי, פריצותא. זמרי נשי ועני גברי, כאש בנעורת.

רמב"ם, הלכות קריאת שמע, פרק ג

טז כשם שאסור לקרות כנגד צואה ומימי רגליים, עד שירחיק, כך אסור לקרות כנגד הערווה, עד שיחזיר פניו. אפילו גוי או קטן, לא יקרא כנגד ערוותן. ואפילו הייתה מחיצה של זכוכית מפסקת, הואיל והוא רואה את הערווה, אסור לקרות, עד שיחזיר פניו. וכל גוף האישה ערווה; לפיכך לא יסתכל בגוף האישה כשהוא קורא: ואפילו אשתו--אם היה מגולה טפח מגופה, לא יקרא כנגדה.

רמב"ם, הלכות איסורי ביאה, פרק כ"א

א כל הבא על ערווה מן העריות דרך איברים, או שחיבק ונישק דרך תאווה ונהנה בקירוב בשר--הרי זה לוקה מן התורה, שנאמר "לבלתי עשות מחוקות התועבות" (ויקרא יח,ל), ונאמר "לא תקרבו לגלות ערווה" (שם, ו). כלומר לא תקרבו לדברים המביאין לידי גילוי ערווה. והעושה דבר מחוקות אלו, הרי הוא חשוד על העריות.

ב ואסור לאדם לקרוץ בידיו וברגליו או לרמוז בעיניו, לאחת מן העריות; וכן לשחק עימה, או להקל ראש. ואפילו להריח בשמים שעליה, או להביט ביופייה--אסור; ומכין המתכוון לדבר זה, מכת מרדות. והמסתכל אפילו באצבע קטנה של אישה, ונתכוון ליהנות--כמי שנסתכל במקום התורף; אפילו לשמוע קול הערווה, או לראות שיערה--אסור.

ג וכל הדברים האלו, אסורין בחייבי לאוין. ומותר להסתכל בפני הפנויה ולבודקה, בין בתולה בין בעולה--כדי שיראה אם היא נאה בעיניו, יישאנה; ואין בזה צד איסור: ולא עוד, אלא ראוי לעשות כן. אבל לא יסתכל דרך זנות, הרי הוא אומר "ברית כרתי לעיניי, ומה אתבונן על בתולה" (איוב לא,א).

ד ומותר לאדם להביט באשתו כשהיא נידה, ואף על פי שהיא ערווה, ואף על פי שיש לו הנאת לב בראייתה: הואיל והיא מותרת לו לאחר זמן, אינו בא בזה לדבר מכשול. אבל לא ישחק ולא יקל ראש עימה, שמא ירגיל לעבירה.

ערוך השלחן, אורח חיים, סי' ע"ה

ז. ועתה בואו ונצווח על פרצות דורינו בעונותינו הרבים, שזה שנים רבות שנפרצו בנות ישראל בעון זה והולכות בגילוי הראש, וכל מה שצעקו על זה הוא לא לעזר ולא להועיל. ועתה פשתה המספחת שהנשואות הולכות בשערותן כמו הבתולות. אוי לנו שעלתה בימינו כך! מיהו, על כל פנים, לדינא נראה שמותר לנו להתפלל ולברך כנגד ראשיהן המגולות כיון שעתה רובן הולכות כך והוה כמקומות המגולים בגופה, וכמו שכתב המרדכי בשם הראבי"ה בסוף פרק ג' וזה לשונו: כל הדברים שהזכרנו לערוה דווקא בדבר שאין רגילות להגלות, אבל בתולה הרגילה בגילוי שיער לא חיישינן דליכא הרהור. עד כאן לשונו. וכיון שאצלנו גם הנשואות כן, ממילא דליכא הרהור (והרי"ף והרמב"ם השמיטו לגמרי דין שיער וקול משום דסברי להון דלאו לקריאת שמע איתמר. עב"י [עיין בית יוסף?]

Shemot (Wanderings)

2012-01-31T08:36:00.000-08:00

Setting the Stage

Most of this issue is devoted to a special essay, entitled “Kol be-Isha Ervah —‘A Woman’s Voice is Lewdness.’” I will, however, preface it with a few remarks about the beginning of the Book of Shemot (Exodus).

Perhaps I’m belaboring the obvious, but it occurred to me recently that our Torah is both “Our Holy Torah”—an integral, inseparable unity, each of whose parts complements the other —and Hamisha Humshei Torah, “The Five Fifths of the Torah”—five separate books, each one of which is an entity in its own right, with its own central theme or themes, its own style and character, its own literary structure, and its own beginning and end. Thus Bereshit (Genesis), the Book of Beginnings, starts with the very origins of the universe, continues with the beginnings of humankind through a series of archetypal stories that seek to typify the nature of this strange creature called Man (a kind of philosophical anthropology through the medium of myth or legend), and whose major bulk, from Chapter 12 through 50, is devoted to the sage of the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, ending with this modest-sized clan or tribe living peacefully in Egypt.

The opening chapters of Shemot may be read as setting the stage for the central theme of enslavement and redemption, much as Genesis 1 and 2 set the stage for the story of humankind, and Abraham’s family within it. “These are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt….” And: this is how the Egyptians came to turn against them and enslave them, including a plan to murder all the male infants; this is how the midwives outwitted them; this is the early life of the great leader, and how he became whom he became. And, after the whole story of the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai, the book concludes, at length and in great detail, with the fulfillment of the religious goal of all these things—the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness as a dwelling place for the Divine presence. The final verses of Shemot, with the cloud symbolizing or embodying the Divine presence, represent a kind of climax, a sense of closure and completeness in and of itself. (Might there be two very different “goals” to the Torah: the Divine Presence coming to rest in the midst of the people, and the settling of the people in the land of Israel/Canaan, to which so much attention is given, especially at the end of Numbers and throughout Deuteronomy? We shall return to this question later.)

I will, with the Almighty’s help, return to this question of the beginnings and ends of each of the other Humashim and their internal unity when the time comes. Meanwhile, a few comments on some central themes of these opening, “stage setting” chapters.

The Book of Bereshit concludes with Yosef’s culminating conversation with his brethren and, in the final verse, “And Yosef died aged one hundred ten years; and he was embalmed, and placed in a coffin in Egypt.” (Gen 50:26). At the beginning of Shemot, straight after the list of names, we read, “And Joseph died and all his brethren and all that generation” (1:6) and thereafter, “A new king arose in Egypt, who knew not Joseph” (v. 8). Yosef was a kind of Archimedian point in Jacob’s family, a focal point, a center.

I see him as the first in a long series of Jews who served as advisor, as counselor to kings and to the mighty of the earth. A person who comes seemingly out of nowhere, gifted with tremendous talents, who advises and guides policy, whether economic or diplomatic and geo-political. He himself does not occupy the center of the stage, but works more-or-less behind the scenes—but his wisdom is instrumental in the success of the regime and of the country. “And all that he did, God made successful in his hands.” One may think of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin D’Isreali, Bernard Baruch, Walter Ratthenau—and, long before them, Shmuel Hanaggid and Don Isaac Abravanel (who, in addition, to being an important Biblical commentator, was financial advisor to the kings of Portugal and Spain: Ferdinand almost begged him to convert pro forma so that he could remain in the country after the Expulsion of 1492). (A somewhat cynical aside: Perhaps our problem in Israel is that we don’t have any covert Jewish advisors, but our leaders are themselves Jews, who are overly impressed with their own cleverness; a rank newcomer starts his own party, rather than working his way up from within—assuring a needless divisiveness within his own sector.)

The second theme here is the beginning of anti-Semitism. Once the unique Jewish advisor is gone, people begin to fear the Israelites—their talents and successes, and their sheer numbers. Their natural fertility is described as “swarming,” comparable to rodents or vermin. The fearful Pharaoh decides to murder all infant boys, who are only saved by the natural morality and decency (“fear of God”—1:17) of the midwives. I was impressed here by the striking similarity to Nazism: as far as I know, prior to Hitler there was never a comprehensive racist action in which an anti-Semitic leader attempted to kill every Jewish child, whether of one or both sexes—yet we have it here.

The third major theme in “setting the stage” is, parallel to the story of the oppression, and beginning from within it, the early life and shaping of the future redeemer: his birth, his being saved from death, his adoption by Pharaoh‘s daughter, his awakening sense of justice which led to bold, even rash acts, which in turn lead to his lengthy exile in Midian. There he married Zipporah, there he may have learned certain kinds of wisdom from Yitro—we don’t know—and there he spent long hours wandering the hills and mountains with his sheep: thinking, reflecting, achieving a certain stage of readiness and maturity. All these reach their culmination in what I see as the real beginning of the book, in terms of its theological–redemptive message: Chapter 3, in which Moses encounters God at the Burning Bush.

For more teachings on this parashah see the archives to this blog for 2005_12_25, as well as January 2007, 2009 2010, and 2011 (scroll down).

Vayehi (Wanderings)

2012-01-08T07:52:00.000-08:00

“Do Not Bury Me in Egypt!”

This time, I would like to explore and try to understand one detail of this week’s parashah: the meaning of burial and the place of burial. I noticed a striking fact: Parashat Vayehi is framed, at its beginning and its end, by two closely parallel, otherwise unique incidents. In Genesis 47:29-31, Yaakov calls to his son Yosef and makes him swear an oath that he will not bury him in Egypt, but will remove his body and bury him with his parents and his kin, in the land of Canaan. At the very end of the parashah, which is devoted almost entirely to various events surrounding that death—Yaakov’s calling especially to the sons of Yosef, the blessings of the twelve sons, his death, embalming, and the funeral procession in which he is indeed taken up to the cave of Makhpelah in Hevron—after the family returns to Egypt and several years pass, the time comes for Yosef to die (interestingly, he thereby predeceases all of his brothers, despite being nearly the youngest). At this point (50:24-25), Yosef prophecies that God will remember them (Elohim pakod yifkod etkhem) and will take them up out of this land and take them to the land which He has sworn to give to their fathers. He makes them take an oath that, when that happens (and here he repeats the formula pakod yifkod etkhem), they will take his bones with them—as they indeed do (see Exod 13:19; Josh 24:32). Incidentally, this very phrase serves as one of the signs confirming Moses’ authenticity: God tells him, at the burning bush, to use these words to announce his redemptive mission—Exod 3:16 (cf. 4:31; 13:19).

What does all this tell us? What does it mean? It is interesting that Yaakov does not specifically command his children to bring his bones to the Promised Land, as Yosef does; on the other hand, the reinterment of Yosef, specifically, is somehow seen as a visible sign of the deliverance from Egypt. It is also interesting that nowhere else in all the 24 books of Tanakh do we have anyone adjuring others to bury him in a specific place and not bury him at another.

Two ideas occurred to me in this context. The first is, of course, the importance of place, in the sense that the place of burial indicates the place to which the person attaches ultimate significance in his life. Burial is a symbolic act of singular importance in human life, marking as it does its conclusion. The body was the vessel for the person’s life, for his soul, so that even when life departs it is not treated in a purely functional manner, as an object, but in some sense continues to embody, if one may put it thus, the meaning of that life—first and foremost through its location, through where and with whom it is buried.

Yaakov clearly felt himself a sojourner, an exile in Egypt. But even Yosef, who spent his entire adult life in Egypt, made it clear, through this simple request not to be buried in the land of Egypt as soon as he could be removed, that he too saw himself as no more than a sojourner, an exile in that land: his real roots were in the land of his forefathers. It is common, in our own day, for Jews who lived abroad to ask to be buried in the land of Israel—and their families, typically, respect that wish. It is easy to make fun of this posthumous Zionism of those who lived their entire lives in the comforts of Diaspora, but the sentiment it expresses is real: that this is their true home, that had life developed differently they would have gladly lived here as well. On another level, the rëinterment of Theodor Herzl in Israel, shortly after the establishment of the State, was an important symbolic statement for the Zionist movement, that this founding figure had been reunited with the land he did so much to rebuild.

A second observation prompted by the parashah has to do with father-son relationships. The Bible as a whole, does not tell us much of human relations. Genesis is of course rich in human stories, in vivid portraits of individuals and families and their interrelationships, but it is unique in this respect. The remaining four books of the Torah are a mixture of law, exhortation, and a record of the three-corner relationship among the people of Israel, God, and Moses—something else again. The other two sections of Tanakh—Nevii’m and Ketuvim—are filled with prophecy, history, poetry, and “wisdom,” but there are only a handful of books which, among other things, tell the stories of people and their lives as such: Judges, 1-2 Samuel, to a lesser extent, 1-2 Kings, Ruth, Esther, and possibly Jonah—and that’s about it.

I once read an essay about American literature—probably by Lionel Trilling, I’m no longer sure—in which the author speaks of the greatest theme of literature generally, and 19th and early-20th century American literature in particular (especially the Bildungsroman) —as being that of fathers and sons and the difficulties of their relationship—the young man’s struggle for identity or separation from the paternal home, the process of “self-discovery,” and the eventual coming full turn to a more mature acceptance of the father. (Thus, for example, the final scene of the movie East of Eden, in which the James Dean character takes care of his dying father with true devoted; albeit that film was made 50 years ago; I wonder if that ending would go over today).

By contrast, the central theme in much of modern writing as well as movies, TV shows, etc., is romantic love—the relationship of man and woman relations. Even though children are born of the love of man and woman, that is only rarely the theme of such literature. Rather, the focus is on the relationship itself as an end, a kind of eternal present without continuity, without any sense of building something larger—love and sexuality as a source of pleasure and fulfillment in themselves.

would call these two types “vertical” and “horizontal,” respectively. In the human narratives in the Bible, the focus is overwhelmingly on the vertical, inter-generational drama. We have there mostly men’s interactions with one another as fathers and sons, or as brothers; or women as mother & daughter, as sisters, as mother-in-law and daughter-in-law (Ruth), or as a mother nurturing young child. There is no real developed portrait of the romantic love relationship. Even Song of Songs is a lyrical portrayal of love, not a narrative of a real relationship between fleshed-out characters. It seems to me that our generation has much to learn from this approach.

Miketz-Vayigash (Wanderings)

2012-01-08T07:47:00.000-08:00

A Study in Character

As last week (belatedly) I wrote about Hanukkah alone, this time I shall discuss together the two parshiyot of Miketz and Vayigash, which in any event constitute a single continuous sequence. Indeed, Miketz is the original “cliff-hanger,” ending on a note of total suspense, leaving the reader/listener wondering “How will Judah and his brothers get out of this one?”

The story is a familiar one. The central issue in this narrative, as I see it, is that of character: that of Joseph, and that of his brothers. Why does Joseph treat his brothers as he does: as soon as they come down to Egypt to buy provisions for their families in Canaan, Joseph recognizes them, but they do not recognize him (42:7-8): after all, they had no expectations of seeing him, least of all in the guise of a high Egyptian official, with all that implies in terms of dress, language, style of beard and hair, trappings of office, whereas they were much as he lad left them—somewhat older, but otherwise much the same in appearance, manner of dress, speech, etc. Joseph was hardly the frightened teenager they had last seen thrown at the bottom of a pit, twenty or more years earlier. In any event, he immediately decide to behave as a stranger, concealing his true identity, putting them through a series of trials and travails. Why the masquerade?

There are several possible answers to this, which fall under two basic headings. The one, of course, is that of vengeance. They had treated him with unspeakable cruelty, mocking him, stripping him of his precious garment, no doubt beating him, throwing him into a pit without food or water, some of them openly speaking of killing him, and later (here the text is a bit murky and even self contradictory) selling him as a slave to a caravan of Midianites, or perhaps Ishmaelites. Thus he began on a course in which he lost everything and everyone that was precious and familiar to him, and forced to survive on his wits—which, fortunately for him, were good. It would have been perfectly natural for him to hate them and to attempt to “pay them back in the same coin” once the tables were turned and he had the power and they were at his mercy. In particular he must have detested Simon and sought to wreak revenge on him; Shimon, whom, according to both the Midrash and even the biblical text itself, following a simple process of elimination (Reuven tried to save him; Judah spoke up and sent “why spill his blood, why not sell him?”; the sons of the concubines and the younger sons of Leah had a lower status; while Shimon and Lev were already known as hot-heads from their behavior in the incident of Dinah and Shechem), was the ringleader of the violence performed upon him. But even in his case, he seems to have released Shimon from imprisonment as soon as the brothers were out of sight.

But did he hate them? A few weeks ago an Israeli television program about the parshat hashavua featured a young man from Djerba named Rafram Hadad who some years ago was imprisoned in Libya for no apparent reason; he described the arbitrary, Kafkaesque nature of his sudden arrest, and described his feeling, like that of Yosef, that “I have done nothing that they placed me in this hole!” In other words, he simply didn’t understand why what had happened did, and suggested that, like him, Yosef was clueless as to why his brothers hated him; in his naïve narcissism, he sincerely thought that everybody loved him, and that they even perceived him and accepted him as their [future?] leader, and did not bear any grudge for his dreams/visions/fantasies of greatness. In this view, Yosef’s estrangement from his brothers, playing the harsh, suspicious official, was naught but a test of their character, to find out who they were and whom they had become.

Joseph’s ambivalence comes out strongly in the scene in Parshat Miketz: “When he saw his brothers he recognized them, but he estranged himself from them and spoke harshly” (42:8). But once he hears them talking among themselves, saying “We are guilty to our brother, that we saw the distress of his soul, pleading to us, but we did not hearken” (42:21), Joseph quickly turns aside and weeps. A second time, in the banquet hall scene during the brother’s second trip to Egypt, he is overwhelmed by emotion upon seeing Benjamin and, after a cursory blessing, quickly turning to a side room to weep—and then washing his face and composing himself, so as to conceal the depth of his emotion (43:29-31). The image gained is of someone who is at heart a deeply emotional, perhaps even sentimental person, who has decided to maintain a tough, impassive exterior—but finds it hard to do so, and thus periodically breaks down and reemerges to hide his feelings.

In the dialogue between Joseph and Judah with which Parashah Vayigash begins, all that comes to an end. Yehudah, still ignorant of Joseph’s identity, presents e series of passionate arguments, relating to the “Egyptian official” the intimate history of his family in the hopes that he will elicit some feeling of humanity, of compassion, in the stone-faced man. Most of all, he expresses his concern for his old father: If the old man, whose “wife” (i.e., Rachel, the only true love of his life) bore him two children, one of whom is lost, then if you take the youngest as well, you will kill him. A person would have to be very hard indeed to hear these words and not be moved.

Joseph’s original plan was to force the ten brothers to return to their home in Canaan a second time, without Binyamin, thereby forcing Yaakov to come down to Egypt with them without yet knowing that “the man” is in fact his long-lost son Joseph. In that way, Joseph’s second dream would be carried out: “the sun and moon and eleven stars”—clearly symbolizing his eleven brothers (including Benjamin!), his father, and Leah, the surviving matriarch of the family, his own mother being dead—would all bow down to him.

A digression about dreams: Parashah Miketz is the last in a series of parshiyot in which dreams or dream-like sequences all play a central role: from Rivkah’s surrealistic sense of her two fetuses struggling in her womb, a kind of omen requiring her to consult an oracle; vis Jacob’s ladder vision at Beth-El and his mysterious encounter at Yabbok; to Joseph’s own dreams of greatness; to those of the baker, the cup-bearer, and to those of Pharaoh himself, through which he comes into his own and rises to prominence as a dream interpreter and more. What is the nature of dreams? They belong to the subjective, suggestive, inner part of our life: to the nocturnal world of feeling, of intuition, of subconscious wishes and desires. They are filled with thoughts and impression that the light of day more often than not wants to quickly forget. Yet the Tanakh clearly suggests that they are important and worth reckoning with; if not full-scale prophecies, then they are surely something very akin to it (“a sixtieth part of prophecy”).

At this point, Yosef’s basic softness, his vulnerability, his humanity, his family feeling, come to the fore. “And Joseph could not hold back” (Gen 46:1), and he reveals himself to his brothers. Was this a sign of weakness, or of strength? I leave the question open.

But perhaps even more than the issue of character per se, the basic theme of this parashah is teshuvah. The word has been much corrupted by its use as a synonym for conversion to religious Orthodoxy. I use it here in its classic sense—as contrition, repentance, turning away from any and all wrongdoing and, especially, the entire process of personal change (i.e. in a positive direction). In this sense, teshuvah is extraordinarily difficult (see on this Rambam, Hilkhot Teshuvah 7.3). I have mentioned in the past a profound idea I heard once from Rav Yehudah Amital ztz”l: that the great works of Western culture—Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, etc.—are promulgated on the premise that people don’t essentially change; that character (at times synonymous with fate) is essentially fixed, and that all of human life is the playing out of the flaws and faults that ultimately lead to the tragic end.

Both Yosef and the brothers must do teshuvah. How so? Yosef needs to turn away from the narcissism and self-centeredness of his youth. Through a combination of simple maturation and experiences of suffering (an interesting and important question: What does trauma do to people? Arbitrary imprisonment and unjust treatment? Radical change in life situation? Poverty? Fall from grace? Many become bitter and selfish; only a few, it would seem, are enobled.) In any event, Yosef clearly came to know the world during his years away from Jacob’s loving home, and had ample opportunity to see people at their ugliest—the brothers distorted by hatred; the journey with the caravan, of which we are told nothing; Potiphar’s wife, enflamed by lust, and then driven by spite; the ungrateful wine butler—but in the end he came out as a decent person, perhaps almost too good to be true.

After revealing his identity, even before Joseph and his brothers sit and talk, he displays real generosity of spirit. There is no hint of resentment or hostility towards the brothers. Almost the first thing he says: Do not be cross or angry [at yourselves] that you sold me to Egypt, for God sent me to keep people alive” (45:5). He devotes himself to settling both his father and his brothers as comfortably as possible in this strange country, constantly acting as their intermediary. This is again shown at the very end of the “Joseph cycle”: towards the end of Veyehi, after Jacob has died, is buried, and the family returns to Egypt, the brothers say: Now that father is gone Yosef will hate us and his true colors will come out (50:15). Instead, he is nothing but kindness and forgiveness. (If I may mention my own life experience: there have been certain very difficult relationships in my life but, after a certain time has passed, I found that I was able, not to forgive, but to forget the intense negative emotions of that time—that is, I can recall certain of the events and feelings in my memory, but the negative emotional charge is totally gone—and I am able to accept that person in his/her present situation and humanity.)

Perhaps the underlying idea is that, perhaps as one grows older, one becomes more aware of human mortality, of our vulnerability, and one is able to forgive, to perceive what one once perceived as abominable behavior as simple human weakness, the expression of flaws of the kind common to all flesh and blood. (By the way, this is also the idea underlying the request for seliha ve-kaparah, asking forgiveness of others, prior to Yom Kippur.)

As for the brothers: their teshuvah consisted in turning from their hatred, spite, to genuine feeling and caring for the other—for their father and his sensitivities, for their younger brother. Interestingly, in his speech Yehudah quotes father saying “My wife bore me two children” without any hint of resentment or acrimony—notwithstanding the implication that he, like the other children of Leah were somehow second-class children. Indeed, in a widespread Hasidic schema, where as Yosef is discussed as a Tzaddik by nature, Yehudah is the epitome of the Baal Teshuvah—both in overcoming his anger and tendency to violence, but also in the scene with Tamar, where he transcends conventional patriarchal attitudes towards sexuality.

Hanukkah (Wanderings)

2012-01-08T07:41:00.000-08:00

Is Hanukkah a Festival?

The other day I went to the local post office to pay a bill and send some letters. After I finished my business, the clerk, in keeping with the spirit of the recently privatized Israel postal service, tried to sell me something. “What are these?” I asked her. “Greeting cards.” “But Rosh Hashana was three months ago!” I answered. “Ah, these are for Hanukkah.” I told her that, as I see it, Hanukkah is not a holiday on which Jews customarily send greetings to all and sundry, and that this seemed to me a Gentile custom. “Oh no, these are for Hanukkah!”

This little incident set me thinking about the status of Hanukkah today, the great, possibly exaggerated importance it enjoys in many circles, and its “proper” status in Jewish thought and halakhah. Perhaps I suffer from the overly strict halakhic education I received from my teacher, Rav Soloveitchik—strict in the intellectual, not necessarily in that of humrot in praxis; he always focused on the importance of clear and exact categories and definitions—hence his love of the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah. In any event, it suddenly occurred to me that the greetings commonly used here in Israel—Hanakkah sameah; Hag Hanukkah sameah, or even Hag Urim sameah—have always grated on my ears. Is Hanukkah in fact a hag, a festival in the religious sense? (Old time Hasidic Jews greet one another with the words, A Likhtig’n Hanukkah—”a light-filled Hanukkah”—and the sources often speak of yemei Hanukkah, “the days of Hanukkah.”) Is there any component of joy in the traditional understanding of these eight days? IOs there, for example, a religious obligation to eat a festive meal on Hanukkah? And what about the phrase Hag Urim or “Festival of Lights”? Is it an indigenous Jewish expression, or is it a modern invention of some sort—and if so, by whom?

At this point, I can imagine some readers shrugging their shoulders and applying to Hanukkah something like the old Yiddish saying: “Purim ist nisht a yontiff, unt Kholera ist nisht a krank”—that is, “Purim is not a festival day, and cholera isn’t a disease.” As if to say: don’t be such a pedant: Hanukkah is what it is and it has a life of its own in the Jewish folk understanding. It is an important part of what Mordecai Kaplan called the sancta of the Jewish people. If Jews treat it as a major holiday, then that’s what it is. But bear with me: there is a serious point to all these questions—namely, has Hanukkah become a rather bombastic group of days? And if so, why?

To begin with the mitzvah of joy or the absence thereof on Hanukkah: in the classical Talmudic source for Hanukkah, b. Shabbat 21b, in response to the question, “What is Hanukkah?,” the text briefly recounts the miracle of the cruse of oil, concluding, “And [these eight days]… were fixed as goodly days [yamim tovim], with praise and thanksgiving—Hallel ve-hoda’ah—and lighting candles.” Hallel refers to the recitation of the complete Hallel during the Morning Service on each day of Hanukkah; hoda’ah to thanking God for the specific events commemorated by these days by means of the adding the section beginning with the words Al ha-Nissim, which relates the salient points of the Hanukkah story in capsule form, in the Amidah prayer and Grace after Meals throughout the eight days. There is no mention here of “joy,” a characteristic of the three pilgrimage festival of Pesah, Shavuot and Sukkot; there is no mention of a festive meal, which is a sine qua non of festivity in Jewish tradition (but see Orah Hayyim 670.2, in the gloss of the Rem”a, that it is “a bit of a mitzvah” to do so); no Kiddush; nor is there any mention of a prohibition of labor. On the other hand, Rambam, who in his Code devotes two halakhot to a summary of the rationale for the days, describes the eight days of Hanukkah as “days of praise and joy (Hallel ve-simhah) and lighting therein candles” (Hilkhot Hanukkah 3.3).

What kind of joy is he speaking about? Hanukkah is the last remaining remnant of a whole category of minor festive days commemorating various events that occurred during Second Temple times, listed and described in an ancient tannaitic text known as Megillat Ta’anit. The common denominator of these days is “joy” in the negative sense—that is, the prohibition of certain manifestations of sadness, such as fasting and/or eulogizing the dead. It is thus a very moderate, low-key kind of joy.

As for the term “Festival of Lights”: at first glance, it seemed to me that this was one of those term (like “Seasons Greetings”) invented in the United States during a period when many American Jews sought to smooth over the differences between their own traditions and those of the majority culture—what has sometimes been termed “the December Dilemma”—and to give their own holiday a more “universal,“ acceptable ring. Perhaps the “lights” mentioned can be seen as alluding both to the Hanukkah candles and to the “Christmas lights” used to decorate the Christmas tree and Christian homes during the Yuletide season). The noted historian of American Jewry, Jonathan Sarna, in response to my query, wrote that “My sense is that ‘Festival of Lights’ goes back to the time when Jews eschewed Hebrew names for their holidays and tried to find English language equivalents for everything (for a time, Pesach was Jewish Easter), in a bid to make Judaism more intelligible to their neighbors. If you refer to [the Jewish News archives at] http://archive.jta.org and search for ‘Festival of Lights,’ you will see that the term was used as early as the 1920s.” Following his suggestion, using this fine resource whose very existence I had not known until now, I found an item from August 23 1927 describing a newly-published booklet by the Reform movement’s Union of Hebrew Congregations containing 13 sermons for the various holidays, including one for what is referred to as “the Festival of Lights.”

But then he added, quoting his colleague Dianne Ashton, that the term was already used by Josephus in Antiquities, Book XII. However, the fact that the term is not found anywhere in classical Rabbinic literature nor, to the best of my knowledge, in medieval Jewish sources, would suggest that its contemporary usage is a direct revival of an ancient but long forgotten term, motivated by the assimilatory or universalistic tendencies mentioned earlier.

My wife reminded me of yet another aspect of Hanukkah: that both Hanukkah and Christmas occur in the dead of winter, at a time when days are short and the sun is rather low in the sky. Thus, some historians of religion have suggested that both holidays bear some connection to an earlier pagan midwinter festival marking the turning point of the year, a kind of celebration of death and rebirth. (Israel Yuval has spoken about this, in an as-yet unpublished paper; see below.)

Yet another theory is suggested by one Al Wolters in an article reprinted in N. Zion and B. Spectre’s A Different Light (pp. 247-248): astronomers have calculated that Halley’s comet made one of its once-every-74-year appearances in the sky during the autumn and winter of 164 BCE—i.e., at the time of the Hanukkah story. Moreover, at that time (unlike 1985) it passed particularly close to the earth and was thus unusually bright. This brilliant light, visible in the daytime sky, was seen as a portent of the great events that ensued; hence the name, “Festival of Lights.” (On all this and more, see HY IX: Hanukkah [=Aggadah]; or see my blog archives at 2009_11_18).

To return to our central point: there’s nothing wrong per se in greeting one’s friends and neighbors with the words Hanukkah Sameah or in eating latkes and/or sufganiot (after all, Jews like to eat!); the important point is how we think about it. Hanukkah, traditionally, celebrates the survival of Judaism, and of the Jewish people, in the face of tremendous opposition—the survival of a small, beleaguered group, through quiet, steadfast loyalty to its Torah and its way-of-life, like a tiny flame emanating from a small wick with a bit of oil. The problem is that in our day we no longer know how to celebrate in low key. Everything about Hanukkah has become, for different reasons, exaggerated, over-emphasized, even bombastic. The reasons are various: in America, as mentioned, the proximity to Christmas, and the desire to “compensate” Jewish children for not having Christmas, has led many to make Hanukkah into a kind of Jewish counterpart to Christmas, with a focus on gift-giving. In recent years, someone even coined the term “Chrismukkah”—a hybrid of the two, tailor-made for the intermarried. In Israel, the Hasmonean rebellion against the Seleucid overlords has been interpreted as the first war of Jewish national independence, foreshadowing the Zionist renascence and the State of Israel’s military victories; the Maccabees are seen as a heroic alternative to the “nebbishy” image of the Galut Jew, and the “Lights” include torches as well as candles. Even Habad has gotten into the act, with huge menorahs and lighting ceremonies in public places. And in all these places, there are commercial interests, pushing the message of “Buy! Buy! Buy!” The original sense of Hanukkah, as I see it, is that of the small light burning through the darkness of winter, the darkness of Galut; it is precisely the smallness of the flame, so to speak, that is suggestive of its greatness. But, then, how can a subtle, inner quality like Wisdom compete with ever-expanding capitalist economies?

For more teachings on Hanukkah, see the archives to this blog at 2005_12_01, and at December 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.

Vayeshev (Wanderings)

2011-12-16T06:24:00.004-08:00

Yaakov and David as Fathers

The first Rashi I ever learned, or rather heard, is the opening one of this parashah. My parents had a friend named Isaiah who, like most of my parent’s circle, New York–Jewish progressive intellectuals, was a non-observant Jew who had grown up in a traditional home. But unlike most of their friends, who had either been born in America or come as small children during the early decades of the last century, Isaiah had spent enough years in the Old Country to receive a Heder education somewhere in White Russia, and still remembered his Rashi. This particular Rashi spoke to him in a deep way. At the time of my story, in my teen years, he was already well into middle age, and hoped to see his two daughters “settled,” so that he could spend his sunset years in peace and quiet, “shepping nakhas” from grandchildren. Instead, as my elder brother phrased it rather cynically, one of the daughters was too pretty for her own good, and the other too homely. Hence, our Isaiah identified with the patriarch Jacob when Rashi said: “Vayeshev Ya’akov. ‘Jacob dwelled’—Jacob wished to dwell in tranquility; yet there descended upon him the trouble of Joseph and his brothers.”

Thinking of Yaakov’s troubles with his children calls to mind some interesting parallels between the figure of Yaakov and that of King David. Both occupy roles of central importance in the Jewish imagination. On the Midrashic-Kabbalistic level, Yaakov is conceived as the “third leg” of the Kisei ha-Kavod, the Divine Throne, a figure who somehow harmonizes the strikingly opposing pulls of Abraham and Yitzhak: the expansive generosity of Avraham, expressed in unlimited hospitality, welcoming and reaching out to strangers; and the rather closed, introverted, somewhat harsh and even judgmental figure of Yitzhak. Moreover, unlike Abraham and Yitzhak, who also sired a Yishmael and an Esau, Jacob was the patriarch of the entire nation, Yisrael Sabba, after whom the nation as a whole is called: Israel. As for David: he epitomizes Jewish kingship. He is the founder of the eternal royal dynasty in Israel, the father of the future King Messiah, who will one day ingather all of Israel to restore our days as of old. In Kabbalah, he is identified with Malkhut / Shekhinah: the feminine attribute, representing God’s earthly sovereignty over the concrete, corporeal world, which unites with Yaakov-Tiferet.

Yet on the human level, that of simple, straightforward reading of the text, both were very problematic figures, at least in their role as fathers. Yaakov’s favoritism towards Yosef sparked a round of jealousy, conflict, and near murderous hatred. Yaakov was taken aback when Joseph told everyone around him about his dreams, with their obvious message of his imagining—was this fantasy or prophecy?—himself ruling over all the others. Yet he himself planted the seed when he favored him blatantly by giving him the striped coat—or, some say, the long-sleeved coat, going down to the palm of his hand (reading the word passim as derived from pas, palm)—so unlike the shepherd’s jerkins of his hard-working brothers, which symbolized his chosen, even aristocratic status within the family.

King David had it even worse. Two of his sons—Adoniyahu and Avshalom—tried to replace him on the throne during his lifetime. Another son, Amnon, raped his half-sister Tamar, and was murdered (the first “honor killing”?) in revenge by his brother Avshalom. When Avshalom, who led a violent uprising against David, was killed in a grisly accident while chasing wildly through the forest, David was not relieved at the death of his mortal enemy, but weeps Avshalom bni, b’ni b’ni Avshalom—“Woe, my son Absalom, my son Absalom; would that I could have died in your stead” (2 Sam 19:1; a phrase used in the title of one of William Faulkner’s novels). In the case of Adoniyahu, we are told (1 Kings 1:6) that David “never in his life told him: why are you doing such-and-such a thing?”—that is, he never attempted to discipline or teach him right and wrong. The overall picture that emerges is of a sentimental, indulgent father, utterly lacking in a clear notion of what was really happening within his own family.

Some thoughts on the situation of fathers and children: There is a classic image of the pater familias on old age, surrounded by a large, harmonious, loving family. But it is rarely thus in actuality. Parents tend to be blind to the weaknesses of their own children. Thus, Yitzhak loved Esau blindly—a pattern repeated in Yaakov, who loved Yosef. Why? Was he preferred because he was brighter and more resourceful than his brothers? The text, at the very beginning of this week’s parashah (Gen 37:3), tells us that this was because Yosef was his ben zekunim—“the son of his old age,” a phrase that usually denotes the youngest child. But this verse is somewhat strange: what about Benjamin, who was much younger, the only one born in Eretz Yisrael, and whose mother died in birthing him? Midrash Tanhuma says Yosef was “the son who supported him in his old age,” a role we see clearly in Egypt, where he enjoyed great political and economic power—but that is clearly not the simple sense of the verse. Yaakov no doubt favored Yosef because he was the son of his beloved Rahel, for whom he worked so many years, who was initially replaced in the bridal bed by her weak-eyed sister, and who died tragically young.

But was he the most fit to be the leader of the clan? It’s not at all certain; the functions of primogeniture, taken from the immature and impetuous Reuven, were divided among Judah (ancestor of the Davidic dynasty), Joseph (who received a double portion of territory), and Levi (the priestly tribe). But Yehudah was in his own way a powerful figure: he was a natural leader, who knew how to lead his brothers without giving himself airs of superiority (unlike the narcissistic and somewhat effeminate Yosef) or arousing hostility. He was what the Israelis call a “khevreman”—someone who was down-to-earth, who knew how to be a peer and a leader at the same time (some say this was the secret of Arik Sharon’s success). Inability to do so is a fatal flaw in many politicians; perhaps some of the criticism Obama is getting today is because he seems somehow aloof, not a “regular guy,” having grown up very much as a loner, in limbo between the two worlds of white and black in America.

