Do you remember this experiment with babies that you learned about in developmental psychology class years ago as an undergraduate? Place a brightly colored object like a toy or a bottle in front of a baby’s face. His or her face will of course light up, and if the baby has sufficient dexterity, he or she will reach out and grab it. Now, place a piece of cardboard in front of the object so that the baby can no longer see it. Before the age of about 12 months, the child will quickly lose interest, assuming that the object is no longer there, or perhaps was never there to begin with. From a year of age onward, the child will begin to look for the object, perhaps even growing sad, restless and whiny when he or she cannot find it. Developmental psychologists refer to this phenomenon as object permanence: the cognitive ability to hold something in your memory and even to be able to figure out logically where it may have gone to, when it is no longer in your sight. Object permanence is the reason why young children at a certain age love the game Peek-A-Boo: when I hide my face from the child with whom I am playing, that child knows I am still there behind my hands, and is eagerly anticipating my return. The great psychologist, Jean Piaget, was able to define formally the different stages of cognitive and intellectual development in the life of a human being. He called this earliest stage at which object permanence begins to develop, sensorimotor: from ages 0-2, we are trying to figure out the relationship between ourselves, our bodies, and the world around us. We begin life quite egocentrically, not understanding that we and the world are not the same thing, and that it does not revolve around us. As we grow older, we recognize that the world and its objects are separate from us, and that just because we do not see something does not mean it is not there.
I always think about these developmental insights when I come to the high holiday season and read this double portion, Nitzavim-VaYelekh. This is because of the haunting idea, hastarat panim, the hiding of God’s face, that is found in the parshah and in psalm 27, the psalm for the high holidays. In Deuteronomy 31, after Moses warns the people about the consequences for violating the covenant, God tells him: “…My anger will flare up against them, and I will abandon them and hide My face from them…And they shall say on that day, ‘Surely it is because our God is not in our midst that these evils have befallen us.’ Yet I will keep My face hidden on that day, because of all the evil they have done in turning to other gods.” Torah commentators are generally of two minds about what hiding God’s face is. Some, like Rashi, say that God is threatening to ignore the people and to refrain from watching over them. Others, like the early Targumim (who translated the Torah into Aramaic) say that God is threatening literally to remove God’s presence from the people. The first interpretation focuses on the psychological dimensions of God’s absence: the feeling that we are abandoned. The second focuses on the ontological –or spiritual- dimensions of God’s absence: the fact that God has abandoned us. Whatever the hiding of God’s face means, for the Torah, it is the result of the Israelites’ decision to worship and serve other gods, a punishment for their behavior.
Psalm 27 takes a different approach to the hiding of God’s face. After telling us that God literally hides him in the hiddenness of God’s tent (yastireini b’seter ohalo) from his enemies, the psalmist turns to God with plaintive desperation: “To you my heart says, ‘Seek my face!’ O Lord, I seek Your face. Do not hide Your face from me; do not thrust aside Your servant in anger; You have ever been my help, do not forsake me, do not abandon me, O God, my deliverer.” For the psalmist, God’s hiding of God’s face is a source of terror, the adult spiritual equivalent of a child experiencing the most primitive separation anxiety when his or her parent walks away. There is no morally causal reason for the hiding of God’s face, no explanations are to be found in the individual’s behavior: after all, the psalmist is called God’s servant, hardly a term for someone who has sinned against God.
Whichever of these interpretations and contexts for understanding Hastarat Panim we connect with, we are still missing an important piece of the puzzle that the idea of object permanence can help us to find. Note what is implied in these both of these scriptural passages: the hiding of God’s face is real and effective because we experience it as such. Paradoxically, we are bereft and terrified at God’s hiddenness precisely because, like the child who has learned object permanence, we expect God to be there, always, behind the hiddenness. In fact, unlike the young infant who loses interest in the bright object behind a screen, we know that God is there, even as we seek God out in such desperation. So, whether we do wrong and alienate ourselves from God, or we just feel terribly disconnected and hidden from life, God is there always, and always waiting with love, patience, and compassion. Our perceptions of God’s fluid presence and absence are the result of our many experiences. Our deeper perceptions of God’s permanence lie just beneath them, waiting for us to take them out and affix them as wings that carry us home to God. Shabbat shalom.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Old Friends, Book Ends (D'var Torah For Parashat Shoftim 5770)
Do you remember this opening stanza of Simon and Garfunkel’s classic song, “Old Friends”?
Old friends, old friends sat on their parkbench like bookends.
A newspaper blowin' through the grass
Falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.
The song is about two men (perhaps Simon and Garfunkel themselves?) imagining their friendship projected from the position of lively youth many years into the future, when they find themselves much older and lonelier but still together. The song possesses a melancholy beauty, though the rest of its lyrics are somewhat naïve, almost ageist, given the assumptions about aging that the two youthful song writers seemed to have, and given the American youth culture in which they lived.
I actually am not as interested in the song’s treatment of friendship and aging, as in the striking metaphor that it uses: old friends sitting on a park bench like bookends. We could say that this image conveys a kind of deadness and stiffness. After all, bookends may hold in and maintain the shape and position of books, but unlike books, they have no life of their own. Another way to hear this metaphor is this: bookends contain between them the rich breadth and depth of the books that they support; they are a supportive structure and a physical context, without which books lie around and become broken. To the books, those bookends are truly “old friends.”
Let me suggest that to anyone hungry for understanding and wisdom, the beginning and ending sections of this morning’s parashah, Shoftim, are definitely important bookends, and if we allow them to speak to us we will see that they are truly old and trusted friends as well. The first bookend of Shoftim is the all-important theme of justice and some of the rules for its realization: the people of Israel will need a judicial system when they enter the land of Canaan; their judges are forbidden from judging unfairly, from showing partiality, and from taking bribes; we must pursue justice, not wait passively for it to happen to society. The parashah continues with other rules about judges, justice, and the limits of rulers within the rule of law: we are commanded to go to the highest court of the land whenever a case of law is too difficult for us; we may appoint kings to rule over us, but they are bound by specific God given laws, and they must keep a written copy of God’s law with them at all times, to prevent them from grasping too much power; we are only to listen to prophets who speak to us in God’s name when those prophets command us to follow what God has commanded us; in cases of accidental manslaughter, we must provide cities of refuge that protect the killer from the passionate anger of family members of the victim, who would seek to avenge the death of their loved one upon a person who killed without malice. This first bookend of Shoftim is all about justice pursued under the rule of law, with reason and deliberation predominating.
