Vignettes From A Pilgrimage To Israel.
The following meditations are a sampling of some of my thoughts upon returning from two weeks in Israel with Congregation Ohav Shalom’s biennial mission.
Hebrew
Like Semitic languages in general, Hebrew is quite ordered and logical. Unlike English and other Germanic languages, the Hebrew vocabulary flows naturally from shorashim or word roots, three or four letter verb stems in the infinitive form that are the basis for different verb conjugations as well as nouns.
Consider the following examples. In Hebrew, the shoresh or verb root khazar (KH, Z, R) consisting of the letters khet, zayin and resh, means to return. If I want to say “I am returning,” an intransitive verb form, I say, “ani KHoZeR.” If I want to say “I am returning the ball,” a transitive verb form, I say “ani maKHaZiR et ha-kadur.” However, these shorashim are even more versatile. If I want to say “reconstruction,” I say “sheeKH-ZuR.” If I want to say “recycling,” I say “meeKH-ZuR.” All of these words are completely different from each other, but if you listen carefully to them, you hear echoes of the original verb stem, KHaZaR, to return.
Returning on one’s own, returning someone else’s belongings, reconstruction, recycling: they are all about return, coming back to something, bringing back something, rediscovering that which was, is, and will be.
I notice these kinds of words as I leave Ben Gurion Airport and walk the streets of Israel once again. The words of Hebrew, the street signs, the protest slogans, the Hebrew newspapers all point to a pervasive truth that is Israel, a truth brought to life by the language: to come to Israel is to return to the source, the root, to come home.
The Torah Scroll.
In Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, there is a Torah scroll on display, which had been saved from destruction at the hands of the Nazis during Kristallnakht, the Night of Broken Glass which took place on November 9, 1938. That night, on the orders of Hitler’s regime, Nazi party members all over Germany looted Jewish businesses, vandalized synagogues, raped, assaulted, and murdered German Jews across the country, as their fellow citizens - friends and neighbors – looked on in fear, apathy, or approval. This was a foretaste of the hell to come for European Jewry and millions of other people.
The scroll is now the property of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, opened up for everyone to see that the Jewish people and its God passed through the fire, badly burned but alive nonetheless. I am always intrigued by Torah scrolls, but I have been most intrigued this year as our congregation proceeds with the writing of our own new scroll. I look closely at the passage to which it has been opened, the ancient priestly blessing that Jews recite on different occasions.
May God bless you and guard you; may God cause the light of God’s face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may God lift up God’s face to you and grant you peace.
What was the intent of the person who opened the scroll to this passage? To make a cynical point? “How wonderful, Jews. Look at the blessings bestowed upon you by your God who died at Auschwitz along with you! And yet you still believe.” To make a statement of profound faith? “Jews, we and our Torah are still here. The blessing and its God are still alive.” I cannot know what the museum curator who did this was thinking. All I know is that no more than an hour’s drive from Jerusalem, in the Israeli city of Ashkelon, our sofer (Torah scribe) is slowly writing our new scroll in black ink, in this nation that grew out of the dark ashes of the Holocaust like a weed poking through a pile of rocks, yet whose attachment to this land is far older and greater. May God bless us and guard us.
The Kotel.
In his poem, “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He then wrote a painful reflection upon the forced boundaries placed between him and his neighbor, ones that defy the natural impulse for things and people to connect with one another. What would Frost have thought if he had visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem? Also known as the Kotel, it is a magnet for the faithful, the faithless, the curious, the lost, the sick, the broken, an endless humanity that streams towards it day after day, all day from every faith, every corner of the earth. They place written prayers in the Kotel’s cracks and crevices, desperate as they are – as perhaps we all are – for healing, to be heard by God, for guidance, for forgiveness. Sometimes, the prayers are not pleas, but offerings of pure gratitude, words of praise given unconditionally. The sea of people that visits loves this wall, needs this wall, looks forward to imagining an intimate conversation between each person and God at this wall, the very last vestige of the ancient Jerusalem Temple that stood on the Temple Mount. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, are there perhaps also no rational skeptics at the Kotel?
With all this, the Kotel is wrapped in irony. This most sacred place began as nothing more than the outer retaining wall of the newly renovated second Temple of King Herod the Great, one of the most brutal men to rule over the land of Israel in behalf of the Roman Empire. Perhaps equally ironic is that this place which draws people from the four corners of the earth to worship together is also a physical and social boundary between Jews who worship at it below the Temple Mount, and Muslims who worship on the Temple Mount. I feel the Kotel almost heaving, reeling from the seismic tensions between Jews and Arabs, struggling to retain not only the earth behind it but to keep peace as well, by keeping us tucked in behind safe boundaries.
The Kotel is a wall, and the Kotel is the world: an endless paradox of separation and togetherness, boundaries and oneness, peace and conflict, the sacred and the profane living in the same space, the same time. And flying above its stones, traveling straight to God’s throne of glory, are words, the tools of creation and destruction given to us by God, who waits to hear what we have done with them.
At the Entrance To the Carmel Market…
A young man, thin, lithe and agile, tap dances skillfully for money to the tunes on his boom box at the entrance to Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market. Friday afternoon here reveals a sea of colorful humanity and insanity, as even the largely secular residents of this city rush about to prepare for Shabbat and the closing of the market stalls for one day. I sit on a bench at the entrance, watching the dancer tap, tap, tap away on his wooden board like a clock tick-tocking too quickly, as he entertains the passersby who appreciatively throw in a few shekels after they clap in admiration.
In my head, I am moving in time with him, shouting to him: “Dance my friend, move swiftly against the tide of despair, the hatred of the nations, the mortal threats. Dance faster and faster, quicken your pace, and quicken the pulse of all who dance with you, this seemingly endless flow of people who are Israel, who know that they must never stop dancing, never stop moving, never stop hoping; for at the moment that they stop, they cease to live!”
He stops tapping, scowls at me and says, “Idiot, I’m not your American Zionist poster boy, so cut the crap. I’m just out here trying to make a buck like everyone else.”
Khaval Al Ha-Z’man
Lior, our group’s bus driver, has the boyish look of a sixteen year old and the swarthy dark skin of his Yemenite ancestry. His appearance is like Israel itself, old and young. To look at him, listen to his soft voice, and appreciate his modest demeanor, you would not know that in Tzahal (The Israel Defense Forces) his job was to operate a critical missile defense system using complex mathematics and computer models, something he cannot and will not say much about.
Because I am fluent in Hebrew, Lior and I converse easily. When I talk about all the great places to see and do in Israel, something about which he knows quite a bit, he greets my enthusiasm with the Hebrew saying, khaval al ha-z’man. Roughly translated, it means, “time’s a-wasting.” It normally is used to express regret that one is running out of time or to push someone else to get moving on your behalf. However, Lior seems to be using the phrase to mean, “I agree, ‘X’ is so cool.” I keep meaning to ask him how this phrase took on a new meaning, but I figure it out on my own: ‘X’ is so cool and so worth making the time for, but khaval al ha-z’man, time is sadly so tight that we can’t do or see everything that interests us.
Perhaps I never get around to asking Lior about what he is saying, because I sense what else this phrase means to Israelis at a deeper level, and I don’t feel right asking him about it. Rightly or wrongly, Israelis have the reputation for being fatalists. Though Israel is a strong, world-class nation, Israelis live with a sense that time is never really on their side, even more than the rest of us do. However, this fatalism does not seem to breed collective despair, as anyone spending time in this turbulent, thriving, energetic country can tell you. Israelis go about their daily business, no less or more meaningfully than the rest of world…but possibly feeling greater compulsion to see more, say more, get more, give more, love more, hate more in less time, for who can know what tomorrow or even the next hour will bring them? Khaval al ha-z’man: we who live outside of Israel don’t really get the sad slippage of time the way that they do.