One more interesting parallel between the two, which occurred to me while writing this: both Ya’akov and David were led to favor that son which they did because of their love, or even lust, for a woman; to put it simply, even coarsely, these stories illustrate the great power of sex. Yaakov fell in love with Rahel at first sight, when he met her by the well, because she was “fair of figure and fair of appearance” (Gen 29:17); after her death, he favored her son Yosef, who no doubt resembled her. David’s connection with the voluptuous Batsheva began when he saw her bathing on the roof and he sent to bring her to his palace. In due time, after the fruit of their adulterous liaison died, a second child was born, Solomon. Although by this time he had had many children by many different wives and concubines (see 2 Sam 3:2-5; 5:13-16), it was Solomon whom he chose to continue his royal line. Batsheva, in turn, enjoyed the dignity of being the dowager queen both during David’s lifetime (see, e.g., 1 Kgs 1:11 ff.) and after his death, when she is shown sitting on the throne next to her son Shlomo (2:19).

What are we to make of all this? Why dwell upon the human quirks and shortcomings of our illustrious forebears? A conventional answer is that the Torah, and the other books of the Tanakh, constantly stress that even the greatest figures are human beings, that they are not “plaster saints,” but men of flesh-and-blood, with all the passions and foibles and mistaken judgments implied by the human condition. There is no perfection save that of the One and unique God.

But beyond that, there are two more important points. First, that we learn something about human life from these stories—in these cases, inter alia, of the mistakes parents make—of over-indulgence, of blind spots, of favoritism. While not written as a handbook for parents each of us, in his own life situation, may draw significant lessons from these stories. Secondly, our Jewish tradition holds that the guiding hand of Providence acts in the world through the noble and ignoble motivations of real human beings, even if these be of the basest sort. In another incident told in this week’s parashah (Genesis 38), Judah sees a woman dressed as a whore and, his desire being kindled, he goes to her. But the Midrash tells us that, while the brothers were busy selling Joseph; Reuven, Yaakov and Yosef himself were bewailing the latter’s fate, and Judah was seeking a tumble in the hay, “the Holy One blessed be He was bringing down the light of King Messiah” (Gen. Rab. 85.1). The woman was in fact Yehudah’s mistreated and widowed daughter-in-law Tamar, and one of the children born to her, Peretz, was destined to continue the line that was to culminate in King David.

* * * * *

A Brief Postscript to Vayishlah: Yaakov’s name was changed to Yisrael—first by the spectral figure he meets at the Yabok crossing, and then by God Himself. But notwithstanding the words, “your name shall no longer be called Yaakov,” repeated twice (Gen 32:28; 35:10), and unlike the other figures in the Torah whose name is changed (Avram to Avraham; Sarai to Sarah; Hoshea to Yehoshua), who from then forth are called by the new name alone, in this case the Torah constantly switches back and forth between the two. What pattern, if any, is there here? A close reading of the chapters following the name change shows little consistency. Indeed, God is often referred to, and describes Himself, as “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob”—e.g., to Moses at Mount Horeb (Exod 3:15), in the opening phrase of the daily Amidah prayer, and in many other places (one striking exception is Elia at Mt Carmel: 1 Kgs 18:36). The only pattern I see is that, in most scenes involving Yosef, he is called Yisrael. But why? What does it all mean? The matter requires further study.

For more teachings on the parashah, see the archives to thsi blog for December 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010

Vayishlah (Wanderings)

2011-12-16T06:24:00.003-08:00

A Dialogue About Ego Death

The early part pf this week’s parashah contains one of the strangest events in the Torah—Yaakov’s nocturnal encounter with the mysterious, almost spectral figure of a “man” who struggles with him until dawn, injures his thigh muscle, and then blesses him and gives him a new name (Gen 32:24ff.). Rather than Ya’akov, a name redolent of crookedness, even dishonesty, he becomes Yisrael—he who struggles with God and is able; and/or, he who is upright with God (yashar-el). Was this figure an angel of God? An avatar of his brother Esau, whom he is about to encounter again after twenty years, and from whom he parted with most bitter feelings? Whatever the exact nature of this figure, and whether it is to be read as an actual occurrence or a dream–vision (thus, e.g., Rambam in Guide II.42), we may surely read it as a “dark night of the soul,” a deeply transformative, inner experience which somehow consolidated the changes Yaakov underwent during the twenty years he spent in Haran. It seems to me that, in the spirit of Hasidism, it would not be too far-fetched to read this as a paradigm “for very person, in every time and place”; surely all of us, at some point or another, must undergo deep inner struggles with whom we are and whom we need to become.

These thoughts are elicited especially strongly in light of a significant dialogue I wish to share with readers with Stan Tenen (on whom more below). This discussion began with his reaction to my essay for Vayera about the Binding of Yitzhak, and ultimately touches upon important issues relating to the nature of what we mean by religion, the meaning of life and death, self and the cosmos. expressing some of our questions and conundrums about that event. In his first letter, Stan wrote:

The willingness to sacrifice one's only child, and thus also one's entire future, is the epitome of the ego-death experience. If Avraham Avinu had not been willing to sacrifice all he had, all his life and all his future, he would not have reduced his ego sufficiently to merit inheriting the future.

There is a direct relationship between the depth of one's nullification of ego and the potential for growth and miracles. If one completely nullifies one's ego by awareness of the infinite and transcendent nature of God, then the future has infinite possibilities. The depth of nullification is proportional to the height of possibilities.

At this stage, I found some of what he said very troubling. In my reply, I wrote: “Perhaps I misunderstand you, but I have deep reservations about the whole concept of ‘ego-death.’ In brief: as I see it, the real problem is not ego vs. negation of ego (what Hasidim call bittul atzmi), but inflated ego vs. healthy ego.” At this point, I understood him to be advocating “self-nullification”—a concept found in many early Hasidic texts—as a serious, actual option for the religious life of the Jew. I strongly questioned whether there is such a thing as a person who has truly negated his ego, and suspect that those who think that they have done so are in some sense deluding themselves; hence, to hold it up as an ideal encourages either hypocrisy (conscious or unconscious), or various kinds of craziness. Hence, I cannot accept the Habad notion (found in Chapter 1 of Tanya) of a Tzaddik gamur, a “perfect” or “completely righteous person” who has no ego, no will, and no desires, but lives entirely to help others and to serve God. It is at best a useful theoretical construct, a foil against which to poise real, living human beings.

The alternative to this, which I see as the “high road” of Judaism, is to guide our ego in a healthy but modest, humble way. A central part of this is what I call a “life project.” By this, I mean some activity—which may be intellectual, artistic, practical-social in nature, or even building a family—which engages the person’s energies and imagination to the fullest, and involves creating or building something beyond the self and its own immediate satisfaction and pleasures. Those of us who have found a serious and worthwhile life project in which to pour our ego–energies are fortunate—but it is important to realize that such a life project is ultimately in some sense a function or offshoot of the ego, not its negation; it is, in some sense, an expression of the self and its uniqueness. Albeit, on another level, to use religious language, its ultimate aim is to magnify God’s Name and make it present in the world.

I know from myself, that my writing— in piecemeal fashion, through the medium of these weekly essays and studies, and perhaps ultimately through some more systematic presentation in book form—have been a source of deep satisfaction to myself. If I may be so bold, Stan, my dialogue partner here, has been engaged for several decades in a very exciting and unique intellectual enterprise to which he has devoted his best energies (more on that below). I would go so far as to say that the life of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, whom Habad doctrine describes as a tzaddik gamur, may be understood by us ordinary mortals in terms of a very audacious and far-reaching life project—to bring the entire Jewish people back to Torah and mitzvot, and to create the world-wide network of emissaries needed to do so; at a certain point in his “career” as Rebbe this was even conceived as messianic project. I of course know nothing from “within” of the personality of the late Rebbe or how he thought about his own life, but simply by virtue of the mere fact that he was a human being I believe that he was in some senses imperfect and clearly had an ego—and to all evidences a very strong one.

Two more comments at this point. One, that just as our Sages say that no person dies having fulfilled half his desires—a saying usually understood as referring to grossly carnal or corporeal desires—may also apply to the spiritual and creative life. That is, there is always more to learn, more books to write, or more music to compose or paintings to paint, more people to help, more to understand. Thus, life projects are rarely or never completed in full.

A second aside: Perhaps Rabbah, when referring to himself as a beinoni, even though, as noted there, he never walked four ells without wearing tefillin and without speaking words of Torah—i.e., he was as close to perfection as a Jew can be —implies that the idea of tzaddik gamur is a fiction, or a theoretical yardstick, not a reality.

Stan replied to my above comments as follows:

There's a deep paradox here, and it relates to the alternative-universes theory in physics…. I don't think it's possible for a person to stay in an ego-death state, except for a short period. I think the majority of people who have ego-death experiences don't integrate them very well. Some become egomaniacs, and some think that they're the Messiah.

The true ego-death experience can be initiated spontaneously, as part of a disease process (heart attack), in very deep meditation, and/or as facilitated by psychotropics. It is my understanding that regardless of how the circumstance comes about, the results are pretty much the same….

A person undergoing an ego-death experience must not be able to tell that it's an ego-death experience rather than their actual death. This is because the ego would have to be active in order to realize that its death was psychological and/or psycho-physiological, but not physical.

Thus, a person undergoing an ego-death experience believes that they are actually dying. In this experience, a person has a choice either to fight the experience and try to stay alive, or to surrender and yield up their soul. At the moment of surrender, at the moment of letting go, at the moment of ego-death, a person is turned inside-out and transformed.

Others observing a person undergoing ego-death might see them actually die, or might be aware that it's an ego-death experience and not see them die. This leads to a bifurcation of reality and/or alternate realities. The greater the self-abnegation, the wider the window of opportunity for the “action of heaven.” Complete self-abnegation thus leads to the greatest possibilities for future life and growth.

Stan’s answer put things in a totally different perspective. It’s clear that what he is speaking of is a very powerful, probably singular, once in a lifetime transformative mystical experience. In this light—not as a normative demand, nor even as a hypothetical ideal as the highest level of living one’s life, but as something which happens through a kind of Divine grace—it takes on a totally different significance. Nevertheless, I think that my own above remarks, based on a certain misunderstanding, are of value in their own right as clarifying certain issues.

What Stan writes here is reminiscent of what has been described in certain mystical experiences, in which a person feels himself totally nullified in union with God. I once read that certain medieval Jewish mystics used to make their souls take an oath that, following the Heavenly ascent, they would return to the body and not stay “up” there, as otherwise the person would die. Perhaps “death by the Divine kiss” was a mystical ego-death which, if the person was ready, became a bodily death as well. To continue:

A person who wears their humility on their sleeve is an egomaniac. Intense, forced (or over-practiced) piety and/or humility are actually the exact opposites of real piety and real humility. … Of course, I don't know everyone or every condition, but I'd say that people who think they've burned out their Yetzer Hara [lit., “the Evil Urge”—but really also the source of life vitality, of eros] have really just burned out their creativity…. The Yetzer Hara is necessary for life. It refers to all activity on the “earth plane,” and to a Newtonian reality where everything circles “Ra,” the Egyptian sun-god [I don’t know if I agree with this etymology—but that is a very minor point-yc]. The Yetzer Hara is the wheel of karma, and the cycles of the planets and the seasons, and the cycles of living beings.

The scholars (Wolfson, et al.) think that Kabbalah is about sex magic, because -- not having experienced the grand mort of ego-death, they mistake the descriptions of ego-death for le petit mort of the sexual experience. There is a relationship: le petit mort is le grand mort writ small, and le grand mort is le petit mort writ large. {Is that why the Kabbalah uses the metaphor of sexual union to describe unification within the Godhead divinity? I hope to write an essay on this in the near future. YC]

There are also real-world opportunities to engage the principle of self-abnegation. This is the subject of my old essay "The Three Abrahamic Covenants and the Car-Passing Trick" at http://www.meru.org/carpass.html. … Abraham's complete self-abnegation, in his voluntary willingness to yield up his future (Isaac), opens the world of infinite growth and possibilities, numbering greater than the stars in the sky or the grains of sand.

Because it's very rare for academic or religious scholars to have actually experienced ego-death for themselves, the bulk of scholarly discussion on the matter is uninformed (by lack of experience) and confused and confabulated with le petit mort, near-death, and other quasi-ego-death experiences that can't be distinguished. And the world of conventional (Newtonian mind-think) doesn't help, because it insists on excluding the conscious experience of the experimenter—which is of course crucial to any understanding of the ego-death experience, which is impenetrable from the outside.

One concluding comment about the Akedah: everything Stan has written on this relates to the ego-death required of Abraham: to give up his future, his progeny, and thus also the continuity of his own life-project of spreading knowledge of God’s oneness —singularity and uniqueness, combined with His rulership over all—beyond his own death. But there is another, equally serious problem with the Akedah: the ethical issue, what Kierkegaard calls the awful paradox of the “theological suspension of the ethical.” How could God command Abraham to sacrifice, i.e., to kill, another human being, to violate what we are told elsewhere is a basic, innate ethical rule? Here, I envision Abraham living every moment of the three days journeying from Beer-sheva to Mount Moriah with a kind of double consciousness: simultaneously believing that God required this of him, and being prepared to obey blindly out of his great love for Him; and the equally great certainty that God could not demand this of him, and that in some way he could not comprehend that it would in the end prove to be so.

* * * * *

A few words about Stan Tenen. Stan has devoted his life to studying the idea that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are not merely a group of conventional signs, but a kind of hand signal whose meaning is intuitively understood by human beings without any further instruction. To this, he adds a wealth of insights from the worlds of mathematics, geometry and physics. He has recently published a book in which he presents his ideas: The Alphabet That Changed the World. For details, visit his website, www.meru.org.

Vayetze (Wanderings)

2011-12-16T06:23:00.000-08:00

“… and Its Top Reaching to the Heavens”

This week I originally thought of writing “A Tale of Two Sisters” to complement last week’s essay about the two brothers, Esau and Yaakov, and noting the similarities, parallels, contrasts, etc., between them—and there are such. But then I realized that, as a man, and as one who grew up in a family with three sons and no daughters (even though in my adult life I’ve been connected to mostly female families), I feel that I don’t really understand women’s interaction with one another. Add to that the fact that the subject in this week’s parashah is the competition between two sisters to bear children within a bigamous or polygamous household—a reality alien to just about everyone except for certain schismatic Mormons, Black Israelites, pre-State Yemenites, and followers of Goel Ratzon and such-like cults—I decided instead to focus upon the opening scene in the parashah.

Jacob’s vision or dream of the Ladder (Gen 28:10-22) is one of the paradigmatic visionary scenes in the entire Bible, certainly in Genesis (albeit Rambam has suggested that the reason Yaakov saw this dream–vision was because at this point in his life he was on a lower stage than the other patriarchs, who engaged in direct, ordinary-seeming conversations with God). The account of the vision is divided into three parts:

1. The Vision: vv. 10-15. Yaakov arrives at a certain place, lies down to sleep after gathering some stones together as a rudimentary pillow, and sees in a dream-vision a ladder or staircase ascending to the heavens with angels ascending and descending. God, who is standing at the top, offers him words of personal blessing, comfort and assurance in his difficult situation (fleeing his murderous brother and leaving behind family and everything he has ever known). There is something very immediate and striking about this picture. Jungians might say that the imagery of the ladder connecting heaven and earth is a kind of eternal symbol, intuitively understood by the human unconscious: the reality of the ascent to God, and the availability of the Divine, alongside the seemingly mundane journeys in the physical world.

2. Jacob wakes up: vv. 16-17. The Hebrew word used here, va-yikatz, is an unusual one, used specifically to refer to someone who awakens suddenly in the middle of the night, often from a dream (compare the description of Pharaoh’s two dreams in 41:4, 7, and 21), differing from the words usually used to describe waking early in the morning to begin one’s day, vayashkem (appearing two verses later, as well as in Gen 19:27, 21:14, 22:3, 28:18 and in many other places) or vayakom. Va-yikatz has a connotation of something sudden, even shocking, and is perhaps related to such verbs as קצה, קצץ, and קצר, which relate to cutting, harvesting, or coming to an end.

Ya’akov’s reaction is one of awe, wonder, astonishment: “Indeed, there is God in this place and I did not know! How awesome is this place; this is none other than the house of God and this is the Gate of Heaven!” He was struck by the numinous quality of his experience, which carried over to the nature of the place itself. Surely, he seems to have felt, any place where God reveals Himself must be special, must be holy.

Was this place uniquely or innately holy? Did Jacob become aware of a preexistent holiness and Presence inherent in this place, or are his words a reaction to the vision per se? A simple reading of the chapter suggests that he came to an ordinary place, and was surprised by the vision. The implication (or am I imposing my own modernist theology on this chapter? Radak seems to propound a similar reading) is that God is potentially present in all places. The Omnipresent, the Creator and Master of the entire world, makes Himself known to those who need to know Him, wherever they are, and Jacob’s statement that “this is the House of God” means that it shall henceforth be honored as Beit-El, the “House of God,” reflecting the sense of presence he felt there—but it could be anywhere.

On the other hand, there are those midrashim which suggest that this place Beit-el, which we know as a location some 20 km. north of Jerusalem, was really Jerusalem, or that it was a place where one of his ancestors had previously worshipped. I even once heard a Samaritan say, consistent with his theology, that Beit-El is really Mount Gerizim. (!!) (For a discussion of the tension in Judaism between holiness of place and God as being beyond place, in the midrashic context, see HY III: Vayetze [=Midrash].

3. Jacob awakens in the morning: vv. 18-22. He now makes an orderly, well-articulated vow, almost a quid pro quo with God: if God will sustain me and protect me, give me food and clothing, and return me safely to my birthplace and homeland and family, then I will erect a shrine here.

In these two scenes we see a kind of tension between two aspects of or kinds of religion. The one is direct religious emotion and experience; the powerful sense of being in the presence of the Holy, of knowing—not through received teaching or dogma, not through holy books, not through family or parental tradition, but through direct, immediate experience—the reality of God. Such an experience is very rare, it is fleeting, and is overwhelming personally. Jacob’s words are brief, and express direct feeling, the sense of the numinous—of that which is alien, totally outside the realm of the familiar or the expected. “There is God here, and I did not know!”

The second kind of religion is the more usual kind, and somehow seems more fitting to the clear light of day, as opposed to the terrors, but also the insights and deeper perceptions, of the nighttime: he vows to build an altar, perhaps even a shrine, on this site. In our language: fixed forms: religious institutions; halakhah, ritual, liturgy, perhaps a priesthood of some sort. If you will: Devotion vs. Commandment.

Two Kinds of Mysticism

The subject of mysticism is a very popular one these days; books, lectures, courses in Kabbalah flourish like mushrooms after the rain. But people are often unclear as to just what they mean when they speak of mysticism. In writing the above, it occurred to me that there are in fact two very different phenomena that go under this name, corresponding to the two types of religion mentioned.

The one is the sense of the holy, the sense of direct, immediate contact with God, of religious or spiritual experience unmediated and unmitigated by any formal institution. One definition that has been given is: “The pursuit of communion with or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality… through direct experience, intuition, or insight.” Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, and his spontaneous reaction, “So there is God in this place, and I did not know,” seems the quintessence of such mystical experience.

On the other hand, there is a form of mysticism associated with magic, with the manipulation of unseen cosmic forces or, its correlate, the sense of certain places, person, or objects being innately holy. This popular usage is demonstrated, for example, by a TV program on Israel’s Channel 10 called “Time for Mysticism,” which features a numerologist, an astrologer, a tarot card reader, and a “channeler”—all of whose talents are marshaled to help people with various personal problems. About a year ago, due to difficulties in walking long distances, I began to regularly attend a synagogue just up the hill from my home, which seems to have a high proportion of very rational and sceptical, albeit religiously observant, Jews. In at least two recent conversations there I encountered people who object to mysticism and Kabbalah precisely because of its identification with such phenomena, and all my efforts to show that both Kabbalah and mysticism have more to them than this were to no avail. And indeed, it often seems that much of the popular interest in Kabbalah is focused on such things as gematria (numerical values of words and verses in the Bible), letter mysticism, holy places, and the intricacies of the Sefirotic system. And indeed, between the early Spanish Kabbalah of the 13th centuries (Sefer ha-Bahir and Sefer ha-Zohar) and the Lurianic Kabbalah of 16th century Safed, Kabbalah seems to have become progressively more complex and convoluted. Some say that Hasidism was a much needed simplification of this system. (I once knew a woman who studied Kabbalah at the university and said, half in jest, that she was prepared for this career by the fact that her mother is a psychiatrist and her father ran an automotive parts dealership—requiring detailed attention to a high number of permutations and combination of models, makes, and specific parts.)

Add to this the seeming ubiquity in current Israeli life of “Kabbalists”—people who claim a special channel to the hidden realms, offering the credulous amulets, bottles of holy water, candles, red strings from Rachel’s Tomb, and various other palliative devices—and being paid handsomely for their supposed intercession on their behalf in the supernal worlds. Such people give a bad name to both Kabbalah and Judaism generally.

Even some academic scholars seem to emphasize this aspect of Kabbalah. Moshe Idel’s book, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: SUNY, 1995), as its title implies, stresses that, alongside the ecstatic prayer, joy, and communal solidarity found in Hasidism, there is also a strong element of magic, theurgy, manipulation of objects and symbols, and extravagant attribution of powers to the Tzaddikim. I cannot fault him for this, as historically he has much ground to stand on.

More disturbing is a quotation from Gershom Scholem, which serves as a kind of motto in a book about a certain aspect of Hasidism which I’ve recently been editing. He claims there a certain dullness, even lifelessness of non-mystical, mainstream Rabbinic Judaism. He speaks of:

… the special problem of ritual in Rabbinical Judaism, which can perhaps be formulated as follows: on the one hand, we have here a way of life based entirely on the performance of ritual, a tendency to absorb life itself into a continuous stream of ritual, and not merely to extract ritual acts from its flow at particular climaxes and turning points. But in this Judaism, on the other hand, the performance of sacred actions, of ritual is largely divorced from the substrate that has always been the mother of ritual…

After noting the transition, early on, from nature ritual to historical ritual, he continues:

… the primordial history that is here recollected was no longer regarded by the celebrants as a mythical history… but as the real history of the Jewish people. Thus this history-saturated ritual was accompanied by no magical action. The rites of remembrance produce no effect…. The ritual of Rabbinic Judaism makes nothing happen and transforms nothing. Though not devoid of feeling, remembrance lacks the passion of conjuration, and indeed, there is something strangely sober and dry about the rites of remembrance with which the Jew calls to mind his unique historical identity. Thus this ritualism par excellence of Rabbinical Judaism is lacking precisely in the ecstatic, orgiastic element that is always somewhere present in mythical rituals. The astonishing part of it is that a ritual which so consciously and emphatically rejected all cosmic implications should have asserted itself for many generations with undiminished force, and even continued to develop. -- “Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists,” in his On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 120-121

What Scholem desires, so it seems here, is magic, is theurgy, is ritual “that changes things” (that moves things On High?), is myth in its most primitive, primal, orgiastic sense (and orgies, we know, are popular in contemporary culture—as an image in theory, even if practiced by only a daring few). Was Scholem, the sober, precise, Yekke scholar, at heart a neo-pagan, longing for a quasi-idolatrous Judaism, which he seems to have found, at least in a certain measure, in Kabbalah?

I feel I have touched upon some very serious and profound issues in contemporary Judaism, and the meaning of the revival of Kabbalah and “New Age” spirituality, in terms of both popular and “higher,” intellectual and academic culture, which requires far more elaboration than I can give it at this time.

I also hope, very soon, to present here a dialogue with one of my readers which touches precisely upon the issue of mystical experience from another perspective—that of mysticism and liminal experience, the meaning of death and life, of self and others, of personal growth, etc.

Toldot (Wanderings)

2011-11-26T11:28:00.000-08:00

A Tale of Two Brothers

Before turning to this week’s parashah, I would like to reiterate a point that has guided much of what I have written here over the years: namely, that the Jewish tradition frequently puts a very definite slant on the meaning and interpretation of a particular Biblical text, so much so that we automatically see it through that perspective, and often tend to overlook the peshat, in the sense of the straightforward meaning. A case in point is the story of Jacob and Esau, which lies at the center of this week’s reading. We are so accustomed to thinking of Esau as esav ha-rasha, as the nemesis of the Jewish people throughout history since time immemorial, that a special effort is needed to see what the biblical text itself is actually saying. (Of course, one can also read it through the midrashic lens, as I have done on those years when my writing has been devoted to midrash, aggadah, Rashi, Hasidism, etc. It is nevertheless important to be aware that one is doing so, and from time to time to attempt to read the parashah with fresh eyes, without preconceptions.)

A second point about the Bible’s method of writing: literary critic Erich Auerbach, in his masterwork Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, begins by noting a basic difference between the Greek epic and the Bible. Whereas, e.g., Homer in the Odyssey depicts the scene of Odysseus’ homecoming in great detail, with digressions, elaborate flashbacks, etc., the Bible is often succinct to the point of terseness, conveying worlds of meaning in a few brief sentences. (Albeit not always: Hazal noted with some puzzlement the verbosity of the text in last week’s parashah, in which the story of the servant’s mission to find a wife for Yitzhak is repeated several times, and in considerable detail.) The opening section of this week’s parashah, Genesis 25:19-34, is a classic example of this: in a few broad strokes we are told of the conception, pregnancy and birth of the two brothers, their respective characters, their parents’ respective preferences between them, and the scene of the selling of the birthright.

We begin with the two brothers struggling in the womb and their mother seeking an oracle of the Lord. She is not told that one is morally superior to the other; rather, “Two peoples are in your womb, and two nations shall be separated from your innards, and one nation shall struggle against the other”—i.e., they are both [seemingly] equal. But it concludes with a prophecy about their future: “the greater [i.e., the elder] shall serve the younger” (v. 23). Thus, from the very outset there is a certain hint of destiny, of the idea that Yaakov is the rightful heir to his father (presumably, including the covenant with God and the inheritance of the Land); hence, his underhanded attempts to obtain, first the birthright, then the unique and singular paternal blessing, may be seen as carrying some justification.

Or is all this window dressing, and ought we to focus upon this story in terms of sibling rivalry, pure and simple—a story as old as humanity itself. There is a deep paradox here: we speak of “brotherhood” as a metaphor for human solidarity, friendship and cooperation, a model for peaceful coexistence between different nations and religions—and yet, as often as not, real brothers, born of the same flesh and raised in the same home, are at odds with one another. They fight for paternal love and attention: a situation often exacerbated when the parents, despite the best intentions, do not love all their children equally well, but favor one over another. Worse still, when each parent has their own favorite, the rivalry between the children may be deflected back to the marital relation. In royal households, or other families in which there is some hereditary privilege, this may end in bloody struggles over the succession (note the conflicts in the family of King David, or contemporary quarrels in Hasidic courts; I might note here that the late Bostoner Rebbe, ztz”l, did well to assure that his “Rebbesha” patrimony was divided among all three of his sons upon his death. There may have been more erudite scholars than he, but he was a very wise man.)

To return to Genesis 25: Esau was an outdoors type, a hunter, a person of crude, roughhewn masculinity—he was even born hairy; whereas Yaakov was delicate, cerebral, one who liked to sit at home in his mother’s tent. In a later age, these two types seemed to coalesce perfectly with, or even to serve as paradigms for “Goyish” and “Jewish” models of masculinity (see Daniel Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, in which he asserts that Judaism, specifically in the notion of the talmid hakham, the Talmudic scholar, created an alternative model for male heterosexuality to the Greco-Roman Adonis figure; cf. Maurice Samuel’s The Gentleman and the Jew, in which the rejection of sports and the hunt is seen as a defining moment in Jewish self-understanding). Interestingly, one of the central cultural motifs of Zionism was the creation of the “new Jew”—i.e., a model of masculinity closer to that of the other nations: hence the emphasis on sports and physical fitness (the Maccabee Association), on agriculture, and of course on readiness to use arms in self-defense (Hashomer)—all of which also required a rejection of the religious piety of the “Galut Jew.” In more recent times, a new type of Israeli religious Jew has created a certain synthesis of the two, at times aggressively so. But one might conclude that even more recently, in a certain historical irony, as computer software has outstripped citrus fruit and even military goods as Israel’s major export industry, the computer nerd has become a new hero of sorts.

The term tam, used here to describe Yaakov, did not yet have the sense of simplicity or even naivete and simple–mindedness which it later acquired—e.g., in the third son of the Passover Haggadah. R. Nahman of Bratslav turns this stereotype on its head in his story Al Hakham va-Tam, which celebrates the man of simple, naïve faith. Here the word has the original meaning of completeness, fulness, integrity, soundness, purity, as well as a certain innocence and simplicity. But Bible scholar George Savran has suggested that Ish tam may be intended here ironically, in light of what follows.

After a few minor incidents, we turn to the second major part of this week’s parashah, Chapter 27, in which Yaakov, at the prompting and under the guidance of his mother Rivkah, receives the blessing intended for Esau. We have written in the past that Yitzhak may well have been suspicious all along, repeatedly asking “Are you really my son Esau?” The sense of this passage is that he had somehow chosen to play along with the masquerade, possibly realizing, as he began to confront his own death (see Gen 27:2,4; but he in fact did not die until more than twenty years later, after Yaakov’s return to the Land: see below, Gen 35:27-29) that Yaakov would be a more fitting heir to his covenantal inheritance. (The question as to why each parent loved whom he/she did is an interesting one. One traditional answer is “opposites attract”: just as in marriage we are drawn to someone whom we unconsciously feel may complement or compensate for our own shortcomings, so too in preferences towards children: Yitzhak knew he was indecisive, even somewhat effeminate, and was drawn to the uncomplicated, rough masculinity of Esau; Rivkah, who had grown up with a “toughy” like Lavan, appreciated Yaakov’s delicacy.)

Two more points. One is the role of Rivkah, and the psychology of a son who was loved overly well by his mother. Beyond the ethical issues, this can be unhealthy emotionally, leading to a passive personality. Indeed, Yaakov’s entire subsequent life history may be read as an attempt to overcome this.

A second point relates to the role of food in this whole drama. Why are food and eating so important here? Yitzhak tells Esau: “Go, bring me some hunt so that I may bless you before I die.” Three times the Torah uses here words implying causation—בעבור and למען— “so that I may bless you” (27:4, 19, 25), implying a direct cause and effect relation between the bringing and eating of food to Yitzhak, and his blessing the son who does so. We know, both in Judaism and other cultures, of the centrality of eating, of the table as a focus of fellowship, whether in the family or in the larger community. Moreover, feeding others is perhaps the paradigmatic act of Hesed, of kindness, of giving, of generosity. Joseph’s rule as leader and even savior in Egypt is tied to his role as provider, as ha-mashbir. Similarly, the term used in medieval Jewry for the communal leaders, parnasei ha-tzibbur, is derived from the root פרנס, which originally meant to feed or provide—hence parnasah is “livelihood.” (This thought is prompted by the death last week of a neighbor named Yosef Parnes—may his memory be a blessing.)

It is interesting that blessing generally, in Judaism, is related to food. Birkat Hamazon, the Grace After Meals, is the paradigmatic blessing from which all other blessings, both before partaking of food and on innumerable other occasions, is inferred. Rambam notes that it is the only blessing de-oraita, of Torah status. Is thanking someone who has fed one—a civilized convention—in essence equivalent to saying “bless you”? Are blessing and thanks conceptually equivalent? This is an appropriate question for the weekend of “thanks–giving.”

Finally, to return to the central ethical question posed by the parashah: perhaps Yaakov and Rivkah’s behavior is best understood, not as simple deceit, but as a certain choice, a way of dealing with a real dilemma, a situation fraught with ambiguity: on the one hand, the very real sense of destiny, that in some sense Yaakov is the rightful heir of Avraham and Yitzhak’s spiritual heritage; on the other, the sense that Esau, simply as a human being, was deserving of consideration and fair treatment.

Hayyei Sarah (Wanderings)

2011-11-26T11:22:00.000-08:00

“And Yitzhak went out to the field”

One of the verses in this week’s parashah that has always intrigued me is ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב וגו': “And Yitzhak went out to converse/meditate/stroll in the field towards evening…” (Genesis 24:63). The traditional Rabbinic interpretation, cited by Rashi and others (Sforno, R. Saadya Gaon, R. Hananel), is that Yitzhak went into the field to pray at that time; hence, he is seen, in a Talmudic passage I have discussed several times in the past in the context of communal vs. individual prayers, as establishing the Minhah (Afternoon) Prayer, just as Avraham “established” Shaharit and Yaakov Ma’ariv (see b. Berakhot 27b, in the name of R Yossi bar Hanina). The passage in question interprets the verb לשוח, from the root שיח , as meaning “to pray” on the basis of its usage in the heading to Psalm 102: “The prayer of a poor man when he is faint [or: enwrapped, as in a prayer shawl] and pours out his discourse before he Lord (ולפני ה' ישפך שיחו).

Another group of commentators (most prominently Radak, Rashbam, and Ibn Ezra), often referred to as peshtanim for their emphasis on a straightforward, philological understanding of the biblical text and a rejection of the often fanciful associations found in midrash, say that he simply went out to walk in the field (BDB sees this as a variant of the root שוט), to meet an acquaintance in this particular place, or to inspect what was happening with the shrubs and trees (Radak, interestingly, reads לשוח as a verb derived from the noun שיח, “shrub”).

A third view, which I saw many years ago in a parashah sheet from Bar-Ilan University, suggests that לשוח derived from an Arabic root meaning to open oneself up, to meditate without any predetermined contents. In any event, whether praying, meditating, or aimlessly walking about by himself, Yitzhak appears here as a solitary figure, given to what the Romantics called ”communing with nature” (or perhaps, to avoid the pantheistic implications of that phrase, “communing in nature”).

All this elicits questions about the personality of Yitzhak. We see him here as a solitary, somewhat dreamy figure, rather than as a “mover and shaker” like his father. It has often been noted that a certain kind of passivity is a dominant strain in his personality: he plays a passive role in the Akedah, where he is saved at the last possible moment by angelic intervention; he does not actively court his wife nor, unlike Yaakov and Moshe, does he impress her with his masculine strength, courage and gallantry. Rather, she is brought to him by his father’s servant and, in an almost Freudian verse a few lines down, we are told that with his wife he was “comforted after his mother[’s death]” (ibid., v. 67). Yet again, in the final scene shown of his life, he appears as a feeble, blind old man easily deceived (or was he really? did he perhaps consciously and deliberately “play along” with the ruse?) by his powerful wife and stay-at-home son. All these facts suggest a passive, even feminine hue to his personality.

A third point is that, according to Kabbalah, Yitzhak is the archetype for the sefirah of Gevurah—of stern judgment, of a certain strictness, constriction and even harshness, just as Abraham is identified with Hesed—overflowing love and kindness and constant reaching out to others; of love of life; of seeing God’s presence in every blade of grass. This is stated explicitly in at least one biblical sequence: when Yaakov parts from his father-in-law Lavan, he twice invokes “the God of my father Abraham and the Fear of my father Isaac (פחד [אביו] יצחק)…” (Gen 31:42, 53). What, if any, is the relationship among solitude, passivity and fear? To answer this question, he must first understand the concept of “fear of God.” There is a tendency among many people today to emphasize love alone. Certainly, the new Jewish spirituality speaks of love, of warmth, of striving for joy and even ecstasy in prayer, and also of self-acceptance, as a sine qua non for religion for today’s world. This is perhaps especially so in Orthodoxy, where many have experienced the old-type Orthodoxy—the proverbial heder melamed who hit his pupils over the knuckles with a ruler whenever they made a mistake—who alienated a whole generation of Jews from observance. A gentler, more benign and benevolent approach certainly seems called for.

Yet Judaism speaks of ahavah and yirah, of the love and fear of God, as two sides of the same coin, as two attributes both of which are necessary, as complementing one another. I am reminded here of William James’ concept, in his masterly study The Varieties of Religious Experience, of “world-affirming” and “world–denying” religiosity.

What then is meant by fear? One definition is yirat ha-onesh: fear of Divine punishment, be it in this life or the next, for failure to perform the mitzvot or for active transgression, in the sense of performing a forbidden act. This is the “fear of God” taught by the fire-and-brimstone preachers of yore.

A second, more sublime level, is yirat ha-romemut, in which fear is understood in terms of awe, the sense of being overwhelmed by God’s majesty and transcendence, more reminiscent of Rudoph Ottos’ mysterium tremendum and the sense of God as being Wholly Other. This is the אימה ויראה רתת וזיע which the people experienced at Sinai; it is this which caused prophets to fall on their faces upon seeing the Divine Glory.