The second bookend of Shoftim, seems to be the exact opposite of the first. It contains a strange passage about a murder victim found in an open field, whose assailant’s identity cannot be determined by normal judicial means of evidence, law and investigation. The same elders and judges who were called upon at the beginning of the parashah to dispense rational, thoughtful justice are now called upon to perform a ritual. Those leaders of the town closest to where the victim was found break the neck of a young heifer over an ever flowing stream. They wash their hands over the animal, and symbolically wash their hands of culpability for the commission of the crime whose injustice they cannot adjudicate and rectify by using the regular apparatus of law. Thus, they cleanse the land and the people of blood that has been shed, for in the minds of our ancestors, the unrequited blood of victims would literally pollute land and society.
In America today, we do not perform rituals like this when a crime cannot be solved or an injustice cannot be rectified. We prefer to focus insistently on our faith in the rational aspects of our laws, judicial proceedings, and judges. After all, we are a democratic, secular society. Are we not fully committed to the idea that the rule of law is supreme, that reasoned investigation will ultimately bring justice, and that our legal system, though imperfect, is the best there is for preserving justice, freedom and human dignity? What do these two bookends, our old friends at each margin of the parashah, seem to be teaching us when they are taken together contextually? Perhaps it is this: the pursuit of justice through law, the courts, fairness, and reasoned application of law is of unparalleled importance: it is the sacred scaffolding upon which our society is founded. But there are times when even the reach of law cannot adequately bring justice; there are times when even those judges and lawmakers charged with dispensing justice according to the rule of law allow people in power to get away with murder, figuratively, if not literally. In those times, Americans and their leaders need rituals -ways of coming together and articulating our sense of injustice- that are comforting and electrifying, religious and secular, personal and communal; they are the ways through which we say to ourselves and each other: “Our hands did not shed this blood, but we still need to cleanse ourselves of the outrages that have occurred by seeing to it that justice and the balances of power are restored.” Only then can the community feel whole and begin to restore justice.
Old friends, old friends sat on their parkbench like bookends.
A newspaper blowin' through the grass
Falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.
The song is about two men (perhaps Simon and Garfunkel themselves?) imagining their friendship projected from the position of lively youth many years into the future, when they find themselves much older and lonelier but still together. The song possesses a melancholy beauty, though the rest of its lyrics are somewhat naïve, almost ageist, given the assumptions about aging that the two youthful song writers seemed to have, and given the American youth culture in which they lived.
I actually am not as interested in the song’s treatment of friendship and aging, as in the striking metaphor that it uses: old friends sitting on a park bench like bookends. We could say that this image conveys a kind of deadness and stiffness. After all, bookends may hold in and maintain the shape and position of books, but unlike books, they have no life of their own. Another way to hear this metaphor is this: bookends contain between them the rich breadth and depth of the books that they support; they are a supportive structure and a physical context, without which books lie around and become broken. To the books, those bookends are truly “old friends.”
Let me suggest that to anyone hungry for understanding and wisdom, the beginning and ending sections of this morning’s parashah, Shoftim, are definitely important bookends, and if we allow them to speak to us we will see that they are truly old and trusted friends as well. The first bookend of Shoftim is the all-important theme of justice and some of the rules for its realization: the people of Israel will need a judicial system when they enter the land of Canaan; their judges are forbidden from judging unfairly, from showing partiality, and from taking bribes; we must pursue justice, not wait passively for it to happen to society. The parashah continues with other rules about judges, justice, and the limits of rulers within the rule of law: we are commanded to go to the highest court of the land whenever a case of law is too difficult for us; we may appoint kings to rule over us, but they are bound by specific God given laws, and they must keep a written copy of God’s law with them at all times, to prevent them from grasping too much power; we are only to listen to prophets who speak to us in God’s name when those prophets command us to follow what God has commanded us; in cases of accidental manslaughter, we must provide cities of refuge that protect the killer from the passionate anger of family members of the victim, who would seek to avenge the death of their loved one upon a person who killed without malice. This first bookend of Shoftim is all about justice pursued under the rule of law, with reason and deliberation predominating.
The second bookend of Shoftim, seems to be the exact opposite of the first. It contains a strange passage about a murder victim found in an open field, whose assailant’s identity cannot be determined by normal judicial means of evidence, law and investigation. The same elders and judges who were called upon at the beginning of the parashah to dispense rational, thoughtful justice are now called upon to perform a ritual. Those leaders of the town closest to where the victim was found break the neck of a young heifer over an ever flowing stream. They wash their hands over the animal, and symbolically wash their hands of culpability for the commission of the crime whose injustice they cannot adjudicate and rectify by using the regular apparatus of law. Thus, they cleanse the land and the people of blood that has been shed, for in the minds of our ancestors, the unrequited blood of victims would literally pollute land and society.
In America today, we do not perform rituals like this when a crime cannot be solved or an injustice cannot be rectified. We prefer to focus insistently on our faith in the rational aspects of our laws, judicial proceedings, and judges. After all, we are a democratic, secular society. Are we not fully committed to the idea that the rule of law is supreme, that reasoned investigation will ultimately bring justice, and that our legal system, though imperfect, is the best there is for preserving justice, freedom and human dignity? What do these two bookends, our old friends at each margin of the parashah, seem to be teaching us when they are taken together contextually? Perhaps it is this: the pursuit of justice through law, the courts, fairness, and reasoned application of law is of unparalleled importance: it is the sacred scaffolding upon which our society is founded. But there are times when even the reach of law cannot adequately bring justice; there are times when even those judges and lawmakers charged with dispensing justice according to the rule of law allow people in power to get away with murder, figuratively, if not literally. In those times, Americans and their leaders need rituals -ways of coming together and articulating our sense of injustice- that are comforting and electrifying, religious and secular, personal and communal; they are the ways through which we say to ourselves and each other: “Our hands did not shed this blood, but we still need to cleanse ourselves of the outrages that have occurred by seeing to it that justice and the balances of power are restored.” Only then can the community feel whole and begin to restore justice.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Moses: Judge And Lover
MOSES: JUDGE AND LOVER.
Dvar Torah For Parshat Devarim, Shabbat Hazon: Third Of The Tlata D’Puranuta, 5770.