Khaval al ha-z’man: time’s a-wasting. We grow older, and if we are lucky we will reach seventy or maybe even eighty, as the psalms remind us; who knows if we will even be healthy, wealthy, with it enough to enjoy all the years we are given. For the Jews, being a free people in our own land is a blessing, a miracle, but have each of us tasted that blessing, experienced that miracle? If you support the State of Israel and care for Her, that is wonderful. But to truly know Israel, to be transformed by Israel, you need to be in Israel, even if only for a short period of time. Khaval al ha-z’man: hopefully, Israel will continue to defend herself from her enemies, will find peace with her neighbors, and will live for another thousand years. But you and I will not. Don’t wait to come home until you no longer have the strength to come home. Come to Israel. Khaval al ha-z’man.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
CIRCUMCISION, SEDERS AND IDENTITY
A Dvar Torah for Parshat Bo 5772
The very first seder, about which we read this morning in the Torah, must have been a somewhat uncomfortable affair in more ways than one. Certainly, it was filled with anxiety, as the Israelites consumed the Passover offering in a rush to prepare for the Exodus from Egypt that would happen the next morning, then awoke to the sounds of anguished suffering of their Egyptian neighbors immersed in the plague of the firstborn at midnight. However, the latter part of Exodus, chapter 12, points to what may have been a different source of discomfort, by mentioning different categories of people, men more specifically, who could not consume the Passover offering. These included any non-Israelite, specifically any non-circumcised male such as one’s slave, a resident alien, two categories of employed laborers, and any Israelite who was not circumcised. The Torah makes clear that circumcision is the distinction that determines eligibility for consuming the Passover offering. We might imagine the absurdity of the scene at that first seder in Egypt: households preparing for this major feast before the Lord in anticipation of real freedom, suddenly in an uproar as male celebrants are forced to show their credentials at the door, or to submit to circumcision before they can be part of the celebration. A passage like this likely offends liberal Western sensibilities because it emphasizes exclusivity of membership in the Israelite clan as well as the primitive blood ritual of circumcision, what we call brit milah, as the price to be paid for acquiring membership. Isn’t the seder experience supposed to celebrate the universality of freedom and the struggle against oppression in which all good people are included? Further, why would the Torah demand that a man undergo a ritual such as circumcision in order to be part of what should be a beautiful reenactment of the quest for freedom?
Our contemporary seder is a ritualized re-telling of the Exodus story that has been generously reinterpreted over millennia through the prisms of many different individuals and groups seeking to find their own stories of slavery and freedom in it. Today’s seders, even among plenty of Orthodox Jews, include non-Jewish colleagues, friends, and family for whom this re-telling is often their first encounter with Judaism and the power of the Jewish experience. However, the actual consumption of the ancient Passover offering was an exclusive affair of the Jewish community; its ticket of admission was circumcision. This reflects one major value of Judaism that many people do not like but about which the Torah is unabashed: Jewish identity and community are at times highly particularistic. Further, unlike Christianity whose major criterion of membership is what or how you believe, a major criterion of Jewish membership is how you behave and what you do, including what you do with your body to show that you are part of the Jewish people.
Asserting the distinctiveness of Jewish identity and community has never been an easy thing for the Jews. It has been the major source of anti-Semitism and persecution of our people for many thousands of years, beginning with pagan and early Christian refusals to accept that the Jews have a right to be different. From the time of the Spanish Inquisition all the way through to the development of modern anti-Semitism and Nazism, this same hatred of Jewish distinctiveness took on virulent racial and blood-line overtones: being Jewish wasn’t simply a curse that could be overcome through the abandonment of Judaism, it was an inherent state of imperfection, even pathology, that could never be eradicated without physically destroying the Jewish people.
One of the most telling examples of these enormous challenges to Jewish distinctiveness has been circumcision. When they occupied the land of Israel many centuries ago, the Greeks derided this Jewish practice as a barbaric mutilation of the body that stood in stark contrast to the Hellenistic emphasis on the body’s perfection as living sculpture. Eager to fit in at the Greek gymnasium, many Jewish men of that time sought to hide this mark on their bodies, while others practiced it even under the threat of persecution and death at the hands of some Greek authorities. Later rabbis living in the land of Israel under the Romans’ occupation energetically taught their fellow Jews that circumcision is what makes the body beautiful, rather than what the dominant culture asserts is beautiful, because this is what God asks of us.
In our time, this age-old debate over circumcision has taken on a very destructive tone. Anti-circumcision activists, under the cover of child advocacy, have turned their guns on the freedom of Jews and Muslims to practice our religions by attempting to put anti-circumcision laws on city and statewide ballots across the country. They argue mostly that circumcision is mutilation no different from mutilation forced upon young girls in developing nations. Further, since there is no evidence that circumcision has any medical benefits, all it does it cruelly rob a person of full sexual fulfillment in his adult life; a person is perfect as he is from birth and not in need of such barbaric procedures. These arguments are both old and new, but they are all, in my opinion, disingenuous, and some are motivated by pure bigotry. Brit milah is a profoundly embodied sign of a new Jewish boy’s relationship with God, Jewish history and our people, as the Torah shows us in numerous passages. It bears no real resemblance to female genital mutilation which is used in some cultures to utterly, brutally control women’s sexuality and lives. Further, the argument that circumcision robs men of their sexual capacities wrongly assumes that this can somehow be measured and tested. It obsessively focuses on the anatomy and physiology of a body part as the exclusive determinant of sexuality, an offensively reductionistic way of thinking about relationships, love and desire, and it sends a crude, insidious message that Jewish men are somehow weak and disabled by virtue of their Jewishness. Finally, though circumcision’s benefits are not medically undisputed, there is a body of research indicating that it may be beneficial. However, even if this were not the case, it would be religiously irrelevant: Jews and Muslims don’t circumcise their kids for medical reasons, we do this because this is how we connect to God, history, peoplehood, our values, and our identities.
Obviously, not everyone who opposes circumcision is an anti-Semite, and I respect any Jewish family’s right not to perform brit milah on their own children, as long as they don’t try to tell me or my community what to do as religious people. However, I would ask them the following questions before they make such a decision. Is your decision motivated by a well-thought out opposition to brit milah based upon careful study of its history and meaning? Are you opposed to brit milah on the basis of misinformation that often terrorizes parents of newborns into believing that they are hurting their kids? Do you really want one of the most basic rites of passage into the Jewish family, whose power is precisely its primitiveness, to be a mere matter of choice? Can you stay open to the fact that, within the bounds of safety and parental responsibility, not every act and ceremony needs to be rational or fit the dominant culture’s demands? That religion is sometimes about leaps of faith of a whole community into a different way of living in the world, one that lends a depth of meaning to its adherents’ lives? Do you recognize that as a Jewish family the most potent way for you to be a part of the world is at times to live apart from the world, to embrace the universal by living proudly within what makes us particular?
Like the Passover offering, brit milah is an uncomfortable yet powerful reminder that to be Jewish is to choose to be more than just an individual, it is about choosing to be part of a sacred people called forth by God with a huge mission to heal the world, throughout the dimensions of time and space. It is one permanent symbol that helps us to literally embody that mission in our lives as individuals and as a community.
The very first seder, about which we read this morning in the Torah, must have been a somewhat uncomfortable affair in more ways than one. Certainly, it was filled with anxiety, as the Israelites consumed the Passover offering in a rush to prepare for the Exodus from Egypt that would happen the next morning, then awoke to the sounds of anguished suffering of their Egyptian neighbors immersed in the plague of the firstborn at midnight. However, the latter part of Exodus, chapter 12, points to what may have been a different source of discomfort, by mentioning different categories of people, men more specifically, who could not consume the Passover offering. These included any non-Israelite, specifically any non-circumcised male such as one’s slave, a resident alien, two categories of employed laborers, and any Israelite who was not circumcised. The Torah makes clear that circumcision is the distinction that determines eligibility for consuming the Passover offering. We might imagine the absurdity of the scene at that first seder in Egypt: households preparing for this major feast before the Lord in anticipation of real freedom, suddenly in an uproar as male celebrants are forced to show their credentials at the door, or to submit to circumcision before they can be part of the celebration. A passage like this likely offends liberal Western sensibilities because it emphasizes exclusivity of membership in the Israelite clan as well as the primitive blood ritual of circumcision, what we call brit milah, as the price to be paid for acquiring membership. Isn’t the seder experience supposed to celebrate the universality of freedom and the struggle against oppression in which all good people are included? Further, why would the Torah demand that a man undergo a ritual such as circumcision in order to be part of what should be a beautiful reenactment of the quest for freedom?