But there is also a third, more down-to-earth level: yirat het, “the fear of sin.” There are those who define it in terms of fearing the alienation from God that one might bring upon oneself through one’s own sinful acts. But I would suggest something much simpler. Fear of sin really means: fear of one’s own Yetzer Hara, of one’s own Evil Urge or Evil Inclination. The one who fears is aware of the complexity of human personality, of the multiplicity and ambivalence of every human being’s inner life; the propensity to sin, to mislead oneself. This is, perhaps, the source of Yitzhak’s solitude: I can imagine him spending long hours reflecting on his own actions, weighing them carefully, analyzing his motivations—in short, a kind of Nevarhadok Mussar-nik. This may also explain his passivity: excessive fear of sin may lead to indecision, even to paralysis of the will, because one worries too much about making the wrong decision. I am reminded of a certain person named Bava ben Buti who, according to the Mishnah at Keritut 6.3, brought an asham taluy—the sacrifice of atonement for a possible sin every day of his life: “perhaps I did something wrong.” Thus, rather than simply going out into the world with a happy, positive attitude, ready to embrace the world and to do what needs to be done, Yitzhak (and all those that share this temperament) was plagued by fear that, somewhere along the way, he might commit a misstep and fall into transgression.

But there is nevertheless reason to fear one’s own potential to sin. There are relatively gross and obvious forms of the Evil Inclination, which a person who has worked on himself may feel he ahs overcome in some fashion—such things as lust, gluttony, love of money and material wealth, anger, sloth—in short, the seven deadly sins of the Christians. But there are other, subtler temptations: the desire for honor and recognition from others; or, among some of those who may consider themselves Tzaddikim, the inverted form of pride involved in pretending to others—or even to oneself—that one is modest and humble. Many people delude themselves that their own motivations are good and true and holy, when they too are really motivated by other, concealed motivations.

I would like to conclude with an example from this week’s parashah, which I heard from Mickey Rosen, z”l, who said it in the name of R. Simha Bunem of Psyshcha’s Kol Simhah: In two separate places the servant says “Perhaps the maiden won’t go with me” (Gen 24:5; 39). What then? Rashi, upon the second appearance of this phrase, notes that the servant had an agenda of his own: in his heart, he secretly hoped that his mission would fail, so that Abraham would then choose his own daughter as Yitzhak’s spouse. But R. Simhah Bunem notes a subtle difference in vocalization between the two verses: in the former it is vocalized with a shuruk, and spelled אולי; in the latter, with a melapum or kubutz, and is spelled אלי—a word that may also be read as “to me”: i.e., the shiddukh will then come to me. But it was only once he realized that this was no longer a real option, and it was clear to him that Rivkah was in fact the destined one, that Eliezer realized that he had been carrying this unconscious wish that his own daughter become Avraham’s daughter-in-law.

Returning to Yitzhaks’ “meditation” in the field: perhaps the subject of his meditation was, first and foremost, a kind of constant soul-searching (heshbon nefesh). Indeed, there are those who advocate that a person review his actions every night before going to sleep, while reciting the bedtime Shema. There are those for whom a constant fear of wrongdoing, a pervasive sense of guilt, of the need to improve their behavior, or perhaps their very existential being, is the central motif of their religious life. In James’ terminology: these are world rejecting type, who see life as full of pitfalls – unlike Abraham, enthusiastic, loving ecstatic who is too full of joy and love, too busy doing mitzvot, to worry about pitfalls. “Judaism” as such has room for both. It does not, and perhaps cannot decide definitively in favor of one or the other, for the simple reason that these are temperaments which exist in every group of people. In the end, both are valid, simply because both types of personality exist.

Vayera (Wanderings)

2011-11-14T05:56:00.001-08:00

Dedicated by Mark Feffer, in loving memory of his parents, Harry and Clara Feffer (Hayyim Zvi ben Mordechai Hakohen ve-Esther) and Hayah bat Chaim ve-Dreiezel

The Binding of Isaac and the Beatles

The chapter of Akedat Yitzhak, the Binding of Isaac, is no doubt the most problematic one in the entire Torah, raising thorny problems, theological, ethical and covenantal. How are we to understand the notion of a God who tests the faith of “Abraham His lover” by demanding that the latter sacrifice his own son, born after decades of barrenness, and who was meant to continue the covenant that his seed would be a “great nation,” “as numerous as the stars” and as “the sand by the sea,” and who would in due time “inherit the land of Canaan”? There is an unbearable contradiction between what we are taught about God elsewhere, as the very source of all that is good and just and righteous, and what He demands here—what the Danish theologian Kierkegaard called the “theological suspension of the ethical.” And even if, as we readers know in advance from our familiarity with the story, God intended all along to halt this cruel and barbaric human sacrifice at the crucial moment, what does it say about Abraham’s faith? Was he truly a “knight of faith,” or a fool who equated faith with blind obedience to the cruelest, unethical and self-contradictory commandment?

Rivers of ink have been spilled in attempting to understand this problem, and I would not suggest that I have any new solutions to this knotty dilemma that has taxed the best minds over the centuries. On another level: the Akedah is seen in our tradition as the model for Kiddush Hashem—for the willingness of Jews to die in order to sanctify God’s Name. Particularly at those junctures in which Jewish faith was placed to the test—during the First Crusades and at other periods of Muslim or Christian religious fanaticism and persecution, when Jews were confronted with the awful choice of either foregoing their faith or being put to death, Abraham at Mount Moriah was seen as a model of heroism for Jews who were called upon to emulate his single-minded devotion. Here in Israel, some speak of the Akedah—often ironically—in secular terms, as a model for parents who send their children to fight, never knowing whether they too may end up as “sacrifices” for the homeland.

Many years ago, John Lennon of the Beatles wrote a song called “Imagine”

Imagine there’s no heaven / Its easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky / Imagine all the people / Living for today / Oh-oh. Imagine there’s no countries… Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too/ Imagine all the people / Living life in peace…

This song may have been the closest thing to an ideological manifesto of the Beatles and the 1960’s youth culture for whom they served as spokesmen of a sort—if you will, a kind of anthem for the “hippie nation.” What they (or should I say we—I include my younger self in this movement) saw in the adult world was mostly racism, economic exploitation, war and bloodshed motivated by national or religious differences. Wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place if all these artificial differences between people were to miraculously disappear? If all the people were to live “for today.” Then the world would live in peace. As the song concludes:

You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one / I hope some day you’ll join us /And the world shall live as one.

One line in this song—“nothing to kill or die for”—seems diametrically opposed to the ethos implied by the Akedah, raising a crucial question: Is there anything worth dying for? Is life—meaning, in the end, the individual’s life—dear at all cost? Are there any absolute principles, ideas so central and cardinal, that one must die rather than violate them? Are there any actions so reprehensible, that one must avoid doing them even at the cost of one’s own life?

I think of the generation that preceded those of us who grew up in the ‘60s—the generation that fought against Hitler and the Nazis in World War II, which at times refers to itself as “the Great Generation” because of the qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice called for by that struggle. To the Beatles generation, the concept of the existence of forces so evil that one must do battle against them, was unknown—doubtless because of the dubious justification for the War in Vietnam, which dominated that era. The credo was that people are basically the same, that everyone want the same things from life, and that it’s only the leaders who, for their own diabolical, power-driven reasons, set one group against another.

The Jewish tradition has its own, rather definitive answers, to the question, “Is there anything worth dying for?” The Talmud in Sanhedrin lists three mitzvot for which “one should be killed rather than violate them” (יהרג ולא יעבר): namely, bloodshed, sexual license (i.e., incest, adultery, and the like), and idolatry. Interestingly, two of these three are social–ethical mitzvot, in the sense that they relate to the Other: i.e., taking another person’s life and violating another person’s sexual integrity. But the last of the three is at once the most cardinal and, doubtless, the most problematic in terms of the ethos underlying Imagine: denying, even for temporary expediency, even to external appearances, one’s loyalty to the God of Israel. This is, in a sense, the crux of the lesson of Akedat Yitzhak, and it is that which, in the end, distinguishes the ethos of the Akedah from that of the ‘60s.

SUPPLEMENT — SHLOMO CARLEBACH YAHRZEIT

Shlomo’s “Afterlife” - The Carlebach Minyanim

In memory of Rav Shlomo ben Ha-Rav Naftali Carlebach, who departed this world on 16 Heshvan 5755, 22 October 1994.

Needless to say that no one can say for certain what happens to the human soul after death, but what one can say of our teacher, Shlomo Carlebach, is that he enjoys a certain life after his death in the sense that he is more honored, appreciated, and better known in his death than during his lifetime. One important area in which this has happened is that of “synagogue music” (to use a formal, even solemn term Shlomo would have never used): since Shlomo’s death in October 1994, “Carlebach minyanim” have sprouted up like mushrooms throughout the Jewish world. In these groups, the community davens Kabbalat Shabbat using what has become known as the “Carlebach nusah”—a certain set of melodies written by Shlomo which are regularly used for various parts of this service. In some places there is a “Shlomo Shabbat” once a month, usually on Shabbat Mevarkhim, in others Shlomo’s nusah is used every week; in some places it is only used on Friday night, in others on Shabbat morning as well; at times people get up and dance to L’kha Dodi and other parts of the service, in others they are more restrained. In any event, the comment of David Hartman, that Shlomo Carlebach saved Jewish prayer from boredom, is very apropos: in all those places that have adopted “Nusah Shlomo,” participation in the service has gained a new lease on life. It thus seems in place to say a few words about Shlomo and prayer. I will begin, as Shlomo would, with a story:

The story is told of the Rebbe of Jaroslaw (pronounced “Yaroslav”), who spent several weeks each summer at a certain vacation spot in the Carpathian mountains favored by Jews. One summer a certain mitnaggid—an opponent of or sceptic about the Hasidim—went there as well. Somehow, a Hasidic friend persuaded him to daven with the Yaroslaver Rebbe on Shabbat morning, but he found the Rebbe’s behavior very strange: he arrived late in the shul and, rather than davening, walked about, chatted with people, laughed, joked, kibbitized, , and in general acted like anything but the holy man, famed for his piety and intense devotion to the “labor” of prayer, which he was reputed to be. Our mitnaggid went away more puzzled and sceptical then he came, and chastised his friend for sending him to what he called a moshav letzim—a congregation of irreverent jokers. After much arguing the hasid persuaded his friend to give the Rebbe another chance and to go to his tisch, his Shabbat table, the following week. Thus, the next Friday night found our mitnaggid at the Rebbe’s tisch as he had dutifully promised; but, while there some nice singing and special Hasidic melodies to the zemirot, a generally warm atmosphere, and the Rebbe said some words of Torah, he found nothing particularly special or memorable about the occasion. The tisch finished well after midnight—one must remember that many places in Eastern Europe are far further north than even the most northernmost points in the continental United States, so that in midsummer Shabbat did not begin until close to 10 o’clock—and our hero, who was alert and wakeful after an evening of energetic Hasidic singing, decided to go for a walk. His walk lasted well over an hour, so that by the time he returned the faint red glow of pre-dawn light was visible on the eastern horizon. As he passed the Beit Midrash where the Yaroslovar had held his tisch, he heard a soft, melancholy voice chanting in Hebrew. Through the window, he saw a figure wrapped in a tallit, pacing back and forth, chanting the beginning of the Shabbat Morning prayers in a voice filled with pathos and sincere devotion—the Yaroslaver Rebbe. Then our mitnaggid understood …

Unlike Shlomo, I will add a few words of commentary to this story, which to my mind illustrates three important things about Hasidism—and perhaps also about Shlomo. First, that the Rebbe in this story was not an ascetic recluse who p[ursued the course of the solitary mystic, but a khevreman—a “people person” who loved other people and enjoyed their company; for him, even ordinary conversation with others was one of the pleasures of Shabbat, and possibly also something with an inner kernel of holiness (an idea found in Hasidic writings). Secondly, this Rebbe, like various other Hasidic rebbes, deliberately concealed the intensity of his inner spiritual life by “playing the fool”—at times acting like a simple, ordinary, even superficial person (as did Shlomo, at times). Third, and most important: the central importance of prayer as a cornerstone of religious service—so much so that, unlike the norm in non-Hasidic Judaism, many Rebbes preferred to daven in solitude rather than with a minyan. There is a constant tension in Hasidism between public, communal prayer and the intense, inner prayer of the soul, which may require its own space. Thus, for example, Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav spoke of the merits of praying at time alone, in the field. In Lubavitch, specifically, where Shlomo spent many years of his youth, there was great emphasis placed on slow, meditative prayr—tefillah be-arikhut—and more than a few hasidim would go to synagogue simply to participate in the responses of Kaddish, Kedushah and Barkhu and to hear the reading of the Torah—but would then go to recite the prayers by themselves, at their own pace. Thus, the image of the Yaraslover Rebbe performing his devotions in the wee hours of the morning, and later going to the synagogue more or less pro forma, is part of a long-standing tradition.

(I would like to mention here that a central Hasidic text on prayer has recently been translated into English, with notes and commentary by Menachem Kallus—a member of our circle here in Jerusalem. I refer to Amud ha-Tefillah, an extensive collection of the Baal Shem Tov’s traditions on prayer, and a major part of Sefer ha-Ba’al Shem Tov. The English book, entitled Pillar of Prayer: Guidance in Contemplative Prayer, Sacred Study, and the Spiritual Life from the Baal Shem Tov and His Circle (Fons Vitae Spiritual Affinities Series) is available through www.olamqatan.com.)

What has all this to do with the Shlomo minyanim? The Carlebach minyanim imbue public prayer with a sense of joy and enthusiasm, of camaraderie and fellowship, at times even of ecstasy—not to mention the simple release of sheer animal energy and vitality. But all this is only one half of prayer—and quite possibly the less important half. There is no doubt that, as we quoted Hartman earlier, Jewish prayer in many places is marked by boredom. This boredom is manifested in the practice found, in too many synagogues, of rushing through the words of prayer as quickly as possible in order to “get it over with”—even on Shabbat. At times, in certain “Shlomo minyanim,” I get the feeling that people are rushing through the words—even those of such central and vital parts as Keri’at Shema and Amidah—in order to get to the next song. Ultimately, the solution to the problem of boredom lies, not in music, but in people learning how to daven—meaning, how to “get into” the depths of the words themselves. In the words of an old Hasidic vort (bon mot): God’s words to Noah, “Get you into the ark” are read, in a double-entendre, as “Go into the word” (teivah means both “ark” and “word”). Leaning to pray means learning how to concentrate, to focus, how to meditate. This is something that is always difficult, but far more so in contemporary culture, in which we are constantly inundated by “data” and noise of all sorts, every hour of the day and night—cell phones, SMS’s, transistor radios, ipods, the huge volumes of written material we receive daily in newspapers, emails, websites, etc. There is no simple or quick solution to the problem: the road to true prayer is a long and arduous one, requiring hard work and dedication and concentration over a period of time. Sometimes I think that certain elements of Eastern religion—the quieting of the soul through silent meditation—are useful to this end. Indeed, our own Sages said many centuries ago that a person should sit quietly for a certain period of time before beginning to pray. Or, to quote the title of “Jewish Buddhist” Sylvia Boorstein’s book: Don’t Just Do Something: Sit There.

Shlomo loved music, and he loved telling stories, but he used both, not only because he loved them and was good at them, but because both are universal languages, understood by all, and as such a useful tool for reaching out to others. But he was also a Hasid—among other things, a Habad Hasid—steeped in the tradition of devekut, of prayer as the ascent of the soul, and I believe that in an important part of his soul he strove to emulate Tzaddikim like the Yaraslover Rebbe who prayed at length and with great concentration. Indeed, it is told that in his youthful years as a “Tamim”—a student at the Lubavitcher’s Yeshivat Tomkhei Temimim—he was not only a matmid, a deeply devoted Talmud student, but also an oved—one who prayed at length, after hours of preparation though learning Hasidus and through meditation.

Two other aspects of Shlomo’s “life after death” are: (a) the dissemination of his music, both through a plethora of tapes and CDs of his music, as well as the emergence of a number of excellent musicians who specialize in playing and singing his songs; and (b) the publication of books, both in English and Hebrew, of his teachings. There is now a Carlebach Haggadah, as well as volumes of Shlomo’s teachings on Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Purim, etc. There is also a major project underway by the Shlomo Carlebach Foundation to preserve his legacy through systematic recording and cataloging of all of his teachings, including, if I am not mistaken, an attempt to reconstruct his teachings on the entire Humash—plus various other books and memoirs by his followers, and various attempts to write his biography.

In this context I would like to make special mention of a new book published this past year: an autobiographical account of the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco by one of the leaders of the House, including interesting vignettes of renewed encounters, thirty years later, with many of the people who were involved then, and the diverse direction their lives have taken. The book is Aryae Coopersmith’s Holy Beggar: A Journey from Haight Street to Jerusalem (El Granada, California: One World Lights, 2011). It is available through the publisher, www.oneworllights,com, or via www.olamqatan.com.

Lekh Lekha (Wanderings)

2011-11-06T01:31:00.000-07:00

“Abraham My Lover”

In Isaiah 41:8, one of the relatively few verses outside of the Torah which mentions Abraham, the children of Israel are referred to as זרע אברהם אוהבי—“the seed of Abraham My lover.” While Moses is known as the greatest of the prophets and the archetypal teacher of Torah, the unique quality ascribed to Abraham is that of Avraham ohavi—the archetype of the human being who loved God.

We often tend to think of Judaism as a system of law, a code of duties and obligation, and of obedience: fulfilling the mitzvot and “accepting the yoke of Heaven” is the highest or central religious virtue. And indeed, Christian polemics make much of the contrast between Judaism as a religion of Law and Christianity as one of Love. Normative behavior thus seems to be the most characteristic stance of Judaism, the emotions being somehow thought of as “extras”—as something over and above the normative requirements, for unusually pious individuals.

Yet if we turn to the pre-Torah roots of our faith, we find that, in the days of Abraham, there was no Torah, in the sense of a set of binding laws and imperatives. Abraham is portrayed in the midrash as a man who discovered the truth of the one God, and who was motivated by an intimate personal relation with that God, by a sense of love and devotion to Him.

What do we mean by love? Within the human realm, it connotes a desire to be close to the beloved, to be with him/her, to perform acts of kindness, of caring; it implies thinking of them even when one is not with them; the desire to make the other person happy, to bring a smile to their face. The deepest reward of love is simply—love returned, reciprocated, knowing that one occupies a special place in the heart of the beloved, that one is treasured. Even physical expressions of love, pleasurable as they may be, are ultimately just that—expressions or signs of love, but not the thing itself.

NOTE: Perhaps one of the lessons taught by what is called taharat ha-mishpaha—the body of halakhot periodically prohibiting sexual love between husband and wife during their earlier years—is to remind them that love and physical intimacy are two very different things. As we all know, there can also be physical intimacy without its emotional counterpart; perhaps one of the greatest pitfalls of a sexually permissive society is that tends to foster and encourage such emotionally empty acts, thereby reducing what should be the natural connection between physical intimacy and emotional closeness. I might briefly mention here the book by an early disciple of Freud, Theodor Reik, Psychology of Sex Relations, in which he challenges the Freudian idea that romantic love is no more than a sublimation of the sexual impulse—an idea which has caused much mischief to our culture. Reik suggests a very different model for understanding the love between man and woman. But all this is taking us rather far afield from today’s subject.

But beyond that, love between man and woman, powerful and central as it may be to our lives, is only one form of love; there is also love between parents and children, love between friends, between siblings, between teachers and disciples, etc.—all of which may in turn serve as models for the love of God.

Carrying the analogy into the Divine-human relationship: the ideal love of God is one without any expectation or interest in reward, but rather love for-its-own-sake:

A person should not say: I will perform the commandments of the Torah and engage in its wisdom so as to receive all the blessings written therein, or to merit the life of the World to Come… Rather, one who serves out of love engages in Torah and mitzvot and walks in the paths of wisdom, not because of any thing in the world… but he does the truth because it is truth, and in the end the good will come about as a result…. Such was the level of the Patriarch Abraham, whom the Holy One blessed be He called “His beloved,” because he served [God] out of love alone….

What is the nature of the desired love? That one love God with a great and excessive and very intense love, until his soul is bound up in the love of God, and he muses about it constantly, like one who is beset with love-sickness, so that his mind is never free of the love of that woman: he daydreams about her constantly, when he is sitting down, when he is walking about, or while he is eating and drinking…. And the entire Song of Songs is a parable for this matter. — Rambam, Hilkhot Teshuvah, 10.1-3 (for a full translation and discussion, see HY V: Yom Kippur = Rambam: Yom Kippur = HY blog, September 2006, scroll down).

There is a delicate balance that needs to be struck between love and law. On the one hand, we are living at a time of ever-greater piety within the Orthodox world, expressed in all kinds of strictures (humrot) and a certain kind of self-cloistering, with an emphasis on obedience and often sterile external performance—ever stricter kashrut, ever stricter Shabbat observance, ever stricter standards for conversion to Judaism and even for marriage within the Jewish fold—and all this, too often, without the inner sense of the mitzvot as an Abrahamic path of love, which gives it its warmth and joy and vitality.

On the other hand, there are certain modern Jewish thinkers who reinterpret Judaism purely in terms of religious experience and emotion. There is an anti- or a-nomianism in some circles. Thus, for example, Martin Buber, who in principle rejected the idea of any external, objective, fixed norms (it is said that he never stepped foot within a synagogue as a matter of principle); he opposed the institutionalization of religion, which he saw as displacing the living spirit. Buber, one might say, made an extreme choice in favor of the prophetic rather than either the priestly or the Rabbinic path. For him, everything was a function of intention, of relating to the Other as a Thou, of the immediacy of the concrete situation; hence his rather idiosyncratic interpretation of Hasidism, which in some ways glides over the central role of mitzvot in Hasidism. Strangely enough, this approach is also to be found today in certain branches of the renewed interest in Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah: there are those who teach Kabbalah in isolation from its root in the mitzvot. Needless to say, this is clearly alien to the spirit of the Zohar which is a mystical midrash on the Torah, specifically; and is filled with mystical interpretations of the mitzvot and the halakhah.

Perhaps one might put things this: Judaism is impossible without halakhah, both because such is its essential nature, and because love in general seeks expression in acts. For the Jew, the mitzvah is the natural avenue of expression of his love for God. Indeed, some midrashim, as well as Hasidic commentators, ask the question: How did Abraham and the other patriarchs show their love and attachment to God without the mitzvot? Some say: their secular acts were filled with love of God, with the intention to uplift the world. Others say that they somehow fulfilled the entire Torah even before it was given (Art Green has an interesting book about this subject, Devotion and Commandment).

But in any event we live in a world in which there are mitzvot, and the love of God expressed through mitzvot. The bottom line, as I see it is: rather than conceiving of mitzvot as the contents of Judaism, the mitzvot and the halakhah are the path. The content is the reality of God, the love and fear of God, the wish and desire to serve God expressed therein; the mitzvot are the vehicle. The ideal is to reach a place in which there is no conflict between external coercion, the obligation imposed from without (i.e., “Greater is he who is commanded and does, than one who is not commanded and does”) and inner motivation, the sense of joy, of love, of fulfillment as a person through the Jewish religious path.

In conclusion, I would add that there is a second half to the emotional side of the Jewish path: fear, what is called yirat shamayim. But that is a subject for another time. We must wait another two weeks, until our readings bring us to the patriarch Yitzhak, who epitomizes yirah.

Rav Zaddok – The Torah of Beginnings

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was much impressed upon rereading the opening pages of a slim volume of Hasidic teachings called Tzidkat ha-Tzaddik, by R. Zaddok ha-Kohen of Lublin, one of the more interesting figures of late 19th century Hasidism. A prolific author (albeit, because he had no children to see to publishing his writings after his death, “only” 25 or so titles of his survived and are extant, whereas he reportedly wrote over 100 books). A Talmudic genius or ilui who followed a rigorous, ascetic path, he “converted” to Hasidism at a certain point in his life, following an encounter with R. Mordechai of Ishbitz (author of Mei ha-Shiloah) under dramatic circumstances. He may be seen as part of that thread within Polish Hasidism that began with Psyshcha and Kotzk and continued through Mordechai Ishbitzer, Yitzhak Meir of Ger and Sefat Emet, who was his contemporary. His works are often difficult to follow, as he seems to assume that his readers are familiar, not only with both Talmuds, but with all of the classical Midrashim and Zohar, which he often quotes without citing his sources.

Much of what he writes may be read as a kind of spiritualistic interpretation of the “meat and potatoes” of Rabbinic Judaism. He does not engage in the sort of word–play in which the literal meaning is turned on its head, as is found on nearly every page of early Hasidic writers such as the Maggid of Mezhirech, R. Elimelekh of Lizhensk, Degel Mahaneh Efraim, Me’or Einayim, & Toldot Yaakov Yosef. Instead, he reads/interprets familiar Rabbinic adages in a beguilingly simple manner, shedding radically new light upon them.

For example: he begins the book by saying that “When ones first enters into avodat haehm, one should do so with haste”—i.e., with intense energy and constant application – by way of analogy to the Exodus of Egypt, which was performed בחפזון, “with haste,” so as to cut himself off from his previous habits and patterns of life. Thereafter, he adds, one may proceed at a more comfortable pace. I find the concept of “entering into God’s service” interesting, in line of what I discuss above: the clear message is that the religious life is more than merely doing the mitzvot, performing one’s obligation, but something more, evidently driven by love, passion, and by a deeply personal, existential decision. In any event, the most important thing is to make a good beginning.

The second teaching on this page quotes the verse “blessings to the head of the righteous” (Prov 10:6). Punning on the first word, he asks the question: why is Berakhot the first tractate in the entire Mishnah, and Talmud? (It is seemingly anomalous, because it has nothing to do with Zera’im, “Seeds,” the first order; indeed, it doesn’t fit into any of the six categories of the Mishnah.). His answer: because the essential thing is religious life is consciousness: “Know the God of your fathers and serve Him.” The idea of blessing is to recite a few words expressing consciousness of God’s presence in whatever it is that one is doing: eating and drinking; enjoying fragrant smells; the routine daily acts of getting up in the morning, opening one’s eyes, getting dressed, stretching one’s limbs; special sights or sounds (the sea; the rainbow; thunder; beautiful vistas); any special occasion, such as seeing a friend one hasn’t seen for a long time; performing a mitzvah; etc. And behind all these is the awareness of God.

I skip to Section 4: the first mitzvah that a lad performs upon becoming bar mitzvah—that is, at nightfall of his 13th birthday—is to recite the Evening Shema: accepting Divine sovereignty. But there is an added idea: one does so specifically at night, because the Shema of day and night symbolize not only periods of time, but mental states. One must accept God’s kingship in the archetypal states of day and night, which represent activity and repose. In day, when does so at the beginning of one’s daily activity, perhaps to sanctify the mundane. In repose there are other challenges: not to act properly, but that the realm of dreams, of the imagination, of the subconscious, also be somehow related to God. And indeed, the Shema of night comes first: “because one first accepts God’s kingship in a state of darkness and ignorance and lack of action—and only afterwards when all is clear and bright…”

For more teachings on thia parashah, see the archives to this blog at Oct 10 2005, Oct 20 2006, October 2007, November 2008, October 2009 and 2010.

Noah (Wanderings)

2011-10-31T02:35:00.000-07:00

“Their Thoughts were Only Evil all Day Long”

The first images that come to mind when we speak of the story of Noah and the Flood is of the building of the great ark and the animals filing in by twos, of the dove flying back and forth and returning with an olive branch in its mouth, and the appearance of the rainbow. To this, one must add the detailed description of the construction of the ark and the actual chronology of the Flood (which, appropriately enough, both began and ended very close to the time, early in the month of Heshvan, when we read Parshat Noah every year) detailed in the Torah.

But what is really significant, to my mind, is the portrait found here of a world that has “gone to rot”—i.e., totally surrendered to evil. There are two accounts of sin in Parashat Bereshit: the eating of the “forbidden fruit” by Adam and Eve, which seems to have been motivated by curiosity, temptation, an element of willfulness and “testing of boundaries,” and persuasion by the clever arguments of the Serpent; and Kain’s murder of Abel, which may be seen as a sudden outburst of anger and frustration, possibly also an “accident” resulting from Kains’ lack of awareness of his own strength. In both cases, it is difficult to speak of “radical evil” or of evil utterly dominating the personalities involved.

What one may say, in a reading relevant to our abiding interest here in matters of community, is that God, once He had created the world and the human species, “tried His hand,” so to speak, at building community and harmonious social interactions among this new and interesting species. His first attempt was in the nuclear family, in the attachment of man and woman, sexual and otherwise (ודבק באשתו), but the ultimate result was not one of true equality and harmony, but of domination (see 3:16). He then tried fraternity—the camaraderie of two brothers, who were inherently equal in status and standing. The end result was a quarrel that ended in murder. (Interestingly, some midrashim make Kain out to be the “bad guy” from the outset, while others show the two quarreling without distinction about property, religion, or access to a desirable woman. See Gen. Rab. 22.7; HY I: Bereshit2)

In the generation of the Flood, there seems to be a “raising of the ante”: humankind had somehow become fixed on an evil path. The last four verses of last week’s parashah Bereshit speak of God’s seeing that “man’s evil had become very great on the earth, and all the impulses of the thoughts of his heart were only evil all the day” (Gen 6:5). (This follows upon an account of the “sons of God” who took—grabbed, really—whatever women they fancied.) The opening verses of Parshat Noah go on to say that mankind, nay, “all flesh had corrupted its ways in the land” and “the land was filled with violence” (כי השחית כל בשר את דרכו על הארץ... ותמלא הארץ חמס; 6:12, 11).

What was the nature of this radical evil, and what was its source? Martin Buber, in a short essay entitled “Images of Good and Evil” (in his Good and Evil, pp. 63-143) speaks of two kinds of evil: The first is evil as confusion, indecision: lack of direction in life, what he calls the whirlpool or vortex of the multitude of options and possibilities, or what Levinas calls the “temptation of temptation” (the Don Juan, who tries to sleep with every attractive woman who comes his way, epitomizes this type). In my generation, which reached young adulthood in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, there were those who saw life as a field for varied and intense experience, and advocated the idea that “one should try anything once.” But, per Buber, there is another kind of evil, in which a person (or an entire community—and it is thus that I see the generation of the Flood, and the people of Sodom) consciously chooses evil as a path. The essence of such evil is not so much in the specific acts performed, but in the scoffing at all values. An attitude of cynicism, apathy, indifference to others, sheer cussedness—which may in turn include hatred, maliciousness, and gratuitous violence; even, a certain hatred of goodness (note the midrash about the people of Sodom, who viciously punished a young woman who showed kindness, generosity, and compassion to an unfortunate person).

What can we learn from the Biblical account about the origin, the roots of these negative attitudes? I would like to return to the verse about Eve’s temptation. The Serpent—whether we see him as an actual persona, a mythical forebearer of modern reptiles or, as Maimonides sees him in the Guide, as a personification of the Evil Impulse within the human being himself—is portrayed as clearly understanding human psychology, and appealing to its most vulnerable points. Eve, after being presented with the Serpent’s offer, says to herself three things: “And the woman saw that (a) the fruit was good to eat, (b) and that it [aroused] desire/appetite through the eyes, (c) and the tree was pleasant [for acquiring] knowledge—so she took of its fruit and ate” (Gen 2:6). I suggest reading this verse as alluding to three basic human needs or proclivities. It was “good to eat”—on the most basic level, it fulfilled a basic need, A person may steal an apple or a loaf of bread because he is hungry, or violate a sexual norm because of overwhelming lust. “And it was desirable to the eyes.” The eyes are an organ of perception, not of desire—but they trigger the imagination, which in turn awakens the heart—i.e., the realm of desire. Through sight, a person begins to imagine a multitude of possibilities, of things he might want (see Rashi at Num 15:32). (Some social biologists would say that one of the differences between human beings and other animals is that, standing on two feet, our sexual desire is triggered less by the sense of smell, and more by that of sight—a fact which in turn carries a panoply of further implications.) Third, “the fruit was pleasant for knowing.” Human beings differ from the beast in their intellect, which is not limited to the direct encounter with the environment. Human beings envisage possibilities and lay plans; the human intellect expresses itself in curiosity, in language, in the ability to create abstractions—ideas and concepts; and in the ability to dominate others—the natural environment, other species who may have greater brute strength, and other human brings. This last factor is a two-edged sword: through the application of intellectual power, through tool making and social organization, human beings and humankind generally may help others, build a better world, construct labor-saving devices—but may also develop weapons of destruction and means of enslaving others, literally or figuratively.

The desire to dominate and rule over others is very powerful. It is already alluded to in 1:28, as a blessing, but it may become a central plank in the path of evil. The will to cause fear in others, to bend them to one’s own will, may stem from the imagination, it may take its power to act from the intellect, it may stem from the instinct for self-preservation somehow gone wrong, transformed into black hatred. I think of the case, a few years ago, of three young people who attacked a stranger, an older man sitting on a park bench with his family near the Tel Aviv beach, and viciously beat him to death for no coherent reason (adding insult to injury, the criminals were eventually apprehended, tried, and convicted, but of manslaughter rather than murder). This may be taken as a microcosm for far greater examples of evil our world has known, perhaps especially in our age, from Hitler on down.

To summarize the story of Etz ha-Da’at, the Tree of Knowledge and what went after: God wanted man to have free will, to make his own choices in life. Only thus could he be a true spiritual being; otherwise he would forever remain a child, morally and emotionally (I follow here Erich Fromm’s reading in You Shall Be as Gods). But this freedom carries the possibility of being taken to extremes of evil: of unchecked desire, unchecked curiosity, unchecked imagination, and unchecked aggression towards others. So God gave the Torah (including the “capsule version” in the Noachide code) as a kind of antidote against humanity becoming overwhelmed by its own evil propensities (בראת יצר הרע, בראת תורה תבלין לו–בבא בתרא, פרק א'; “You created the Evil Urge, You created the Torah as a ‘seasoning’ for it”). The Torah teaches a decent path—but of course no one can force people to follow it.

Bereshit (Wanderings)

2011-10-31T02:28:00.000-07:00

Introduction: Wandering the Highways and Byways of Torah

I deliberated for some time as to what topic to choose for this year. Truth be told, I even considered taking a “sabbatical” from writing this year, as there are many pressing personal tasks I have delayed for far too long which I need to do, and at times the time spent in writing this sheet requires time that, while deeply enjoyable and rewarding, I cannot always afford. This thought was reinforced when I realized that the one major genre of Jewish literature that I have not treated in years past is that of classical (i.e., medieval) Biblical exegesis—parshanut ha-miqra—a topic in many ways more difficult and complex than any of those I have treated thus far. It seemed to me that, at least for this year, it would demand far more time than I have available, involving intensive study even before writing one word. This is particularly so in that one of the central figure ins parshanut (apart from Rashi, whom I have already treated after a fashion [see Year VIII: 2006–07], whose writing is seemingly simple—I would add, deceptively so), to whom I would doubtless devote much of my attention and energy, is Ramban (R. Moshe ben Nahman, or Moses Nahmanides, 1194-1270). Ramban’s entire approach is dialectical and polemical: he almost always begins by quoting some other commentator, usually Rashi, and then demonstrating why the latter’s interpretation is wrong, and then proposing an alternative reading of the given verse or section. Hopefully (bli neder), if the Almighty gives me continued strength, I will undertake this project in 5773 (2012-13).

But I could not see giving up Hitzei Yehonatan and disappointing my devoted readers. I thus decided this year to write “free–style”—without any preconceived limitation or specific topic or genre. Hence the title: “Wanderings the Highways and Byways of Torah,” suggesting no specific agenda, but a kind of free roving over the terrain of Torah. This also provides an opportunity to tie up certain loose ends—zenavot, or “tails,” as they’re called in Hebrew. For example, I would like to discuss treat certain psalms which seem important to me, which I did not get to during the year I wrote about Tehillim (Year VI: 2004–05). I will no doubt return now and then to the words of Rashi or to Aggadot Hazal which I have not yet examined, or simply to the peshat of the parashah. And, after Pesah, during the spring and summer months, I hope to return to Pirkei Avot, about which I have written in the past, but in helter-skelter, unsystematic fashion. In addition, there are a number of special essays which I have not yet brought to fruition, which I would like to share with readers once completed. These include a major essay on Individualism (a kind of summation of this past year’s topic); thoughts on Orthodoxy; Zohar and the Eternal Feminine; Reflections Upon Rereading Richard Rubenstein; and the follow-up to what I wrote earlier about Torat Hamelekh.

Many readers have suggested that I publish some of my writings in book form. This idea is something which appeals to me and which I would like to do, if possible. I already have a scheme as to how to organize these writings, involving multiple volumes; all that I really need is time and, at a later stage, money.