From the very beginning of Deuteronomy, the Moses that we encounter is a contradictory man who defies what we have known about him previously. All through Exodus, our law giver has shunned the role of public speaker, preferring to hand that task to his brother, Aaron. The reason for his reticence? Exodus 4:10 tells us the whole story. Desperately attempting to get out of God’s charge to him to go to Pharaoh and demand the release of the Israelite slaves, Moses begs: “Please, O Lord, I have never been a man of words, either in times past or now that You have spoken to Your servant; I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” After a bit more haggling with God, God appoints Moses’ brother to be his mouthpiece, and Moses is then dispatched to a life of leadership, struggle and nation building. Fast forward from that moment at the Burning Bush when Moses complained about his oratorical disabilities to this very first verse in Deuteronomy: “These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.” Note what is so significant about this verse. Moses, the man who is not a man of words, addresses an entire assembly of over a million people with words. The Hebrew words, devarim (words) and dibber (addressed) are grammatically related, thus intensifying the meaning of what is happening here: Moses is about to pour out a profusion of words, specifically words of warning, admonition, complaint and judgment upon the motley and rambunctious Israelites prior to his death and their entrance into the promised land. Not only that, Moses –the same man who is slow of speech and tongue- will speak to his charges for a total of 33 long, eloquent, and haranguing chapters, all in God’s name! (Note of course that throughout Deuteronomy we never hear what the people think about his speeches. Is it that, like the overly long rabbinic sermon, his words simply made everyone go to sleep? We’ll come back to that question, maybe.)
Clearly, words matter to Deuteronomy, and placing them in the mouth of Moses is of the greatest importance. What we see as a contradiction between the Moses of Exodus and the Moses of Deuteronomy may in fact be that. Scholarly consensus identifies Deuteronomy as a book that was composed and edited later than the first four books of the Torah and then appended to the Torah during the age of religious reform of the Judean king, Josiah, around 621 BCE. However, that historical fact does not do justice to the inspired religious and literary purposes of whoever attached Deuteronomy. Whatever the histories of her respective sources, the Torah as she stands is a literary and spiritual unity. The Moses who reluctantly accepts his mission, then gives the people God’s law, then begins to burn out as the Israelite trek wears on for forty years, is the Moses who now will reflect upon his life, the failings of the Israelites, and his insights about how the people can succeed in the promised land as a people of God. He is a man with one last opportunity to tell this people he loves so much, how angry they make him and God at times. And tell them he will.
From the very beginning of his final addresses to the people, Moses does sound like a man haranguing and judging them, quite harshly. This morning, only 12 verses into his first address, we read these words of his to Israel, at Deuteronomy 1:12: “How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden and the bickering?” Note that this verse, in Hebrew, begins with the word Eichah, “how?” You may have noticed that it was sung using the tune of the book of Eichah, also known as Lamentations, that we will read on Monday night at Tisha B’Av services: a not too subtle reminder that the people who tried Moses so sorely in the desert later wound up in exile from the land of Canaan as a result of their sinfulness. For the following 33 chapters, Moses will really annoy them about worshipping only one God, remembering their earlier backsliding, preparing to live according to the covenant, and accepting that they will likely fail at doing what God wants anyway. Like an emotionally abusive parent whose child can never do right, Moses does not exactly seem to be interested in warm nurturance and positive reinforcement. He is all judgment all the time.
But this analysis of Moses’ relationship with the Israelites, even and especially at the end of his long life and tortured dealings with them, barely scratches the surface. Moses could never have spoken to the children of Israel this way effectively were there not something much deeper to their relationship that gave his words credibility. Consider the insight of our rabbis who commented upon this first verse of Deuteronomy, which is found in the great midrashic compilation, Devarim Rabbah:
The words of rebuke and judgment found in Deuteronomy really should have been spoken by Bilaam the prophet, who was originally sent to curse the people of Israel. The blessings that Bilaam gave them back in the book of Numbers really should have been spoken by Moses, their leader! However, had Bilaam rebuked and judged them, the Israelites would have dismissed him, saying, “Of course Bilaam’s berating us. He hates us!” Had Moses blessed them, the nations of the world would have scoffed at him, saying, “Of course Moses is blessing them. He’s one of them, so he’s biased towards them and he loves them! Thus God decreed that Moses their lover should rebuke and judge them, while Bilaam who hated them should bless them. (Devarim Rabbah 1:4)
Recall, of course, that Bilaam is the non-Israelite prophet and magician sent by the Moabite king Balak to curse and destroy the Israelites. He ultimately blesses them because, as he warns Balak, he can only speak what God puts into his mouth. Later biblical and rabbinic traditions cast Bilaam not as a hapless hired gun, but as a person who actively hates the Israelites. He is the perfect person to bless them in this reversal of fortune. Yet what is most significant about this rabbinic teaching is the way it applies good political and psychological insight to talking about rebuke and judgment between people: to avoid others’ accusations of gushing bias, you want to show that you can criticize the folks you love for their shortcomings, even more than the folks you hate. Even more important, your judgment of others can only possess the highest credibility and human authenticity when you do it out of genuine love. It is easy to tell off the people in your life for whom you have no use or who are your enemies, but such judgment often carries little moral or spiritual weight with it, weighed down as it is by bias. It is much harder to criticize those you love, yet only with love as the basis for a real relationship can your more harshly critical words have any value or impact. This certainly seems to underlie the sharp critiques by the prophet Isaiah of the people of Israel in the haftarah that we are about to read. After chastising them for their sins, and calling them to do justice, God has Isaiah tell the people: “Come let us reach an understanding. Be your sins like crimson, they can turn snow white. Be they red as dyed wool they can become like fleece!” (Isaiah 1:18) God and Isaiah speak in judgment with the people because their judgmental words emerge from real love, passion, and investment in their well being.
In our own lives, we learn over and over again that judgment and criticism have to be balanced with rahamim, mercy and compassion for the person we are critiquing, that is founded upon love and respect for that person. Certainly, there are many times when judgment and criticism can be excessive, and when a great deal more compassionate and humble understanding of a person’s actions and attitudes is called for, and when we would do well not to be so quick to judge. However, a truly authentic moral choice for human beings is not only between total neutrality and excessive judgmentalism. That is a simplistic pseudo-choice concocted by a culture that often wants to live by the relativistic motto of “everything goes.” Like Moses, we human beings who are defined by loving relationship can also carefully choose between criticism of others that is based upon love and respect, and criticism that seeks only to hurt and denigrate. As we approach these final days before Tisha B’Av, may we learn from the words of our teacher Moses, who judged us precisely because he loved us and wanted the best for us. Shabbat shalom.