Our contemporary seder is a ritualized re-telling of the Exodus story that has been generously reinterpreted over millennia through the prisms of many different individuals and groups seeking to find their own stories of slavery and freedom in it. Today’s seders, even among plenty of Orthodox Jews, include non-Jewish colleagues, friends, and family for whom this re-telling is often their first encounter with Judaism and the power of the Jewish experience. However, the actual consumption of the ancient Passover offering was an exclusive affair of the Jewish community; its ticket of admission was circumcision. This reflects one major value of Judaism that many people do not like but about which the Torah is unabashed: Jewish identity and community are at times highly particularistic. Further, unlike Christianity whose major criterion of membership is what or how you believe, a major criterion of Jewish membership is how you behave and what you do, including what you do with your body to show that you are part of the Jewish people.
Asserting the distinctiveness of Jewish identity and community has never been an easy thing for the Jews. It has been the major source of anti-Semitism and persecution of our people for many thousands of years, beginning with pagan and early Christian refusals to accept that the Jews have a right to be different. From the time of the Spanish Inquisition all the way through to the development of modern anti-Semitism and Nazism, this same hatred of Jewish distinctiveness took on virulent racial and blood-line overtones: being Jewish wasn’t simply a curse that could be overcome through the abandonment of Judaism, it was an inherent state of imperfection, even pathology, that could never be eradicated without physically destroying the Jewish people.
One of the most telling examples of these enormous challenges to Jewish distinctiveness has been circumcision. When they occupied the land of Israel many centuries ago, the Greeks derided this Jewish practice as a barbaric mutilation of the body that stood in stark contrast to the Hellenistic emphasis on the body’s perfection as living sculpture. Eager to fit in at the Greek gymnasium, many Jewish men of that time sought to hide this mark on their bodies, while others practiced it even under the threat of persecution and death at the hands of some Greek authorities. Later rabbis living in the land of Israel under the Romans’ occupation energetically taught their fellow Jews that circumcision is what makes the body beautiful, rather than what the dominant culture asserts is beautiful, because this is what God asks of us.
In our time, this age-old debate over circumcision has taken on a very destructive tone. Anti-circumcision activists, under the cover of child advocacy, have turned their guns on the freedom of Jews and Muslims to practice our religions by attempting to put anti-circumcision laws on city and statewide ballots across the country. They argue mostly that circumcision is mutilation no different from mutilation forced upon young girls in developing nations. Further, since there is no evidence that circumcision has any medical benefits, all it does it cruelly rob a person of full sexual fulfillment in his adult life; a person is perfect as he is from birth and not in need of such barbaric procedures. These arguments are both old and new, but they are all, in my opinion, disingenuous, and some are motivated by pure bigotry. Brit milah is a profoundly embodied sign of a new Jewish boy’s relationship with God, Jewish history and our people, as the Torah shows us in numerous passages. It bears no real resemblance to female genital mutilation which is used in some cultures to utterly, brutally control women’s sexuality and lives. Further, the argument that circumcision robs men of their sexual capacities wrongly assumes that this can somehow be measured and tested. It obsessively focuses on the anatomy and physiology of a body part as the exclusive determinant of sexuality, an offensively reductionistic way of thinking about relationships, love and desire, and it sends a crude, insidious message that Jewish men are somehow weak and disabled by virtue of their Jewishness. Finally, though circumcision’s benefits are not medically undisputed, there is a body of research indicating that it may be beneficial. However, even if this were not the case, it would be religiously irrelevant: Jews and Muslims don’t circumcise their kids for medical reasons, we do this because this is how we connect to God, history, peoplehood, our values, and our identities.
Obviously, not everyone who opposes circumcision is an anti-Semite, and I respect any Jewish family’s right not to perform brit milah on their own children, as long as they don’t try to tell me or my community what to do as religious people. However, I would ask them the following questions before they make such a decision. Is your decision motivated by a well-thought out opposition to brit milah based upon careful study of its history and meaning? Are you opposed to brit milah on the basis of misinformation that often terrorizes parents of newborns into believing that they are hurting their kids? Do you really want one of the most basic rites of passage into the Jewish family, whose power is precisely its primitiveness, to be a mere matter of choice? Can you stay open to the fact that, within the bounds of safety and parental responsibility, not every act and ceremony needs to be rational or fit the dominant culture’s demands? That religion is sometimes about leaps of faith of a whole community into a different way of living in the world, one that lends a depth of meaning to its adherents’ lives? Do you recognize that as a Jewish family the most potent way for you to be a part of the world is at times to live apart from the world, to embrace the universal by living proudly within what makes us particular?
Like the Passover offering, brit milah is an uncomfortable yet powerful reminder that to be Jewish is to choose to be more than just an individual, it is about choosing to be part of a sacred people called forth by God with a huge mission to heal the world, throughout the dimensions of time and space. It is one permanent symbol that helps us to literally embody that mission in our lives as individuals and as a community.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
STALKING TZIPPORAH
Dvar Torah For Parshat Shmot 5772.
You know the old sexist saw that behind every great man is a great woman? One way to think about Moses whom we met once again in the Torah this morning, is that behind him and his success stand a number of even greater women; some of them are never given names by the Torah, and almost all of them can only carry out their missions through subterfuge, since they lack the power of men in their society. The first two chapters of Exodus offer us a bonanza of these incredibly courageous women who toil quietly and subversively to resist Pharoah’s genocidal decree and to save Moses, the savior of Israel. Whether or not they are Hebrew midwives or non-Jewish midwives to the Hebrews, Shifrah and Puah exploit their expertise and their proximity to women in labor to save innocent children from being murdered; Pharaoh’s daughter exploits her position of power to violate her father’s laws, as she knowingly brings this Hebrew baby into the royal palace and raises him right under her father’s nose, even to the point of giving him a name; Moses’ as-yet unnamed sister intervenes with Pharaoh’s daughter by offering her their mother as a wet nurse to feed and care for baby Moses. All of these women enter a conspiracy of compassion against Pharaoh and the Egyptian state, using their intelligence and love for this one child and for all the children at risk, to disrupt the apparatus of a terrorist regime. The rabbis of the Talmud are so impressed by the role of women in these Torah narratives that they tell all sorts of tales about how all the Hebrew women encouraged their despondent husbands to not lose hope or the desire to bear more children. The Talmud even declares that women should not be exempted from the obligation of being part of the Pesach seder - a time –bound, positive commandment from which Jewish women would normally be exempted according to Jewish law. They reason historically that women were also active participants in the redemption from Egypt, and they too must be part of the seder experience.
Because of all the courageous, quick-thinking behavior of these heroines, Tzipporah’s arrival on the scene in this Torah portion stands out as an enigma. She and her sisters are portrayed initially as shepherdesses- in-distress whom Moses the Egyptian stranger must save from the male thugs hassling them at the local well. When Reuel, her father, questions her about why she did not offer Moses hospitality after his brave act of kindness, we get the feeling that she is a somewhat passive, perhaps not-too-bright eldest daughter, or that she is perhaps a rather young girl. We read that Moses marries Tzipporah, in accordance with ancient near eastern marriage laws requiring the eldest daughter to be married first. After that, all we are told is that Moses takes leave of his father-in-law to return to Egypt on a mission from God to redeem his people, and that he takes Tzipporah and their son, Gershom with him into the heart of the danger. We never hear about Tzipporah’s reaction to her husband’s decision, and later rabbinic writers have to supply an imaginative dialogue in which her father tells his son-in-law that putting his wife and child in the way of harm is a really bad idea. Later rabbinic interpretations of the Torah suggest that Moses becomes celibate as he gets closer to God during the forty years’ wandering in the desert, thus presumably leaving Tzipporah in a miserable married state with an emotionally and sexually unavailable spouse. A very late midrashic source even imagines Tzipporah lamenting to Miriam, her sister-in-law, about the terrible situation of the wives of communal leaders.
It seems that only one biblical story, an extremely strange and elliptical one, offers us a much more forceful, complex view of who Tzipporah really is. Turn back with me to this morning’s Torah portion in Humash Etz Hayyim, pages 336-337, verses 24-26:
At a night encampment on the way, the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him. So Tzipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when He (God) let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”
Everything about this bizarre, chilling story hints at even more ancient tales of the angry God or gods being warded off by blood, which serves as an apotropaic, a magical ritual or device that protects people from evil. For a parallel example, think about the blood of the first Pesach offering being splashed on the doors of the Israelites to ward off the impending plague of the firstborn. In our scene, at least as it is understood by many commentators, Moses has failed to perform brit milah, circumcision, on his son, who is now presumably the one imperiled by God’s desire to kill him. Circumcision is the sign of the covenant, and without it a person cannot be part of the covenanted community.