Speaking of money: I have always believed deeply in Torah Lishmah—that, insofar as possible, the Torah must be studied and taught without any thought of material reward, but for its own sake. Rambam’s declaration (an extreme minority view, certainly in today’s religious world) that those who study Torah without working, in the expectation of communal support—i.e., the kollel system—ultimately profane God’s name, resonates deeply with me. I have never studied in a kollel or lived off study stipends; I have never asked for money for sharing my insights in Torah. But, increasingly, I see the practical difficulty to this approach in today’s world. Hence, I would ask whoever can do so to contribute any sum, large or small (recommended minimum: US $20 or NIS 75 per year), to enable me to continue writing Hitzei Yehonatan and to engage in my other writing and pre–publication activity. (Re the above: I would consider this as partial reimbursement for the time invested in HY, that might otherwise have been spent for remunerative professional work.) If anyone knows of potential patrons for this project, I would appreciate their help; similar, if anyone wishes to dedicate an issue of HY to the memory of a loved one, they may do so. Concerning all these matters, please contact me for details at my email address.

In the Beginning

“In the Beginning.” When the King conceived ordaining [or: in the beginning, in the King’s wisdom], he engraved engravings in the luster on high. A blinding spark [or: spark of darkness] flashed within the concealed of the concealed from the mystery of the Infinite, a cluster of vapor in formlessness, set in a ring, not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all. — Zohar, Parshat Bereshit, I.15a. Translation from Daniel Matt’s The Essential Kabbalah, p. 52.

These words, with which the text of Sefer ha-Zohar properly begins, are deeply evocative of the mystery of Creation. The important thing about this chapter is not, as the Creationists have it, whether it is to be read as a literal description of origins, nor the pros and cons of Darwinsim, nor whether the universe is 5772 or 15,000,000,000 years old (even if these disparate views can somehow be reconciled through clever mathematical sleight-of-hand). The perennial question elicited by the beginning of Genesis is: why is there Being at all? A. J. Heschel once said that the basic religious emotion is wonder, what he called “radical astonishment.” Knowledge of God begins with a certain sense of childlike amazement at the fact that this beautiful world, with all its diverse species and vistas and phenomena, and all the vast, nearly infinite space beyond it, exists at all, rather than there being nothingness. Beyond that, the message of Genesis 1 from verse 2 on is that there is order rather than chaos (symbolized by the primordial waters); the Six Days are paradigms for God ordering the world from chaos….

The First Sin

A few brief thoughts about the story of Adam, Eve, the Serpent and the eating of the forbidden fruit in the Garden—one of the most important and suggestive stories in the entire Torah. Following the mystery and wonder of Being, the central question posed here is: What is Man? What is the meaning of life as a human being? What are we to do with the ambiguities, ambivalences, and antinomies with which we live?

I see a line connecting the notion of man dominating the rest of Creation (1:28b); the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; the disruption the idyllic relations between man and woman as a result of the sin, expressed in the curse addressed to Eve, “Your desire shall be towards your man, and he shall rule over you” (3:16); and God’s words to the angry and frustrated Kain, foreshadowing his murder of Abel, “If you do good, you shall be uplifted; but if not, sin crouches at the door, and its desire is to you, but you may [or: must] rule over it” (4:7). Kain is confronted with moral choices, indeed, with two chances to improve himself—already now, when he is angry and frustrated; and even if he submits to Sin—the violent, even murderous impulse lying within every person, here personified as a wild beast lying in wait to pounce on him—he may yet succeed in taming and dominating him.

Two leitmotifs here: the intellect, the crowning glory of the human species, is also a potential pitfall, a quality with its own innate dangers. The mind, ever active, is filled with curiosity, with the desire to know (the woman saw that the fruit was not only good to eat and attractive in appearance, but also that the promise of knowledge which it offers is somehow “pleasant”: 3:6). It also provides the ability to dominate—for human beings to dominate all of nature, and of man to dominate woman. Together with that, we are also filled with inchoate desires and lusts, which drive us to action at least as much as does our intellect: the woman’s desire for her husband, notwithstanding the inevitable domination that comes in its wake; and the sin–demon lurking by the gate, that caused Kain to smite his brother.

There are those thinkers—first and foremost one of the wisest and greatest Jews ever, R. Moses Maimonides—who suggest that, if only we could learn to give the intellect a final and conclusive victory over the inchoate elements in our nature—our desires, lusts and instincts, our imagination, our emotions—all would be well with us. Then we will become a kingdom of wise philosophers who will spend our time contemplating the Godhead. But somehow, with all due respect to the Great Eagle, besides whom I am like a puny ant, I don’t think it’s going to happen—not in this world, and not with this human species. (And for those who are in doubt on this point: go see the award–winning film, “Footnote,” about the scholars of Jerusalem).

The Torah of Beginnings

Even more than Rosh Hashanah, I see Shabbat Bereshit as the real beginning of the year—that is, the effective beginning of the year made up of ordinary days and weeks, during which we get up, go to work, come home, eat, spend time with family, sleep, have Shabbat once a week, and face the challenge of somehow finding time and mental room to fit in Torah and prayer and other mitzvot—not to mention dealing with all the situations of real life in an ethical and menshlikh fashion. The festivals are a sort of “time out,” a special, elevated kind of time, during which we are as much preoccupied with preparation and observance of the various rituals and celebrations as we are with “ordinary” concerns. The real beginning of the latter only comes with Parshat Bereshit.

It was in this light I wanted to preset a few teachings from the very first page of a wonderful little Hasidic book, Tzidkat ha-Tzaddik by R Zaddok ha-Kohen of Lublin, but due to constraints of both time and space I will postpone that until next week.

For more teachings on this parashah, see the archives to this blog for October 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.

Simhat Torah (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:27:00.005-07:00

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Sukkot (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:27:00.003-07:00

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Yom Kippur (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:27:00.001-07:00

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Ten Days of Teshuvah (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:26:00.004-07:00

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Rosh Hashanah (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:26:00.003-07:00

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Nitzavim-Vayelekh (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:26:00.001-07:00

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Ki Tavo (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:25:00.002-07:00

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Ki Teitzei (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:25:00.001-07:00

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Shoftim 2 (Individual & Community)

2011-10-31T02:24:00.000-07:00

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Shoftim (Individual & Community)

2011-09-02T03:30:00.000-07:00

Torah and “Secular” Law—May the Two Walk Together?

A Hebrew version of this essay appears in this week’s Shabbat Shalom, the parashah sheet of the Religious Peace movement, Netivot Shalom, widely distributed in synagogues throughout Israel. Contributions to the movement, at P.O.B. 4433, Jerusalem 91043, are most welcome.

About two months ago, when public controversy about the book Torat ha-Melekh and the brief detainment for questioning of Rabbis Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef were at their height (see HY XII: Pinhas), there were people who invoked the slogan, “The Torah is above the law.” But is this really so? What, if anything, is the role of law, legislated by a secular body like the Knesset, in halakhah? This week’s parashah, Shoftim, which contains a set of laws defining the various institutions of government in the Jewish commonwealth envisioned by the Torah, including a section concerning the authority of the Hakhamim and the Sanhedrin in particular (“When a matter of law shall be too difficult for you… According to the Torah which they teach you … do not deviate to the right or left...”: Deut 17:8-13) seems an opportune occasion to examine the relation between Torah and law in some detail.

There are numerous ways of answering this question. One principle frequently invoked is that of דינא דמלכותא דינא: “The law of the land is the law”—that is to say, a Jew is required to be a law-abiding citizen of the country within which he lives. But this rule applies primarily, if not exclusively, to Jews living in the Diaspora, under non-Jewish rule; the underlying premise or subtext seems to be that maintaining good relations with the Gentile world, of not offending the rulers upon whose grace and good will the Jewish community has traditionally been dependent, is of primary importance. While this reason is perhaps not quite so relevant since the Emancipation, particularly in contemporary Western democracies, where the equal rights of all are guaranteed by law, and the Jewish community is not held accountable for the sins of its individual members (not even Bernie Madoff!)— the rule as such is still basically in force. In any event, in Eretz Yisrael, in a sovereign Jewish state, however secular, the situation is clearly totally different, and different principles apply.

Another halakhic model for understanding the authority of the Knesset, the judiciary, and other organs of the state is that of Jewish self-government in medieval Europe. Throughout the Middle Ages Jewish communities had various organs of self-government, chosen or elected by the community or by the elites of money and pedigree, that functioned alongside the mara de-atra (local rabbi) and the bet din (Rabbinic court). These bodies had responsibility for those matters that were not specifically halakhic—e.g., raising and distributing moneys to run various communal institutions, taxes and levies imposed by the non-Jewish rulers, relations with the “outside” generally, etc. This body was known as ziknei or nikhbedei ha-‘ir, shiv’ah tuvei ha-‘ir, or simply ha-kehillah or ha-kahal (“the elders / distinguished men of the city”; “the seven good ones of the city”; “the community”). These bodies had the right to legislate various takkanot and gezerot—edicts and ordinances—which then had halakhic power, after receiving the stamp of approval of the rabbis. Furthermore, during the 16th and 17th centuries there was even an over-all representative body for matters of common concern to all the Jewish communities in Poland and its environs, Vaad Arba ha-Aratzot, the “Council of the Four Lands.”

The noted jurist and legal philosopher Professor Menahem Elon, in his great compendium Ha-Mishpat ha-Ivri and elsewhere (including personal conversation with this author), has suggested that the Knesset enjoys a position of authority at least equivalent to that of the shiv’ah tuvei ha-‘ir and that, being democratically elected by the entire Jewish (and non-Jewish) population of the country, its laws and decisions are binding halakhically. Needless to say, in light of this view there is no justification for displays of contempt towards it or ignoring it, as has happened upon occasion.

I recently read a study by Dr. Haim Shapira relating to two other approaches to law outside of the strictly Rabbinic purview. Among other things, he mentions there the approach of R. Nissim of Gerona (the Ran; Spain, 14th century), who speaks of what he calls “the law of the king” (mishpat ha-melekh) as a parallel system of law, alongside that of the Torah. The Ran claims that the king (or other Jewish ruler) has the right and authority to legislate laws and statutes rooted in Torah principles of justice and equity, albeit not necessarily following the specific details of Torah or Talmudic law. One of the reasons for such a body of law is that Torah law is extremely strict in matters of criminal law, imposing requirements of testimony and prior warning making it all but impossible to convict a person of serious crimes, i.e,, those carrying the death penalty. While these strict procedures are admirable for their humane spirit, expressing the concept of the innate dignity of the human being created in the Divine image, it was felt that these laws did not provide adequate sanctions to discourage criminals and wrongdoers; hence, an alternative system of law and punishment was needed to insure the overall welfare and order of society.

A second legal principle mentioned by Shapira was that articulated by R, Moses of Coucy, author of Sefer Mtzvot Hagadol (Semag; France, 13th centuries). The Semag confronted a situation in which pious judges were reluctant to judge by Torah law, being overwhelmed by fear of error. Hence, the Semag recommended that, wherever possible, the judges stipulate to the litigants the condition that they agree to be judged, not by Torah law, but that the judge be free to rule on the basis of his own judicial discretion, understanding and judgment. (Note: This did not necessarily imply that the judge would rule on the basis of pesharah, serving as a mediator in arranging a compromise between the two sides—even though his words were interpreted thus by many of the poskim who came in his wake—but that he would rule on the basis of his own conscience and sense of justice.) Thus, the judge is not only permitted, but encouraged, to bypass Torah law as the final arbiter—an approach incorporated as a guideline in the Shulhan Arukh (Hoshen Mishpat, 12)!

In addition to these alternative approaches to judgment, there are a number of what might be called meta-halakhic principles, by whose means it is possible to introduce our own ethical insights, sensitivities and approaches to halakhah. The real problem is: What does one do if a given Torah law, or even an entire area of Torah, conflicts with our own best moral sensibility and values, or even with the sensibility and sensitivity of an entire culture, an entire generation? This is, of course, the underlying issue in the public furor surrounding Torat Hamelekh, and the underlying value conflict between its defenders and its critics (although I wonder how many of either its most passionate critics or its dogmatic defenders have in fact read it.)

1. Darkei shalom (“ways of peace”). This argument was developed specifically by R. Menahem Hameiri (France, 14th century) as a way of softening the bite of some of harsher Anti-Gentile halakhot brought in the Talmud (of the ilk cited by Torat Hamelekh). He argued that Jews may, in effect, ignore certain of these rules in order to ensure peaceful relations with the non-Jewish world, but added that, in principle as well, these rules only apply to the pagans who lived in ancient times, “in their days,” and not to the Gentiles with whom we interact today, who are monotheists and guided by the norms of civilized morality.

2. Natural Law. Rav A. I. Kook repeatedly speaks of the natural ethical sensibility implanted within the human being as an essential fundament of the Torah, as the basis of the religious personality, alongside the Sinaitic revelation. In several places in his writings he notes that, if a person feels a conflict between the natural ethical feeling implanted within us and what we read in the halakhah, something must be wrong—and it may well be that we do not understand the halakhah properly. (This point is developed in the section entitled Orot ha-Musar in Vols. 3 and 4 of Orot ha-Kodesh)

3. לפנים משורת הדין — “Beyond the letter of the law.” According to the Talmud, the truly good and pious person must not blindly follow what is written in the Talmud and the halakhic codes, but ought to go above and beyond it, to seek the maximal ethical perfection in every situation. Again, this concept gives broad scope for conscience and for human understanding of ethical demands.

4. הלכה ואין מורין כן — “It is halakhah, but we do not teach it as such.” This principle is typically invoked in cases where the implementation of the halakhah as written would be morally repugnant, or otherwise problematic. In such cases, the halakhah in question remains in force in purely theoretical terms, but is not applied in practice.

In conclusion, the slogan that “the Torah is above the law”—and by implication above all else—is a simplistic reading of the significance of Torah that ignores the deeper and truer meaning of Torah; at times, the literal demands of the Torah must pass through the filter of human ethical and moral sensibility. Or perhaps we might say that “The Torah itself is above the Torah”—that is, that a true understanding of the Torah is far deeper and more complex than the narrow interpretations given it by some.

POSTSCRIPT: A Wedding Sermon

Last Thursday night (August 25) I had the privilege of conducting a wedding in Akko. I would like to share the brief homily I made on that occasion with my readers.

The sixth of the Seven Nuptial Blessings, sheva brakhot, begins with the words שמח תשמח רעים האהובים—“rejoice indeed, beloved friends.” There is something intriguing in this pharse, as I shall explain below; moreover, there are no less than four different textual readings of the third and fourth words: (1) רעים האהובים—re’im ha-ahuvim (“the beloved friends”). This is the reading found in standard editions of the Talmud at b. Ketubot 8a, and in most Ashkenazic Siddurim); (2) הרעים האהובים ha-re’im ha-ahuvim—an amended text, mentioned by Baer in his Siddur Avodat Yisrael (Rödelheim, 1868; reptd. Tel Aviv, 1957; p. 564) as intended to correct a grammatical nicety—namely, the need for the definite article on both the noun and the adjective that follows—itself a rather dubious point; (3) רעים אהובים re’im ahuvim (“beloved friends”)—the same, but without the definite article, treating both words as generic rather than specific. This reading is used among many Sephardim and appears in the Siddur Rav Amram Gaon and in Sefer Avudraham. In all three readings, the meaning is much the same; as Baer puts it: “The bridegroom and bride, who are connected by their mutual love to be re’im to one another”—a word that may be translated as “friends,” “companions,” “partners” or “spouses.”

(4) רעים ואהובים The fourth reading, brought by the Sheiltot de-Rav Ahha Gaon and in Rambam, Hilkhot Berakhot 2.11 (but compare Ishut 10.3, which is like (1) above) is re’im ve-ahuvim, with a connective vav—“friends and beloved”— in which the word ahuvim is not used as an adjective—i.e., “loving friends” or “beloved friends”—but the two words are each nouns: they are described as both friends and lovers.

I find this point to be a significant one. Our culture, at least in such popular mass media as television, cinema, and novels, holds great stock in “love,” in the sense of romantic/erotic/sexual love between man and woman, as a kind of holy grail; as one of the central focii of meaning in life; and as the desired—both necessary and sufficient—basis for marriage. Re’ut, by contrast, refers to what might be translated as friendship, companionship, partnership, camaraderie. It is used in this sense in the title of the song Ha-Re’ut, celebrating the battles fought by the Palmah during the War of Independence, in the sense of fellowship in arms. (If I may, I would add that this word has special resonance for me as the name of my youngest granddaughter.) It is a quality characteristic of those engaged in a joint enterprise which occupies much of their time and effort, to which one’s thoughts are devoted “heart and soul.”

Such a partnership, while less intense than romantic or erotic love, may in the long run be a more stable basis for a lifetime commitment such as marriage than the vagaries of subjective emotion and physical–bodily attraction. If marriage is indeed meant, not only as a satisfying relationship for the two parties involved, but as the basis for a family, which will in turn serve as a link in the continuity of the generations—and as a basis for the project of raising and educating children—the re’im model is at least as important as the ahuvim model.

Interestingly, the young couple who were the principles at this wedding, in addition to their personal relationship, work together in their profession, that of theater—the man as an actor, the woman as director—where they deal with weighty and important issues, such as that of the Israeli exile community in Germany, relations between Jews and Germans at this point in history, etc.

I conclude with two linguistic points, which may somewhat qualify the above: There is a difference between ahuvim and ohavim (אהובים / אוהבים). While the latter clearly means “lovers,” the former may also mean “dear friends.” As such, it may refer to the hatan and kalah and their young love (as suggested by Baer), but it might also be addressed to the hatan and kallah by the shushvinim, the companions who celebrate and rejoice with them, calling them “beloved friends.” As if to say: we, your companions, love you and wish you much happiness in your newly-established life as man and wife (remembering that the Sheva Brakhot are typically recited by the companions at the conclusion of the various wedding feasts, celebrated with a circle of a minyan of friends.) It then concludes כשמחיך יצירך בגן עדן מקדם—“just as your Creator rejoiced you [i.e., your forebears, Adam and Eve, the very first couple, of whom every new couple are somehow avatars] in the Garden of Eden, long ago.”

The word ahavah is not used specifically for sexual love, but for all varieties of love—love of parents and children, love of God, love of close friends such as David and Jonathan (the homosexual reading of which, popular these days in certain circles, seems to me forced); as well as the love between man and woman. I find it interesting that Shir ha-Shirim, the Song of Songs, the Biblical book celebrating love of man and woman (however interpreted), refers to erotic love primarily as dodim. Thus: כי טובים דודיך מיין (1:2) ; שם אתן את דודי לך (7:13); and many others. The word ahavah, by contrast, appears relatively infrequently in the book.

Finally, ra’yah may also mean “beloved” in the sexual or marital sense. The woman in Song of Songs consistently refers to her lover as dodi, while he refers to her as ra’ayati.

For more teachings on this parashah, see the archives to this blog for July 25 2006, July 18 2007, August 10 2008, and August 15 2009 (scroll down).

Ekev (Individual & Community)

2011-08-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

On Prayer, Public and Private

This week’s parashah contains the brief phrase upon which the mitzvah of prayer is based: “to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart (ולעבדו בכל לבבכם) and with all your soul” (Deut 11: 13). Rashi, quoting the ancient tannaitic midrash Sifrei, focuses upon three words: “to love him with all your heart.” It is worth taking note of his exact language:

“And to serve Him with all your heart” (Deut 11:13). Service of the heart—this is prayer. For [we know that] prayer is called service from the verse, “Your God before whom you serve constantly…” (Daniel 6:17). And is their service n Babylon? Rather, because he was used to praying, as is said, “and he had windows open there [facing Jerusalem]” (ibid 6:11). And so too David says, “Let my prayer be accepted before You like incense” (Ps 141:2).

Rashi, and the midrash upon which his comment is based, appear to have sensed a certain contradiction in the combination of the two concepts, “service” and “heart.” “Service” or “work,” avodah, generally refers either to physical labor, or to the subjugation or submission of one person (or nation) to another—and this, in the concrete, material realm. Thus, when one nation pays tribute to a powerful conqueror it is said to serve the latter (see, e.g., Gen 14:4); likewise the word for slave or servant, ‘eved, comes from the same root; the animal sacrifices offered in the ancient Temple are referred to in Rabbinic literature as ‘avodah, albeit this phrase appears but infrequently in this sense in the Bible. Hence, the idea of prayer—the verbal expression of adoration and worship of God, which is seen primarily as an expression of the heart, of the individual human being’s emotions and spirit—being called avodah shebelev seems strange, even discordant. Hence Rashi feels the need to bring, not one, but two (really three) separate proof texts—first to show that prayer may legitimately be referred to as “service” (the verse from Daniel), and then that there is a clear and direct parallel equation made between prayer and the Temple cult (Psalms).

Nevertheless, referring to prayer, not merely as avodah, but as avodah shebelav, suggests that the essence of prayer is within man’s innerness—in the heart, the seat of a person’s intentions, emotions, thoughts, and soul. It follows that prayer requires a certain inner, psychological–spiritual preparation. Thus, the entire first section of Shaharit, the daily Morning Prayer—the longest and most elaborate of the three daily prayers—known as Pesukei de-Zimra, is seen by many as essentially a way of preparing the heart for the Prayer as such which follows thereafter. Indeed there is a vast literature concerning how one ought to prepare for prayer, and how one ought to behave during the act of prayer, how one ought to guide one’s inner life and thoughts and feelings. It is far more than merely reading the words of the Siddur, and even less so—as often seems to happen—an attempt to recite the maximum number of words in the minimum amount of time.

But if this is the case, then another, opposite question arises: What is the point of public prayer altogether? If the essence of prayer is service of the heart and soul—which almost by definition pertain to each individual—then it ought not to need a public dimension. Each person may best perform this mitzvah by him/herself, at their own pace, in the privacy of their own home.

And yet, it is a well-known fact, almost a truism, that the halakhah places great emphasis upon public prayer, and the importance of participation therein—although it stops short at actually defining it as an obligation incumbent upon each individual. (Although if every place where Jews dwell there should be a synagogue, and a daily minyan, then that would seem to imply a certain duty or obligation on at least those ten men to show up in shul!) But even if it is not incumbent upon the individual to pray with a minyan, it is highly praised by the Rabbis. Thus, Abba Binyamin states that “A person’s prayers are only heard constantly in the synagogue [with the public].” (Berakhot 6b). Or, to the contrary, Rabin bar Rav Adda in the name of R. Yitshak, who said that if one who goes to the synagogue every day, and one day doesn’t come, God asks after him (ibid.). Or Resh Lakish, who states that : “One who has a synagogue in his town and does not go there to pray is called a bad neighbor” (ibid., 8a). On the other hand, we do read of Rav Ami and Rav Asi who, even there were thirteen synagogues in their city [Tiberias], only prayed “between the pillars where they studied” (8a).

But perhaps most striking is the statement that the Shekhinah only resides where ten people from Israel are gathered together (ibid., 6b). This is the underlying reason for the rule of davar shebe-kedushah—that is, that there is a whole gamut of things which may only be recited in the presence of a minyan, beginning with Kedushah (the declaration of God’s Holiness in imitation of the angels (“Holy, Holy, Holy…”), including Kaddish and Barkhu, and ending with the public reading of the Torah and the recitation of the Priestly Blessing.

I once discussed here (HY IX: Hayyei Sarah [=Mitzvot]) a passage in the Talmud, Berakhot 26b, concerning the source or root of prayer: is it based upon the model of the patriarchs, or upon the sacrifices offered in the Temple? I wrote at that time that these two views, of R Yossi b. Hanina and R., Yehoshua b. Levi, respectively, clearly correspond to two different aspects of prayer: individual and public. (Why the Sages chose the particular verses and words they did to prove the patriarch’s connection to thrice-daily prayer is itself an interesting question, deserving deeper discussion some other time.) That is, public worship in the synagogue is a kind of reenactment, on some spiritual level, of the service in the Temple performed on behalf of Knesset Yisrael.

Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik once drew a distinction between “prayer in public”—where each individual prays by him/herself, but coordinated with the public; and “prayer of the public,” symbolized by the Hazarat ha-Shatz, in which the reader recites the entire Amidah aloud on behalf of the public. It seems to me that the latter is a kind of parallel or replication of the Tamid shel Shahar—the daily sacrifice offered morning and evening in the Temple, through which all Israel together worship God.

But one might still well ask the question: if the essence of prayer is service of the heart, and the entire realm of both thought and emotion are almost by definition located within the individual, how can one meaningfully speak of the “heart” of the public, of a collectivity of individuals? There is a suggestive Rashi on this matter in the chapter of Matan Torah. At Exodus 19:2, he comments: "'יחן שם ישראל נגד ההר' – כאיש אחד בלב אחד"—“’And Israel camps [the verb is in the singular] there opposite the mountain’—as one man, with one heart.” That is, in some almost mystical sense the entire nation were spiritually united, “with one heart.” There can be a phenomenon of a large group feeling an emotional bond, binding them into one (this may operate for good or for evil—but that is another matter).

What, then, is collective prayer? There are two major aspects to prayer: on the one hand, bakashat tzerakhim, beseeching God for one’s concrete needs in practical life—such things as health, economic security, family, peace in one’s social and political environment, etc.; on the other hand, there can be prayer in the sense of pure avodah, worship of God without any ulterior motive, a demonstration of one’s devotion to God—all of which is implied in the phrase עמידשה בפני ה', “standing before God” (see HY X: Ekev [=Zohar]). If one were to place private and public prayer on a continuum between these two poles, private prayer would be closer to petitionary prayer and public worship would be closer to the idea of pure worship. Here, too, public prayer seems to be modeled upon the korban tamid—the daily sacrifice, which was specifically an olah, a burnt-offering symbolizing simple, complete devotion to God.

But in addition, there may be extraordinary situations in which the collectivity engages in prayer for some common need or concern—of bakashat tzerakhim for the public. This is in fact the model for Ta’anit Tzibbur, public fast days, in which the entire community, in response to some crisis—the classical Rabbinic model is that of drought and the implied threat of famine, but the crisis may be one of it may warfare, epidemic disease, disastrous floods, or even the welfare of a leader or some other individual whose fate touches the entire community. Some readers may remember, in October 1994, when soldier Nahshon Waksman, hy”d, was kidnapped by Arab terrorists and held captive for several days against the release of certain prisoners. There was a mass prayer meeting at the Western Wall one night of that week, when 10,000 or more people came to pray for him; even more impressive, that Friday night Jews throughout Israel were asked to gather in their synagogue after the Shabbat meal to recite Tehillim on his behalf. (In the end, unfortunately, he was murdered.)

Interestingly, Rambam notes that it is a special prerogative of the community’s prayer that they are answered at all times: whenever a community turns to God in this way, it is comparable to the Ten Days of Repentance when God is somehow accessible in a special sense to every individual who does teshuvah (Hilkhot Teshuvah 2.8).

I would like to conclude, very briefly, by noting that this issue goes beyond the specific issue of prayer to the entire area of individual and community. There has been an enormous shift in Western society over the past half century from an excessive emphasis on the group, usually the nation–state, to the other extreme, in which almost all aspects of culture and life—from the large structures of economic life through the ways we think about sexuality and the family unit, and everything in between—are seen almost exclusively through the prism of the individual. This may be felt in the way we think about spiritual life as well: whether in an over–emphasis on individual, subjective experience, or an individualistic, at times almost anarchic approach to halakhah found in many quarters, without a true understanding of the spiritual riches and power to be found in a healthy, deeply interconnected community.

For more teachings on this parashah, see the archives to this blog for July 12 2006, August 2007 (scroll down), August 2008, and August 2009.

Vaethanan (Individual & Community)

2011-08-12T08:02:00.000-07:00

For more teachings on this parashah, see the archives to this blog for July 5 2006, July 2007, August 2008, and August 2009.

Unity of the Individual, Unity of Society, Unity of the Cosmos

In one of his lectures in honor of his father ‘s Yahrzeit (Shiurim le-zekher Abba Mari z”l, Vol. I, pp., 32-52, esp. 32-37), Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik discusses the concept of accepting the yoke of Heaven through Keri’at Shema—the twice-daily recitation of Shema. His starting point is the sugya in Berakhot 13a-b, in which there is a dispute among R. Eliezer, R. Akiva and R. Meir, regarding the question: Until what verse is one required to recite Shema with kavanah, with inner awareness/concentration? The sugya gives three answers: during the first verse alone—”Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deut 6:4); through the second verse: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” (v. 5); or up to and including the third verse, “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart” (v. 6). Rambam, at Hilkhot Keri’at Shema 1.2, synthesizes them into one answer: “One recites Shema early [upon rising], for it contains God’s unity, His love [i.e., our love of Him], and His study [i.e., our obligation to study His word], which is the great principle upon which all depends.”

The Rav goes on to explain that these three verses allude to three dimensions of religious commitment: the first refers to the basic articles of faith—God’s existence, our knowledge/faith/acceptance of this fact, and the rejection of idolatry (i.e. since God is one, unique, there is no other). The second verse refers to the human response to these cosmic, metaphysical axioms, through love of God—“with all your heart, soul and strength/being.” The third, curiously, refers to acceptance of the Torah as the vehicle through which we come to love and accept God’s kingdom (”these things which I command you this day”).

What are the underlying ideas of each of these three verses, and of the various tannaitic approaches as to what is central and what is, if not extraneous, somewhat less important? I would like to suggest that Ker’iat Shema, among other things, means that unity is the central organizing principle of Judaism, and that these three verses correspond to three different realms or dimensions of that unity.

The first verse is, at least on the face of it, the simplest and most basic: the Being and Unity of God: the statement that “the Lord” (HWYH) is our God, and that He is one. However, there are many possible interpretations of God’s unity. There is the simple definition implied in the Bible and by Hazal, in which God’s unity simply means His exclusivity: that idolatry is in fact mere fetishism, that the other gods do not really exist, but their worship is prohibited only so that people will not express incorrect ideas about the cosmos. (Some historical scholars of Bible might add: in certain passages one finds a concept of henotheism—that HWYH is the mightiest god, and all other powers that exist in the world are subjugated to Him.) Then there is the philosophical definition, propounded by Maimonides: that God is an eternal, unchanging perfection; that as such He is without any internal divisions, and hence is not only incorporeal, but without any emotions, actions, etc. ; anything that confutes this view is purely metaphorical, to translate the God-idea into human terms. Finally, there is the Kabbalistic–Hasidic conception, in which God is dynamic, with a complex inner life, involving various forces or sefirot that bridge the gap between the realm of the finite world and the infinite—but within this diversity, He is one.

But whatever position is taken (and these are of course simplifications), the important idea is the unity of the cosmos: that beyond the appearance of multiplicity, of numerous phenomenon, there is an underlying principle that unites them all. This leaves us with another question: Must a Jew believe in a personal God, or is the notion of Divine personality itself a figure of speech used to make the idea of God, which is utterly mysterious and beyond, in some small way comprehensible to us? And: does God have a will? And if He is not a person as we understand that concept, what does this mean?

The second verse leaves aside these theological questions; those who insist that it, too, is an integral part of Shema imply thereby that what is important is how we live as human beings, and not what axioms we accept about the area of God’s being, which is anyway ultimately unknowable.

The Love of God: I would suggest that what this really means, at least in the traditional Rabbinic reading, is the integration of the human personality around the love of God. A well-known mishnah, at Berakhot 9.5, interprets each of the three phrases in this verse. “With all your heart” means: “with both your urges: with both your good and evil urges.” The Evil Urge is not evil in any nasty, demonic sense, but simply refers to the instinctual life, what Freud called the Id: especially sexuality, but also other vital appetites, and the simple urge for survival, for self-preservation, which can at times lead to aggression and even violence against others—in short, things which are not in themselves evil, but which are typically areas in which things can get out of hand. This must be integrated with the “Good Urge”—the ethical impulse, love for others without any ulterior motivation, generosity and selflessness, as well as the impulse towards spirituality, the urge for transcendence and, if you will, the quest for meaning, and even the impulse for all kinds of cultural and intellectual creativity.

“With all your soul.” The traditional interpretation is: total commitment, up to and including sacrificing one’s very life, if need be. Just a few days ago we observed Tisha b’Av, in which the motif of Jewish martyrdom looms large (in the piyut, Arzei ha-Levanon). This is so, not only because we have had a history n which Jews were forced at many junctures to make the choice between apostasy or death, many faithful Jews submitting to martyrdom, but because in principle the idea of Kiddush Hashem symbolizes total commitment—a commitment that in principle totally transcends individual life. (Some Rebbes and Kabbalists called upon people to mentally imagine undergoing Kiddush Hashem every day during their prayers, either at this verse or in Tahanun.)

“With all your might [or: wealth / vitality / in all life situations].” Here the mishnah introduces a homiletical reading of מאדך as בכל מידה ומידה שהוא מודד לך —“In every aspect that He measures out for you”—which is clearly not peshat. The basic point here is that, just as one must remember God in all life situations—getting up, going to bed at night, walking on the road, sitting at home—so must one acknowledge and accept His presence and authorship of all life situations.

This is far from a simple matter. I know of people who gave up being religious when things went bad in life—not only after the Holocaust, but in response to more mundane misfortune: when a marriage turned sour and they found themselves alone in mid-life, death of a love one, illness or physical disability or financial reverses. The idea of Tzidduk Hadin, of accepting God even when life dishes out hard knocks, is not at all simple, but is essential to faith in a God who is not merely a cosmic Santa Claus.

The third verse: “And these things which I command you this day shall be upon your heart” is understood as referring to the study of Torah and, more than that, a constant existential connection to Torah. An idea repeated constantly in certain early Hasidic books, such as Me’or Einayim, is the unfathomable gap between the finite human being and the infinite, transcendent, unreachable God, and the function of the Torah as a kind of intermediary or bridge between the two. The Torah serves as the central image in Judaism—not only as a specific book, not only as Law, but as Wisdom, as a kind of underlying fabric of the universe, even as a kind of apotheosis of God Himself. The verses that follow this one in the first paragraph of Shema—that one must teach Torah to one’s children, speak of it constantly, attach it to one’s body through the tefillin, write a section of it in the mezuzah on the portal to one’s home—are all expansions of this basic message. Moreover, the second paragraph of Shema, which Hazal refer to as “accepting the yoke of mitzvot,” is a yet fuller elaboration of this basic message.

How do these ideas apply to our scheme of individual and community?

The first verse speaks of God as He is in Himself, in His glory and splendor and transcendent unity, and as such is beyond the human. The second verse speaks of personal integration, of how the individual relates to God in a unified way—the individual being the seat of human consciousness, the basic unit through which life in all its multiplicity is experienced.

The third verse speaks of Torah. The Torah of course addresses the individual, and its study—whether done by oneself, with a partner, or in a larger group—is ultimately an individual experience, the intellect residing within the mind of each individual. But it is also the covenantal document of Klal Yisrael, of the totality of Israel, and as Divine Wisdom it is universal, even cosmic in significance. One could even say: identification with other Jews as Jews takes place through the community of Torah, through what the Rav called the Masorah community.

Indeed, one of the great problems of Jewish modernity is either ignorance of Torah, or rejection of Torah—i.e., secularism. The story of modern Jewry can be read, at least in part, as the history of the attempts to discover or create substitutes for Torah, through culture, nationalism, language, collective memory, etc.—and with only limited degrees of success. Thus, one can read this verse primarily on the collective level as: unity of community, the connection of Jews with one another through the instrumentality of Torah. Or, to conclude in the words of the Shabbat afternoon prayer: Atah ehad ve-shemkha ehad umi ke-Amkha Ysrael goy ehad ba-aretz.

Some Tisha b’Av Afterthoughts

After my piece on Shabbat Hazon and an attempt at an existential reading of the meaning of the Temple, I received the following email from long-time reader Yaakov Sack:

I really liked the notion of homo sacrifices, but what is not being said is the communal rejection of the Temple led by the Rabbis (this being an absolute condition of acceptance of haluka derabanan), while at the same time hypocritically mouthing words about “rebuilding the Temple” or its “falling from Heaven complete.” Such an acceptance of contrary states so close to the heart of our faith points to a serious malfunction in reality management—a fiddler on the roof, so to speak—which is hardly affected at all by this state you mention as being so important.

My response: Thanks for your very interesting reading. But did the community really reject the Temple? Don’t forget that it was destroyed by the Romans, in the course of a long and painful war. Maybe haluka derabanan, as you put it, was simply making the best of the new reality. Then, after a time a Judaism without the Temple, but centered around halakhah and Torah study, became so highly developed that there was no way back...

To which he answered in turn:

Couldn't Yohanan ben Zakkai have asked for the Temple instead of Yavneh? It's impossible to ignore the centuries of conflict between Temple-based religion and Rabbinical trends. Wasn't the Temple’s end the triumph of another way and the true end of a civil war waged for centuries. And what about the attempt of the Emperor, Julian the Apostate (363 CE) to rebuild the Temple that was thwarted by the rabbis? But we’re not discussing history, but a kind of blind spot in us that prevents looking at what we feel inside—[namely,] repulsion at the Temple.