Dvar Torah For Parshat Devarim, Shabbat Hazon: Third Of The Tlata D’Puranuta, 5770.
From the very beginning of Deuteronomy, the Moses that we encounter is a contradictory man who defies what we have known about him previously. All through Exodus, our law giver has shunned the role of public speaker, preferring to hand that task to his brother, Aaron. The reason for his reticence? Exodus 4:10 tells us the whole story. Desperately attempting to get out of God’s charge to him to go to Pharaoh and demand the release of the Israelite slaves, Moses begs: “Please, O Lord, I have never been a man of words, either in times past or now that You have spoken to Your servant; I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” After a bit more haggling with God, God appoints Moses’ brother to be his mouthpiece, and Moses is then dispatched to a life of leadership, struggle and nation building. Fast forward from that moment at the Burning Bush when Moses complained about his oratorical disabilities to this very first verse in Deuteronomy: “These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.” Note what is so significant about this verse. Moses, the man who is not a man of words, addresses an entire assembly of over a million people with words. The Hebrew words, devarim (words) and dibber (addressed) are grammatically related, thus intensifying the meaning of what is happening here: Moses is about to pour out a profusion of words, specifically words of warning, admonition, complaint and judgment upon the motley and rambunctious Israelites prior to his death and their entrance into the promised land. Not only that, Moses –the same man who is slow of speech and tongue- will speak to his charges for a total of 33 long, eloquent, and haranguing chapters, all in God’s name! (Note of course that throughout Deuteronomy we never hear what the people think about his speeches. Is it that, like the overly long rabbinic sermon, his words simply made everyone go to sleep? We’ll come back to that question, maybe.)
Clearly, words matter to Deuteronomy, and placing them in the mouth of Moses is of the greatest importance. What we see as a contradiction between the Moses of Exodus and the Moses of Deuteronomy may in fact be that. Scholarly consensus identifies Deuteronomy as a book that was composed and edited later than the first four books of the Torah and then appended to the Torah during the age of religious reform of the Judean king, Josiah, around 621 BCE. However, that historical fact does not do justice to the inspired religious and literary purposes of whoever attached Deuteronomy. Whatever the histories of her respective sources, the Torah as she stands is a literary and spiritual unity. The Moses who reluctantly accepts his mission, then gives the people God’s law, then begins to burn out as the Israelite trek wears on for forty years, is the Moses who now will reflect upon his life, the failings of the Israelites, and his insights about how the people can succeed in the promised land as a people of God. He is a man with one last opportunity to tell this people he loves so much, how angry they make him and God at times. And tell them he will.
From the very beginning of his final addresses to the people, Moses does sound like a man haranguing and judging them, quite harshly. This morning, only 12 verses into his first address, we read these words of his to Israel, at Deuteronomy 1:12: “How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden and the bickering?” Note that this verse, in Hebrew, begins with the word Eichah, “how?” You may have noticed that it was sung using the tune of the book of Eichah, also known as Lamentations, that we will read on Monday night at Tisha B’Av services: a not too subtle reminder that the people who tried Moses so sorely in the desert later wound up in exile from the land of Canaan as a result of their sinfulness. For the following 33 chapters, Moses will really annoy them about worshipping only one God, remembering their earlier backsliding, preparing to live according to the covenant, and accepting that they will likely fail at doing what God wants anyway. Like an emotionally abusive parent whose child can never do right, Moses does not exactly seem to be interested in warm nurturance and positive reinforcement. He is all judgment all the time.
But this analysis of Moses’ relationship with the Israelites, even and especially at the end of his long life and tortured dealings with them, barely scratches the surface. Moses could never have spoken to the children of Israel this way effectively were there not something much deeper to their relationship that gave his words credibility. Consider the insight of our rabbis who commented upon this first verse of Deuteronomy, which is found in the great midrashic compilation, Devarim Rabbah:
The words of rebuke and judgment found in Deuteronomy really should have been spoken by Bilaam the prophet, who was originally sent to curse the people of Israel. The blessings that Bilaam gave them back in the book of Numbers really should have been spoken by Moses, their leader! However, had Bilaam rebuked and judged them, the Israelites would have dismissed him, saying, “Of course Bilaam’s berating us. He hates us!” Had Moses blessed them, the nations of the world would have scoffed at him, saying, “Of course Moses is blessing them. He’s one of them, so he’s biased towards them and he loves them! Thus God decreed that Moses their lover should rebuke and judge them, while Bilaam who hated them should bless them. (Devarim Rabbah 1:4)
Recall, of course, that Bilaam is the non-Israelite prophet and magician sent by the Moabite king Balak to curse and destroy the Israelites. He ultimately blesses them because, as he warns Balak, he can only speak what God puts into his mouth. Later biblical and rabbinic traditions cast Bilaam not as a hapless hired gun, but as a person who actively hates the Israelites. He is the perfect person to bless them in this reversal of fortune. Yet what is most significant about this rabbinic teaching is the way it applies good political and psychological insight to talking about rebuke and judgment between people: to avoid others’ accusations of gushing bias, you want to show that you can criticize the folks you love for their shortcomings, even more than the folks you hate. Even more important, your judgment of others can only possess the highest credibility and human authenticity when you do it out of genuine love. It is easy to tell off the people in your life for whom you have no use or who are your enemies, but such judgment often carries little moral or spiritual weight with it, weighed down as it is by bias. It is much harder to criticize those you love, yet only with love as the basis for a real relationship can your more harshly critical words have any value or impact. This certainly seems to underlie the sharp critiques by the prophet Isaiah of the people of Israel in the haftarah that we are about to read. After chastising them for their sins, and calling them to do justice, God has Isaiah tell the people: “Come let us reach an understanding. Be your sins like crimson, they can turn snow white. Be they red as dyed wool they can become like fleece!” (Isaiah 1:18) God and Isaiah speak in judgment with the people because their judgmental words emerge from real love, passion, and investment in their well being.