A lot is unclear in these verses: is Moses in danger or is their son in danger? Does Tzipporah take the foreskin and touch it to Moses’ leg or to their son’s leg? What is a bridegroom of blood, and who does it actually refer to, Moses or the child? What is very clear is that Tzipporah not only acts in this crisis situation, she acts quickly and decisively to stop God from hurting her family. How astounding it is that only Tzipporah is named here, along with God, with no men intervening. She and God are alone in a life-and-death battle that requires the actual drawing of blood, not for death but for life. Even more astounding is that Tzipporah takes the radical initiative of performing a brit milah, a religious circumcision, one of the most sacred, mysterious Jewish rituals that focuses exclusively and publicly on the religious identities and power of Jewish men. The Rabbis take this mysterious biblical tale and expand it into an even wilder tale in which Tzipporah sees God’s angel swallow Moses, from his head to his genitalia, and she then realizes that her family is in mortal danger because of Moses’ dereliction in carrying out the mitzvah of circumcision on their son, a mitzvah she values highly.
This portrayal of Tzipporah is refreshingly paradoxical: she is deeply faithful to her adopted religion, including its male-centered rituals and leadership, yet within that framework she is an aggressive advocate for her family, she takes bold religious initiatives, and she fights openly with God! Though they make many patriarchal assumptions and rules about women’s status, the Torah and its rabbinic interpreters recognize Tzipporah’s public activism as a normative role model for traditional Jewish women. Sadly, this model is being seriously threatened in parts of the Jewish world today, as Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy (in Hebrew, Haredi) grows increasingly belligerent and misogynistic. Using Jewish laws of modesty as an excuse, some rabbinic authorities and lay leaders here and especially in Israel have intensified their campaign to utterly segregate men and women in ways frightfully reminiscent of Jim Crow laws in the south. These have included sex-segregated private bus lines that are publicly franchised by New York City in Brooklyn and public bus lines in Israel that are illegally segregated in religious neighborhoods. In both circumstances, women are literally relegated to the back of the buses. Another recent example of brutal sex segregation was the sickening harassment of 8 year old Naamah Margolis of the Israeli city of Bet Shemesh, who was spat upon and verbally abused as she walked to the new Orthodox girl's yeshivah that she attends in that city. Her harassers, members of a violent Haredi faction, claim that she and other girls were not dressing modestly enough to be allowed to walk in public. The outcry from all segments of the Israeli street, including some in the Haredi community, as well as community leaders and politicians, has so far been significant, and peaceful protests against the encroachment upon women's rights -and upon democratic protections- within Israeli society have been growing. Still, such brazen public attempts at repressing women are chilling.
The Haredi community has never supported the religious equality of men and women; it is not egalitarian, and it is not our right to tell Haredi Jews that they must practice Judaism as we do. However, what I am describing is not traditional religious practice, but the perversion of Jewish law in an effort to forcefully silence the public voices and presence of women, even if American and Israeli law and culture forbid someone from doing so. Particularly in Israel, where aggressive Haredi political parties often have their fragile government coalitions by the throat, the growing repression of women is encroaching upon public space and the rest of Israel’s citizenry. This adds to an already contentious relationship between religious and secular Jews around a wide variety of issues that engender deep resentment and divide Israeli society. We are not Israeli citizens, yet as Jews, Zionists, and supporters of democracy, we have a genuine vested interest in helping all women in the State of Israel to live freely and without fear. The increased public repression of women is one canary in the coal mine of Israeli democracy that is facing increasing challenges from political and religious ultra-rightists in the Israeli government and religious community. Under the guises of security and religiosity they are slowly eroding basic protections for women, minorities, and those with differing political view points. This is not good for Israel as a democracy. Yet it is also not good for Israel as a young, vibrant society. Israel needs Shifrah and Puah, the daughter of Pharaoh, Miriam and Yocheved: women who have the strength and the courage to work with men and challenge men to continue to build a state and a Jewish people founded upon justice. Most of all, Israel, the Jewish people and the world need Tzipporah: women for whom Judaism matters vitally, and who are also not afraid to speak their minds and act forcefully in behalf of others in the midst of crisis, when the gravity of the hour calls for it.
You know the old sexist saw that behind every great man is a great woman? One way to think about Moses whom we met once again in the Torah this morning, is that behind him and his success stand a number of even greater women; some of them are never given names by the Torah, and almost all of them can only carry out their missions through subterfuge, since they lack the power of men in their society. The first two chapters of Exodus offer us a bonanza of these incredibly courageous women who toil quietly and subversively to resist Pharoah’s genocidal decree and to save Moses, the savior of Israel. Whether or not they are Hebrew midwives or non-Jewish midwives to the Hebrews, Shifrah and Puah exploit their expertise and their proximity to women in labor to save innocent children from being murdered; Pharaoh’s daughter exploits her position of power to violate her father’s laws, as she knowingly brings this Hebrew baby into the royal palace and raises him right under her father’s nose, even to the point of giving him a name; Moses’ as-yet unnamed sister intervenes with Pharaoh’s daughter by offering her their mother as a wet nurse to feed and care for baby Moses. All of these women enter a conspiracy of compassion against Pharaoh and the Egyptian state, using their intelligence and love for this one child and for all the children at risk, to disrupt the apparatus of a terrorist regime. The rabbis of the Talmud are so impressed by the role of women in these Torah narratives that they tell all sorts of tales about how all the Hebrew women encouraged their despondent husbands to not lose hope or the desire to bear more children. The Talmud even declares that women should not be exempted from the obligation of being part of the Pesach seder - a time –bound, positive commandment from which Jewish women would normally be exempted according to Jewish law. They reason historically that women were also active participants in the redemption from Egypt, and they too must be part of the seder experience.
Because of all the courageous, quick-thinking behavior of these heroines, Tzipporah’s arrival on the scene in this Torah portion stands out as an enigma. She and her sisters are portrayed initially as shepherdesses- in-distress whom Moses the Egyptian stranger must save from the male thugs hassling them at the local well. When Reuel, her father, questions her about why she did not offer Moses hospitality after his brave act of kindness, we get the feeling that she is a somewhat passive, perhaps not-too-bright eldest daughter, or that she is perhaps a rather young girl. We read that Moses marries Tzipporah, in accordance with ancient near eastern marriage laws requiring the eldest daughter to be married first. After that, all we are told is that Moses takes leave of his father-in-law to return to Egypt on a mission from God to redeem his people, and that he takes Tzipporah and their son, Gershom with him into the heart of the danger. We never hear about Tzipporah’s reaction to her husband’s decision, and later rabbinic writers have to supply an imaginative dialogue in which her father tells his son-in-law that putting his wife and child in the way of harm is a really bad idea. Later rabbinic interpretations of the Torah suggest that Moses becomes celibate as he gets closer to God during the forty years’ wandering in the desert, thus presumably leaving Tzipporah in a miserable married state with an emotionally and sexually unavailable spouse. A very late midrashic source even imagines Tzipporah lamenting to Miriam, her sister-in-law, about the terrible situation of the wives of communal leaders.
It seems that only one biblical story, an extremely strange and elliptical one, offers us a much more forceful, complex view of who Tzipporah really is. Turn back with me to this morning’s Torah portion in Humash Etz Hayyim, pages 336-337, verses 24-26:
At a night encampment on the way, the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him. So Tzipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when He (God) let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”
Everything about this bizarre, chilling story hints at even more ancient tales of the angry God or gods being warded off by blood, which serves as an apotropaic, a magical ritual or device that protects people from evil. For a parallel example, think about the blood of the first Pesach offering being splashed on the doors of the Israelites to ward off the impending plague of the firstborn. In our scene, at least as it is understood by many commentators, Moses has failed to perform brit milah, circumcision, on his son, who is now presumably the one imperiled by God’s desire to kill him. Circumcision is the sign of the covenant, and without it a person cannot be part of the covenanted community.