And my own response: About what you say here: the gemara (Gittin 56b) seems to imply that Rabban Yohanan chose Yavneh because he wasn't sure Vespasian would grant him Jerusalem at all. The gemara says he choose הצלה פורתא, a small deliverance, rather than risk losing everything.

Was this choice motivated by deeper attitudes and mindset? Perhaps. But note: there is a passage in the Talmud which says that when Rabban Yohanan was dying he wept. His disciples asked him: Why do you weep? Can it be that a great man like you, a true tzaddik and sage and leader (פטיש חזק עמוד ימיני) fears the Divine judgment? He answered: Two paths were open before me, one leading to Gehinnom and the other to Gan Eden, and I do not know which is which, and whether or not I chose the right one. Rav Soloveitchik, when learning this sugya, said that Rabban Yohanan was wondering whether he had in fact made the right choice at that juncture.

But as Yakov says, this is not the real issue, but rather that of “exploring our real feelings in the face of what we're legislated to feel… It’s the feeling that the power of faith is letting slip by what everyone knows is a lie.” People don’t like to talk about these things, but this is true: in the religious community there are conventionally pious things one is supposed to say, I thought of this Tuesday morning when someone said to me, “Next year we won’t observe Tisha b’Av” or when a prominent rabbi, at the beginning of a Webcast of an all-day series of shiurim, began by saying that he hopes that this will be the last such shiur ever (because by next Tisha b’Av the Temple will be rebuilt; incidentally, it is by no means clear that Tisha b’Av was not observed during the period of the Second Temple.) Or the fact that most Kinot are printed in cheap paper-back editions, as a way of emphasizing that they are not, so to speak, intended for permanent use—even though the same books are used year after year.

I look around at the people in my synagogue, or people I know generally, and wonder how many of them are really yearning for the Temple in the depths of their soul, and how much of it is a kind of unconscious or semi-conscious pious play-acting. By and large, people are pretty much satisfied with their religious lives—or if not, the dissatisfaction isn’t because of the absence of the Temple, but other factors, To mention something completely different, but reflecting the same mentality: During my father-in-law’s final illness, I told someone at a certain social gathering, “My wife isn’t here tonight because her father is dying and she’s on her way to the US.” The response was, “You mustn’t say such a thing.” Does religious faith really mean that we are supposed to believe that God can and will miraculously heal a dying person at the last minute, and to deny our basic sense of reality? People, after all, are mortal!

There are various ways of dealing with this: In my earlier essay I mentioned Rambam and his seeming ambivalence about the Temple, as expressed in the sharp contradiction between what he says in the Guide and his detailed presentation of its laws in the Yad. (See my discussion of this in HY V: Vayikra [=Rambam: Vayikra]). Richard Rubenstein, in his book After Auschwitz, writes, as a Reform rabbi, a very interesting essay about why reciting Seder ha-Avodah on Yom Kippur is important. In a psychoanalytical approach, he states that he doesn’t want to see an actual revival of Temple but that, psychologically, religion is not only about ethical exhortation and perfectionism, but also about the community experiencing a kind of collective admission of failure and catharsis—and this is somehow done through recalling the ritual performed at the Temple. Or, perhaps more simply, one can relate to the Temple worship with a certain kind of nostalgia, without literally wanting to see it reconstituted—at least not with the animal sacrifices. (Perhaps as a kind of Super–Great Synagogue? Surely there’s nothing wrong with the idea of a central site for a particularly elevated form of collective worship—a kind of Jewish Mecca.)

Another implicit problem: for those who accept the modernist idea of historical development of religion and religious institutions, one can see the Temple and animal sacrifices as something we’ve left behind, perhaps even with a certain nostalgia. But one who sees the Torah, in the sense of the peshat of the Five Books, as literally the basic, unchanging guide to God’s eternally revealed will, will have a harder time with this idea.

Tisha b'Av (Individual & Community)

2011-08-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

For more teachings on Tisha b’Av, see the archives to this blog for July 2006, July 2007, July 10 2008, July 2009 and July 2010.

This past Shabbat I went to Yedidyah—which during my first two years in Talpiyot had been my regular shul, but which I left last summer when I found the distance too hard on my suffering knees and legs—for the first time in nearly a year. It was most fortuitous, for when there I heard a wonderful, passionate sermon for Shabbat Hazon delivered by Gershom Gorenberg, journalist and socially engaged person. His theme was the verse from the haftarah: “Hear the word of the Lord, chieftains of Sedom; hearken to the Torah of our God, people of Amorah” (Isa 1:10). Why, he asked, were the people of Israel compared to those of Sedom? What did Sedom symbolize? What was their salient characteristic?

His answer was a simple one (unlike the Western Christian tradition which associates Sodom with homosexuality, hence the word “sodomy”): the sin of Sedom was indifference to the other; not necessarily cruelty, viciousness, gratuitous violence, but simple indifference and apathy. Pirkei Avot writes: “He who says: What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours, is an ‘intermediate quality,’ and there are those who say: This is the quality of Sodom (midat sedom)” (Avot 5.10). In short, the ethics of Sedom was remarkably similar to that of “neo-liberalism”—that is, of unfettered capitalism, in which state and society abdicate responsibility for the well-being of society, and of its weakest members, as much as possible. Each man is left on his own; the ethics of what is romantically referred to as the “rugged individualism” of the American frontier.

How does this relate to my discussion, in my most recent piece for Shabbat Hazon, of the almost metaphysical meaning of the Temple? Some might say that there is a sharp conflict between the area of ritual and the ethics: either/or. But, alternatively, it is possible to see them as complementing one another. There really is an existential human need for worship, for sacrifice, and even for atonement—but the road to these things goes through social ethics and justice. Our haftarah and similar prophetic texts relate, not to the expression of grief and longing and nostalgia once the Temple was destroyed, but to the question: why was the Temple destroyed? And the answer to this is clear: in punishment for social injustice, indifference to one’s fellow, and groundless hatred that marked Israelite/Judaean society at the time of the Destructions. It is significant that, when the prophet Zechariah was asked (7:1-3) by those who had just returned from Babylonia whether or not they should continue to observe Tisha b’Av (“the fast of the fifth month”), he did not give them a straight answer, but delivered a lengthy prophecy–sermon–rebuke (7:4-8:17) on the subject of social justice, of caring for the orphan and widow, of kindness and compassion, of not allowing the strong to rob the poor (whether with a pistol or a fountain-pen, in the words of the American folk-song)—and only then addresses their question with somewhat cryptic words of blessing: “the fast of the fourth, and the fifth, and the seventh, and the tenth month, shall be days of joy and gladness to the house of Israel,” ending with a final implied admonition: “but [most of all?], love truth and peace” (8:18-19). Or, in terms of my discussion on Shabbat: the need of human beings to feel closeness to the Divine, to break through the barriers between heaven and earth, and to transcend the barriers created by their own weakness and sin and failures (kaparah as existential need) can only be fulfilled when they first behave decently towards others—thereby, as it were, pleasing God, the loving Father of all humankind.

* * * * *

All this is closely related to the events occurring in Israel in recent weeks, on which I shall elaborate, especially for the benefit of readers abroad who may not be au courant. For the first time in many years—certainly for the first time since I came on aliyah, thirty-seven years ago—issues of civil society, of economic justice and of national priorities—are at the forefront of the nation’s agenda, rather than issues of “the territories,” the Palestinians, and “security.” Seemingly out of nowhere, there is a mass awakening of the “ordinary” middle-class Israeli—tens and hundreds of thousands of people have taken to marching and demonstrating on the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities and even middle-sized towns, week after week, expressing a sense of profound dissatisfaction and even distrust with the government.

It all began with the issue of housing: the grossly inflated prices of both purchase and rental of even modest-sized apartments in the big cities, and the feeling of many young people—hard-working people, many of them professionals, most of them university graduates—who camped out in tents in the middle of Sderot Rothschild in Tel Aviv, that they would never be able to afford a place to live: that is, that society and its leaders had let them down.

But it quickly spread to other areas: the system of medical care—the fine hospitals in which Israel takes such pride—is breaking down. There are not enough hospital beds; interns are paid scandalously low wages (NIS 22 per hour!) while working many and long night shifts every month in addition to a 40-hour-week, leaving them barely any time for family life. There has been privatization of education, so that many high schools have a two-tier system, in which parents with more money can place their children in special classes run private associations that provide a better education. Meanwhile the teachers are hired on a year-to-year contractual basis, without tenure and without social benefits; and, perhaps more important, the schools no longer function as a means of social advancement for bright kids from poor families, as they will get a second-rate education.

More generally, there is an overall sense of unfairness, of injustice, that the “salt of the earth”—those who work and contribute most to society—doctors, teachers, young soldiers—enjoy the least benefits, that too much of the nation’s budget goes to special interest groups of all sorts. That too much wealth and power is concentrated among a handful of “tycoons”—of wealthy individuals and families who enjoy tax incentives and easy-term loans from the government, on the theory that their wealth will “filter down” to the rest of the population. That there is too great a tax burden on the middle class, with too many “regressive” taxes—e.g., 16% VAT on most goods and services—and not enough “progressive” taxes on the wealthy. That too much money has been spent on West Bank settlements, in cultivating cheap land and housing there and not elsewhere, in building bypass roads and infrastructures (NB: I deliberately bracket here the political, moral and even international-relations aspects of this question, and refer only to the economics). That vast quantities of money are spent subsiding full-time Torah study by Haredim—an activity which is hardly in the “national consensus” as a cultural priority—who are also exempt from military service, in response to what can only be called political blackmail. That the military is a “sacred cow,” automatically given priority in matters of budget (Note: While this is seemingly called for in a country like Israel which has had to fight so many wars and suffers serious security threats, much of that budget goes to retirement benefits for career officers from the age of 45, when they can start new and lucrative careers in business, politics, or management—not to mention simple waste and inefficiency.)

The government’s response thus far has been to set up a committee, to talk about fiscal responsibility, budgetary limitations, costs, etc. But the real issue is not this or that minor change or adjustment, but the crying need for a serious rethinking of national priorities, which will require cutting the unfair perks to special interest groups to pay for more equitable social and other services for all. If this involves struggle with those groups which have hitherto enjoyed special privileges (as it will)—so be it. In simple terms: it’s time for the government to be taken back by the people.

All this is something very new to Israel. For more than forty years, politics in Israel have revolved around the issue of the West Bank, and the parties which have various positions on this issue. This new movement is not political in the traditional sense of partisan politics and the struggle for power among them, but in the root sense of concern for the structure and priorities of society. We can only hope that they are successful, in some small measure, in opening a more vital and vibrant discussion on al levels of society, and beginning a much-needed process of change.

Devarim-Hazon (Individual & Community)

2011-08-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

Tisha b’Av: “Shall I Weep as I Have Done?”

This Shabbat is the saddest Shabbat of the Jewish year—indeed, virtually the only Shabbat when a certain degree of melancholy is permitted. Known as Shabbat Hazon, “vision”—the first word of the haftarah of rebuke from Isaiah 1 read this Shabbat—it is devoted to the theme of the Destruction of the Temple, commemorated on the fast of Tisha b’Av, to be observed on Tuesday of this coming week. But perhaps the title hazon may also be read, homiletically, as an allusion to the vision of rebuilding, of consolation, and of restoration which has enabled Jews throughout the millennia to somehow survive through harsh and difficult times.

In our days, more than in the past, there are many people who ask the question asked by the delegation of elders to the prophet Zechariah: “Shall we weep and fast during the fifth month, as we have done these many years?” (Zech 7:3). Or, in simple language: is mourning and weeping for the Temple still relevant? This question is asked by different people on at least two levels. On the Zionist level: now that we have a State of Israel, that our age has witnessed the miracle of national renascence and the restoration of political sovereignty, the settlement of our ancient homeland and the creation of a flourishing society, culture and economy, the renewal of the Hebrew language, the rebuilding of Jerusalem as a modern city—all this notwithstanding the problems and difficulties facing Israel, including the sense of social and economic injustice underlying the widespread demonstrations of the past three weeks—what point is there to bewailing our putative Galut? On another, modernist–religious level: in a world where religious worship is overwhelmingly performed through verbal prayer, where whatever modest revival of religion and “spirituality” that has occurred in recent years is focused on the individual and his inwardness, how can people identify with the loss of a centralized Temple, focused upon slaughtering animals, sprinkling their blood, and burning their flesh on the altar? Indeed, those troubled by this question may cite Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, III.33; cf. 45-46, where he speaks of the Temple and the numerous commandments concerning sacrifices as a kind of interim or transitional stage, using the language of that type of ritual familiar to the Israelites when they left Egypt, but leading towards a more “advanced” experience of verbal prayer. In much the same way, indeed, he hints that humankind may eventually move past verbal prayer to pure mental contemplation of the greatness and transcendence of God.

In years past, I have emphasized the role of Tisha b’Av as a kind of national day of mourning for a; those things that have befallen the Jewish people throughout its history, beginning with the Destruction of the First and Second Temple and its aftermath of exile, enslavement, and the Hadrianic persecution of Jewish practice and Torah study, through the murderous anti-Jewish rampages of the Crusaders, the Inquisition and Expulsion in Spain and Portugal, the pogroms in the Ukraine, Poland and Russia, and culminating in the demonic horrors of the Holocaust within the memory of some people living today.

But this year, I prefer to address the question of the Temple per se, which I shall formulate around the terms to which I have repeatedly returned this year: How does Tisha b’Av address the individual, and how so the community? Or: in what sense does the individual miss and yearn for the Temple, and in what sense does the community?

The connection of the Temple to community is obvious. The most basic of all sacrifices offered therein, first mentioned at the conclusion of the chapters in Exodus 25-29 describing its construction, is the Korban Tamid—the fixed daily offering, offered morning and evening—which was offered on behalf of the people as whole, as the living embodiment of the House of Israel’s constant worship of the Divine. The great festivals celebrated in the Temple—Passover, with its paschal offerings eaten by family units to mark the beginnings of the people; and Yom Kippur, with its atonement ritual performed by the High Priest on behalf of the entire people—are all focused, in one way or another, upon themes in the collective life of the people. Likewise, on the last day of the festival of Sukkot the people would march around the altar, adorning it with willow branches, and crying out: “Beauty unto you, O altar; beauty unto you, O altar”—as if the altar itself somehow shared in the praises due to God. When we learned this passage with the Rav in Boston, he explained it in terms of the special of love and even adoration that Jews of olden times felt for the altar, as the physical locus of the miracle of kaparah—atonement. (more on this below)

But the Psalms are also filled with expressions of the longing of individuals for the Temple and the powerful sense of Divine Presence felt there. Thus, for example, Psalm 42 expresses the longing of an individual living in the distant northern province of the Jordan headwaters and the Hermon for God’s presence, and his wish to visit the “house of God” and for the “sound of joyous song and celebrant throng” which mark his experience there. So, too, in Psalm 63, while in “a dry and weary land,” his soul thirsts and his flesh long for God, and “to see You in the holy place.” Similar sentiments may be seen in Pss 27, 87, 135, and many others.

These feelings are expressed yet again in the series of shorter psalms bearing the heading “a song of degrees” or “song of steps” (Pss 120-134), which may have been originally written to be recited during the festal pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Following such familiar hymns celebrating the Holy City as Pss 122 and 126, they build up to Ps 132, King David’s song of longing to build the Temple, which only his son would live to accomplish; the fellowship of “brethren sitting together” in Ps 133; reaching a crescendo with the brief but eloquent song of praise and blessing of those “standing in the house of God at night” in Ps 134. In all these psalms, the experience of individual longing for and joy in the Temple is combined with the public or collective experience felt there.

What does, or did, the Temple mean to each individual per se? A strange midrash, cited by Rambam in Hilkhot Bet ha-Behirah 2.2, states that the altar was built at the exact spot where Abraham bound Yitzhak on the altar—a familiar idea—but goes on to add that this was the same place where Noah offered sacrifice after the Flood, where Cain and Abel built the altar for their spontaneous offerings (with its tragic ending), and, most significantly, the spot from which Adam himself was created, and where he offered a sacrifice upon his creation—“to teach one, that from the place of his creation, there came his atonement” (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer; Gen. Rab. 14.8). Rav Soloveitchik connected this idea with a notion, that no doubt sounds strange to modern ears, that sacrifice, and specifically the process of atonement that comes about through certain kinds of sacrifice, is an existential need of Man; he speaks of homo sacrificius Thus, the Temple was important, not only as the locus for collective worship, but as the place where each and every individual could undergo the process of catharsis and purgation brought about through sacrifice to the Almighty, to somehow bridge the gap between finite man and the infinite, transcendent, wholly Other God.

This last point demands elaboration. What does it mean for man to need sacrifice, and to need atonement, as a basic, existential need. And how does this relate to the strange mixture of elation, holiness and joy experienced on Yom Kippur—not at all a day of guilt and self-castigation, but of renewal and forgiveness? When we speak of existential needs, we usually think either of basic physical needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, and sex, or of basic emotional needs—whether the need for love, for security, or the fulfillment of ego needs such as recognition, dignity, respect from others, or of meaning in life, a significant life-project, etc. Even such sublime areas as the aesthetic or the intellectual ultimately refer back to a sense of pleasure, however refined.

But more than that: Many of us, under the influence of modern psychology, have accepted the notion that guilt per se is somehow a bad thing, that all neuroses originate in unnecessary feelings of guilt; that the healthy individual is marked by a high degree of “self-acceptance,” and that the task of therapy is to help bring this about. In this sense, teshuvah, what some would call religious conversion, including the notions of commandment and transgression, involves a profound inner revolution, a change in mind-set involving the rejection of some of the most basic axioms of our society.

What then is meant by kaparah? It is one of the conventions of modern Jewish apologetics to say that, unlike Christianity, we do not believe in Original Sin. To be sure, on one level this is true—man is not irredeemably evil, tainted with sin and corruption. But on another level, Judaism struggles deeply with the issue of sin, and there are even certain moments in our sacred history—the eating of the fruit of the Tree by Adam an Eve, the story of the Golden Calf, the sin of the Spies—which are seen as archetypal for our experience through the generations. Sin—meaning: failure, misdirection in life, missing the mark, wrongdoing, and even acts of real evil, of overt deep selfishness and meanness and cruelty towards the Other—are all but inevitable in life. Life is in some sense a realm in which one constantly errs. The human being experiences frustration, not only over things lacking in the material realm, or unrealized desires (“No man dies with half his desire in his hand”), but even more so because of his or her own shortcomings, stupidity, or slavery to impulse. The gap between the ideal by which one would like to live (particularly if the person has a modicum of spiritual sensitivity) and the actuality of our lives.

It is at this point that the notion of kaparah comes in, whereby one somehow feels a level of intimacy with God that would not, could not, exist otherwise. And this experience of atonement, of becoming purged and cleansed of one’s spiritual impurity, is somehow linked to Mikdash, and to the rituals performed there. It is for that, ultimately, that the individual mourns on Tisha b’Av. In the words of a piyyut recited on Musaf of Yom Kippur: “All these when the Temple stood on its site; does not our soul grieve even to hear about it!”

I would like to conclude with a few comments about the Zionist adoption of Temple Mount as sela kiyumenu, “the rock of our existence”—as a national symbol, as a place, sovereignty over which is somehow essential to the Zionist enterprise of Jewish national renaissance. On this point, I fear that I will sound almost like a member of Neturei Karta: that this is a secularization, an adoption for political-sociological purposes, of something that in truth exists on an entirely different plane. Such groups as Ne’emanei Har Ha-Bayit (“Loyalists of the Temple Mount”), which sees the right to ascend the Temple Mount as an essential expression of national pride, hopelessly misunderstand what the Temple and its holiness are all about. The Shekhinah is not an Israeli citizen, nor an Israeli patriot. (Mind you, I think it would be unwise of Israel to cede total sovereignty of the mountain to the Palestinians—but this for realpolitik, psychological–political reasons relating to the nature of negotiations and our future relaions—not because of any inherent, substantive national reasons. Meanwhile, davka refraining from ascending the mountain, close as it may be, is a powerful sign that, on some existential level, we are still in Galut.)

Mas'ei (Individual & Community)

2011-07-29T08:56:00.000-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to this blog for June 20 2006, July 2007, July 5 2008, July 2009 and 2010.

“What A Trip!”

The opening section of this week’s parashah, from which it takes its title, speaks about journeys, or “trips”—recounting the places where the children of Israel encamped during their journey from Egypt to the land of Israel, forty-two stations or masa’ot in all. Although the literal sense of the Torah here is concerned with the collective experience of the entire people, many later commentators—Hasidic and otherwise— read these masa’ot as alluding to the individual and his life journey: from its very beginning, at birth, in breaking out of the “narrowness” (metzarim=Mitzrayim) of the womb and birth canal, through a variety of stages, both good and bad, until one reaches “the Land of Eternal Life”—i.e., death and that which lies beyond.

Interestingly, Rashi on the opening verse of our portion (Num 33:1), cites a Midrash that relates specifically to the metaphor of personal experience: “This may be compared to a king whose son was ill, and he took him to a distant place to be healed. On their return journey, the father began to enumerate all the places they had passed: here we slept, here it was cold, there you had a headache” (Tanhuma, Mas’ei §3; Numbers Rabbah 23.3).

But whether one is speaking of an individual or a community, the metaphor of life as a series of stations on a journey is a cogent one. Life is seen here in dynamic, not static terms: as a constant process of growth and change. There is a temptation among some to see Judaism in a static way: as a fixed pattern of life, with a daily, weekly, and annual cycle of rituals repeated endlessly. Once one has become a shomer mitzvot—thus gores this argument—one feels that one has reached the goal. (Such thinking is at times encouraged by the sharp differentiation felt in the observant community between those who are “within” and those on the “outside”—“our people” and “Others.”) But in fact the external pattern of observance, the halakhah, couched in objective terms, is merely the beginning, the outline, the external framework for real spiritual, moral and personal growth.

It seems to me that one of the reasons for the popularity of Hasidism, of Hasidic thought and the study of Hasidic books in our generation, is that it articulates this insight. Hasidism speaks of religious life as a constant process of ratzo va-shov—literally, “running and returning,” but really: ebb and flow, ups and downs, moments of profound spiritual insight and even ecstasy, when everything coalesces and one feels close to the Divine source; and other times of dullness, when one is stuck in the mundane, ordinary world, doing no more than going through the motions of Torah and mitzvot.

This, then, is the chapter of masa’ot, of the stations of life. At times one feels surrounded by supportive friends and community: one is in Keheilata, or even Makhelot, where one is part of a choir of harmonious voices singing a beautiful song. Or one may belong to a court focused on the figure of a charismatic leader, like a Hasidic Rebbe: Hatzerot. At other times one is dead within, and all those passions and desires which gave life its color and excitement—whether sexual love, friendship, creative work, or even the simple appetite for food—are meaningless: one has come to Kivrot ha-Ta’avah, the burial place of appetite; or worse than that, one may find oneself in a place of sheer existential terror, Haradah. Then again, at other times life may be filled with sweetness—Mitkah; but at others one is in the dregs, in the dung at the very bottom of the pit—Tahat. And finally, perhaps close to the end of ones journey, all one knows is that one has undertaken an arduous climb to the top of the hill, and one is on the verge of the transition into the unknown: Harei ha-Avarim.

Does it all make sense? At times life seems a series of senseless, random events: success and failure, happiness and sadness, joy and tragedy, seem to come out of nowhere and have no coherent pattern or sense. The existentialist would say that the meaning of life is that which one chooses to give it. The religious person may add that, even if one cannot perceive the rhyme or reason for what has happened, it somehow makes sense in the eyes of God. And the Jew will add: “These are the journeys of the children of Israel”—one’s own life is part of the age-old history of the Jewish people, in its long, labyrinth path from Egypt, through Sinai, to ultimate Redemption. If nothing else, those of us who have borne and raised Jewish children, or taught others even one word of Torah, are links in the chain.

What are the “trips” or “stages” in the nation’s way towards becoming a nation? Here, too, the life of a nation is an endless series of steps and changes. In recent weeks I have, in my professional life, translated some material written during the decades before the creation of the State of Israel. I was impressed by the power of this vision, and the certainty that all would be different after Statehood—and of course, it was a very great event indeed. But living here, and looking backwards from a distance of more than sixty years, one sees that statehood was only the beginning, and that there were ups and downs, new kinds of problems, both within and without, and that even here “we have not yet come to the peace and the inheritance.” National life, too, is an endless series of stations, of “campgrounds”—but never a final resolution.

Some other, larger questions: What is the value of reminiscing about what happened in the past? The fact that the Torah recounts all these stations, and that the Midrash reaffirms it, suggests that it is of some value. Or is the scene described by Rashi simply an expression of the human impulse to remember, to reminisce? When I was a child my mother, z”l, used to tell me how when her own parents and their age-cohorts would get together and talk, sooner or later someone would ask Gedengst?—“Do you remember [such–and–such and so-and-so]?—and they would begin reminiscing about people they knew in Der Heim, in the “Old Country.”

But the value of memory goes beyond that. Memory is a crucial component of identity—be it personal identity, familial identity, or national identity. A group is bound together by common memories, by the stories that it tells itself about its common past. Particularly in the modern age, when religious faith and religious praxis have weakened as a unifying thread of Jewish identity, and when any simple conception of Jewish peoplehood and Zionism based upon common language and soil have turned out to be more problematical and even divisive than thought, common historical memory may yet prove to be the common denominator of Jewish identity. (A young scholar, Yehuda Kurzer, was awarded the prestigious Bronfman Chair in Jewish Communal Innovation to write on the theme of rebuilding Jewish memory).

Matot (Individual & Community)

2011-07-22T04:56:00.000-07:00

.For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to this blog for June 20 2006, July 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.

“All that comes out of your mouth you shall fulfill”

This week’s parashah incorporates a number of diverse subjects, including the entry into the Land and its future inheritance by the tribes (e.g., the issue of the tribes of Gad and Reuven). The very first section, however, deals with vows and oaths. The opening verse (after the title) contains the general principle “When a man makes a vow to the Lord, or swears an oath to prohibit something upon himself, all that he says he shall do” (Num 30:3). The bulk of this section deals with the exceptions to this rule—namely, that if a woman makes an oath while under the aegis of either her father or her husband, he has the right to abrogate her vow, provided he does so “on the day that he hears it.” Why this should be so, what it says about the relations between man and woman, etc., is a subject unto itself, which we have dealt with in the past. (Another troubling question I noticed this week relates to the apparent repetition of vv. 7–9 in vv. 11–14—but that too is a separate discussion.) I will mention briefly a provision that mitigates somewhat what many would call the sexism of this passage: the Rabbis infer from a certain turn of phrase here that the right of abrogation only applies to those vows by a woman which somehow impinge upon her husband’s or father’s interest—e.g., by requiring him to spend extra money or go to special trouble to, say, provide her with food or raiment as a direct result of her vow.

I wish to relate here to another, broader question: What are vows all about? What is the significance of the rule that one must fulfill one’s vow? Wikipedia describes an oath as “a statement of fact or promise made by calling upon something or someone that the oath maker considers sacred, usually God, as a witness to the binding nature of the promise or the truth of the statement. To swear is to take an oath, to make a solemn vow… The essence of a divine oath is an invocation of divine agency to be a guarantor of the oath taker's own honesty and integrity in the matter under question. By implication, this invokes divine displeasure if the oath taker fails in their sworn duties. It therefore implies greater care than usual in the act of the performance of one's duty, such as in testimony to the facts of the matter in a court of law.” For our purposes, a vow or oath is an articulation, an embodiment in words, of an autonomous decision made by a person, to which there is added a certain religious dimension.

I would add an important difference between the two in terms of halakhah: whereas an oath (shevu’ah) involves the invoking of God’s name, a vow, or neder, is a solemn promise, but one whose sanction is built-in, so to speak: one takes upon oneself a certain penalty—usually the obligation to bring a sacrifice or other gift to the Temple if he fails to fulfill his word (konam…).

I have written elsewhere (e.g., last year before Shavuot: see HY XII: Bamidbar and Shavuot) about the heteronomous nature of the Torah: “Greater is one who is commanded and does [i.e., the mitzvah] than one who is not commanded and does.” In this view, the Torah is essentially seen as a set of external laws imposed upon the human being from without, by the supreme authority of the Creator. What role is played, in this context, by man’s autonomous will, by decisions undertaken voluntarily? Vows and oaths are essentially the embodiment of a particular person’s autonomous will. As such, they are in one sense inferior to the universal, categorical obligations of the Torah, in an ethos focused upon submission to the will of God; on the other hand, the Torah values such decisions, at least to the extent of obligating the individual to fulfill his vows or oaths once he has undertaken them. A person must honor his own word, must take whatever he has committed himself to do, seriously; this is an important moral principle, relating to the inner integrity of the person within himself. (Interestingly, Sefer ha-Hinukh, in his treatment of this mitzvah, §§406-407, defines it as “not to alter which he have committed ourselves to do within our souls, even without an oath.”)

Thus, I may decide not to eat meat, or not to drink wine, or perhaps not to speak with a particular person who has insulted me or angered me; or I may decide to perform some positive act: to make a pilgrimage to such-and-such a place; to engage in a particular form of Torah study every day—perhaps a chapter of Tanakh or of Mishnah, a page of Talmud, a section of Shulhan Arukh (or to undertake a clearly defined project of secular studies); or to give a specific sum to a certain charity—a common ploy in fund-raising, where people are called upon to make “pledges,” as in the Yizkor appeals in many synagogues. Once I embody these decisions in a neder, I am obligated to fulfill it like any other mitzvah of the Torah. There is even a discussion in the Talmud as to whether there is a specific time limit within which a person must fulfill his vow, e.g., to bring an offering to the Temple, after which he violates the commandment in this chapter. It should be mentioned that there can also be a fixed “package” of prohibitions which a person may vow to observe; such is the nature of the Nazirite vow, about which the Sages expressed no small ambivalence, as they did regarding vows generally.

Interestingly, a person cannot take a vow “to study Torah” or “to give tzedakah,” or to daven or to keep Shabbat, because these things are mitzvot, acts which one is already obligated to do—“sworn to do so from Mount Sinai.” A vow must relate to something which one was not heretofore obligated to do. This last point is significant, as with the proliferation of Jews who are sometimes called ba’alei teshuvah—that is, those who have decided to adopt a more Jewishly pious or observant way of life for themselves—such decisions are often seen as a kind of vow—and it is not so.

There is a certain ambivalence about vows in the Jewish tradition. The halakhah respects them, insists on them being taken seriously—but it also expresses reservations. Thus, Kohelet says: “When you make a vow to God, do not delay to pay it… that which you have vowed you shall pay. But it is better not to vow, than to vow and not to pay” (Eccles 5:3-4). There is also a mechanism for releasing a person from vows—one goes to a sage, who sits as a court with two other people, who asks the one vowing if he has taken into consideration all the possible ramifications of his vow; inevitably, he has not (for no human being can foresee all that life may bring), and this functions as a petah, a valid halakhic “opening” to nullify the vow. If you would have thought of thus-and-such a scenario, you would never have viewed in the first place! Moreover: we begin Yom Kippur with Kol Nidrei, a public, communal nullification of all future vows; in many congregations a general nullification of vows is recited before Rosh Hashana. As if to say: specifically before the days of solemnity, when we pass in judgment before the Divine throne, it is better that a person be unencumbered by vows.

Perhaps this is the reason why Judaism does not have marriage vows. In Christianity, marriage is constituted through an exchange of vows, promising mutual help, caring and fidelity, the priest or minister functioning only as a kind of witness and guarantor to this solemn oath. In Judaism, marriage is seen rather differently (as a kinyan, in which the man takes the woman under his aegis, a view that many find problematic; see on this my essay, “Jewish Marriage—Time to Restructure?” in HY IX: Ki Teitze–Supplement = Ki Teitzei (Mitzvot). In any event, perhaps the absence of marriage vows relates to a general reluctance to take vows or oaths.

For the same reason, religious Jews do not use the term “I swear” before giving testimony in court or upon assuming public office, but simply “declare” their commitment to tell the truth, or to fulfill their duties faithfully. (Interestingly, in the IDF swearing-in ceremony at the end of basic training, the new recruits swear loyalty to the State, to the Army, and to the chain of command with the words ani nishba’ [“I swear”]—but religious soldiers are allowed to say instead ani matzhir [“I affirm”].)

To return to our central issue: the tension around vows seems to involve two basic issues: First, the tension between the emphasis in vows upon the individual’s will, the sense of his creating his own set of norms, a kind of private code, as against the objective standard of the Torah, the heritage of all Israel, a common societal teaching. This is especially so, as vows can often be trivial or capricious, even motivated by negative emotions: e.g., I hate this guy so I’ll take a vow that I won’t talk to him for a month! Second, in the case of oaths, there is the issue of invoking God’s Name: should one be unable for one reason or another to fulfill one’s vow or oath (which, I reiterate, is essentially a superfluous act to begin with), then God’s Name will be desecrated and will have been used in vain.

A further, more textually- and halakhically-focused discussion of Torat ha-Melekh will follow soon.

Pinhas (Individual & Community)

2011-07-22T02:35:00.000-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to this blog for June 15 2006, July 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.

Some Thoughts on Zealotry

This week’s parashah takes its title from Aaron’s grandson, Pinhas, whose act of zealotry and its surprising, if not paradoxical, reward—“My covenant of peace” and “an eternal priesthood” {Num 25:12-13)—form the opening section of this reading. Although I have discussed the meaning of zealotry—both of Pinhas’ specific act, and in general— a number of times in previous years, it seems to me that theme for this year may shed some special light on the subject, and vice versa.

Zealotry—fanaticism, extremism, ideological passion so intense as to lead at times to violent acts—has a bad name in our day and, in many cases, rightfully so. But allow me to be the Devil’s advocate, in an attempt to understand before condemning: the zealot is, first of all, an extreme individualist, one who refuses to accept conventional norms and conventional judgments of situations he encounters, who does not easily conform to bourgeois norms of “polite” attitudes and behavior. He sees life—or thinks he sees, and there at times is the rub—with great clarity, in stark contrasts of black and white rather than in shades of grey. Thus, he may find, as Pinhas did, a dire threat to the moral foundations of society, and be moved to action, in a situation to which everyone else responds with passivity. In the case described here, he saw the combination of sexual debauchery and pagan worship, left unchecked, as threatening to undermine the hard-won fruits of the Exodus from Egypt—all this, while Moses and Aaron stood aside in helplessness and paralysis of the will. The zealot is guided by his own conscience; he may think of himself as a “minority of one” (à la I. F. Stone); he sees the error of conventionally-accepted truths and, at the risk of being considered odd, eccentric, or worse—being burned at the stake for his opinions—he teaches his own truth. One could argue that such heroes of Renaissance science as Copernicus and Galileo were zealots in the pursuit of truth. Moses, when he smote the Egyptian and then had to flee for his life, was a zealot. The Patriarch Abraham, the first iconoclast, was also a zealot, as was Elijah, who is celebrated in this week’s seldom-read haftarah.

The zealot is thus, first and foremost, an individual who has the inner power to somehow neutralize the influence of conventional thinking, to ignore the little voice inside each one of us which asks, “What will the neighbors think?” He knows that there is right and wrong, that one must struggle for the right and “Damn the consequences!” (Gershom Scholem, in a short essay entitled “Three Types of Jewish Piety,” describes an extreme type who is not necessarily “political” or activist in the usual sense: the hasid, as “an exceptional type of man… the radical Jew who, in trying to follow the spiritual call, goes to extremes.” )

In a sense, one of the fundamental mitzvot of the Torah—Kiddush Hashem, “to sanctify the Holy Name”—is nothing other but a call, under certain circumstances, to fanaticism. After all, who but a fanatic willingly lays down his own life for an abstract principle, to refrain from performing an act (bowing down to an idol, kissing the Cross) which, inside oneself, one knows to be meaningless and that one’s compliance is forced by sheer power. And yet, the Jew is called upon to die for Kiddush Hashem when need be, and our martyrs are celebrated among the greatest heroes of our faith.

The problem, of course, is that zealotry may be seriously misguided—and even when not, may obscure the subtleties of c0ompelx moral judgments. Or, for that matter, zealotry may be just plain crazy. There are those people who hear voices telling them to do strange bizarre things. I once met one: in the midst of a meeting with Shlomo Carlebach after a concert, in his hotel room in the wee hours of the morning, a very beautiful, very pregnant young woman suddenly burst into the room, followed by a young man. Shouting, confusion, tears: only after Shlomo calmed them down somewhat and they left the room did he explain the situation: the young man, whose name happened to be Abraham, was convinced that, like his Biblical namesake, he had been commanded by God to sacrifice his firstborn son—that is, to violently abort the unborn infant in his wife’s womb. He was, of course, literally crazy: he had escaped from a mental institution and in due time the proverbial “men in the white coats” came to take him back. Nevertheless: who can prove that that which made Abraham a “knight of faith” made him plain cuckoo?