In our own lives, we learn over and over again that judgment and criticism have to be balanced with rahamim, mercy and compassion for the person we are critiquing, that is founded upon love and respect for that person. Certainly, there are many times when judgment and criticism can be excessive, and when a great deal more compassionate and humble understanding of a person’s actions and attitudes is called for, and when we would do well not to be so quick to judge. However, a truly authentic moral choice for human beings is not only between total neutrality and excessive judgmentalism. That is a simplistic pseudo-choice concocted by a culture that often wants to live by the relativistic motto of “everything goes.” Like Moses, we human beings who are defined by loving relationship can also carefully choose between criticism of others that is based upon love and respect, and criticism that seeks only to hurt and denigrate. As we approach these final days before Tisha B’Av, may we learn from the words of our teacher Moses, who judged us precisely because he loved us and wanted the best for us. Shabbat shalom.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Microfinancing Zelophehad's Daughters
MICROFINANCING THE DAUGHTERS OF ZELOPHEHAD.
Dvar Torah For Parshat Matot/Masei and Second Week Of Tlata D’Puranuta 5770/2010.
The story of the daughters of Zelophehad that we read in last week’s Torah portion, comes back to haunt us this week in an inverted way. Recall what we learned in Parshat Pinchas. As Moses is preparing the Israelites for entering and conquering the promised land, five women –the daughters of a man named Zelophehad- approach Moses with an unprecedented concern. The inheritance rules given to the people by God privilege sons over daughters. Only sons inherit their fathers’ estates. But the daughters pose a unique problem: they have no brothers to inherit their deceased father. Is it fair that his property and legacy should be lost because they, his descendants, are forbidden from inheriting him? This is one of four “on-the-spot” cases that are brought to Moses and God in the book of Numbers, generally as complaints, because they present the potential for injustice and unfairness. God addresses the daughters’ complaint by ruling that in a case of a man who has only daughters, his estate reverts to them upon his death. At the very end of Parshat Masei that we just read, the leaders of Zelophehad’s tribe approach Moses on the eve of entering the land of Canaan and press the matter of his daughters’ inheritance in the other direction: if these five women, and other women in the tribe, inherit their fathers’ estates then marry out of the tribe, the tribe’s property holdings will be diminished. Once again, God engages in an on-the-spot ruling that the daughters are only to marry within the tribe itself, so that the tribal property will be maintained. The book of Numbers ends with the five daughters marrying their cousins within their clan.
As I have mentioned in the past, these two stories about Zelophehad’s daughters fascinate me because they show us how even God, as it were, has not anticipated each real life situation of injustice encountered by the Israelites that requires rectification. Even God has to be moved by the complaints of human beings who see an injustice being created inadvertently. Back in Genesis, Abraham challenged the Judge of all the earth to act justly by distinguishing the righteous from the evil citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah before punishing the cities. Here in Numbers, the same challenge to God to rectify potential injustices is brought up, howbeit on a smaller scale. Continuing this theme of human beings alerting God to potential injustices, note of course that God only modifies the ruling about the daughters’ inheritance rights with respect to their marriages after their tribe complains.
As I noted last week, this is not the feminist text that some would like to read it as. The daughters do not press their case with Moses as an issue of fairness to women: “Why should we not be able to inherit like the men? Aren’t we as good as any brother?” They pose their question to Moses in order, ostensibly, to achieve justice for the memory and honor of their deceased father. Further, what we would think of as the ultimate injustice –that daughters were not allowed to inherit equally with sons- is never really addressed in this story at all. Nor is it ever rectified in later Halakhah, even though in much of the ancient world women did inherit equally with men. Nonetheless, as the basis for a discussion about Judaism and women’s empowerment, our story is remarkable, given the boldness of these daughters in even making their case before Moses and God. I believe that this is the only case of bold women pressing God directly for justice in the five books of Moses. Generally when biblical female characters advocate for themselves or for others, they do so surreptitiously, well behind the scenes, and as it were, behind the backs of God and men.
What more can we take away from this unique story about the proactivity of Zelophehad’s daughters? Is it there to teach us more than what we have analyzed? Though what I am about to say is admittedly a midrashic stretch, I think its spirit has a basis in the bold spirit of these women as narrated by the Torah. I imagine the following scene. Zelophehad has died, as the Torah tells us in Numbers , ch.27, because of his sinful behavior, something that his daughters make very clear to Moses and the community. Later rabbinic commentators identify Zelophehad with the man who was put to death for violating Shabbat, a story found back in Numbers , ch. 15. The daughters pick up from shivah, grieving, distraught, and humiliated. They are now tainted as a family by daddy’s public behavior and execution, they lose pedigree that will help them to find husbands, and worse yet, they have no property rights. Soon enough, the males in the family will grab everything, leaving them even less empowered than they already are. Surely, the God who commanded their community to love one’s neighbor and to protect the orphan and the widow would not want them to lose their one source of empowering livelihood—the ancestral property of their father! With that land, they can grow their own food, make money, and support themselves. However, no matter how just God may be, the men in the community are very set in their traditions, especially when it comes to women inheritance rights. The daughters huddle one night. “Look, we know what we need to have happen here, but if we argue this with Moses in our own behalf, he’ll never go for it. He simply lacks God’s expansive vision for equality and justice, as great a man as he is. Besides, the community overall will have too many problems with this. We need to frame this demand of ours as being about daddy: how can the community allow his name to be utterly obliterated just because he was unlucky enough to only have girls?” The next day, they call out Moses and the community. God, Who wants these women to have real earning power, but Who also knows that even He can’t change a community’s attitudes over night, gives Moses the ruling. A man dies, leaving only daughters? Let them inherit his property. Yes, Zelophehad’s tribe will come back and complain about the negative effects this may have on their property holdings, but God will deal with that later. For now, five women have taken one small step forward in preserving their family’s livelihood with God’s backing. This is my modern midrashic take on the story.