A lot is unclear in these verses: is Moses in danger or is their son in danger? Does Tzipporah take the foreskin and touch it to Moses’ leg or to their son’s leg? What is a bridegroom of blood, and who does it actually refer to, Moses or the child? What is very clear is that Tzipporah not only acts in this crisis situation, she acts quickly and decisively to stop God from hurting her family. How astounding it is that only Tzipporah is named here, along with God, with no men intervening. She and God are alone in a life-and-death battle that requires the actual drawing of blood, not for death but for life. Even more astounding is that Tzipporah takes the radical initiative of performing a brit milah, a religious circumcision, one of the most sacred, mysterious Jewish rituals that focuses exclusively and publicly on the religious identities and power of Jewish men. The Rabbis take this mysterious biblical tale and expand it into an even wilder tale in which Tzipporah sees God’s angel swallow Moses, from his head to his genitalia, and she then realizes that her family is in mortal danger because of Moses’ dereliction in carrying out the mitzvah of circumcision on their son, a mitzvah she values highly.
This portrayal of Tzipporah is refreshingly paradoxical: she is deeply faithful to her adopted religion, including its male-centered rituals and leadership, yet within that framework she is an aggressive advocate for her family, she takes bold religious initiatives, and she fights openly with God! Though they make many patriarchal assumptions and rules about women’s status, the Torah and its rabbinic interpreters recognize Tzipporah’s public activism as a normative role model for traditional Jewish women. Sadly, this model is being seriously threatened in parts of the Jewish world today, as Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy (in Hebrew, Haredi) grows increasingly belligerent and misogynistic. Using Jewish laws of modesty as an excuse, some rabbinic authorities and lay leaders here and especially in Israel have intensified their campaign to utterly segregate men and women in ways frightfully reminiscent of Jim Crow laws in the south. These have included sex-segregated private bus lines that are publicly franchised by New York City in Brooklyn and public bus lines in Israel that are illegally segregated in religious neighborhoods. In both circumstances, women are literally relegated to the back of the buses. Another recent example of brutal sex segregation was the sickening harassment of 8 year old Naamah Margolis of the Israeli city of Bet Shemesh, who was spat upon and verbally abused as she walked to the new Orthodox girl's yeshivah that she attends in that city. Her harassers, members of a violent Haredi faction, claim that she and other girls were not dressing modestly enough to be allowed to walk in public. The outcry from all segments of the Israeli street, including some in the Haredi community, as well as community leaders and politicians, has so far been significant, and peaceful protests against the encroachment upon women's rights -and upon democratic protections- within Israeli society have been growing. Still, such brazen public attempts at repressing women are chilling.
The Haredi community has never supported the religious equality of men and women; it is not egalitarian, and it is not our right to tell Haredi Jews that they must practice Judaism as we do. However, what I am describing is not traditional religious practice, but the perversion of Jewish law in an effort to forcefully silence the public voices and presence of women, even if American and Israeli law and culture forbid someone from doing so. Particularly in Israel, where aggressive Haredi political parties often have their fragile government coalitions by the throat, the growing repression of women is encroaching upon public space and the rest of Israel’s citizenry. This adds to an already contentious relationship between religious and secular Jews around a wide variety of issues that engender deep resentment and divide Israeli society. We are not Israeli citizens, yet as Jews, Zionists, and supporters of democracy, we have a genuine vested interest in helping all women in the State of Israel to live freely and without fear. The increased public repression of women is one canary in the coal mine of Israeli democracy that is facing increasing challenges from political and religious ultra-rightists in the Israeli government and religious community. Under the guises of security and religiosity they are slowly eroding basic protections for women, minorities, and those with differing political view points. This is not good for Israel as a democracy. Yet it is also not good for Israel as a young, vibrant society. Israel needs Shifrah and Puah, the daughter of Pharaoh, Miriam and Yocheved: women who have the strength and the courage to work with men and challenge men to continue to build a state and a Jewish people founded upon justice. Most of all, Israel, the Jewish people and the world need Tzipporah: women for whom Judaism matters vitally, and who are also not afraid to speak their minds and act forcefully in behalf of others in the midst of crisis, when the gravity of the hour calls for it.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
CHICKEN LITTLE, FALSE PROPHETS, COMMON SENSE AND THE RULE OF LAW.
Dvar Torah For Parshat Reeh, 5771.
Do you remember the story of chicken little? According to Wikipedia, “There are several Western versions of the story, of which the best-known concerns a chick that believes the sky is falling when an acorn falls on its head. The chick decides to tell the King and on its journey meets other animals which join it in the quest. After this point, there are many endings. In the most familiar, a fox invites them to its lair and there eats them all.” The story is actually listed in one of the folklore indexes in the category of world-wide folktales –in this case a fable- that make fun of paranoia and mass hysteria .
I have been thinking about Chicken Little as I’ve read Parshat Reeh, in particular its warnings about false prophets. Let’s read what Deuteronomy has to say about them, Humash Etz Hayyim, pages 1068-1069:
If there appears among you a prophet or a dream-diviner and he gives you a sign or portent, saying, “Let us follow and worship another god” whom you have not experienced; even if the sign or portent that he named to you comes true, do not heed the words of that prophet or that dream diviner. For the Lord your God is testing you to see whether you really love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul. Follow none but the Lord your God and revere none but Him; observe his commandments alone, and heed only his orders; worship none but him and hold fast to Him.
Far from merely warning us away from disloyalty to God, the Torah is also warning us not to engage in chicken-little style behavior: that state of being instantly smitten with something, some idea or someone we encounter, even something, some idea, or someone whose pronouncements about truth are so impressive as to seem absolutely definitive. We need to guided by what the great Torah commentator, Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra, refers to as shikul ha-daat, the patient, sober use of reason and good, common sense. Even if a prophet calling us to worship another god produces the promised sign or portent as proof of his legitimacy, we should still not be fooled into believing him, because his claim is still at odds with what we know about God and truth.
This prohibition that Moses gives to the Israelites is true to the form and content of Deuteronomy: it emphasizes absolute loyalty to the one, universal God, even when the faithful person is faced with seemingly compelling evidence to the contrary from a charismatic figure who can back up his or her claims with miracles. Deuteronomy spends a great deal of energy appealing to the people’s good sense and reason, constantly reminding them that they personally experienced God’s redemptive power during the Exodus from Egypt, as well as God’s appearance to them to give them the Torah at Mount Sinai. Signs and portents that support the idolatrous claims of a prophet or diviner might be wondrously seductive, but they are merely tests by God to determine the people’s fidelity to God.
This last argument at first glance feels like a bit of circular reasoning: follow God only, not a false prophet; how do I know he’s a false prophet? He tells you to worship gods besides the God of Israel; but he’s given me signs and wonders that prove his point that I should follow other gods; no, his proof is really a test by the one true God to determine your loyalty; but how do I know it’s merely a test from God, and not a real sign from that prophet? Because that prophet is telling you that you should worship other gods, besides the one true God, so he must not be telling the truth, and his signs must be God’s test, not real signs.
However, we should not be fooled by what appears to be mere circular reasoning. What this passage of the Torah is warning us not to do is mistake the bells and whistles of charisma for the not always popular appeal of reason, and loyalty to the sober boundaries of Torah as determined by the ongoing process of interpretation of a living faith community. Dynamic personalities and emotional appeal can make a huge difference in our lives by inspiring us and giving us meaningful narratives by which to live. However, they are no replacement for truth arrived at through the use of reason, the discovery of fact, and the rule of law. It is far too easy for a demagogue to use all kinds of verbal and emotional sleights of hand –what the Torah referred to as signs and portents- to make an impressive point that convinces people to follow him or her, despite the extremism of his or her claims. The balancing of personal faith with personal reason is a very difficult challenge, but it is the only way to keep faith from degenerating into spiritual fascism and self-destruction, and to keep reason from degenerating into soul-deadening, inhumane rigidity.
How do these teachings apply to us? The presidential election is a little over a year away, and already a whole group of prophet-wanna-be’s are crowding the presidential candidate playing field, each of them hawking his or her form of signs and portents. Each will campaign in poetry and govern in prose, a conceit which we are used to, and which we largely accept as the price to be paid for a free electoral process and a complex system of checks and balances. Each will make near-prophetic claims about what ails America and the world, then make sweeping pronouncements about what he or she will do to solve our problems. To paraphrase our Torah portion: warning, America, we are being tested: can we resist the apparatus of America’s false prophecy arsenal-- the prettily packaged promises, the telegenic shots of baby-kissing shape shifters who keep crafting their messages to the latest voting bases, and the shameless use of obscene wealth to crush opponents in elections? Can we see past the false prophecies of jingoistic fear mongering, of race baiting? Can we curb our own idolatrous impulse to set aside the sober search for truth and fact out of a desperate need to be coddled by the soothing words of people who tell us what we want to hear, and not what we need to hear? Can listen past the smoke-and-mirrors to discover the ideas and leaderships qualities that will make a great leader for the future?