What is “the King’s Torah”?

A number of readers have asked me to comment about the recent hullabaloo in Israel concerning the book Torat ha-Melekh. First, a few basic facts, for those unfamiliar with the story: about a year ago two rabbis from the West Bank settlement Yizhar, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, published a book entitled Torat ha-Melekh, in which they discuss, on the basis of various Talmudic, midrashic and later halakhic sources, the question: Under what circumstances may one kill a non-Jew? More particularly: may one kill an innocent civilians, non-combatants, in time of war, and under what circumstances? What about women and children? The book (which I must confess I have not personally read, or even seen) evidently cites a broad range of situations in which such behavior are permissible. (The sub-text of the discussion is of course the behavior of the Israeli army during the December 2008 Gaza campaign known as “Operation Oferet Yetzukah” and its aftermath in which accusations were leveled against Israel of having violated international law and basic principles of morality, the report of the Goldstone Commission, etc.; and, perhaps more important, an attempt to justify sporadic violence between West Bank settlers and local Arabs, including violence against Arabs trying to harvest their olive orchards, torching of mosques, etc..) Calls were issued to investigate the book to determine whether its authors had violated the laws against racist incitement to violence. A few weeks ago two prominent rabbis, Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef (son of Rav Obadiah Yosef and known posek in his own right), who gave haskamot (a kind of “imprimatur”) to the book, were briefly detained by the police for questioning. In a controversy that generated more heat than light, the “Left” accused, not only its authors, but the two rabbis, of “racism”; the other side, in turn, held a demonstration against the High Court, using such slogans as “The Torah is above the Law.”

As I see it, the central issue is: Does Jewish law draw a distinction between the value of the life of a Jew and that of a non-Jew? And, if so, what does this mean, and what practical implications are to be drawn from this, if any? I will discuss these issues, including texts and translations, in the second half of this article.

First, some general, introductory remarks: Is there only one, cut-and-dry halakhah on these (and other) questions? As I understand it, the halakhah is—and always has been— a dynamic, dialectical system. Among other things, there has always been a tension between codification, pesak, giving one single answer to any given question, and a more open-ended, dialectical approach (this was one of the reasons why Rambam’s great code, the Mishneh Torah, was criticized when he first wrote it). More generally, one of the issues that emerges in this and similar controversies is the conflict between a literalist, fundamentalist approach to halakhah, and one which takes into account historical development and change—but more on that another time.

Thus, for example, R. Menahem Hameiri, the great halakhic anthologist of 14th century France, author of the encyclopedic Beit ha-Behirah on the Talmud, whenever interpreting a passage portraying Gentiles or idolaters in negative terms, took pain to emphasize that this only applies to the Gentiles who lived in those days, but that the non-Jews of his own day, who accept civilized norms of ethics and behavior, are to be treated differently; moreover, even if not so, darkei shalom, the maintenance of peaceable relations with the outside world requires this. And, I would add: if thus regarding Medieval Christians, who believed e.g. in the Trinity, all the more so the Muslims, whom everyone would agree are pure monotheists (whatever other deeply–rooted differences, partly religiously-inspired, we may have with them).

The main point: as many religious Zionist thinkers have observed, perhaps the most important halakhic challenge faced by the Jewish people today is that all those areas deriving from the reality of a sovereign Jewish state—legislation, the nature of the courts, economic planning on a state level, international relations and diplomacy and how that impacts on decisions made, army, warfare—are only minimally -developed in the traditional halakhic sources. There are many areas of halakhah which have been actively observed by Jews throughout generations, such that the halakhic literature of the rishonim and aharonim are filled with substantial discussion, textual analysis, responsa relating to various practical questions which may serve as precedents—but these relate primarily to the areas of personal observance (issur va-heter), family life, civil law (contract law, damages, partnerships, etc.), or questions relating to the synagogue and the round of the week and the year. By contrast, those areas related to the life of society as a whole (which would include the questions treated by Torat ha-Melekh) are not highly developed, for the simple reason that, already in the earliest formative period of the Rabbinic tradition, Jews did not have political sovereignty. Hillel and Shammai lived during the reign of Herod, when Judaea was de facto a satellite or protectorate of Rome—and the situation only get worse after his death. Thus, discussions about courts administering the death penalty or engaging in warfare were largely theoretical, made without real responsibility for their consequences.
Maimonides — motivated partly by messianic considerations, partly by a deep-seated belief in the integrity of the Torah as an entirety, including those laws not operative in his historical age — was the only major authority to include these subjects in his great halakhic work, Yad ha-Hazakah or Mishneh Torah. Thus, he includes detailed laws of the Temple, of purity and impurity, of agricultural laws applicable only in the Land, and, most germane to our subject, “Laws of the Sanhedrin,” and “Laws of Kings and Their Wars” (Hilkhot Melakhim u-mikhamoteihem).

Some religious Zionist thinkers have addressed these issues, explicitly stating that the creation of a Jewish state would require a major intellectual revolution in halakhah. Thus, Rav Chaim Hirschensohn, who lived in the United States during the first half of twentieth century, wrote a multi-volume halakhic treatise entitled Malki ba-Kodesh, in which he addresses a wife gamut of issues that would be raised by the creation of a Jewish state. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, both as Chief Rabbi of the IDF and of the State, addressed many issues, particularly those relating to Army and warfare in a Jewish state. Rav Yehudah Gershuni also wrote on some of the larger “meta-issues” relating to state and halakhah. Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a thinker who was not himself a halakhist, wrote passionately of this need—and no doubt there are many others who could be mentioned. But in recent decades many of those writing about these issues have tended to be highly ideological and rather narrow in their purview.

Finally, before turning to the substance of the issue itself, a brief comment about Rav Lior’s arrest: there was something a bit odd about investigating him simply because of giving a haskamah to the book; such letters of commendation do not necessarily imply that the rabbi writing it approves of its contents, or has even perused them thoroughly, but simply that he knows its author to be an observant and a learned Jew. But on another level, what is happening now is too little too late. At the time of Rabin’s assassination, nearly sixteen years ago, there was some much talk about various rabbis having encouraged the assassin, Yigal Amir, and providing him with halakhic–ideological justification for his act—one of the most traumatic and divisive events in the history of the State— by stating that Rabin was a rodef, one who endangered the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Rav Lior’s name featured prominently among those rabbis whom Amir consulted—but nothing was ever done about it. There was too much pressure from religious circles who regarded rabbis as somehow above interrogation by the police, even if their (at time, highly influential) actions may well have been tantamount to “incitement “ to criminal acts. In my opinion, even if a person who is clothed in garments of Torah fosters rebellion against the duly elected leaders of the sovereign state of the Jewish people, he must be treated as such, despite his rabbinic office. In the same way as the President has been tried and convicted for rape, and a host of ministers and Knesset members have been tried and sat in prison for various white collar offenses, so too a rabbi is not above the law. In that respect, perhaps his arrest, if only for a brief interrogation, was good thing.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Balak (Individual & Community)

2011-07-22T02:29:00.000-07:00

“A People That Dwells Apart”: Thoughts About Inclusion and Exclusion

This week’s portion, uniquely, portrays the Israelite/Jewish people from outside, through the eyes of Bil’am, the Midianite seer hired by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the menacing newcomers to the region; instead, he ends up blessing them. The very first phrase in the first of his three blessings emphasizes Israel’s apartness: “I see them from the top of mountain crags, and from hills I behold them; they are a people who dwell alone, and are not reckoned among the nations” (Num 23:9). The later blessings likewise describe the distinctiveness of Israel, culminating in the blessing, after Bil’am completely abandons his magical techniques, when he sees Israel “dwelling by its tribes” (24:2) and, in a Divinely inspired vision, says: “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” (24:5). And indeed, the apartness of the Jewish people in relation to other nations is a frequent leitmotif in the midrash, one both borne out by historical experience and reinforced by Jewish self-perception. It is a truism to note that the Jewish people has had a very painful history, leading to suspicion of the Other, at times verging on paranoia (but, as the old joke has it, “Even a paranoiac can have real enemies”).

Somewhat over a month ago, following Parshat Bamidbar, my friend Rabbi David Greenstein, addressed me with a comment cum question about Rashi on Lev 24:10. That verse, as will be remembered, describes the nokev hashem—the person who, in the heat of argument with his fellow, blasphemed God’s name; Moses, after inquiring of God what to do, sentences him to the death penalty. Interestingly, this man is described as the son of an Egyptian man and an Israelite woman, Shlomit bat Divri. (A well-known passage in Midrash Tanhuma says that his Egyptian taskmaster–father raped his mother while her husband was working in the field by pretending to be the latter; later, when the cuckolded man realized what had happened, he was beat harshly by the Egyptian and Moses, who saw what was happening, smote him and killed him, as related in Exod 2:11-12.) Rashi on our verse quotes a midrash (Torat Kohanim 14.1; Tanhuma 23) that cites, among other reasons for him cursing God’s name, that he was denied a place to encamp among the tribes because he did not have a Jewish father, the camps being assigned on the patrilineal principle—איש על דגלו באותות לבית אבותם (“each man by his banner and sign by their fathers’ houses”: Num 2:2).

In light of all this, David asked a simple question: Where ought he to have gone? Or was he simply excluded from inheriting among the people (also in the later division of the Land)?

… If he should not have camped with Dan [his matrilineal tribe], where exactly should he properly have camped? It seems he needed to be, literally, mi-hutz la-mahaneh, “outside of the camp.” We have reference to this domain regarding lepers and other issues of ritual impurity, but I have never seen any discussion of exactly how “outside-of-the-camp” related—geographically or otherwise—to the camp itself. (The blasphemer story is particularly sad given that Dan is supposed to be the me'assef le-kol ha-mahanot, “he who gathered up all the camps”—which, I want to assume, would also include picking up any stragglers who had to be outside the camp for reasons of purity).

A follow-up on this question - the midrash would have it that the blasphemer could not encamp in the tribal area. Yet, once Israel enters the Promised Land and the tribal lands are allotted, there is no prohibition against a stranger (ger toshav) living in those allotted areas. Why the apparent difference here? …

We are inclined to see the mahaneh as an idealized paradigm of our community. But it seems that the paradigm does not cover all possible members of the community… . This question has been staring me (us) in the face for millennia, but we have been blind to it. Furthermore, I myself, who only came to ask the question a couple of years ago, realize that I was only awakened to the issue because it involved the son of a Jewish mother, perhaps because this was someone who, by today’s standards, would be considered by most to be a full Jew. But the question has existed with regard to others as well (the leper, etc.) ... Yet I was blind to the question until recently. Partly this can be attributed to the hypnotic attraction exerted by the “perfect image” of the Israelite community, as delineated by the Torah. (This “perfect image” is also the message of Bilaam’s Mah tovu ohalekha Ya`aqov...") Such an image tends to put blinders on our eyes so that we do not even look mi-hutz la-mahaneh.

It seems to me that how one responds to this newly heard/seen challenge of the “other” is a major moral challenge for us today. The Orthodox community has expressed a narrow range of responses that all try to preserve the “perfect image” as much as possible, even at the risk of defiling that very image (see, e.g., the ban on conversion among Syrian Jews [and in Brazil, etc.-YC]). The non-Orthodox world is all over the place on this issue. Once some concession has been made to any new claims for inclusion, no one (myself included) has been able to establish solid footing for their position vis-a-vis the rest.

I know of no answer to this question, on the textual level, in any of the obvious places—the major Bible commentators and midrashic collections. But far more important is what David says in his final paragraph—i.e., reading this case as a metaphor for the issue of exclusion or inclusion today, how we deal with the “Other” in contemporary Jewish life. To what extent are we willing to include the “Other” in our community? (Emanuel Levinas makes the attitude to the Other the linchpin of his philosophy of Judaism.) How high or low, how flexible or rigid, are the boundaries of community, and what ought they to be?

The issue takes different forms in Israel and in the Diaspora. In today’s Diasporas, certainly in those places where Jews enjoy the benefits of a free, open, democratic, and liberal society, there is widespread assimilation and intermarriage, which many strategists of Jewish public policy see as a grave threat to Jewish survival, “killing us with love,” so to speak. One response, that of strict Orthodoxy, is to build high albeit invisible walls around the community, to raise children to view the broader society in an instrumental manner, as a place where one can earn a living, but to live one’s “real” life—family, cultural, spiritual, and intellectual life—within the Jewish community. There is room for “outsiders” or “newcomers”— ba’alei teshuvah and gerei tzedek—but only insofar as they fully accept the rules of strict mitzvah observance, so that they or their children eventually become insiders. This solution has met with no small success, demographically and in attracting a certain number of serious religious seekers.

But as soon as one turns away from strict Orthodoxy (and even within more liberal sectors of Orthodoxy) there are no simple answers. How ought one relate to the non-Jewish world? The mainstream of American Jewry, including the Rabbinic leadership of the non-Orthodox movements (even those who, e.g., do not personally perform intermarriages), has reached a certain modus vivendi with intermarriage, based on the down-to-earth sense that it is a concrete reality one must accept, that one cannot tilt at windmills forever, and must make the best of it. And indeed, there are intermarried families in which the Jewish element is predominant and the non-Jewish partner supports his/her spouse in giving the children a Jewish upbringing (I have seen this among people I know personally, and find it to be genuine, not just lip service). One possible attitude of committed Jews might be acceptance on the human level, while preserving a theoretical, ideological opposition to intermarriage as a phenomenon. (Incidentally, I find myself adopting a similar attitude towards homosexuality: as I have written here, I accept the halakhic proscription against homosexual acts, while accepting individual homosexuals as friends, enjoying their company, appreciating their positive human traits, inviting them to my home for Shabbat, etc. Is this a contradiction? Perhaps. But if so, such contradiction is part of being human.)

A few nights ago, I had an interesting conversation with an old friend whom I met at a wedding. He suggested that Judaism in America is in a position similar to that it held during the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE in the Greco-Roman world, when the pagan gods were “dying” and there was intense cultural and spiritual ferment, with many people looking for meaning in life. Judaism served as one option—hence, there was a certain movement towards either conversion to Judaism or at least the adoption of its belief in the One God by those known as yirei Ha-Shem. Nascent Christianity and some of the Gnostic mystery religions were other options in this cultural “stew.”

Our world today is equally confused and confusing, if not more so. On the one hand: atheism, secularism, “post-modernism” with its almost free-for-all approach to ethical and behavioral norms, signal the breakdown of the old norms of Western culture. On the other hand, the growth of “New Age” eclectic spirituality, the interest in Far Eastern religions, the revival of emotionally intense form of Christianity—Evangelism, Pentecostalism, even Roman Catholicism—suggest a spiritual hunger, in which Judaism may prove attractive to some. As my friend put it: “If Judaism ‘markets’ itself correctly, it may serve as a real option for many people.”

In Israel, these problems assume a different form. As a Jewish state, with an established Rabbinate, the issue of conversion to Judaism and the monopoly of a very conservative Chief Rabbinate is a painful and divisive one. On the other hand, in many ways it is a very open, cosmopolitan society, perhaps like that envisioned by Herzl in his Altneuland. In the major cities of Israel, one can see people from all over the world, and the issue of then limits of how accepting we are to be towards, e.g., foreign workers or refugees from beleaguered neighboring countries is a controversial one. Alongside the liberal pull, there are strong inward–turning impulses, reinforced by the ongoing sense of threat from the Arab world and the unresolved Palestinian issue, as well as by the often unfair condemnation of Israel by the “liberal” world.

But the issue of “inclusion vs. exclusion” is not only a Jewish problem, but one of the issues in human community generally. It is almost a law of community that, if one includes some, one must if necessity exclude others. Those with the greatness of soul to accept all fellow humans are few and far between. There is a tendency within small, tight-knit communities, both in small towns and ingrown religious communities, to develop certain negative attitudes towards “the Other.” This is also true of intentional communities, which in accepting certain individuals as members reject others. Thus, alongside the positive values of community—its function as a system of mutual help and support among its members, the sense of responsibility it inculcates, the overcoming of alienation, working together towards a common goal and shared values, its taking the individual outside of preoccupation with his own self—there are very real dangers involved as well. There is a tendency towards gossip, pressures for conformity, for people to become overly obsessed with the smallest quirks of others, at times a quashing of all expression of individuality. Here in Israel, for example, many of those who left kibbutzim over the years complained of the lack of privacy, the sense of intrusion of the collective into the smallest, most petty details of individual life. In ideological movements, community may express itself in the form of “group-think,” of collective thinking, and of censuring or marginalizing those that think differently—again, this may be true of revolutionary Marxists, dogmatic feminists, hyper-nationalist Zionists, ultra–Orthodox Jews, and many other kinds of group.

Perhaps I ought to conclude with a personal experience. In my early 20s, I applied for membership in a certain new, intentional community which was doing exciting things Jewishly. I was subjected to a series of lengthy interviews with members of the entrance committees, in which I was asked a series of rather bizarre questions about how I would respond in certain hypothetical situations. As I think about it even now, more than forty years later, I remember keenly the feelings of anxiety, anguish and pain elicited by the whole procedure.

I’m not sure what lesson to draw from all this, except to say that my immediate feeling is more towards inclusion and acceptance of the “Other,” rather than rigid ideological positions which reject others. My hope is that, if children are raised from an early age with an acceptance of the diversity and difference of our human species, they will end up as more generous and loving adults.

Hukat (Individual & Community)

2011-07-01T02:53:00.000-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to this blog for June 2006, June 2007, 2008, June 5 2009, and June 2010.

A Brief History of Moses’ Staff

In this parashah we jump over a 38-year period, towards the concluding year of the period of wandering in the desert, to the wars with the kings of Transjordan, the deaths of Miriam and Aaron, fragments of ancient poetry, etc. Among the incidents related here is the well-known story of how Moses was denied his greatest wish—to enter the Land of Israel together with the people whom he had led for more than forty years—due to a seemingly minor infraction of God’s command. Asked to take water out of a certain stone for the thirsty people by speaking to it, he instead hit it with his staff. Why was he punished so severely for this act?

In order to understand this incident, I suggest undertaking a brief survey of the history of the central “actor” in this story: Moses’ staff. What was it, where did it come from, what was it used for, and what did it signify?

We first encounter the staff in the famous scene of the bush that was “burning but not consumed” (Exod 3:2). In wake of this extraordinary sight, Moses encounters God for the first time, speaks with Him, is told God’s name Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (“I am that I am” or “I shall be that which I shall be”), and is charged with his life mission—to take the people of Israel out of Egypt and to lead them to the promised land. At a certain point in the dialogue, after a number of other problems and objections, Moses asks God, “And if they will not believe me and not listen to my voice” (4:1)—what then? God’s answer is roundabout and indirect:

And the Lord said to him: What is that in your hand? And he said: A staff. And He said: Throw it down on the ground. And he threw it to the ground, and it became a snake, and Moses shied away from it. And God said to Moses: Put out your hand and grab its tail; and he put out his hand and took hold of it, and it became a staff in his hand (Exod 4:2–3).

Following this scene, Moses begins the journey back to Egypt, taking his family with him: “And Moses took his wife and his sons and put them on the donkey, to return to the land of Egypt; and Moses took the staff of God in his hand” (ibid., v. 20). An interesting detail: the verse informs us that, in addition to the members of his family and the donkey (a necessary means of transportation), Moses took with him his staff, referred to here as “the staff of God” (mateh ha-Elohim). Until this point, Moses’ staff had been an ordinary shepherd’s staff used to herd the flock, which no doubt doubled as a walking stick of the type much used by inhabitants of the wilderness in walking over rocky and mountainous terrain. Suddenly it becomes the “staff of God”—an object of Divine significance, intended to help Moses and Aaron perform wonders and miracles and thereby prove to Pharaoh that they were truly sent by the Lord, God of Israel.

And indeed, further on Aaron used the staff in the course of an argument between Moses and the magicians of Egypt:

Say to Aaron: Take your staff, and thrust it down before Pharaoh, it shall become a serpent. And Moses and Aaron… did as the Lord commanded, and Aaron thrust his staff before Pharaoh, and it became a serpent. (Exod 7: 8–10)

Pharaoh’s court magicians succeeded in performing the same act with their secret arts (7:11–13), but the staff/serpent of Aaron swallowed their staffs/serpents—a sign anticipating of the eventual victory of Moses and the Israelites over Egypt and its gods. Note that from this point onwards the miracles involving the staff were performed specifically by Aaron and not by Moses; it becomes “Aaron’s staff.”

Immediately thereafter, there begins a series of ten plagues. These are divided into three sets of three plagues each, each one of which follows a similar pattern; only the tenth plague, the death of the first-born, is unique, outside of the three-times–three framework. In the first set of three plagues, the staff plays a central role:

Blood:

Go to Pharaoh in the morning… by the shore of the Nile. And take the staff which was turned into a snake, and say to him: The Lord God of the Hebrews has sent me, saying: Let my people go! … By this you shall know that I am the Lord: Behold, I shall smite with the staff that is in my hand upon the water which is in the Nile, and it shall be turned to blood… And the Lord said to Moses: Say to Aaron: Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over its rivers and canals and lakes, and over every gathering of water, and it shall be blood…. (Exod 7: 15–17, 19–20)

Frogs:

Speak to Aaron, stretch out your hand with your staff over the rivers and canals and lakes, and bring up frogs over the land of Egypt. And Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt, and the frog came up and covered the land of Egypt. (8:1–2)

Gnats:

And the Lord said to Moses: Speak to Aaron: Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth, and there shall be gnats throughout the land of Egypt. And they did so… and the dust of the earth became gnats in all the land of Egypt. (8:12–13)

From the fourth plague on, there are a number of significant changes: (1) The plagues only affect those places where the Egyptians live, but not the Israelites (“And on that day I shall separate the land of Goshen… and I shall make a division between My people and your people”—8: 18–19); (2) The court magicians are no longer able, with their arcane arts, to duplicate the plagues which God brings upon the Egyptians (this process already began with the third plague); indeed, they barely attempt to do so. (3) The Torah emphasizes that the purpose of the plagues is to make God’s greatness and exclusive sovereignty known both to the Egyptians and to the Israelites, (“that you may know that I am the Lord in the midst of the land”—8: 18; “so that you may know that there is none like Me throughout the land... that you may tell My name throughout the land”—9:14–15; “you shall know that I am the Lord”—10:2; and similar verses). (4) Regarding our subject: after the third plague, the use of the staff ceases.

The unavoidable conclusion, in my opinion, is that the staff was seen as a quasi-magical tool whose purpose was to prove the ability of Moses and Aaron to hold their own—and more—against the Egyptian magicians. Once this goal had been achieved, the use of the staff becomes superfluous. The more important and authentic message of the Torah is that of the dominion of the One God over the entire world, who at His will makes miracles and wonders on behalf of His people, without any need for magical practices—as if He is subject to manipulation by secret arts known only to the few. This may also explain why the staff, which was originally Moses’, became the staff of Aaron: because the (highly limited) use of such implements is a priestly function, and as such appropriate to Aaron, and is alien to the prophetic realm of Moses.

There is one exception to this rule, one in which the staff is used specifically by Moses. At the time of the splitting of the Reed Sea, Moses lifts up his hand while holding the staff, in order to split the waters: so to speak, a last and final victory over the Egyptians and their magic:

Lift up your staff, and stretch your hand over the sea and split it, and the children of Israel shall pass through the sea on the dry land… (Exod 14:16, 26–27)

Interestingly, he does not use the staff to return the waters over the Egyptians, but merely stretches his hands over the waters (vv. 26-27).

With this background, we now turn to this week’s reading. Throughout the murmurings of the people in the wilderness—the incident of the quail, that of the Spies, the rebellion of Korah—no mention is made of the staff. Here it appears for the last time. God again commands Moses to use the staff, but only in order to gather the people together. Instead, Moses expresses doubt in his own ability—and in that of God—to take water out of the rock and, rather than speaking to the rock, hits it with his staff. I bring the text in full:

And the entire congregation of Israel came to the wilderness of Zin, in the first month, and the people dwelt in Kadesh. And Miriam died there and she was buried there, and there was no water for the congregation, and they gathered against Moses. And the people quarreled with Moses, and said: Would that we would have died when our brethren died before the Lord. Why have you brought the congregation of the Lord into this wilderness to die here, we and our cattle. And why have you taken us up out Egypt to bring us to this bad place: a place without seed, neither figs nor vines nor pomegranates, and there is no water to drink. And Moses and Aaron turned away from the people to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting and fell upon their faces, and the Glory of the Lord appeared to them.

And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Take the staff and gather the people, you and Aaron your brother, and speak to the rock before their eyes, and it will give its waters. And you shall take water out of the rock, and water the people and their cattle. And Moses took the staff before the Lord as he was commanded, and Moses and Aaron gathered the people together opposite the rock. And he said to them: Listen, you rebellious ones, shall we take water for you out of this rock. And Moses lifted up his hand, and struck the rock twice with his staff, and much water came out, and he gave to the congregation to drink, and to their cattle.

And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron: Because you have not trusted in Me to sanctify Me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this congregation to the land which I have given them. These are the waters of Merivah (“Dispute”) where the children of Israel disputed with the Lord, and He was sanctified therein. (Numbers 20:1–12)

I would suggest here that Moses’ sin was not simply “lack of faith,” as stated by many traditional commentators, but that he used an implement which belonged to the world of magic—a tool which had been used in Egypt in order to speak to the magicians “in their own language,” a language close to that of the world of paganism and idolatry. Here, in the wilderness, it was neither appropriate nor needed. He should have “sanctified Me”—that is, project a message of faith in the God who rules over the entire world as He wills, without need of magical implements or gimmicks.

Interestingly, in this Torah portion we also encounter another implement which many understood as a magical tool: the serpent of bronze made by Moses in order to cure the people who had been bitten by real snakes (Num 21: 4–9). Hazal already noticed the problematic nature of this story, and took care to clarify: “And does the [bronze] serpent give death or bring to life? Rather, when Israel looked upwards and submitted their hearts to their Father in Heaven, they were healed; and if not, they [their wounds] putrefied” (Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3.8). But in the end, more than half a millennium later, towards the end of the age of the Israelite monarchy, the same bronze serpent became an object of worship in the folk religion, close to paganism. It was called Nehushtan and was even offered incense until King Hezekiah, the great religious reformer, came along and broke it into pieces (2 Kings 18:4).

Concluding Note: The above exposition was not written specifically for this series of Hitzei Yehonatan but, as noted above, for Shabbat Shalom. One may nevertheless well ask the question: how does all this relate to issues of individual and community? Very briefly: Magic, such as that practiced by the hartumei mitzrayim, is closely related to paganism in promulgating the idea that God, or the cosmos, can be manipulated by use of the right words, gestures, materials, etc. But it also serves as an esoteric rather than an exoteric teaching: it is based on secrets belonging to a small, select elite, impenetrable to others, thereby creating a mystique around their bearers serving as a pretext for special power and privileges. There have been and are such tendencies in Judaism—perhaps the ancient priesthood, and certainly practical Kabbalah, which is very much alive today—but the criteria for leadership in classical Rabbinic Judaism—learning and piety—are exoteric and, in principle, democratic and open to all. “Be careful of the children of the poor, for from them shall come forth Torah.”

Korah (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:29:00.002-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to this blog for May 25 2006, June 2007, 2008, 2009, and June 12 2010 (bottom)

Korah’s Rebellion

A general thought: all the stories about murmurings and rebellions in the desert—the quail, the spies, Korah—take place in a space and time that is, in a sense, “nowhere”: in the wilderness, a place beyond civilization and all of its artifacts and well-established social norms. Here, things are reduced to their essence: there are just the people, Moses, God, and the sky, rock and sand. There is a starkness to the desert , but also a purity and a strange kind of beauty felt nowhere else (I experienced this personally on those occasions when I spent my reserve duty in an outpost deep in the desert, with only a handful of other men).

What is the story of Korah about? At first blush (at least as traditionally seen through the lens of tradition, of midrash and aggadah), Korah is a power-hungry demagogue who uses fallacious, “populist” arguments to challenge Moses and, by extension, the Torah itself. But there is a problem: on the face of it, in a literal reading of the text, Korah may be seen as a positive figure, the champion of popular democracy: “For all the people are holy, and God is in their midst; why then do you lord it over the congregation of God” (Num 16:3). Indeed, a cogent argument: if human beings are made in the image of God, than all people are equally holy and, in a sense, all are deserving to be priests. And in fact, there are tendencies like this in world religion: this was in particular the great motivation behind Protestantism: to challenge the elaborate and often arbitrary hierarchy of the Catholic Church; to assert that all men can and should read Scripture and interpret it directly. In some of the more radical Reformation churches there were no priests or clergy of any sort; this is the social meaning of such things as speaking in tongues among the Pentecostals, or of “Thou”-ing and of everyone being allowed to stand up and speak at Quaker meetings. This was also, ultimately, the great idea behind America: the breaking down of the rigid class system practiced in England and elsewhere in Europe; the creation of a new, open society—as open as the vast spaces of the endless prairie and deep forests and high mountains (I know this sounds like a Fourth of July sermon: I think of the contrast to our own tiny country in the Middle East, enmeshed in an endless, bitter struggle over a few thousand square kilometers): that every man’s vote counts, and every man’s voice may be heard. And this radical democracy is perhaps now entering into a new level with the Internet, where anyone can say almost anything in a potentially global forum. But to return to Korah: Moses was the Divinely-appointed leader, a prophet who spoke in the name of God. Korah challenges him, asking, on the simplest, most vulgar level: “Say’s who?” The answer, on the level of peshat, is equally problematical: Moses invokes God’s power, performing supernatural miracles to buttress his legitimacy: Aaron’s incense is accepted, rather than that of the others; the unrepentant Korah and his followers are swallowed up by the earth; Aaron’s staff flowers with almond blossoms. But there is no answer on the level of polemic, no appeal to reason or to man’s innate moral sense.

There are several possible answers to this dilemma. First, that midrash supplies the answers missing in the text itself: Korah is portrayed there as scheming and duplicitous, offering arguments that, upon closer examination, prove to be fallacious and self-serving, motivated, not by genuine concern for the people and the alleged injustices perpetrated by Moses’ Torah, but by the desire to gain power for himself.

Second: a close reading of the text itself shows Korah as a demagogue. Moses’ answer to Korah in vv. 8–10 cuts through the façade of the idealistic leader concerned with the welfare of his people to get to the heart of the matter: “Is it a small thing that God has separated you from the congregation of Israel to bring you close to him so as to serve in the Sanctuary… that you also demand the priesthood?” In other words: behind his high-sounding words about democracy and equality are concealed petty, ego-centered ambitions and jealousy: he thinks that he rather that his cousin Aaron should have been appointed high priest—and that is where it starts and ends.

But there is a third possible answer, perhaps the simplest of all. By his reliance on Divine intervention Moses was saying something very important: if one simply and sincerely believes, or rather knows, that God is present with one, that is the most convincing argument or proof of all. If Moses was truly the humble man we are told he was, for example, in the section read two weeks ago—alongside the description of his extraordinary level of prophecy (Num 12: 6-8), we are told that he was “humbler than any other man on the face of the earth” (v. 3)—then he would not argue his own case, but rely upon God’s greatness to manifest itself, seeing himself as no more than a servant and “emissary” of God. The signs he wrought, his evident personal charisma, and even the shining of his face, were all proofs for the truth of his mission.

Let us return from this perspective to the issue of universal democracy and equality. We live in a cynical age: we find it difficult to believe in leaders who are truly selfless. There have been too many examples of prominent men—political leaders, religious figures, intellectual heroes, business leaders, not to mention “celebrities” from the worlds of sports and entertainment and media—who have been shown to have clay feet, and to do what they do for personal benefit: for money, for sexual favors, for fame and ego gratification. Hence it is difficult for many of us to believe in anyone being truly selfless: the model of the Tzaddik gamur, the wholly righteous person as presented e.g. in the opening chapters of Sefer ha-Tanya: a person who has not only subdued his “Evil Urge, but “burned it away” so that it does not exist at all (“my heart is empty within me”), the one who has achieved total bittul atzmi, self-abnegation, seems an unachievable, hypothetical dream. But even granting that, I have been privileged to know at least a few people who have been genuinely God-fearing, deeply erudite and learned, but also genuinely humble—albeit, being human, not perfectly so.

Apart from his own presumed hypocrisy, the problem with Korah’s supposed ideal of a radically egalitarian society, without any leaders or structure of rulership, is that anarchy does not work. Society needs leaders, and some people are more suited to this task than others. All we can hope for are that those who become leaders will be blessed, in addition to superior talents and intelligence, with a reasonable degree of honesty, integrity, and genuine dedication to the common welfare.

SHELAH LEKHA: Postscript

A few brief observations about Shelah lekha:

Numbers 13:33 is interesting: “There we saw the nefilim, children of the giants, from then Nefilim.” Strikingly, the Spies saw the Canaanites in a mythical context, as descendants of the Nefilim, the “sons of gods” described in Genesis 6: 2 and 4 as abducting whatever human women appealed to their fancy. These verses are connected with the legends of “fallen angels” found in the Apocrypha, in Midrash, and in Christian tradition. The point is that, upon seeing the local inhabitants as more powerful than themselves and thus frightening, they “upped the ante” by describing them in mythical terms.

My wife suggested a naturalistic explanation for this: perhaps the legend of the Nefilim have been based upon an exaggerated image of the peoples of East Africa (the Masai warrior nation of Kenya and the like) who are the fastest and tallest race in earth?

Secondly: this year I noticed more clearly than ever how many parallels there are between the incident of the Spies and that of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32–34. Certainly, these two incidents are considered the archetypal sins of the Jewish people in biblical history. First, there are the obvious parallels: the verses of Divine forgiveness and compassion in Numbers 14:17–20 parallel the Thirteen Qualities of Mercy in Exod 34:6–10; indeed, thy are presented as a truncated quotation. But also, here God threatens, in a way that he does not do in any other of the murmurings, to destroy the nation and make Moses and his descendants a chosen people instead: 14:11-12, is a close parallel to Exod 32:10. (Israeli Bible scholar Yair Zakovitch has written extensively about the phenomenon of “mirroring” in various biblical stories.) Finally, we find here many verses of forgiveness that are used liturgically on the Days of Awe, much like those from Ki Tisa: i.e, Num 14:19-20; 15:26.

Third, a somewhat irreverent, semi-humorous observation about the Haftarah. We read there (Joshua 2) about Rahav ha-Zonah, Rahab the Harlot, who provided hospitality to the spies and hid them from the king of Jericho. Has anyone noticed that her name, Rahav, means “broad” —a somewhat rude slang word for a woman, emphasizing what are politely called a woman’s secondary sexual characteristics— i.e., precisely those points that would be accentuated by a “lady of the night.”

More on San Francisco and Circumcision

In discussing the proposed ban on circumcision in that city last week, I said that the motivation was not anti-Semitic, but a new, super-liberal, individualistic ideology. But I was too sanguine: someone drew my attention to a comic book on the web related to this issue, “Foreskin Man,” which uses anti-Semitic stereotypes worthy of Streicher’s Der Stűrmer (readers may google it if they like). But who knows? I can imagine Jews in the US capable of producing such cartoons, and finding them humorous.

Secondly: as I mentioned, one of the arguments of the “Antis” is that circumcision reduces sexual pleasure. I ridiculed this, stating that every circumcised man I know would agree that sex is a highly plenty pleasurable activity even in our “mutilated” state. But in the name of intellectual honesty and accuracy, I must add that Rambam says the identical thing: in the chapters on ta’amei hamitzvot in Guide for the Perplexed, he writes that one of the reasons for circumcision is to reduce sexual pleasure and thereby (supposedly) reduce temptations to sins of arayot and “violent concupiscience.” But, unlike the SF advocates for its abolition, he uses this as an argument in favor of the practice; as a thinker whose ideal human type was the philosopher, who lives entirely in the realm of mind and spirit, Maimonides sought to reduce involvement in corporeality to an absolute minimum (see Guide III.49).

Interestingly, a prominent scholar of American Jewry wrote me that: a) he thinks the chance of the law passing is slim; b) that it is almost certainly unconstitutional; c) one good thing that may come out of it is that Jews and Muslims will make common cause around this issue.