In a world very much controlled by a male power structure, the daughters needed courage, ingenuity, and a lot of help from God to secure their father’s property for their well being. We should not think that the reality for women is all that different in many parts of the world today; if anything, it has always been much worse for women and their children, especially in vast parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, than it had ever been for them in the times of the Torah, a book that does care deeply about loving one’s fellow human beings. In their powerful book, Half the Sky, journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn describe the hideous treatment of women in a good part of the developing world today. They are often viewed as subhuman compared with men, they have no real access to health care, no political rights, and most of all they lack the two things that actually give them status in their largely rural communities: property on which to grow crops, and resources to make money by starting their own modest businesses. The authors advocate strongly for an empowerment tool for these women –and many poor men as well- that is both simple and very Jewish: microfinance, which is the brain child of Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus, a Pakistani economist. Yunus realized that the best way to empower poor women economically and emotionally is to give them small loans to build businesses, grow food, or stabilize their families so they can build their earning power. Since the time that he developed this practice through his Grameen Bank, microfinance has “gone viral”. Its benefits to poor but proactive women are obvious: like Zelophehad’s daughters, they don’t just get hand outs from government or private sources, they get tools for taking care of themselves and their families in the dignified form of loans that they can pay back after making money. With increased earning power, their status in their villages and towns increases –thus bettering their lives with the men among whom they live. Its benefit to you and me, Western benefactors, is the incredibly small amount of invested –not donated- money it takes to help them. My family recently made a modest investment with Kiva, a major, reputable clearing house for microloans, to six entrepreneurs and business groups in Africa and Asia, many of whom are women or made up of women. Together with others around the world, we are lending them amounts, which to Westerners, are very low, but to them will make all the difference between chronic poverty and self subsistence. This kind of lending also gives them the ability to contribute to their nations’ emerging free market economies, something that can only make them stronger. Finally, in case this was not clear, microfinance is exactly what our teacher, Maimonides, was talking about when he taught that the highest level of Tzedakah is when you lend money or give a job to a needy person. By doing this, you are restoring his or her independent earning power and dignity.
One of the best things to do during these three weeks of contrition and sadness leading down to the Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning and fasting, is to do mitzvot that help others, thus contributing to the redemption of one small piece of the world. I strongly recommend that you think about the traditional mitzvah of microfinance as one way of making a difference in the world. Kiva.org and American Jewish World Service’s website at AJWS.org can tell you more about how to do this. The daughters of Zelophehad could easily have despaired themselves into a cycle of endless poverty and misery, following the death of the most powerful male in their lives. Instead they took a small but significant action, with God’s support, an action that provides us with an empowerment model for all people –women and men- throughout the world today. We have a positive role to play in helping the modern day daughters of Zelophehad. Let us do our best to play that role.
Dvar Torah For Parshat Matot/Masei and Second Week Of Tlata D’Puranuta 5770/2010.
The story of the daughters of Zelophehad that we read in last week’s Torah portion, comes back to haunt us this week in an inverted way. Recall what we learned in Parshat Pinchas. As Moses is preparing the Israelites for entering and conquering the promised land, five women –the daughters of a man named Zelophehad- approach Moses with an unprecedented concern. The inheritance rules given to the people by God privilege sons over daughters. Only sons inherit their fathers’ estates. But the daughters pose a unique problem: they have no brothers to inherit their deceased father. Is it fair that his property and legacy should be lost because they, his descendants, are forbidden from inheriting him? This is one of four “on-the-spot” cases that are brought to Moses and God in the book of Numbers, generally as complaints, because they present the potential for injustice and unfairness. God addresses the daughters’ complaint by ruling that in a case of a man who has only daughters, his estate reverts to them upon his death. At the very end of Parshat Masei that we just read, the leaders of Zelophehad’s tribe approach Moses on the eve of entering the land of Canaan and press the matter of his daughters’ inheritance in the other direction: if these five women, and other women in the tribe, inherit their fathers’ estates then marry out of the tribe, the tribe’s property holdings will be diminished. Once again, God engages in an on-the-spot ruling that the daughters are only to marry within the tribe itself, so that the tribal property will be maintained. The book of Numbers ends with the five daughters marrying their cousins within their clan.
As I have mentioned in the past, these two stories about Zelophehad’s daughters fascinate me because they show us how even God, as it were, has not anticipated each real life situation of injustice encountered by the Israelites that requires rectification. Even God has to be moved by the complaints of human beings who see an injustice being created inadvertently. Back in Genesis, Abraham challenged the Judge of all the earth to act justly by distinguishing the righteous from the evil citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah before punishing the cities. Here in Numbers, the same challenge to God to rectify potential injustices is brought up, howbeit on a smaller scale. Continuing this theme of human beings alerting God to potential injustices, note of course that God only modifies the ruling about the daughters’ inheritance rights with respect to their marriages after their tribe complains.
As I noted last week, this is not the feminist text that some would like to read it as. The daughters do not press their case with Moses as an issue of fairness to women: “Why should we not be able to inherit like the men? Aren’t we as good as any brother?” They pose their question to Moses in order, ostensibly, to achieve justice for the memory and honor of their deceased father. Further, what we would think of as the ultimate injustice –that daughters were not allowed to inherit equally with sons- is never really addressed in this story at all. Nor is it ever rectified in later Halakhah, even though in much of the ancient world women did inherit equally with men. Nonetheless, as the basis for a discussion about Judaism and women’s empowerment, our story is remarkable, given the boldness of these daughters in even making their case before Moses and God. I believe that this is the only case of bold women pressing God directly for justice in the five books of Moses. Generally when biblical female characters advocate for themselves or for others, they do so surreptitiously, well behind the scenes, and as it were, behind the backs of God and men.
What more can we take away from this unique story about the proactivity of Zelophehad’s daughters? Is it there to teach us more than what we have analyzed? Though what I am about to say is admittedly a midrashic stretch, I think its spirit has a basis in the bold spirit of these women as narrated by the Torah. I imagine the following scene. Zelophehad has died, as the Torah tells us in Numbers , ch.27, because of his sinful behavior, something that his daughters make very clear to Moses and the community. Later rabbinic commentators identify Zelophehad with the man who was put to death for violating Shabbat, a story found back in Numbers , ch. 15. The daughters pick up from shivah, grieving, distraught, and humiliated. They are now tainted as a family by daddy’s public behavior and execution, they lose pedigree that will help them to find husbands, and worse yet, they have no property rights. Soon enough, the males in the family will grab everything, leaving them even less empowered than they already are. Surely, the God who commanded their community to love one’s neighbor and to protect the orphan and the widow would not want them to lose their one source of empowering livelihood—the ancestral property of their father! With that land, they can grow their own food, make money, and support themselves. However, no matter how just God may be, the men in the community are very set in their traditions, especially when it comes to women inheritance rights. The daughters huddle one night. “Look, we know what we need to have happen here, but if we argue this with Moses in our own behalf, he’ll never go for it. He simply lacks God’s expansive vision for equality and justice, as great a man as he is. Besides, the community overall will have too many problems with this. We need to frame this demand of ours as being about daddy: how can the community allow his name to be utterly obliterated just because he was unlucky enough to only have girls?” The next day, they call out Moses and the community. God, Who wants these women to have real earning power, but Who also knows that even He can’t change a community’s attitudes over night, gives Moses the ruling. A man dies, leaving only daughters? Let them inherit his property. Yes, Zelophehad’s tribe will come back and complain about the negative effects this may have on their property holdings, but God will deal with that later. For now, five women have taken one small step forward in preserving their family’s livelihood with God’s backing. This is my modern midrashic take on the story.