These are frightening days for America and the world, and as Chicken Little would have said, it feels at times like the sky is falling. Precisely when things feel this way is when the Torah raises its warning to us about false prophets, reminding us that it will take all of our moral, spiritual, and intellectual courage not be taken in by their impressive signs and portents. We will need to ask tough, thoughtful questions about the claims of those who rise up among us, and who might speak charismatically in the name of truth, yet whose claims turn out to be nothing more than calls to us to worship false gods of hysteria or complacency that cannot save us. The Torah of the one true God reminds us: follow none but the Lord your God. Pursue the truth and the values that make us Jews worthy of being God’s people, and that make us Americans worthy of our nation’s legacy.
Do you remember the story of chicken little? According to Wikipedia, “There are several Western versions of the story, of which the best-known concerns a chick that believes the sky is falling when an acorn falls on its head. The chick decides to tell the King and on its journey meets other animals which join it in the quest. After this point, there are many endings. In the most familiar, a fox invites them to its lair and there eats them all.” The story is actually listed in one of the folklore indexes in the category of world-wide folktales –in this case a fable- that make fun of paranoia and mass hysteria .
I have been thinking about Chicken Little as I’ve read Parshat Reeh, in particular its warnings about false prophets. Let’s read what Deuteronomy has to say about them, Humash Etz Hayyim, pages 1068-1069:
If there appears among you a prophet or a dream-diviner and he gives you a sign or portent, saying, “Let us follow and worship another god” whom you have not experienced; even if the sign or portent that he named to you comes true, do not heed the words of that prophet or that dream diviner. For the Lord your God is testing you to see whether you really love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul. Follow none but the Lord your God and revere none but Him; observe his commandments alone, and heed only his orders; worship none but him and hold fast to Him.
Far from merely warning us away from disloyalty to God, the Torah is also warning us not to engage in chicken-little style behavior: that state of being instantly smitten with something, some idea or someone we encounter, even something, some idea, or someone whose pronouncements about truth are so impressive as to seem absolutely definitive. We need to guided by what the great Torah commentator, Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra, refers to as shikul ha-daat, the patient, sober use of reason and good, common sense. Even if a prophet calling us to worship another god produces the promised sign or portent as proof of his legitimacy, we should still not be fooled into believing him, because his claim is still at odds with what we know about God and truth.
This prohibition that Moses gives to the Israelites is true to the form and content of Deuteronomy: it emphasizes absolute loyalty to the one, universal God, even when the faithful person is faced with seemingly compelling evidence to the contrary from a charismatic figure who can back up his or her claims with miracles. Deuteronomy spends a great deal of energy appealing to the people’s good sense and reason, constantly reminding them that they personally experienced God’s redemptive power during the Exodus from Egypt, as well as God’s appearance to them to give them the Torah at Mount Sinai. Signs and portents that support the idolatrous claims of a prophet or diviner might be wondrously seductive, but they are merely tests by God to determine the people’s fidelity to God.
This last argument at first glance feels like a bit of circular reasoning: follow God only, not a false prophet; how do I know he’s a false prophet? He tells you to worship gods besides the God of Israel; but he’s given me signs and wonders that prove his point that I should follow other gods; no, his proof is really a test by the one true God to determine your loyalty; but how do I know it’s merely a test from God, and not a real sign from that prophet? Because that prophet is telling you that you should worship other gods, besides the one true God, so he must not be telling the truth, and his signs must be God’s test, not real signs.
However, we should not be fooled by what appears to be mere circular reasoning. What this passage of the Torah is warning us not to do is mistake the bells and whistles of charisma for the not always popular appeal of reason, and loyalty to the sober boundaries of Torah as determined by the ongoing process of interpretation of a living faith community. Dynamic personalities and emotional appeal can make a huge difference in our lives by inspiring us and giving us meaningful narratives by which to live. However, they are no replacement for truth arrived at through the use of reason, the discovery of fact, and the rule of law. It is far too easy for a demagogue to use all kinds of verbal and emotional sleights of hand –what the Torah referred to as signs and portents- to make an impressive point that convinces people to follow him or her, despite the extremism of his or her claims. The balancing of personal faith with personal reason is a very difficult challenge, but it is the only way to keep faith from degenerating into spiritual fascism and self-destruction, and to keep reason from degenerating into soul-deadening, inhumane rigidity.
How do these teachings apply to us? The presidential election is a little over a year away, and already a whole group of prophet-wanna-be’s are crowding the presidential candidate playing field, each of them hawking his or her form of signs and portents. Each will campaign in poetry and govern in prose, a conceit which we are used to, and which we largely accept as the price to be paid for a free electoral process and a complex system of checks and balances. Each will make near-prophetic claims about what ails America and the world, then make sweeping pronouncements about what he or she will do to solve our problems. To paraphrase our Torah portion: warning, America, we are being tested: can we resist the apparatus of America’s false prophecy arsenal-- the prettily packaged promises, the telegenic shots of baby-kissing shape shifters who keep crafting their messages to the latest voting bases, and the shameless use of obscene wealth to crush opponents in elections? Can we see past the false prophecies of jingoistic fear mongering, of race baiting? Can we curb our own idolatrous impulse to set aside the sober search for truth and fact out of a desperate need to be coddled by the soothing words of people who tell us what we want to hear, and not what we need to hear? Can listen past the smoke-and-mirrors to discover the ideas and leaderships qualities that will make a great leader for the future?
These are frightening days for America and the world, and as Chicken Little would have said, it feels at times like the sky is falling. Precisely when things feel this way is when the Torah raises its warning to us about false prophets, reminding us that it will take all of our moral, spiritual, and intellectual courage not be taken in by their impressive signs and portents. We will need to ask tough, thoughtful questions about the claims of those who rise up among us, and who might speak charismatically in the name of truth, yet whose claims turn out to be nothing more than calls to us to worship false gods of hysteria or complacency that cannot save us. The Torah of the one true God reminds us: follow none but the Lord your God. Pursue the truth and the values that make us Jews worthy of being God’s people, and that make us Americans worthy of our nation’s legacy.
THE MEANING OF OUR WANDERINGS
In Torah portion Ekev, as we go more deeply into Moses’ second speech to the Israelites prior to their entering Canaan, look carefully at how he explains to the people the meaning of their having wandered in the desert for forty years. In Deuteronomy, chapter 8, Moses makes clear what God’s intent was: to test the people’s faith by simultaneously subjecting them to hardships and supporting them. God, Moses tells them, was like a parent disciplining his child, constantly refining their spiritual resilience and clarifying their consciousness of the true source of their blessings. Some of my students and I were stunned when we recently studied this portion in comparison with Numbers, chapter 14. There, God berates the Israelites for their faithlessness and their attempt to return to Egypt, due to their fear-filled refusal to try to conquer the promised land. God declares explicitly that the generation of former slaves would die in the desert, while their free-born children would possess the promised land after the whole slave generation had died out over a period of forty years of wandering.
Look at the contrast between these two explanations of the same event. God declares that the forty year wandering was decreed by God out of anger, as punishment for Israelite intransigence. Moses later reads the history of the forty year wandering in a radically different way: it was a form of spiritual discipline imposed by a loving God upon this people that needed to grow up spiritually and emotionally. Interestingly enough, Moses explanation is followed by his command to them that when they enter the land and enjoy it to the fullest, they will thank and bless God for all of it: an even more emphatic way of saying that their wanderings were a teaching tool for developing in them a sense of appreciation and gratitude.
Which version explaining the forty year wandering of the people is correct? From the Israelites’ back-looking perspective, perhaps both. God did punish the people for their rebellious intransigence, but God also wanted to refine the people’s understanding of where their support and blessings truly come from. Moses seems to be telling the people and us that we read our lives in many different ways. The goal of a cultivated spiritual perspective on life is twofold: to look with maturity at the reality of the hardships we experience, without pretending them away. At the same time, we try to interpret those hardships and challenges in ways that help us to form a meaningful appreciation of our experiences, what we learn from them, and how we grow in compassion as a result of them.