The Antis argue that the proposed law is nevertheless constitutional because “babies have no religion.” Indeed, in our sources (Mishnah Kiddushin 1.7 and the Bavli there at 29a), brut milah is described as mitzvat ha-ben al ha-av—that is, “commandments pertaining to the son incumbent upon the father”—in this case, to introduce him into the Abrahamic covenant. The underlying assumption is that there is such a thing as organic, natural religious communities, and that it is normal, accepted, and expected that parents will initiate and raise their children in their own faith community. The argument of the “Antis” is based on a very different understanding of the nature of religion, rooted in their radically individualistic view of society: society is composed only of individuals, without such a thing as community, and that religion is a purely private matter of personal, inner choice—a definition that may fit some, but by no means all, schools within Christianity, but certainly not Judaism.
,P>Again, the opposition to circumcision may be inspired in part by the analogy to female circumcision, described by the same word, practiced in many Arab and African countries, and the justifiable horror felt at that practice. The latter is a real mutilation, a kind of “castration,” if one may use that term, which prevents a woman from experiencing sexual pleasure. One should reiterate what ought to be self-evident—that circumcision is at least as safe as any other medical procedure, that the vast majority of mohalim are highly skilled people, take necessary hygienic and safety precautions, and that, if anything, it carries many health benefits. Naturally, like any such procedure it isn’t foolproof, and on occasion one hears of tragic incidents—but than, no human activity is foolproof. This might be an argument for licensing and supervision—which by the way, exists in Israel, I don’t know about the US—but not for its abolition,

Shelah Lekha (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:29:00.001-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to this blog for May 15 2006, June 2007 (bottom), and June 2008, 2009, and 2010 (bottom).

“We Have Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself”

While the Generation of the Desert never heard this bon mot of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, their experience clearly exemplified it. This week’s parashah exemplifies two diametrically opposed responses to fear. Moses sends twelve men—one from each tribe—to “spy out” the land of Canaan and bring back a report as to what it’s like. They report that it is a fruitful and verdant land, flowing with water, filled with all good things—milk and honey, and grape clusters so abundant that they require two men to carry them—but that it has strongly fortified cities inhabited by powerful people, “and we were like grasshoppers in their eyes, and so were we in our own eyes” (Num 13:33).

This report elicits two reactions: On the one hand: depression, anger, despair. “Why did you take us out of Egypt to die in this desert? We’ll never be able to conquer this land!” The people, immobilized by fear, sit in their tents and wept, and even contemplated returning to Egypt. Fear can paralyze people, and make them wallow in self–pity.

But there is another reaction, perhaps equally dangerous: fear can drive people to take rash, impetuous, foolhardy action. “To do or die—and damn the consequences.” One group within the people, referred to as the ma’apilim, said “Let us go up and conquer the mountain” (14:40-44) and, in an ill-considered attempt to storm the country by force, were pushed back, many of them killed, driving them into an even deeper funk. The ultimate result of these two types of fear and their loss of trust led to the punishment, that they were condemned to wander for forty years in the wilderness until a new generation emerged, until all those who had been slaves in Egypt would die, and a new generation, born in the clean air of the desert, would come of age and enter the Land.

The “Generation of the Desert”—Dor ha-Midbar—has often been invoked as a metaphor for Israeli life. According to the paradigm, the founding generation of Zionist settlement, born in the Galut, in the European Exile, who in their childhood and youth were raised with the sense of fear and submissiveness of the Exilic Jew, would begin the process of national rebirth, but the task of building a truly free nation, of forming the “New Jew,” would be the task of a new generation, born into freedom, unafraid of the Gentiles, strong and proud and masculine, would create the new, non-Galut mentality.

Tom Segev, in his book 1967, about the Six-Day War and how it shaped Israel in years to come, discusses the distinction between the “Jews”—the older, European-born generation who sat in the government, men like Levi Eshkol and Pinhas Sapir and Abba Even, who tended to be cautious and were constantly askinmg what the wyrld would say—and the “Tzabarim”—the native-born generation who ran the Army, men like Yitzhak Rabin and Yigael Allon and Moshe Dayan—who tended to be brash and more certain of their own ability to determine things.

But from where I sit today, in 2011, things don’t look so simple. The Jewish people suffers from deep traumas—most notably from the Holocaust, but also from two thousand years of persecution. Once you scratch the surface of Israel’s political culture, you find deep-seated fears playing a role alongside rational, pragmatic, realistic strategic thinking—even on the part of those purported to be clear-eyed strategic geniuses. Rather than integrating military might and the threat of force, as a last resort, with intelligent, proactive diplomacy and with building alliances in a difficult region and a difficult world, Israel seems to be withdrawing more and more into a fortress mentality. If “the Generation of the Desert” were at times guilty of excessive caution, the “Generation of the State” and their successors often seem more like the Ma’apilim—impetuous, filled with bravado, so-called diplomats insulting ambassadors from friendly nations so as to drive them into the arms of our enemies—and all this in the name of so-called “Jewish pride,” or excused with the mantra that “Anyway the world is against us”— as if that somehow vindicates our position. (Again, all this with the usual reservations that the Arabs are not easy adversaries, and have their own deeply rooted cultural neuroses and dogmas that are profound obstacles to peace)

The Circumcision Bruhaha in San Francisco

One of the proposals to appear on the ballot in the forthcoming municipal elections in San Francisco concerns the banning of all circumcision prior to the age of 18. Off the cuff, it seems to me that such a law, if passed, would be blatantly unconstitutional, as it prohibits a well-established religious practice. Of course, on the practical level, I imagine that young families wishing to make a brit milah for their newborn sons could do so easily enough by going across the bay, north to Marin county, or down the peninsula outside the city limits (much as Jews living in those European countries which ban shehitah import their meat across the border)-- but in principle the idea that such a measure could even be entertained anywhere in the United States, founded as a bastion of religious liberty, is very disturbing.

But while the effect of such a law would be anti-Judaic, it is not clear that it is motivated by anti-Semitism in any traditional sense. San Francisco is well-known for its so-called super-liberal culture. But in point of fact, this measure is anything but liberal. Essentially, it is imposing the values of a particular group on the entire population: in this case, the underlying value is the radical autonomy of the individual, including his supposed right not to have his body altered without his mature consent, including what has hitherto been considered parental prerogative. In addition, the anti-circumcisionists claim that the practice prevents a man from enjoying the maximal sexual pleasure of which he would otherwise be capable (funny: I’ve engaged in sexual relations most of my adult life, and I never noticed that I wasn’t enjoying it); the philosophical implication being that sexual pleasure is a right of the highest order. On the other hand, this measure would deny the right of another group (our own) to initiate its children in religious community, including a symbolic sealing in the flesh of belonging to that covenantal community. In short: they believe with almost totalitarian fanaticism in their particular set of values, and seem blind to the possibility that others may adhere to a world-view worthy of respect, if not agreement. Need I add that, in terms of our theme, we see here in starkest terms the hyper-individualism of current American “liberalism” vs. the traditional concept of community and the symbolic continuity among the generations, as dramatically symbolized in brit-milah.

Beha'alotkha (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:28:00.003-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to this blog for May 10 2006, June 2008, June 2009, and May 2010.

“Give Us Meat!”

As I observe almost every year around this time, in this section of Sefer Bamidbar the children of Israel, and human beings generally, are shown in their worst light. After the “high” of the Revelation at Sinai (whose commemorative holiday, Shavuot, always falls shortly before the reading of these sections), the people begin to murmur, complain, and even openly rebel against Moses and his leadership. These chapters are among the most significant ones in the Torah for the study of relations between the individual and the community: on the one hand, for the behavior of masses of men, providing case studies of how each individual often loses his own sense of judgment and even of ethics when caught up in a kind of mass hysteria; on the other hand, for the light shed on the behavior of individual leaders charged with leading the people—Moshe Rabbenu and his partners: Aaron, Joshua, the elders, et al.

The causes for the murmurings and complaints gradually grow over these three parshiyot, from trivial to weighty. Here, in Numbers 11, the complaint is one of simple boredom with the food. To paraphrase: We’re sick and tired of eating nothing but manna, day after day. They did not confront real hunger, or any other form of real need; their basic needs were all miraculously provided: nourishment, through the manna that fell every day (except Shabbat, for which special provision was made through the descent of a double portion on Friday); their clothing and shoes never wore out but were miraculously preserved in good condition; God protected them from serpents, scorpions, wild animals, marauders, and other dangers of desert life. The manna itself, according to one midrash, assumed a variety of flavors (and perhaps textures): it was even more versatile than tofu or textured soybean protein! And yet, perhaps because the people had nothing to do—they did no labor, they stayed mostly in one place, traveling only on occasion (42 encampments over a 40–year interval, the majority of these during the first and last year)—they had ample time to mull over the smallest details of their existence which weren’t to their liking. And what is more basic than food? In a verse pregnant with irony, they complain: we remember all the spicy and tasty foods we ate in Egypt “free” (Num 11:5)—forgetting the hardships and indignities and suffering and exhaustion of their servitude.

But there was more to it than that. This chapter vividly describes their primitive, almost primordial desire for meat, specifically. “The riffraff among them desired a desire” (התאוו תאוה; v. 4). There is a sheer physicality involved in the act of eating flesh which does not exist in the same way with other kinds of food (Ironically, quail is one of the leanest, smallest birds, perhaps one-quarter the size of the average chicken). Elsewhere, too, the Bible clearly expresses this perception of flesh as an object of ta’avah. In Deut 12:20-28, in describing the special arrangements to be made for slaughtering meat in non-cultic setting once the people are settled throughout the Land and it is too far to travel to the altar in Temple whenever they want to eat meat, the wording used is “for your soul desires/lusts to eat meat (כי תאוה נפשך לאכול בשר).” While there are many kinds of food that may be “mouth-watering” and which people greatly desire to eat—perhaps fresh-baked bread, or chocolate, or juicy summer fruits, or corn on the cob dripping with butter—there is a kind of lust for meat that is somehow different from this, more basic, even, if I may put it thus, closer to the savage and instinctive within mankind—arguably, second in intensity only to sexual desire. (In my yeshiva days, I remember some boys who would periodically travel to the nearest city just to eat “steak.”) As the other side of the coin, there is a perception, a stereotype of non-meat eaters as somehow more ethereal, more spiritual, almost ascetic, than others, having rejected what seems to many a fundamental need.

I do not want to engage too much in a diatribe on behalf of vegetarianism, particularly as I am myself a carnivore, but it is interesting, also, that the blessings recited over food in Jewish imply a very definite structure: animal products—meat, fish, eggs, cheese, milk, etc.—are simply Shehakol: “that everything was created at His word.” By contrast, there is great differentiation among foods derived from vegetation, suggesting that the ideal diet is centered around grain, fruits, and vegetables—very different from the (until recently) traditional American flesh-centered diet. If they wanted to, Hazal could have formulated a special blessing for eating flesh, perhaps based upon Gen 9:2-3, “who has given us all living things to eat.” That they did not do so says something.

Might there also be a gender differentiation here: in ancient times, men were the hunters and trappers, while women were the gardeners, tillers of the earth and keepers pf the fire, the first cooks and bakers. Note the male ritual around roasting meat at a barbeque. I found myself thinking about all this recently while seeing an ad on TV around Yom ha-Atzmaut (the meat-eater’s holiday par excellence!): the meat packer’s association was pushing the idea of buying meat using the most primitive Hebrew imaginable: “Adom adom basar basar tari tari (roughly translated as: “Very red, very meaty, very fresh”), followed by the statement, “To be Israeli means to love eating meat!” (!)

A niece of mine, an anthropologist whose expertise is Chinese culture, once explained to me the meaning of sexual abstinence in Buddhist and Hindu monasticism. Unlike Christianity, in which this is related to a sense of innate sin connected with sexuality, and in which a certain moral superiority is attached to virginity and chastity, in Far Eastern cultures the avoidance of carnality is a prerequisite for the more refined consciousness required for spirituality and meditation. And, most important: sexual chastity and avoidance of eating meat go hand-in-hand, as expressions of intense engagement in carnality (as suggested by the root meaning of the word: carnos=flesh)

A few words about leadership in this parashah. At one point, when besieged by the people’s complaints, Moses addresses God with words whose purport is: “What do you want from me! Am I this people’s nursemaid!“ (Num 11:11-12). In this passage, I see Moses as a rarefied spiritual or intellectual type who prefers to be elsewhere, prefers contemplating Gods sublime infinity, rather than deal with the petty, almost infantile demands of the mob.

This dovetails with what we discussed in our study for Shavuot: the gap between Moses, the teacher and leader, who is the unique individual on an unparalleled level of spirituality, who alone apprehended in full the true nature of the One God, and the vague, cloudy experience of the masses of the people. The distinction made by Rambam is germane: between “intellectives” (‘aql)—i.e., philosophical truths, such as those concerning the nature of God—and conventional and moral truths (numussiyya), needed for the common weal and the smooth functioning of human society. In Maimonides’ scheme of things, the former are clearly far superior and more sublime, while the latter at times seem little more than a “necessary evil.”

Needless to say, there are other viewpoints within Judaism, in which the pursuit of the just and righteous society, as an expression or imitation of God’s compassion and lovingkindness (“the second tablets”) is far more important, and takes precedence over individual experience, however sublime and elevated.

Shavuot (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:28:00.001-07:00

Two Conceptions of Sinai

For more teachings on Shavuot, see the archive to this blog for May 2006, May 2007, June 2008, June 2009, and May 2010.

Shavuot: the festival of Revelation, Ma’amad Har Sinai—that great day when the entire Jewish people stood “as one man, with one heart,” at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. This event is the central moment, the formative paradigm of Judaism. Midrashim and other accounts describing Sinai in terms of the entire people undergoing this transcendent experience are so numerous, so widespread, that one cannot even begin to cite them—and they are so familiar that there is need to do so. To quote just a few representative sources: “’And the people camped opposite the mountain’— with one heart and one mind” (Rashi on Exod 129:2); “And all the people answered together, ‘We shall do and we shall hear’” (Exod 19:8).
Moreover, Ma’amad Har Sinai was not only experienced by the entire people, but is seen as the paradigmatic, constitutive moment in the covenant of the entire people with God. Thus, one of the aggadot about Sinai focuses specifically upon Moses as representative of human beings in all their weakness. It is told that, when Moses ascended on high to receive the Torah, the angels challenged him with the words, “What business has one born of woman among us?” He answered that, precisely because human beings are mortal, and have bodily needs and human passions and emotions, they need the Torah, which is specifically directed towards the human condition (b. Shabbat 88b-89a; see HY VIII: Shavuot [=Rashi], for text, translation, and discussion).

R. Yehudah Halevi, in his Sefer ha-Kuzari—perhaps the classic work of Jewish apologetics of all time, in which he presents arguments and polemics for the truth of “a despised religion”—invokes the Sinai experience as proof of the truth of Torah. He argues that no other event in human history was authenticated by 600,000 eye witnesses (see, esp., Kuzari I.89-95).

There is an idea in Jewish mysticism (first articulated by the 11th–12th century Spanish philosopher Abraham bar Hiyya in his Megalleh Amukot) that the 600,000 Jews who left Egypt and stood at Sinai correspond to the 600,000 letters of the Torah, so that the soul of each Jew is somehow uniquely connected in its root to a particular letter in the Torah (this theory is only partly confuted by the fact that there are in fact only about 315,000 letters in the Torah).

The Talmud (b. Pesahim 68b), in discussing whether festive days ought to be devoted to study of Torah or to the pleasures of eating and drinking (concluding, rather sagely, that the best course is to divide it “half for God and for yourselves”), notes that “All agree that Shavuot, the day that Torah was given to Israel” must be a time of bodily rejoicing—paradoxically, perhaps, davka because of its spiritual nature.

Finally, to quote a contemporary theologian, Michael Fishbane:

Jewish theology begins at Sinai. This is its axial moment—the occasion when, according to scripture, the people of Israel are called to accept God’s world-historical dominion and live within the framework of godliness. … For Jewish theology, there is no passage to spiritual responsibility that does not in some way cross the wilderness of Sinai and stand before the mountain of instruction. Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 46

And yet, when we turn to the Rambam—generally considered the greatest single figure of medieval Jewry, equally renowned for his great halakhic code and for his philosophic work, The Guide for the Perplexed, regarded as the definitive statement of the Judaic–Aristotelian synthesis—we find a very different picture. In his account, the people, rather than experiencing the Revelation in its full power, are depicted receiving a rather vague, clouded sense of the Divine presence, the central role being played by Moses. In three separate places, in each of the major works of his ouevre—in Guide II.33; in Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah 7.6—8.2; and in his Introduction to Perek Helek (=Mishnah Commentary, Sanhedrin 10), 7th principle—Maimonides presents his understanding of what happened at Sinai, and of the role played therein by Moshe Rabbenu. I already discussed this in the first year of this series in an essay entitled “’And All the People Stood Against the Mountain’ vs. ‘The Prophecy of Moses our Teacher’” (HY I: Shavuot). Here I will recapitulate the central ideas, and discuss some of their implications.

The core of Maimonides’ approach is rooted in his general emphasis on the intellect as the gate to the Divine. He contends that Moses alone experienced the full force of the Divine revelation, clearly hearing the Ten Commandments; the rest of the people only heard “the voice” or “sound” (kol) of the first two commandments, and even that not as clearly articulated words. They only received a vague, indistinct sense of something overwhelming, uncanny, punctuated by awesome sounds and sights. In support of the view that the people did not have the spiritual fortitude to hear the Divine voice for more than a few moments, he quotes the verse in which they tell Moses: “You speak with God and we will listen, and let not God speak with us lest we die” (Exod 20:16). Indeed, the aggadah reinforces the idea that they only heard the first two commandments, inferring that 611 of the 613 commandments were conveyed through the intermediacy of Moses and not heard directly from God (Makkot 23b-24a).

Elsewhere, too, Rambam consistently refers to nevuato shel Moshe Rabbenu, “the prophecy of Moses our Teacher” as the source of the Torah; in various places, he enumerates those areas in which there was a qualitative difference between the prophecy of Moses and that of all the other prophets. Indeed, the reason why an epiphany before the entire people was necessary at all was to testify to the truth of Moses’ prophecy and, by extension, to the binding authority of the Torah: “Behold I come to you in the thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and that they may also believe in you forever” (Exod 19:9).

Maimonides was led to this view by his specific philosophical approach, which identifies the highest religious experience, that of prophecy, with a cognitive apprehension of the Active Intellect—and hence of necessity confined to a small elite, and even that, only after long and rigorous training.

This idea is articulated by Rambam in several other places in his work, and not only with regard to Moses. Thus, Abraham, as the paradigmatic founder of the faith, is depicted as discovering the truth of monotheism after a long process of deep thought and questioning (Hil. Avodat Kokhavim 1.3; see HY V: Lekh lekha). In similar light, he describes the candidate for prophecy as combining great wisdom, sterling moral qualities, an iron will and control of his impulses. If “such a person enters into Pardes and contemplates these profound and remote matters… withdrawing from the society of the majority of men,” it may happen that “the Holy Spirit will rest upon him” (Yesodei ha-Torah 7.1; see HY V: Vayigash & Shemot [=Rambam]). Similar motifs appear in his discussion of the individual who loves God without any ulterior motif (Hil. Teshuvah, Ch. 10). Thus, a process of profound thinking—i.e., philosophizing—is depicted as the source of religious truth.

I noted in the past that Maimonides was a mystic, albeit not a Kabbalist. But he was a mystic of a very special kind: one who strived for Amor dei intellectualis, that love of God that can only be reached through the intellect, after a long process of thorough–going clarification and rigorous scrutiny of ones theological concepts, so as to attain a clear understanding what one is talking about, to avoid believing that a figment or projection of ones imagination so God. Hence, we have his strict discussion of the meaning of unity, his insistence upon careful definition of terms, his negative doctrine of attributes—all these in order to avoid any similarity between God and beings in the “sub-lunar sphere.” Thus, anything that smacks of personality, emotion, etc. is anathema to him. (As against this, see in recent years the learned discussion of the diametrically opposed view in the Bible, and especially the important book by Yohanan Muffs, The Personhood of God.) Hence, it ought to be stressed at this point that Rambam’s insistence that knowledge of God must be intellectually and philosophically grounded is not mere elitism, in the negative sense, but an integral part of his world-view.

Having said all this: how are we to deal with Maimonides’ approach to revelation and, by extension, to religious experiences generally? What are we to do with human differences: in intellect, in mental capacity, and in temperament? If Moses alone experienced the great epiphany at Sinai, where does this leave for ordinary mortals, and what is left of Ma’mad Har Sinai being experienced by all of Israel? And what about mysticism? Can one reach God through an emotional or intuitive path? William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, seems to think so (although he of courser writes as a phenomenologist and a psychologist clarifying and classifying human experience, rather than as a theologian venturing to evaluate the ontological reality of what these people have experienced).

My own tendency is to view “knowledge of God” in broader terms, as not only intellectual or philosophical, but as including elements that are more emotional or intuitive in nature? I have in mind here Hasidism and Mitnaggedism as two different approaches within Judaism, as reflecting different temperaments—the one elitist, the other more democratic. At times, profound religious insights may be gained and taught by very simple people. I think, for example, of an approach almost diametrically opposed to that of Rambam—namely, that of R. Nahman of Braslav. In his story “The Wise man and the Simpleton” (Ma’aseh be-Hakham va Tam), the point is that a certain utter simplicity and naivety is not only called for, but even preferable, in the religious life.

Perhaps one might argue something as follows: God is so transcendent to all humans, that differences in intellect and rational understanding pale before His transcendence and utter unknowability. This is a lesson that some of us over-educated and overly cosmopolitan urban Jews need to heed. Indeed, at times, a person on the near-genius level, filled with erudition, may make a conscious choice for the life of emotion and of a kind of adhering to a few basic, simple truths. Such is my reading, for example, of the late Rav Shlomo Carlebach. On the other hand, there may be great minds in this world who are morally bankrupt and who, alongside their insightful and at times significant contributions to their own specific fields, may be utterly cynical and debased in their personal lives, using their superior mental powers and quickness of mind to exploit and manipulate others for their own selfish ends.

Perhaps we can resolve the conflict between the two ways by saying that the experience of God and of His Presence touches upon human faculties that go beyond both the emotional and the intellectual: the “spiritual,” what Halevi calls “the Divine matter” (inyan ha-elohi), which may be experienced in diverse ways. There are passages where Rambam himself seems to allude to such experiences.

One might suggest the following synthesis: Whether or not the people of Israel clearly heard the words Anokhi and lo yihyeh lekha (“I am the Lord…” and “you shall not have…”) does not really matter: the overwhelming experience of the numinous, of the divine presence, in and of itself, was the “Anokhi” experience; the source of the strongest, surest and most certain knowledge that “I am the Lord your God.” Likewise, the concomitant fear of God, verging on sheer terror and panic in the face of His overwhelming Presence, was, existentially, the source of “you shall have no other gods before me”: they felt the quintessential fear of Him that is the root of all the negative commandments, and first and foremost the prohibition of idolatry.

I would like to quote in this context an idea propounded by the Christian theologian Jacques Maritain. In one of his books, Maritain explains that the philosophical proofs of God’s existence—he speaks particularly of the epistemological and the argument from design—are not only for philosophers, but have their counterpart on another level for ordinary people. The same arguments established by philosophers with rigorous, closely reasoned, step-by-step argumentation, correspond to basic truths that may be intuitively grasped by ordinary people. The philosopher may demonstrate logically why every existing thing must have a prior cause, working back logically until he reaches the First Cause; the simple man looks up at the starry sky, or at the brooding beauty of a deep forest or of a stark desert landscape, and bursts into praise of the Creator: “How great are your works, O Lord!” The philosopher presents the epistemological argument: the fact that we can conceive of God at all proves at He must exist; the simple man feels faith in his heart, directly. And so on. The same holds true for Sinai. The people tangibly felt the Presence and Glory of God, giving birth to a kind of intuitive, inferential faith, which led to Anokhi, the acceptance of His sovereignty—and from there to the acceptance of all the mitzvot they were taught by Moses their teacher. With these words, I will conclude, and wish all a renewed sense of the awe and grandeur of that mysterious day at Sinai long ago. Hag Sameah!

Naso - Shabbat Kallah (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:27:00.002-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to this blog for May 5 2006, May 2007, June 2008 (scroll down), June 2009, and May 2010.

On Nazirites and Wanton Women

This week’s parashah is one of the longest, richest, and most varied in the Torah. I will touch here briefly upon two or three of the subjects which are most fully presented there. First, the law of the Nazirite (Numbers 6:1-21): on the face of it, this law is highly enigmatic. The Torah does not explain why a person might wish to become a Nazirite, or what purpose might be served by these particular rules, but simply jumps right into the laws governing this state—he is to refrain from drinking wine, or anything that comes from the grape; he is to avoid ritual contamination through contact with the dead; and, most strikingly, the visible symbol of his vow, he is to grow his hair long—and the procedure to be followed when it ends. But upon examining the etymology of the term nazir, or the Hebrew root nz”r from which it is derived, we find that it means to dedicate or consecrate oneself. Thus, the opening verse: איש כי יפליא לנדור נדר נזיר להזיר לה', means, quite simply, “When a person makes an extraordinary vow as a Nazirite, to consecrate himself to the Lord.” This same root appears, for example, in the word naizer, used to refer to the holy oil with which the High Priest is anointed in Lev 21:12 (the word also has the connotation of a crown, the symbol of a person beginning dedicated to a particular state). Thus, the Nazirite is an individual who seeks a more intense kind of religious life: who wishes to dedicate himself wholly to God. He is moved by an inner impulse towards a life of purity and holiness, over and above the norms required of everyone in the covenantal community. The restrictions he takes upon himself render him distinct from others, from the mainstream of society. In terms of our theme: the nazir as an individual does not live outside of the community, but is in some ways differentiated from it while living within it (albeit during the First Temple period there was a sect of Nazirites, known as the Rekhabites, who seem to have established their own separatist communities).

Although we do not have Nazirites today—the specific rules governing them seem so distant from our cultural milieu as to be virtually incomprehensible—the psychological-spiritual phenomenon as such is not unfamiliar. We live in an age of religious revival, and it is not uncommon to encounter individuals—most often younger people—who strive for a more intense religious life, to make the meticulous fulfillment of halakhah and the service of God the center of their lives. In Roman Catholicism, in Buddhism and in Hinduism, this impulse has traditionally been channeled into monasticism. In Judaism, these clear-cut rubrics do not exist—among other reasons, because we frown on celibacy and the abandoning of family life. What I have in mind is at times related to what has become known as the “ba’al teshuvah: movement, in the sense that it involves adopting greater religious observance than one’s environment, but it goes beyond that. It is marked by a singular intensity and enthusiasm, at times in ways that may seem strange and bizarre; a times it may involve joining pietist communities of various sorts—Hasidic circles, yeshivot, etc,—while for others it may involve an idiosyncratic, personal pietism within their regular life situation.

The feeling given by this parashah, and by the aggadot about the Nazir, is that they are viewed with a certain ambivalence: on the one hand, their single-minded devotion is praiseworthy; on the other hand, there is the counsel of Kohelet, “Do not be overly righteous… why should you be desolate?” (Eccles 7:16). The norm, one might even say the ideal, is found in life within community, not in either individual withdrawal from society, nor in ascetic communities. Interestingly, Israel Knohl and other scholars have argued that the earliest known monastic community, at least in the Western monotheistic tradition, from which early Christianity took a certain inspiration, was that of the Qumran Judaean Desert sect, which split away from Second Temple Judaism. Thus, Biblical Nazirites and medieval Christian monks may ultimately share more than just the Hebrew term nezirim.

The opposite extreme from this is found in the passage that immediately precedes the law of the Nazirite (Num 5:11-31): namely, licentious indulgence in carnal pleasure, the abandonment of all normative constraints on sexual behavior, and betrayal of the sanctity of the marriage bed for the embrace of an Other. This chapter describes the case of a woman suspected of adultery, the Sotah, and the “trial by ordeal “ she must undergo. I will “bracket” the very real issues presented by this chapter: namely, (1) the “double standard” implied in the woman’s adultery being considered far more grave than that of the man; and (2) that the practice of such an ordeal implies total faith, nay, certainty of Divine intervention (for which reason the Rabbis of the tannaitic age abolished this practice). For us, I would read this chapter, first and foremost, as reflecting the enormous importance attached to the marital bond, and the horror and abhorrence the Torah expresses towards the violation of its sanctity. We live in an age in which casual sex is widely accepted in many circles, and even acts of marital infidelity are regarded more as “misdemeanors” than as “crimes” or “sins”—and certainly are not regarded with the horror implied by this chapter.

These two lengthy and detailed legal passages each form the Scriptural basis for an entire tractate of the Mishnah/Talmud. They are followed by a short but very sweet passage, the Priestly Blessing: three short, poetic verses with which the priests are to bless the people daily, blessing them with assurances of Divine abundance, protection, grace, favor, and peace. Interestingly, small amulets containing this text have been found by archaeologists, confirming its great antiquity.

Further Thoughts on the Sotah

I wrote earlier that our sexual mores are not so strict as they were in ancient times. But I must correct myself: male jealousy is just as virulent, just as violent a factor in human life, as of old. Every year, some thirty to forty women are killed in the State of Israel by their husbands, ex-husbands or lovers—and the numbers are no doubt (proportionately) analogous in the United States and in other places. In many cases, the man has no “justification” for such jealousy, as he had no formal “claim” on her fidelity—but somehow, the idea of another man enjoying intimacies with one whom they continue to think of as “their” woman can drive a certain kind of man crazy and push him over the threshold to murderous violence.

What does the law of Sotah do? Quite simply: rather reaching for his knife or dagger or, in modern times, his gun, the jealous husband must bring her to the Temple and the kohen. The elaborate ceremony, with its numerous stages, may serve to “cool him off.” In any event, the ordeal itself is intended, hopefully, to vindicate her innocence, and reestablish domestic harmony. As our Sages put it: “ Great is peace, for the Holy Name of God is erased in the water for the sake of peace!”

Shabbat Kallah

This Shabbat is known as Shabbat Kallah, “The Sabbath of the Bride,” alluding to the numerous midrashim, including interpretations of Song of Songs, in which the People of Israel is seen as the bride of the Almighty, whom He wed, so to speak, at Mount Sinai. In some communities it is customary for the rabbi to deliver a major discourse on this Shabbat relating to the themes of the festival of Shavuot, the receiving of the Torah, etc. This year I will depart from my usual practice, and present a study of some of these ideas in our Shavuot issue, and not this Shabbat.

Bamidbar (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:27:00.001-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion (including Shabbat Kallah and Yom Yerushalayim), see the archive to my blog for April 28 2006, May 2007, May 8 2008, May 2009, and May 2010 (to be posted)

The Four-Square Camp

After over a month during which these pages have been mostly devoted to digressions, albeit important ones (on Zionism, socialism, Pesah, etc.), we now return to our central theme of the individual and community.

I think of the Book of Numbers, or Bamidbar, whose reading begins this week, as the book of the people of Israel—not of Moses, not of the Law, not of the pre-history of mankind and of the family saga of the fathers of the nation, but of the people per se: its wanderings through the desert, its murmurings and dissatisfactions and rebellions, and its preparations to enter and settle the Promised Land. This week’s parashah is dominated by the image of the twelve tribes of Israel: the census of its numbers, the names of its leaders, and its orderly arrangement, whether marching or encamping. The Sanctuary is located at the center; the clans of the Levites, each with its own leaders and tasks, flank it on all four sides; and, in the outer circle, are the twelve tribes, in a symmetrical, stylized, four-square formation.

What does all this mean? What does this image imply about society? I read this as an ideal vision, in which each person, each beit av (extended nuclear family, perhaps spanning three generations or more), each clan (mishpaha), and each tribe has its own fixed place. Later on, in the Book of Joshua (Chapters 13-19; cf. Chs. 21-22 for the division of the Levitic cities and the special case of Reuven, Gad and half-Manasseh), the Land itself is divided among the tribes, with the tribal portions subdivided in turn among clans, families, and “homestead” units (nahalah; the source of the term hitnahalut) of each individual.

Thus, in striking contrast to modern society—in which each individual seeks his own destiny, his own future, is often driven by ambition to be a “success” and to “rise above” his origins; a society in which anybody can become anything—the image here is of well-structured, stable society, in which each person has a place, and knows exactly where he belongs. (See also the eschatological vision in Ezekiel 48, where the Land is divided into twelve horizontal east-west strips.) It is in many ways reminiscent of what we know of medieval European society—but unlike medieval society, here there is a kind of primitive egalitarianism, in which, at least in theory, inequalities caused by fate, talent, diligence, or lack thereof, are periodically corrected by the institutions of shemitah and yovel (sabbatical and jubilee years). The desert, in which there was no great private wealth for anyone to covet in the first place, thus served as the model for the future. (This was also the inspiration for the austere, egalitarian vision of the Rekhabites; see Jeremiah 35.)

Reflections on Numbers

(No pun on the English title of the book intended in the above heading) In the last three parshiyot of Vayikra, the number seven plays a key-role: in the laws of Shabbat and festivals, in the sabbatical and jubilee years, in the counting of seven times seven days and years; and in the punishments threatened in the concluding admonition of Lev 26. In this section the key number is twelve: the twelve tribes arranged in symmetrical camps around the sacred center of the portable Sanctuary.

I have heard it said that the human mind can grasp intuitively only the first four digits; for more than that, one perceives a group of objects as the sum of several smaller groups. Be that as it may, the first four numbers have very definite meanings:

1 represents pure, simple unity: the perfection of the thing itself. Maimonides discourses extensively on the unity of God, and on the special philosophical meaning of His Oneness.

2 represents polarity or contrast: yin/yang; positive/negative; male/female; black/white. The micro-electronic coding that underlies the computers so ubiquitous in our culture, called “machine language,” is ultimately constructed on the two basic position of any electronic impulse: on/off.

3 represents dynamics, the principle of growth. Hegel’s famous triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is built upon threes; three is the basic number of birth and family (Mommy, Daddy and Me). A question: What intuitive idea is innate in the number three that led Christian theology to build itself around the concept of the Trinity?

4 represents stability: the four-legs of a table. Four is a kind of harmonious multiplicity: duality and polarity raised to the next level. We thus have the four winds or compass points; the four worlds of the Kabbalah (and, as Huston Smith contends, the four-tiered model of reality is found in virtually all world-views throughout history—with the glaring exception of modern, materialistic empiricism); the four levels of exegesis, in both Judaism and Christianity; the four symmetric sides of certain kinds of Hindu and Buddhist mandalas; etc.

These four are the basic building blocks of all higher numbers, including their symbolic meanings. (At various times I have elaborated here upon the notion that Rosh Hashanah is the festival of threes, while Pesah as constructed around fours.) Turning from these to the numbers mentioned earlier: seven, the sacred number of Judaism, represents the dynamism of three raised to the next level: seven is twice three, plus one to make it an odd number, and thus preserve the element of dynamism. Seven represents, if you will, the dynamism of the Divine world—the seven days of Creation, and the seven lower sefirot , which are the building blocks of creation. Twelve is the three multiplied by four: thus, twelve is the number of stability raised to a higher level, a kind of fullness and completeness: the twelve months of the year and the signs of the zodiac, and the twelve tribes, which are the basis for the Jewish people.

From Firstborn to Levites

This week’s portion (Num 3:40-51) describes how the Levites are taken “instead of” the first-born of the Israelites to serve in the Sanctuary (in auxiliary duties to those of the priesthood, the kohanim). This is done by a combination of census, in which the 22,000 Levites substitute for 22,000 firstborn on a one-to-one basis, complemented by a monetary “redemption” for the remaining firstborn ( a kind of foreshadowing of Pidyon ha-Ben, the redemption of the first-born with a silver coin that is practiced to this day).

What does all this mean? In medieval Christian Europe, it was customary for one of the sons—I think specifically the second–born—to go into the priesthood. Here, we find the substitution of an entire tribe, who are without a “portion or inheritance in the land”—i.e., real property, to serve in the Temple. I’m not sure whether this expresses a tendency towards greater or lesser hierarchy, elitism and emphasis on birth; it’s hard to say. In any event, in actuality the firstborn never served as priests or religious officiants.

What we do know is that throughout the Bible, almost from the beginning, the idea of a special role fir the first–born is repeatedly upset and challenged. Time after time, in the patriarchal age and later, those who are not first-born play a central role, superior to their elder brothers: from Jacob and Joseph, through Moses, David, and many others.

Behukotai (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:26:00.002-07:00

For more teachings on this week’s Torah portion, see the archive to my blog for April 20 2006, and May 2007, 2008, 2009, and May 2010 (to be posted).

Sefer Vayikra: A Brief Hadran

Even though this year the two concluding parshiyot of the Book of Leviticus are read separately, they are integrally related. I recently started learning (again), with a hevruta, selected portions of Ramban’s Torah Commentary. He sees Behukotai specifically as a continuation of Behar, or perhaps, contrariwise, Behar as a prelude to the latter. He reads the admonitions and blessings of Chapter 26 as specifically relate to Behar, which is a codex of laws about what to do when entering, and living upon, the Land. Indeed, he reads Vayikra as a whole as related to the situation of preparing for entering land, and adds that, had the tribes not sinned with the affair of the Spies, they would have entered immediately, and the Torah would have concluded with Leviticus {that’s how I read him, anyway}. Just as the construction of the Sanctuary serves as a festive, solemn conclusion to Exodus, with the Divine presence dwelling therein as it dwelled on Mount Sinai, so too do these chapters serve as a kind of solemn coda to the book of what he calls the “Covenant of the Tent of Meeting.”