In a world very much controlled by a male power structure, the daughters needed courage, ingenuity, and a lot of help from God to secure their father’s property for their well being. We should not think that the reality for women is all that different in many parts of the world today; if anything, it has always been much worse for women and their children, especially in vast parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, than it had ever been for them in the times of the Torah, a book that does care deeply about loving one’s fellow human beings. In their powerful book, Half the Sky, journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn describe the hideous treatment of women in a good part of the developing world today. They are often viewed as subhuman compared with men, they have no real access to health care, no political rights, and most of all they lack the two things that actually give them status in their largely rural communities: property on which to grow crops, and resources to make money by starting their own modest businesses. The authors advocate strongly for an empowerment tool for these women –and many poor men as well- that is both simple and very Jewish: microfinance, which is the brain child of Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus, a Pakistani economist. Yunus realized that the best way to empower poor women economically and emotionally is to give them small loans to build businesses, grow food, or stabilize their families so they can build their earning power. Since the time that he developed this practice through his Grameen Bank, microfinance has “gone viral”. Its benefits to poor but proactive women are obvious: like Zelophehad’s daughters, they don’t just get hand outs from government or private sources, they get tools for taking care of themselves and their families in the dignified form of loans that they can pay back after making money. With increased earning power, their status in their villages and towns increases –thus bettering their lives with the men among whom they live. Its benefit to you and me, Western benefactors, is the incredibly small amount of invested –not donated- money it takes to help them. My family recently made a modest investment with Kiva, a major, reputable clearing house for microloans, to six entrepreneurs and business groups in Africa and Asia, many of whom are women or made up of women. Together with others around the world, we are lending them amounts, which to Westerners, are very low, but to them will make all the difference between chronic poverty and self subsistence. This kind of lending also gives them the ability to contribute to their nations’ emerging free market economies, something that can only make them stronger. Finally, in case this was not clear, microfinance is exactly what our teacher, Maimonides, was talking about when he taught that the highest level of Tzedakah is when you lend money or give a job to a needy person. By doing this, you are restoring his or her independent earning power and dignity.
One of the best things to do during these three weeks of contrition and sadness leading down to the Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning and fasting, is to do mitzvot that help others, thus contributing to the redemption of one small piece of the world. I strongly recommend that you think about the traditional mitzvah of microfinance as one way of making a difference in the world. Kiva.org and American Jewish World Service’s website at AJWS.org can tell you more about how to do this. The daughters of Zelophehad could easily have despaired themselves into a cycle of endless poverty and misery, following the death of the most powerful male in their lives. Instead they took a small but significant action, with God’s support, an action that provides us with an empowerment model for all people –women and men- throughout the world today. We have a positive role to play in helping the modern day daughters of Zelophehad. Let us do our best to play that role.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
A Paradoxical Peace
A PARADOXICAL PEACE.
Dvar Torah For Parshat Pinchas, First of Tlata D’Puranuta, 5770/4th of July Weekend, 2010.
Often when I deliver a d’var Torah, I point out grammatical anomalies in the Torah scroll – strange or out of place words, phrases, and grammatical features that hint at some deeper message or teaching. Certainly, many of these anomalies abound. However, equally prominent and suggestive in the Torah text are what I call orthographic anomalies: the strange ways in which letters, words, paragraphs, and verses are actually spelled or written. In the brief course of a mere 13 verses, the first aliyah of Parshat Pinchas contains three of these strange features. Let’s look at each of them and ask ourselves what they may be teaching us, separately and together. Unfortunately, our version of the Humash has expunged a number of these features to make the text cleaner. As I guide you through each of them, I ask you to imagine what they look like. After services, I’ll be happy to show them to you in the Torah scroll itself.
The first anomaly is found at Numbers, 25:11, which you can find on page 918. Notice the name of Aaron’s grandson, Pinchas. Though you can’t see it here, in the Torah scroll the yud letter in his name is written smaller than the other letters. Though it may have originated as a scribal error, it has persisted as the standard way in which to write his name here. It is known in ancient scribal tradition as a Yud Zeirah, a miniature yud. Further, that yud letter is actually not entirely necessary for the spelling of the name. This is an example of ketiv malei, or full script, a full writing of the name Pinchas that uses the yud letter as a vowel. Without that letter, we could still pronounce the name Pinchas properly.
The second anomaly is found in the last word of Numbers, 25:12, shalom, which is on page 919. Again, our Humash version lacks this, so please imagine that you can see it. In the Torah scroll, the vav letter of the word shalom is actually split in half. It is known in scribal tradition as Vav Ketiyah, a snapped or broken vav. This broken vav may also have originally been a scribal error or the result of a crack in ancient parchment. Nonetheless, the tradition of writing this letter in this way is very ancient (it is mentioned by a Talmudic rabbi who lived in the 3rd or 4th century), and it obviously has stuck with us for millennia.
The final anomaly is found in the middle of Numbers, 25:19 and 26:1, on page 920. Our Humash clearly indicates this strange feature with a small star near the final word of verse 19, and by leaving out a colon next to that word that would normally indicate the completion of a verse. This is called Piska B’Emtza Pasuk: a sentence break in the middle of the verse. What this means is that the three words of 25:19 are actually the middle of a sentence, but we treat them as if they were their own separate verse. They form what grammarians call a dependent clause that, translated, reads simply, “When the plague was over…”
All three of these curiosities in our text are emphasized by the Baalei Hamesorah, the very exacting schools of scribal scholars who lived in the land of Israel between the 8th and 10th centuries. They assembled literally thousands of notes on features of the Torah scroll’s script and wording based upon even older traditions that have survived in the Jewish community for millennia. As I alluded to before, what is so amazing about these three is that they are all found in one short 13 verse passage of Parshat Pinchas. What might they be telling us, or more likely, screaming at us?