Look at the contrast between these two explanations of the same event. God declares that the forty year wandering was decreed by God out of anger, as punishment for Israelite intransigence. Moses later reads the history of the forty year wandering in a radically different way: it was a form of spiritual discipline imposed by a loving God upon this people that needed to grow up spiritually and emotionally. Interestingly enough, Moses explanation is followed by his command to them that when they enter the land and enjoy it to the fullest, they will thank and bless God for all of it: an even more emphatic way of saying that their wanderings were a teaching tool for developing in them a sense of appreciation and gratitude.
Which version explaining the forty year wandering of the people is correct? From the Israelites’ back-looking perspective, perhaps both. God did punish the people for their rebellious intransigence, but God also wanted to refine the people’s understanding of where their support and blessings truly come from. Moses seems to be telling the people and us that we read our lives in many different ways. The goal of a cultivated spiritual perspective on life is twofold: to look with maturity at the reality of the hardships we experience, without pretending them away. At the same time, we try to interpret those hardships and challenges in ways that help us to form a meaningful appreciation of our experiences, what we learn from them, and how we grow in compassion as a result of them.
Monday, August 15, 2011
TORAH CURES THE TONGUE
Dvar Torah For Parshat Dvarim//Shabbat Hazon 5771.
אלה הדברים אשר דבר משה אל כל ישראל
“These are the words that Moses spoke to all of Israel…”
Thus begins this morning’s Torah portion, the Book of Deuteronomy, and the great, eloquent speech that Moses presents to the people just as they are about to leave the desert and their past lives as slaves, in preparation for entry into the promised land. In her introduction, Rabbi Kieval pointed out the significance of Moses opening Deuteronomy with his speech, for we have known him throughout the Torah as a stutterer, who is slow of speech, and in need of his brother, Aaron, to be his mouthpiece. Moses has grown over the forty years of Israelite wandering, and the Torah emphasizes this as he is preparing to die.
What is also significant is that Moses –not God- is the focal point of this opening verse of Deuteronomy. Moses, the humblest man upon the earth, whose burial site is not even known and who is never even mentioned in the Haggadah that retells the Passover story, is at the center of Deuteronomy’s drama of entering Canaan, and as a preacher no less! The opening sermon in Deuteronomy Rabbah, an early collection of rabbinic homilies on this book of the Torah, also makes Moses the focus of Deuteronomy for a very important reason. After explaining some rules concerning whether or not a Torah scroll may be written in translation, the rabbi giving the dvar Torah weaves together an intricate set of proof verses and word associations to prove that the words of Torah can cure speech impediments, and that in fact they cured Moses’ problems with speech. How do we know, the homilist asks? Before receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, when he stood before God at the burning bush, Moses begged off his mission to Pharaoh by telling God, “I am not a man of word…I am slow of speech.” Here, on the borders of the promised land, forty years after receiving and teaching the Torah, Moses the law giver has also become Moses the eloquent speaker who prepares the people before his death.
In this opening passage of Deuteronomy Rabbah, we find God personally testifying that God’s gift of Torah is so precious because it cures the tongue of its maladies. Our sages were referring specifically to the actual disorders of speech, such as that of Moses who was miraculously healed and turned into a great public speaker. However, I cannot help hearing the other morally weighty meaning of these words that they would have intended: engagement with Torah heals us of the sickness of Lashon Harah, the evil speech of gossip and slander that destroys people, relationships, and communities. It is obvious that Torah does this by teaching us the rules of civility and moral self restraint, by forcing us to focus our words and speech on holy matters, and not garbage, and by allowing us to learn the value of carefully measured, well thought out words. Certainly, the sages of the Talmud understood that the life of Torah study could actually result in dangerous uses of speech, because heated debate over matters of Torah sometimes has a way of degenerating into name calling and public humiliation. However, they more often exemplified in their lives the value of Torah as a path to healing and peace through its harnessing of human speech for good purposes.
How significant, then, that evil speech is at the center of the most famous story about why Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, a tragic event that occurred on the ninth day of Av, which we will commemorate on Monday night and Tuesday. An enemy of one of the notables of Jerusalem was mistakenly invited to the man’s home for a party. The host roundly humiliated the man who had shown up, thinking that they were to be reconciled. As he threw the man out of his home, the rabbis of the community who were at the party passively watched the scene and did nothing to stop it. Wounded by such despicable behavior on the part of his enemies and the rabbis, the man went to the Roman authorities and slandered them, claiming that they were plotting a rebellion. The emperor marched on Jerusalem and destroyed our holy Temple. As actual history, the story has little merit. As a moral object lesson it is brilliant. In his book analyzing great rabbinic stories, my colleague, Professor Jeffrey Rubenstein, argues that this story is a good example of rabbinic self-criticism. The sages of a later time are criticizing their own class for failure to heed the words of Torah by doing the right thing: defending a humiliated person who has been wounded by words and working decisively to stave off disaster. I also see in this passage its more obvious message: words used in acts of senseless hatred have genuine ripple-effect potential to destroy an entire community. Like a caustic chemical, they corrode the life of our community from the inside, so that enemies from without have only to show up at our doors and easily finish us off. This is a moral message that we learn in the Torah, and it is a truth that underlies a good deal of ancient and contemporary history.
The poet Emily Dickinson once wrote: A word is dead//When it is said//Some say.//I say it just//Begins to live//That day. She was talking about the power of poetry, but she likely also was referring to the power of words in general. On this Shabbat Hazon, the Shabbat preceding Tisha B’Av, let’s allow ourselves some quiet moments to think about how words come alive in our own lives, from our own mouths, as forces for healing and destruction. Let’s also recommit ourselves in the midst of this period of deep sadness to a life engaged with the words of Torah, words that can heal our tongues and harness our speech for good and holy purposes.
Shabbat shalom.
אלה הדברים אשר דבר משה אל כל ישראל
“These are the words that Moses spoke to all of Israel…”
Thus begins this morning’s Torah portion, the Book of Deuteronomy, and the great, eloquent speech that Moses presents to the people just as they are about to leave the desert and their past lives as slaves, in preparation for entry into the promised land. In her introduction, Rabbi Kieval pointed out the significance of Moses opening Deuteronomy with his speech, for we have known him throughout the Torah as a stutterer, who is slow of speech, and in need of his brother, Aaron, to be his mouthpiece. Moses has grown over the forty years of Israelite wandering, and the Torah emphasizes this as he is preparing to die.
What is also significant is that Moses –not God- is the focal point of this opening verse of Deuteronomy. Moses, the humblest man upon the earth, whose burial site is not even known and who is never even mentioned in the Haggadah that retells the Passover story, is at the center of Deuteronomy’s drama of entering Canaan, and as a preacher no less! The opening sermon in Deuteronomy Rabbah, an early collection of rabbinic homilies on this book of the Torah, also makes Moses the focus of Deuteronomy for a very important reason. After explaining some rules concerning whether or not a Torah scroll may be written in translation, the rabbi giving the dvar Torah weaves together an intricate set of proof verses and word associations to prove that the words of Torah can cure speech impediments, and that in fact they cured Moses’ problems with speech. How do we know, the homilist asks? Before receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, when he stood before God at the burning bush, Moses begged off his mission to Pharaoh by telling God, “I am not a man of word…I am slow of speech.” Here, on the borders of the promised land, forty years after receiving and teaching the Torah, Moses the law giver has also become Moses the eloquent speaker who prepares the people before his death.
In this opening passage of Deuteronomy Rabbah, we find God personally testifying that God’s gift of Torah is so precious because it cures the tongue of its maladies. Our sages were referring specifically to the actual disorders of speech, such as that of Moses who was miraculously healed and turned into a great public speaker. However, I cannot help hearing the other morally weighty meaning of these words that they would have intended: engagement with Torah heals us of the sickness of Lashon Harah, the evil speech of gossip and slander that destroys people, relationships, and communities. It is obvious that Torah does this by teaching us the rules of civility and moral self restraint, by forcing us to focus our words and speech on holy matters, and not garbage, and by allowing us to learn the value of carefully measured, well thought out words. Certainly, the sages of the Talmud understood that the life of Torah study could actually result in dangerous uses of speech, because heated debate over matters of Torah sometimes has a way of degenerating into name calling and public humiliation. However, they more often exemplified in their lives the value of Torah as a path to healing and peace through its harnessing of human speech for good purposes.