Two important literary features linking Behar and Behukotai: first, the use of the number seven at the end of each section of the admonition: “If thus far you do not listen to Me, but walk with me crookedly {?}, I will continue to admonish you seven times over for your sins” (Lev 26:18, 21, 23-24, 28, with variations). Seven is also a key number in the preceding chapters, in both Emor and Behar: in the Shabbat and weekly cycle; in the festivals; and in the sabbatical and jubilee year, in cycles of 7 and 7 x 7 years. Second, the verses of blessing here end with the words, “I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt, and broke the yoke of your bondage, and I made you to walk upright” (Lev 26:13, which seems to echo similar verses in Behar dealing with slavery and the Exodus (25:38, 42, 55).

“If You Go with Me in Qeri”

A key word in the Tokheha, the solemn exhortation about future punishments which forms the center of last week’s parashah, is qeri. Repeatedly, we are told: “If you walk with Me be-qeri, then I will walk with you be-qeri, trying you seven times over for all your transgressions.”

But what does this word mean? The usual meaning is “by chance,” or “through happenstance”—that is, not treating the covenant with God and His commandments in a serious manner, but seeing them as something which one can be done casually, as the mood or whim possesses one. Or, more seriously, a view of the world as governed by random chance, as ultimately governed by chaos and meaninglessness (see Rambam, Hilkhot Ta’aniyot 1.4)—all this before modern “Chaos theory.” Or may it be something more deliberate: the RSV translation renders it as “contrariwise,” and the NJPS goes one step further, translating it, rather strangely to my mind, “with hostility.” The matter needs further thought and study. One thing is for certain: when the Tanakh uses a given term repeatedly, as a leitmotif, it is most decidedly not by chance.

More on Socialism and Capitalism: An Open Letter

Last year our issue for Behar-Behukotai was devoted to an essay in honor of my mother’s 25th yahrzeit entitled “Communism, Capitalism, and What’s In Between.” This elicited a number of reader reactions; in particular, one reader from the United States made some lengthy comments. As I never answered these in a timely manner, I have decided to reopen the discussion when this parashah came around this year, in the form of an open letter. Hence, this number will be longer than usual, and somewhat meandering, covering as it does numerous subjects related to this issue. However, I trust that readers will bear with me, as I consider the subject of great importance.

JS wrote:

What does Behar tell us about the best form of government, the best economic system? It certainly expresses what might be called a collectivist Utopian concept as does [Rav Yitzhak Breuer in his book] Nahaliel. But it has to face who we are. I remember a comment by a Hungarian professor I knew years ago, who said that if you have ten hungry people and one loaf of bread you must be a socialist (he meant a Communist), otherwise you would kill each other. But his then junior professor (who later became president of Hungary, at least for a while) said to me that socialism requires a capitalistic back to ride on. The first was a Jew, the second not.

I think experience has shown us that a free market system, including a global market, provides a better living. The Russians showed us that, as does any comparison to the “old days,” the benefits of materialism. We do live better than when I grew up. This is not an unbridled benefit, but is a benefit, that is for sure. We live better and the government doesn't oppress us the way the Communists did. We might make mistakes, but they were our choices, not ones dictated by the all-powerful, all-knowing BIG BROTHER. My experience in life has taught me that people are not always better off when the state does it. Capitalism, even the dog-eat-dog type with its corruption, can't compare to the corruption and incompetence of a modern state, even a social-democratic one, let alone a Communist state.

You end up arguing for a European social welfare state, singling out the most antisemitic Northern European countries, the Nordic states, rather than the hopeless Mediterranean Greece, Portugal, etc., that have spent themselves into poverty. Of course, before the Norwegians found offshore oil (done by the capitalist oil companies), they were very poor farmers who drank a lot. I don't go for these countries. They don't reproduce themselves and have large numbers of Muslim workers, that generates people like Le Pen in France and Haider in Austria. …
[On the other hand,] I could also tell you about my growing up dirt poor in [the Midwest] where, in the ‘30s the only Communists I knew (Arbeiter Ring people) ran a small tailor shop and became wealthy when they bought shares in a company run by [a relative]. To be sure I did meet many NY communists in college, and they were something!

In a more recent letter, he adds:

Two added thoughts. I bought hearing aids from a private hearing aid specialist. I paid her and she has given me wonderful after-sale service. This caused me to speculate: suppose we had a single payer system as do so many Western welfare states. Suppose they allowed me get a hearing aid. Would the post-sale service be as thoughtful and comprehensive at the one I received from my private audiologist?

Of course there are variables. I suspect that a thoughtful and caring state audiologist might give as good service as my private audiologist. But experience with state people has not always been so good. Much may depend on the budget and resources. She might not have the time to do what my private audiologist does for me. My audiologist values my business and she will get more customers if she treats me well and I tell my friends about her. The power of the profit motive…

Another item must be added to the mix. Under a single payer system, were I lacking funds I might not be able to afford a hearing aid or I would have to wait six months for one. Add to this the fact that I can, under certain circumstances, take a tax deduction so that my loss is paid for partly by the state. See what a tiny issue exposes!

My second point relates to a talk I heard at my school yesterday. The lecturer has written a book about victim's rights. My interest was in part piqued by my brother's loss of his only son to two savage murderers. The lecturer was very sharp but she lost me when she said the needed action required government action and money! I could see some role for the state, such as the nature of the trial and punishment, but with public entities in dire financial state where would the money come from for what she wanted? Much of the psychological help she wanted could be done by private organizations, such as the church or other nonprofits. But the State!

Dear JS,

Allow me to begin by summarizing what I understand to be your main points: 1) human nature mitigates against socialism; 2) socialism, and specifically Communism, has a bad record of communism—i.e., the “Big Brother” syndrome, described so dramatically by George Orwell in his book 1984. One might add that Orwell was bitterly disappointed with Marxism, particularly as a result of his experiences fighting alongside Marxist–Communists during the Spanish Civil War of 1937 (incidentally, many American Jewish Communists fought, and some were killed, in that war). In Homage to Catalonia he describes their overly politicized behavior and non-comradely, even divisive attitude towards their non-Communist fellows-in-arms in the anti-Franco struggle. 3) Capitalism, through competition, encourages better quality, service, and more goods for everybody.

I will begin my answer with a caveat: as I have lived in the late 20th and am now living in the 21st century, I cannot approach these questions with the same idealism my parents brought to it in their youth, some eighty years ago. The world has learned some harsh and bitter lessons from the failure of the attempt at Marxian socialism in Russia and the incredible cruelty and the horrors inflicted in its name. But this does not prove, as held by Fukuyama, the eternal and unquestioned superiority of the Western liberal free-enterprise (i.e., capitalist) system. For me, the question remains open, and the quest to improve social arrangements, including the all-important economic ones, must continue, albeit in a less dogmatic fashion than in the bad old days of the CP.

Second, my own basic value position, which I am convinced is expressed in the Torah, and particularly in Parashat Behar, is that all human beings are entitled to a decent life. Your perspective seems to be that of yourself and individuals in similar situations. Your example of the hearing aid is an illuminating one: As I understand it, you are a retired professional man, living reasonably comfortably in the US, so of course you can afford superior service on the private market. But the question that concerns me is: what about the poor, those who have not had the same opportunities you enjoy? They cannot offer hearing aids at all. But, as far as I know, in social-welfare states, such things are available to all.

My starting point is the idea, which I have heard expressed by many here in Israel, that human beings, by virtue of being human, are entitled to certain basic things: health care, education, and not being left hungry or homeless without a roof over their heads. The capitalist system provides a comfortable life for many—whether a majority or a minority depends upon your perspective—but also leads to serious suffering and injustice to others, often (usually?) through no fault of their own. But my main point goes deeper than that. You present the traditional defense of the capitalist system: namely, that it provides the opportunity for the little guy to make a good life for himself, without depending too much upon others, and without the interference of what you call the “all–knowing Big Brother.” If you will, the American dream—the self-made man, the “rugged individualist,” who makes it as a small businessman, artisan, or professional. Or, to put it in a broader intellectual perspective, the basic thesis of Adam Smith: that through individuals acting out of what he called “enlightened self-interest,” things will balance out in the end; that an “invisible hand” will help bring about a decent society. My question is whether this belief, which may have been true for the 18th century mercantile society in which Smith lived, remains valid today, or whether we have entered a new era in which the old truths are no longer valid.

I hold that the world has changed drastically: the world of the old American Dream no longer exists. I submit that capitalism today is radically different today even from what it was fifty years ago, in our own childhood or youth. The change in the size and scope and range of global corporations has so greatly changed quantitatively, as to make a qualitative difference.

A few examples: the squeezing out of the small business man. Small bookstores, grocery and produce stores, restaurants, coffee shops, inns, are gradually disappearing, and are being replaced by monolithic chains, be they supermarkets, book chains, hotels, quick food chains, etc. All this, besides limiting economic opportunities for the “little guy” (who is more likely to seek a career as a “manager”), makes for a narrower, more uniform, blander culture. It also creates a large underclass of people who end up working in what are essentially menial, dead-end jobs. Instead of the small grocery store owner, who had a certain human dignity and made a moderately decent living, today there seem to be an increasing number of workers—I think of the people working in fast food chains, check-out girls in supermarkets, etc.—who receive minimum wage, and find it very difficult to meet even basic human needs. Moreover, in the absence of a national health care plan, they cannot afford decent health care, and often don’t have a decent diet either but eat a high proportion of “junk food.” All this is vividly portrayed in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a journalistic account based on the author’s own attempts to survive for a year living as these “invisible” people do.

Or, on a higher professional level, there is globalization and the “outsourcing” of jobs to India or other places where labor is cheap, and the disappearance of jobs on the middle professional level (in computers, for example, this has happened to several people I know).

On the consumer level: The concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer huge corporations enables them to behave in abusive ways towards their customers as well. For example, the cell phone companies in Israel charge huge ”exit fees” if someone is dissatisfied with the service and wants to break his contract, which typically requires that he stay with his service provider for a year-and-a-half. This of course mitigates against the classic capitalistic philosophy of free competition, but what has seems to have happened is that in many fields, because the infrastructure is so expensive (and not shared by the rival companies, as might seem reasonable) there are only a handful of big companies, which dictate more-or-less similar conditions, to their own benefit and everyone else’s detriment. But price-gauging is the least of the ills of the cell-phone industry. I have heard of cell-phone companies secretly placing huge relay devices, emitting high levels of radiation, on roofs or inside apartments in residential buildings (for example, on Rehov Tahkemoni in Mekor Barukh) where people are raising small children. Since the technology is new, no one knows exactly the health hazards are—and the companies use their economic clout to stifle unbiased research nto the dangers of cell phones. What has happened, perhaps paradoxically, is that many of the same evils people used to attribute to the all-powerful state under communism are happening with the vast global corporations, which de-facto have too powerful a role in our present economy. What I wonder is whether this isn’t the result of a certain inherent logic of the capitalist system.

Another point: we take for granted the prominence in the middle-class employment market of such fields as management, advertising, PR, marketing, etc. But all of these, sorry to say, are fields which don’t really create anything really useful that serves genuine human needs, but serve the big corporations to market and make money, to create artificial needs (including planned obsolescence, forcing the consumer to replace items more frequently than he might otherwise wish or even afford) and, to put it bluntly, engage in large scale lying and deceit, where image and illusion substitute for reality. Watch five minutes of TV advertising, any time of day or night, anywhere, and you will see what I mean.

A related point is the universal use of sex to sell—the sexy girl draped over a car, or refrigerator, or eating a container of fruit yogurt—which is taken for granted. This has contributed to what I call the hyper-sexualization of our culture, which has brought on its wake various evils—and I’m not being prudish.

Yet another disturbing change I have observed in our culture over recent decades is the decline of the humanities and other “non-useful” professions and areas of study—such as history, philosophy and literature—in the universities. Of course, these departments still exist (although in many places even that is by no means assured), and there are a certain number of bright young people who have chosen to devote their lives to these fields, but their number and importance in our general cultural life seems to be drastically declining. By the way, something similar seems to be happening to Judaic studies in the universities here in Israel, leaving the interpretation of Judaism for future generations more and more to the yeshivot and the Ultra-Orthodox, with what I find to be a narrow, a-historical and even primitive interpretation. It would appear that here, too, the profit motive is predominant, and those fields which are less likely to generate wealth, even if they offer great intellectual and spiritual challenges and satisfaction, are less popular.

By nature—dictated as they are by economic motivation—corporations tend not to be socially responsible unless forced to be—and when challenged, can afford expensive lawyers to fend off lawsuits. (Another key factor: the legal system no longer functions as an instrument of justice – one of the central ideals of Judaism – but has become an arena of largely cynical power conflicts.) A case in point is the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with its massive environmental damage, which may take decades to recover—for which BP has paid only a small fraction. Or, on a larger and more dramatic scale: the behavior of the Republican Party (reminiscent of a fundamentalist religion denying evolution or heliocentric universe!), in stifling serious public discussion of world-wide climate change taboo, certainly within their party and certain media. Again, because the consequences of effective action runs against their economic philosophy of unfettered growth and freedom of enterprise, they foster deep intellectual dishonesty.

Another consequence of increasingly aggressive capitalism is the privatization of education. Historically, public education has served to provide an opportunity for poor but bright kids to rise in society. How many American Jews, especially of the second generation, became what they were thanks to free public education? With current trends, with partial privatization of education—that is, with the government proving only the minimum to public schools—that may not happen in the future. Kids in Tel Aviv and Ramat Hasharon and Herliyah will enjoy good schools, while those in Netivot and Yeroham and Mizeh Ramon will perpetuate poverty and ignorance and unemployment for another generation.

As for your comment about the social–democratic states of Northern Europe: their present alleged anti-Semitism (or anti-Israel sentiment) is irrelevant to the validity of their economic system (unless you claim there is some sort of cause and effect between the two, which I don’t see). By the way, Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries had a relatively good record in the Holocaust; their present anti-Israel position is largely in response to the influx of Muslim immigrants, combined with the general atmosphere in much of Europe. As for our question, the crucial issue is this: a welfare state requires a major revamping in the tax structure. People must be prepared to accept a much higher rate of taxation, which they do because they know that in return they receive health care, free education for all (including universities), paid vacations, retirement benefits, etc. This requires a certain tradition, and can’t be changed overnight.

At this point, I must make a major caveat, returning to what we said at the beginning about human nature: that, whatever system one has, one needs to deal with the inevitable shortcomings inherent in human nature. Capitalism appeals to greed and, as mentioned, claims that, by allowing things to work on the basis of self-interest, they will work out in the end. Allow me to mention, as counter examples, the name Bernard Madoff and the experience of recent years in the US. Communism, or Socialism, appeals to idealism, to feelings of human solidarity and mutual responsibility, but leaves the door open for the exercise of raw desire for power and, in its initial stages, revenge of the poor against the rich. Thus, the Leninist theory of a “vanguard party” invited abuse by types like Stalin.

People today in the West, because of the so-called “death of the Left,” often reject the very existence of “class conflict” as a factor in society. Of course it is. On the other side, rigid, orthodox Communists saw everything as economics, ignoring religion, nationalism, group identity, ethnicity, etc., as significant factors in human community. This may be one reason why the so-called Left supports the Arab-Palestinian side in knee-jerk fashion: namely, because they see them (by and large correctly) as the lower economic class—but ignore everything else around the conflict, such as the aspects I discussed two weeks ago.

The bottom line is, as I said at the beginning, that there is no foolproof system. Nevertheless, I believe a serious discussion of socialist values is long overdue—specifically in Israel, which is at a turning point, or has been already for several decades. From a largely egalitarian society, with the kibbutz movement, the political domination of the nominally socialist Mapai (Labor Party), and the prominent position of the Histadrut Labor Federation (which has admittedly lost its way), it has moved towards rampant privatization and a highly centralized form of capitalism. (It is perhaps germane to mention here, close to my mother’s yahrzeit, that this was one of the things that attracted my parents to Zionism in the 1950s, following their deep disappointment in the Soviet Union and the “Sun of the Nations.”) I’d like to see this trend, which creates deep fissures in the public, stopped. If we believe that Israel is still the great project of the Jewish people in our day, we should foster it becoming, as a Jewish country, one in which there is greater justice, equality and social solidarity, rather than an ever more fragmented and divergent society, split into rival trends and sectors, as it has become over the past few decades. I see this as the central task of Zionism in the 21st century—alongside doing everything possible to achieve peace with the Arabs.

Behar (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:26:00.001-07:00

Reserved

Emor - Yom Ha-Atzmaut (Individual & Community)

2011-06-28T11:25:00.001-07:00

Reserved

Kedoshim (Individual & Community)

2011-05-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

For more teachings on this parashah, see the archives to this blog for April 10 2006, and May 2007, 2008, 2009, and April 2010.

”You Shall be Holy, for I the Lord am Holy”

A friend of mine and loyal reader of these pages, Rabbi David Greenstein of Montclair New Jersey, was disconcerted by a remark I made a few weeks ago (Metzora, Supplement II) in which I stated that “Holiness is somehow connected in Jewish thought and in halakhic thought with separation, with making distinctions, drawing boundaries.” He argued, citing Sha’arei Yosher by R. Shimon Shkopf (a major Lithuanian Talmudist of the late 19th and early 20th century, who developed a philosophy of the underlying principles of Jewish law), that the holiness demanded of us is not “to distance ourselves from permitted enjoyments… but that the purposeful goal of our lives [is that] all our service and toil should always be dedicated to the good of the collectivity, that we not avail ourselves of any act or movement, benefit or enjoyment unless it have some aspect that is for the benefit of those other than ourselves.”

Whether intentionally or not, my friend raised the same question as is implied by a well-know midrash on the first verse of this week’s parasha, which warns against confusing Divine holiness and human holiness. In Leviticus Rabbah 24.9 we read:

The Torah states: “You shall be holy [for I the Lord your God am holy]” (Lev 19:2). Is it possible [that you be holy] like Myself? Scripture states: “For I am holy.” My holiness is above your holiness.

God is by His very nature utterly different from human beings or, as Rudolf Otto puts it, “Wholly Other”: His holiness transcends the corporeal world, and He dwells in realms far beyond our comprehension, let alone our ability to participate therein. Hence, when the Torah speaks of human beings, or specifically Jews, as being called upon to be holy, or even to emulate God’s holiness, it refers to something utterly different in nature than God’s holiness—and it is this which Rav Shkopf, and my friend, had in mind. Our midrash does not provide any positive definition of what human holiness is, but suffices with stating the radical difference between Divine holiness and human holiness. However, from the continuation of our parashah and the laws contained in the chapter that follows this general statement, one may infer that it means caring for one’s fellow man, behaving in an ethical manner, and creating an ethical society based, not only on decent behavior, but on loving and generous attitudes towards others. (Verses 5-8, which are concerned with ritual issues of consuming the flesh of a zevah offering within a certain period of time, are a kind of exception that proves this rule, and one might well ask what these verses are doing here—but that is a question for another time.)

An interesting insight into this idea is provided by Rav Yehudah Ashlag in one of the essays in his book Matan Torah (brought to my attention by another friend, Professor Emeritus Yehuda Gellman). Ashlag speaks there of the purpose of human life generally and the reason for Creation, beginning with the statement that it is the very nature of God to give. God needs nothing for Himself; He is infinite and omnipotent, and is in any event incorporeal and without the needs of flesh and blood. Hence, his nature is to give; the Creation of the universe was, so to speak, an expression of His need to give, to have someone to love.

The human being is the exact opposite: his natural, inborn inclination is to take, to grasp, to enjoy, to pursue pleasure and happiness. An infant’s first instinct upon birth is to grasp his mother’s breast, to suck, to take what he/she needs. As a human being matures, his needs and his way of attaining that which he wants and/or needs matures and becomes more sophisticated, but his essential nature and root impulses remain the same. The object of the Torah and its mitzvot is thus to gradually change this nature, to train or teach the human being to give rather than to take, to care about others, to forego certain ego-centered pleasures or at least to make them less central—and through this to become like God. “As I am merciful, so shall you be merciful; as I am compassionate, so shall you be compassionate.”

It is for that reason that we have so many mitzvot governing the corporeal dimension of existence, and particularly the basic drives of hunger and sex: to tame and curb and limit these drives through the laws of kashrut and arayot. (Interestingly, in this book of the Humash, in which the adjective kadosh, ”holy,” appears particularly frequently, these laws specifically are summed up by the remark “you shall be holy.” See, re kashrut, Lev 11:24-25; and re arayot and the cravings of sexuality, our week’s parashah at 20:25-26, in which the laws of sexual conduct, of kashrut, and the concept of holiness are all tied together.)

An aside: in our culture the understanding of love itself is greatly corrupted in popular usage, especially by the Hollywood image of love, which emphasizes sexual love, i.e., the fascination with/desire for another person. Such love may often be as much or more a matter of taking rather than giving, albeit in sexual love there can be both pleasure–seeking and pleasure–giving, ideally in equal measure. But in any event sexual love is only one of many kinds of love among human beings. (It is worth mentioning in this connection Avot 5.16, in which a contrast is drawn between “love dependent upon a thing” and “love which is not dependent upon any thing,” the examples given being Amnon’s exploitative sexual love or desire for Tamar, and the deep camaraderie and friendship between David and Jonathan. This dictum seems to deliberately conflate the different meanings of the word love to make its point.)

In general, our culture often seems to celebrate sex and money as the sources of virtually all happiness in life. One constantly hears the cynical view that people are moved to do whatever they do for financial benefit. Even the creative person—the writer, the artist, the musician, the scholar, the thinker—is seen as driven, not by curiosity, by the simple urge/need to create, or by sheer joy in their work, but by the desire for “advancement” and, ultimately, wealth. Needless to say that all these attitudes mitigate against an orientation rooted in giving.

If I may, I would like to conclude with a striking thought from the teaching of the Dalai Lama, one of the outstanding spiritual personalities of our time. Commenting on the attempts of the Chinese Communists to suppress Tibetan culture and independence, Kyhongla Rato Rinpoché, one of his disciples, said: “We could not hate the Chinese because it was their own ignorance that motivated them to harm us. A true practitioner of religion considers his enemy to be his greatest friend, because only he can help you develop patience and compassion.” The Dalai Lama, writing of his decision to pursue a path of strict nonviolent resistance, added: “Basically everyone exists in the very nature of suffering, so to abuse or mistreat each other is futile.”

It seems to me that, perhaps “bracketing” the specifically Buddhist idea here of the nature of suffering, the underlying spirit of these words and the understanding of love implied therein is not that distant from the Torah’s teaching in this week’s chapter: “Do not hate your brother in your heart… Do not bear a grudge or take revenge… Love your fellow as yourself”… etc.

Shabbat Hol Hamoed Pesah (Individual & Community)

2011-05-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

Le-Ha”y Rabbenu: On the 18th Yahrzeit of Rav J. B. Soloveitchik

Someone once said that the greatness of halakhah is also its weakness: that is, that through the observance of Jewish law an ordinary person can feel that his life is filled with holiness. Every time he gets up in the morning or goes to sleep, eats or drinks, the very structure of his week and year, even when he sleeps with his wife (or she with her husband)—there are laws and rules intended to bring him closer to God. But this is also its great drawback, what A. J. Heschel called “pan-halakhism”: the view that the halakhah is the be-all and end-all can cause one to bypass the inner spiritual core of the Torah; thus, the feeling of holiness simply through obedience to the Shulhan Arukh can in fact be illusory.

I believe that this is what the Rav meant when he said (I heard this from him personally, as well as hearing it reported as something he said at his Talmud shiur at Yeshiva University): “Modern Orthodoxy didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped it would. They serve God with their minds and with their hands, but not with their hearts.”

All this may sound surprising to those who think of the Rav as “the Man of Halakhah” par excellence. Yet there was in fact an ongoing tension, if you will, between “Halakhic Man” and “the Lonely Man of Faith” (the titles of his two best-known monographic essays on the nature of Jewish religious life), which might be described as the tension between objective halakhic behavior and inner religious feeling; between the Mitnaggedism in which he was raised and Hasidism, which exerted a powerful influence on his development in early childhood and later (he often spoke longingly of his childhood Habad melamed in Khaslavecz); between halakhah and aggadah; or, as I once put it in these pages, between the feminine and masculine principles (see “The Rav and the Eternal Feminine,” HY I: Pesah [=Torah]; and cf. his “Eulogy for the Talner Rebbe” in Shiurei Harav: A Conspectus).

It seems to me that this tension is the key to understanding a central concept that the Rav introduced into halakhic thinking. As is well known, the Brisker school of Lithuanian Talmudic learning in which the Rav was raised often tried to resolve various difficulties and conundrums within the halakhic system by raising objective halakhic categories to the level of conceptual abstraction, and thereby drawing various fine distinctions among them: e.g., between heftza and gavra, between understanding a given law as relating to a given object, or as referring to the person performing the action. Now, one of the Rav’s most important and frequently invoked distinctions was that between ma’aseh ha-mitzvah, the physical act performed in a given mitzvah, and kiyyum ha-mitzvah, the fulfillment of the mitzvah. Applying these concepts to those mitzvot with a strong spiritual component / element, who would speak of ma’aseh be-yadaim as against kiyyum shebe-lev—that is, that the mitzvah itself might be performed with the hands, i.e., through some external act, but that its true fulfillment was within the heart. Thus, for example: on the external level, prayer involves reciting a given text at certain fixed times of the day, adopting a certain physical posture, various gestures, etc.; but on the internal level, the kiyyim of prayer means that a person feel himself to be standing before God. In like fashion, teshuvah involves the recitation of a verbal confession, but its inner essence is in the change of heart, the cat of repentance of which Vidduy is a mere external expression. Similar things could be said of Keri’at Shema, as a textual recitation reflecting acceptance of God’s kingship; of Simhat Yom Tov as the inner sense of joy in the festival; of aveilut, of mourning as the inner grieving for the person who was, and will be no more, expressed in certain stylized forms… and so forth.

Now, it seems clear to me that the Rav knew and deeply understood the inner message of Judaism, but he couched these insights in the language of halakhah, because that was the language of his familial tradition, and perhaps also because his social role was that of a rosh yeshivah in a strongly halakhah-centered context—but there was nevertheless an ongoing tension between the two.

It seems to me that this may be what he was alluding to when he spoke about the “loneliness” of the “man of faith.” In the opening pages of the essay of that name, he begins with the stark, rather striking words, “I am lonely”—and goes on to describe the sense of loneliness which is part of the nature of religious experience per se, in all times and places; and the special loneliness of the religious person in modern culture, with its emphasis on technology, on the “here-and-now sensible world as the only manifestation of being.” These words reminded me of a statement in the first published Hasidic book, Toldot Yakaov Yosef. The author speaks there of three levels of Galut (“Exile,” but perhaps better translated as: loneliness, estrangement, alienation): the exile of Israel among the nations; the exile of the scholar within the Jewish people; and the exile of the truly God-fearing and learned person (the one who serves God in an inward way?) even among those of his fellow scholars who are lacking in real piety (what he calls shedim yehuda’in, “Jewish demons”).

Halakhic Postscript: Two Approaches to Kitniyot

One of the more irksome aspects of Pesah is the prohibition, incumbent upon the Ashkenazic world, against eating kitniyot—“legumes”: a category that subsumes rice and a variety of foodstuffs belonging to the bean family, or things that grow within pods: greenpeas, stringbeans, red beans, white beans, lima beans, lentils, soybeans and its products, chickpeas, sunflower seeds, as well as corn.

What people find so irksome about all this is not so much the prohibition itself—after all, for people accustomed to observing kashrut all year round, one more restriction, for one week a year, oughtn’t to pose any great difficulty—but certain other factrs. First, that the rule seems rather ill-defined—it’s unclear whether or not it include oils and other kitniyot derivatives; in some communities, such as the United States, things that everyone used “a generation ago,” such as peanuts and peanut oil, now seem to be forbidden; and that there is a long list of things that are clearly not legumes as such but which contain small seeds and are customarily forbidden, such as anise, kűmmel, peanuts, mustard, safflower oil, rape and rapeseed (canola oil), etc. Second, particularly for those of us living in Israel, the fact that this rule, which greatly restricts one’s diet during Pesah, applies to Ashkenazim but not to Sephardim, is disturbing. Kitniyot puts a damper on free social interaction between the two groups during a week when people enjoy more leisure time and can go visiting—and this, at a time when the barriers between the groups are gradually being erased and when even marriages between people from the different “tribes” of Israel are increasingly common. Isn’t the idea of the “ingathering of the exiles” and “mixing of the exiles” into one nation part of what Zionism is all about? Third, as an offshoot of the above, many of the Passover products one encounters in the supermarkets in Israel are marked “permitted only to those that eat kitniyot”—a label found on such diverse products, seemingly unrelated to beans, as tuna fish or sardines (packaged in oils derived from kitniyot), mayonnaise, cakes and baked goods, etc.

Finally: the justification for this rule is not altogether clear. It is not a Rabbinic edict (takkanah) that was adopted by a council of Sages as a “fence” around the law, but a folk custom which seems to have sprung up among Ashkenazi Jewry at some point in the early Middle Ages and is first mentioned in halakhic literature as an already existing practice, whose reason is unclear and subject to speculation. Some suggest that it was a gezerah made because these substances were sometimes made into flour, which might then accidentally be confused with flour from real grains, and vice versa, causing people to inadvertently use wheat flour as rice flour—a serious violation of the Pesah laws. (But in that case, why should it continue to be observed today, when food manufacture and distribution is better organized? And if it is such a serious issue, why doesn’t it apply to Sephardim?) Then again, there are others who suggest that it may have originated from some egregious error: for example, as the late Prof. Israel Ta-Shma suggests in his book on Ashkenazi minhag, it may have been based on a careless misreading of a text warning against grinding grains on Yomtov generally, as a form of labor forbidden on festival days, that was somehow misinterpreted as prohibiting using anything that could be ground during Pesah, when people’s minds are much on grains.

Thus, one finds some people today, from what might be called the liberal end of the spectrum of Orthodoxy, who have quietly decided for themselves to scuttle the whole business. The sociological factor is important here: if Israel represents an “ingathering of the tribes of Israel,” why should people be so sharply divided and unable to eat in one another’s homes during a festival which symbolizes our birth as a nation—one nation? But each person has his/her own considerations: in one family, several members of whom suffer from celiac, a genetic condition involving an intense allergic reaction to wheat products and other grains, those members with the condition eat kitniyot, while the others do not. Another friend of mine, a Reconstructionist rabbi who is declaredly “non-halakhic” and a strict vegan, is strict about kitniyot because “all year long my diet centers around rice and legumes, so were I to eat kitniyot, there would hardly be any recognizable difference between Pesah and the rest of the year.”

I once discussed this problem with a learned friend, who pointed towards two halakhic approaches to this problem, which he saw as typifying the movements from which they came generally. The one was that of Rabbi David Golinkin, the leading posek (decisor) within Israel’s Masorati Movement (i.e., the counterpart of Conservative in the US), who some years ago issued a ruling granting blanket permission to eat kitniyot. The sociological argument was foremost (he was asked: “in light of the ingathering of the Exiles, shouldn’t it be possible to eliminate this restriction?”), but he followed this with a list of eleven different reasons for the custom, all of which he saw as spurious. He quoted a number of prominent rishonim who opposed the custom when it first emerged, among these the Tosaphists R. Yitzhak (the R”y) and R. Yehiel of Paris, and even some who described it as a minhag shetut (a “foolish” or “silly custom”).

On the other hand, Rav Moshe Feinstein, ztz”l, generally considered the leading Orthodox posek during the latter half of the 20th century in America, wrote a responsum about the use of peanuts during Pesah (Iggerot Moshe, Orah Hayyim, Vol. 3: §63; pp. 370-371) in which he discusses the issues involved in kitniyot generally. He first dismisses the argument that one ought to prohibit as kitniyot all those things from which one could make flour, or those things whose sseds are sown in the ground in a manner similar to wheat. Following that logic, one would have to prohibit potatoes, which as everyone knows are a staple of the Pesah diet of Ashkenazic Jewry! Interestingly, like Golinkin, he notes that the actual reason for the prohibition is shrouded in obscurity and mentions those rishonim who objected to the whole thing.

But his conclusion is different: since the prohibition of kitniyot is a long-standing custom in Ashkenazic communities, one cannot nullify it entirely. But as it was never properly legislated by a gathering of sages, and as there was never a general rule determining what is and is not prohibited, it ought properly be restricted to those items that were originally prohibited, as stated in the Shulhan Arukh (Orah Hayyim 453.1). He thus goes on to permit those things, such as peanuts and peanut oil, as well as kummel and anise, which are not explicitly prohibited. It seems to me, applying the principles implicit in this teshuvah, that one might freely use kitniyot oils in frying and cooking, possibly after making a hatarat nedarim—and such is my practice in my own home. By this, one also bypasses perhaps 80% of the problems encountered in shopping in Israeli supermarkets during Pesah.

But what is more significant in the contrast between these two responsa is the attitude towards tradition. Golinkin seems to see the halakhah largely as a logical system; hence, he has no difficulty in abolishing something which seems to fly in the face of reason or common sense. Rav Feinstein, by contrast, is moved by a sense of reverence towards the halakhic tradition and those authorities who came before him; hence, he is reluctant to give a blanket “dispensation” from kitniyot as such, but at most rounds off some of the rough edges and permits those things which are demonstrably without any basis.

Hitzei Yehonatan

Bo (Wanderings)

Moses and Aaron

Vaera (Wanderings)

What’s in a Name?

Shemot (Wanderings) - Supplement

Kol Be-Isha Ervah—“A Woamn's Voice is Lewdness”

The Problem

A Weather Change in Orthodoxy

The Halakhic Issue

Psychological And Meta-Halakhic Factors

Notes

Appendix: Hebrew Sources

Shemot (Wanderings)

Setting the Stage

Vayehi (Wanderings)

“Do Not Bury Me in Egypt!”

Miketz-Vayigash (Wanderings)

A Study in Character

Hanukkah (Wanderings)

Is Hanukkah a Festival?

Vayeshev (Wanderings)

Yaakov and David as Fathers

Vayishlah (Wanderings)

A Dialogue About Ego Death

Vayetze (Wanderings)

“… and Its Top Reaching to the Heavens”

Two Kinds of Mysticism

Toldot (Wanderings)

A Tale of Two Brothers

Hayyei Sarah (Wanderings)

“And Yitzhak went out to the field”

Vayera (Wanderings)

The Binding of Isaac and the Beatles

SUPPLEMENT — SHLOMO CARLEBACH YAHRZEIT Shlomo’s “Afterlife” - The Carlebach Minyanim

Lekh Lekha (Wanderings)

“Abraham My Lover”

Rav Zaddok – The Torah of Beginnings

Noah (Wanderings)

“Their Thoughts were Only Evil all Day Long”

Bereshit (Wanderings)

Introduction: Wandering the Highways and Byways of Torah

In the Beginning

The First Sin

The Torah of Beginnings

Simhat Torah (Individual & Community)

Sukkot (Individual & Community)

Yom Kippur (Individual & Community)

Ten Days of Teshuvah (Individual & Community)

Rosh Hashanah (Individual & Community)

Nitzavim-Vayelekh (Individual & Community)

Ki Tavo (Individual & Community)

Ki Teitzei (Individual & Community)

Shoftim 2 (Individual & Community)

Shoftim (Individual & Community)

Torah and “Secular” Law—May the Two Walk Together?

POSTSCRIPT: A Wedding Sermon

Ekev (Individual & Community)

On Prayer, Public and Private

Vaethanan (Individual & Community)

Unity of the Individual, Unity of Society, Unity of the Cosmos

Some Tisha b’Av Afterthoughts

Tisha b'Av (Individual & Community)

Devarim-Hazon (Individual & Community)

Tisha b’Av: “Shall I Weep as I Have Done?”

Mas'ei (Individual & Community)

“What A Trip!”

Matot (Individual & Community)

“All that comes out of your mouth you shall fulfill”

Pinhas (Individual & Community)

Some Thoughts on Zealotry

What is “the King’s Torah”?

Balak (Individual & Community)

“A People That Dwells Apart”: Thoughts About Inclusion and Exclusion

Hukat (Individual & Community)

A Brief History of Moses’ Staff

Korah (Individual & Community)

Korah’s Rebellion

SHELAH LEKHA: Postscript

More on San Francisco and Circumcision

SUPPLEMENT — SHLOMO CARLEBACH YAHRZEIT

Shlomo’s “Afterlife” - The Carlebach Minyanim