How significant, then, that evil speech is at the center of the most famous story about why Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, a tragic event that occurred on the ninth day of Av, which we will commemorate on Monday night and Tuesday. An enemy of one of the notables of Jerusalem was mistakenly invited to the man’s home for a party. The host roundly humiliated the man who had shown up, thinking that they were to be reconciled. As he threw the man out of his home, the rabbis of the community who were at the party passively watched the scene and did nothing to stop it. Wounded by such despicable behavior on the part of his enemies and the rabbis, the man went to the Roman authorities and slandered them, claiming that they were plotting a rebellion. The emperor marched on Jerusalem and destroyed our holy Temple. As actual history, the story has little merit. As a moral object lesson it is brilliant. In his book analyzing great rabbinic stories, my colleague, Professor Jeffrey Rubenstein, argues that this story is a good example of rabbinic self-criticism. The sages of a later time are criticizing their own class for failure to heed the words of Torah by doing the right thing: defending a humiliated person who has been wounded by words and working decisively to stave off disaster. I also see in this passage its more obvious message: words used in acts of senseless hatred have genuine ripple-effect potential to destroy an entire community. Like a caustic chemical, they corrode the life of our community from the inside, so that enemies from without have only to show up at our doors and easily finish us off. This is a moral message that we learn in the Torah, and it is a truth that underlies a good deal of ancient and contemporary history.
The poet Emily Dickinson once wrote: A word is dead//When it is said//Some say.//I say it just//Begins to live//That day. She was talking about the power of poetry, but she likely also was referring to the power of words in general. On this Shabbat Hazon, the Shabbat preceding Tisha B’Av, let’s allow ourselves some quiet moments to think about how words come alive in our own lives, from our own mouths, as forces for healing and destruction. Let’s also recommit ourselves in the midst of this period of deep sadness to a life engaged with the words of Torah, words that can heal our tongues and harness our speech for good and holy purposes.
Shabbat shalom.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
KOL NIDRE
Short Fiction By Dan Ornstein
KOL NIDRE.
Some swore that the building was haunted by ghosts, for the relentless creaking of the wooden beams in its roof would make you shiver and wonder if you were hearing davveners long gone. Bernie, the old hazzan who had been pushed by the congregation into retirement, didn’t have to wonder; he listened to them with aching familiarity. Each morning, before his cool, young replacement breezed into the synagogue office, Bernie shuffled around the darkened sanctuary, where his voice had built a bridge of prayerful melody between God and people for decades. All those spirits of his glorious cantorial past floated by and with him: the bar and bat mitzvah students proceeding haltingly, then confidently, with their parts of the Shabbat service; the tearful, thankful parents at their sons' brises and their daughters’ namings; his late wife, Roberta’s, soprano lilt when she sang in the choir; his own tenor loveliness when he chanted Kol Nidre, and helped everyone achieve God’s remittance of their hasty vows and promises for the coming year, at the beginning of Yom Kippur.
One Sunday before Yom Kippur, he stood alone in that cavernous space that the board members had recently stopped calling a sanctuary. “Too old, stuffy, and alienating,” they had declared. “From now on, we refer to it as our beit kesher, the spiritual connection center.” He chuckled bitterly, thinking about their latest ridiculous attempt to replace religion with religious hipsterism, which was right up there with the open-toed-sandaled rabbi, and with Bernie’s baby faced, guitar playing successor. He stepped onto the bimah and saw himself chanting Kol Nidre the previous year, his final time before the people he had served faithfully betrayed him. Roberta’s voiceless face had appeared before him then, making his old voice creak worse than the roof, and his eyes flood with tears. He had lost his place in the Mahzor, standing in front of the open ark and before a thousand dead-silent congregants.
After the board refused to renew his contract and his lawyer persuaded him that suing them on grounds of ageism was futile, Bernie’s friends tried to convince him to continue tutoring students. He taught wonderfully, so they thought it would be the perfect post-retirement job for him, but he declared that he would never again work for the congregation. The Religious School was in session that Sunday, so the chapel just across the lobby from the sanctuary was filled with students practicing prayers. Angry but unable to curb his hunger for his memories, Bernie snuck outside the chapel door to eavesdrop. A muffled chant wafted into the hall from inside. At first, he assumed it was just the perpetual ringing in his ears, but when it would not stop plaguing him he forced himself to open the door and walk in.
Around a table, his junior colleague struggled to engage twenty bored, restless seventh graders. Near them lay their iPads, iPods, and iPhones, the gleaming armaments of modernity that they reluctantly shed when they entered that holy ground. The young cleric stood in the middle, pressing the clunky REWIND and PLAY buttons of an old tape recorder, and desperately attempting to keep them interested in the retro-toy. Bernie recognized the tape of Kol Nidre he had made years ago for a nursing home resident too frail to attend services. As the kids’ attention wandered to their queer looking old guest, their teacher looked up at him in nervous surprise and said, “Cantor, welcome. We found your old recording in the music library.”
Bernie listened and wondered:
Sh’vikin, sh’vitin, b’teilin u-m’vutalin, lo sh’ririn v’lo kayamin.
“All vows—null and void, no longer valid and binding.”
Should he move towards the table?
(c)2011 By Dan Ornstein
KOL NIDRE.
Some swore that the building was haunted by ghosts, for the relentless creaking of the wooden beams in its roof would make you shiver and wonder if you were hearing davveners long gone. Bernie, the old hazzan who had been pushed by the congregation into retirement, didn’t have to wonder; he listened to them with aching familiarity. Each morning, before his cool, young replacement breezed into the synagogue office, Bernie shuffled around the darkened sanctuary, where his voice had built a bridge of prayerful melody between God and people for decades. All those spirits of his glorious cantorial past floated by and with him: the bar and bat mitzvah students proceeding haltingly, then confidently, with their parts of the Shabbat service; the tearful, thankful parents at their sons' brises and their daughters’ namings; his late wife, Roberta’s, soprano lilt when she sang in the choir; his own tenor loveliness when he chanted Kol Nidre, and helped everyone achieve God’s remittance of their hasty vows and promises for the coming year, at the beginning of Yom Kippur.
One Sunday before Yom Kippur, he stood alone in that cavernous space that the board members had recently stopped calling a sanctuary. “Too old, stuffy, and alienating,” they had declared. “From now on, we refer to it as our beit kesher, the spiritual connection center.” He chuckled bitterly, thinking about their latest ridiculous attempt to replace religion with religious hipsterism, which was right up there with the open-toed-sandaled rabbi, and with Bernie’s baby faced, guitar playing successor. He stepped onto the bimah and saw himself chanting Kol Nidre the previous year, his final time before the people he had served faithfully betrayed him. Roberta’s voiceless face had appeared before him then, making his old voice creak worse than the roof, and his eyes flood with tears. He had lost his place in the Mahzor, standing in front of the open ark and before a thousand dead-silent congregants.
After the board refused to renew his contract and his lawyer persuaded him that suing them on grounds of ageism was futile, Bernie’s friends tried to convince him to continue tutoring students. He taught wonderfully, so they thought it would be the perfect post-retirement job for him, but he declared that he would never again work for the congregation. The Religious School was in session that Sunday, so the chapel just across the lobby from the sanctuary was filled with students practicing prayers. Angry but unable to curb his hunger for his memories, Bernie snuck outside the chapel door to eavesdrop. A muffled chant wafted into the hall from inside. At first, he assumed it was just the perpetual ringing in his ears, but when it would not stop plaguing him he forced himself to open the door and walk in.
Around a table, his junior colleague struggled to engage twenty bored, restless seventh graders. Near them lay their iPads, iPods, and iPhones, the gleaming armaments of modernity that they reluctantly shed when they entered that holy ground. The young cleric stood in the middle, pressing the clunky REWIND and PLAY buttons of an old tape recorder, and desperately attempting to keep them interested in the retro-toy. Bernie recognized the tape of Kol Nidre he had made years ago for a nursing home resident too frail to attend services. As the kids’ attention wandered to their queer looking old guest, their teacher looked up at him in nervous surprise and said, “Cantor, welcome. We found your old recording in the music library.”
Bernie listened and wondered:
Sh’vikin, sh’vitin, b’teilin u-m’vutalin, lo sh’ririn v’lo kayamin.
“All vows—null and void, no longer valid and binding.”
Should he move towards the table?
(c)2011 By Dan Ornstein
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