A good way to begin answering this question is to recall the back story to this morning’s Torah portion. Last week we read about how Pinchas engaged in vigilante justice by killing an Israelite chieftain who engaged in lascivious behavior with a Midianite woman in front of the Tent of Meeting. He did this to avert a virulent plague caused by God that was already in progress, the result of God’s anger at the Israelites for idolatrous behavior with the Midianites. When we reentered the Torah this morning, we encountered God granting Pinchas and his descendants a pact of peace and friendship, as well as the mantle of the priesthood in perpetuity. God did this, according to the Torah, because of Pinchas’es act of impassioned and zealous violence that calmed down God’s fury with the Israelites.
The comments in our Humash summarize the two main explanations for this covenant of peace and friendship given by God to Pinchas. The first one, that the Torah and a number of later commentaries on it, makes clear that God’s violent anger was averted by Pinchas’es violence. Presumably this is because Pinchas satisfied God’s need for one person to empathically feel and act upon God’s fury. It may also be that his curative act of violence is an echo of a distant, ancient belief that the two victims were some kind of a sacrificial offering to appease God. This is pure speculation on my part. However, it is clear that without Pinchas’es belligerent behavior, God would have continued plaguing and killing the people. For the Torah, his act was thus justified and desirable, even if shocking and unacceptable to our modern ears. Thus, the pact of eternal peace, friendship and favor was Pinchas’es reward. The second explanation is far more qualified in its praise of Pinchas. His passion and violent behavior were not good, because of the bloody destruction they wrought, and the way in which his vigilantism dangerously ignored the rule of law. The pact of eternal peace, friendship and favor was hardly a reward for his behavior, and more of an attempted antidote to his violent tendencies.
These two opposing explanations for God’s grant of peace to Pinchas actually give way to a third, more subtle explanation, one that members of our Monday morning minyan advanced the other day during the weekday Torah service. The Torah is quite clear that God’s wrath was averted when Pinchas killed the man and the woman. 24,000 people had already died from the plague, and Pinchas’es actions saved even more from being killed. He did what needed to be done for the sake of the entire community. However, his necessary act of violence had a horribly disruptive effect upon the rest of his life, because that is the price we pay for acting aggressively, even if the aggression is warranted in the name of peace. Thus, the small yud in his name symbolizes the way in which part of his identity shrunk after his drastic action. The broken vav in the word shalom indicates how broken Pinchas became after he acted, and how the peace he found in serving God and averting disaster was forevermore broken and incomplete. The strange interruption in the verse about the ending of the plague reminds us that Pinchas’es act of self sacrifice interrupted the peaceful flow of his life.
This interpretation of the aftermath of Pinchas’es actions underscores the paradox of peacemaking, something I suspect every soldier understands all too well. It is all well and good to love peace and detest war, which of course we should. But, until the Messiah arrives, military intervention often remains the only feasible option for protecting fragile democracies, thwarting thug leaders who oppress their own people in rogue states, containing genocidal violence between warring groups, and defending one’s borders and one’s citizens. Our American soldiers –and our brothers and sisters in the Israel Defense Forces as well- are similar to Pinchas in the following way. They perform the dirty, hand bloodying tasks of peace keeping that everyone wants done, but that no one else wants to do. They depart from family and friends for long periods of time with no guarantees of safe return. This is traumatic enough. During their tour of duty they are faced with helping Iraqis and Afghanis to build peaceful, democratic lives, while being forced to take their lives into their own hands and to take the lives of terrorists and Taliban. At times they are tragically killed while defending others. At times, they return home broken by the bloodiness of their peacekeeping efforts, and forced into the living death of disabling war injuries, deep depression, drug use and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Right after President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about the acceptance speech that he wished the president would give. It went like this:
“Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know — and I want you to know — that there is no peace without peacekeepers. Until the words of Isaiah are made true and lasting — and nations never again lift up swords against nations and never learn war anymore — we will need peacekeepers. Lord knows, ours are not perfect, and I have already moved to remedy inexcusable excesses we’ve perpetrated in the war on terrorism. But have no doubt, those are the exception. If you want to see the true essence of America, visit any U.S. military outpost in Iraq or Afghanistan. You will meet young men and women of every race and religion who work together as one, far from their families, motivated chiefly by their mission to keep the peace and expand the borders of freedom. So for all these reasons — and so you understand that I will never hesitate to call on American soldiers where necessary to take the field against the enemies of peace, tolerance and liberty — I accept this peace prize on behalf of the men and women of the U.S. military: the world’s most important peacekeepers.”
This July 4 weekend, as we enjoy, and perhaps take for granted, the blessings of liberty and peace, let’s take a moment to think of, thank, and find ways to support our soldiers. Like Pinchas, they enter the paradox of peacekeeping every day. We are better off for their efforts.
Dvar Torah For Parshat Pinchas, First of Tlata D’Puranuta, 5770/4th of July Weekend, 2010.
Often when I deliver a d’var Torah, I point out grammatical anomalies in the Torah scroll – strange or out of place words, phrases, and grammatical features that hint at some deeper message or teaching. Certainly, many of these anomalies abound. However, equally prominent and suggestive in the Torah text are what I call orthographic anomalies: the strange ways in which letters, words, paragraphs, and verses are actually spelled or written. In the brief course of a mere 13 verses, the first aliyah of Parshat Pinchas contains three of these strange features. Let’s look at each of them and ask ourselves what they may be teaching us, separately and together. Unfortunately, our version of the Humash has expunged a number of these features to make the text cleaner. As I guide you through each of them, I ask you to imagine what they look like. After services, I’ll be happy to show them to you in the Torah scroll itself.
The first anomaly is found at Numbers, 25:11, which you can find on page 918. Notice the name of Aaron’s grandson, Pinchas. Though you can’t see it here, in the Torah scroll the yud letter in his name is written smaller than the other letters. Though it may have originated as a scribal error, it has persisted as the standard way in which to write his name here. It is known in ancient scribal tradition as a Yud Zeirah, a miniature yud. Further, that yud letter is actually not entirely necessary for the spelling of the name. This is an example of ketiv malei, or full script, a full writing of the name Pinchas that uses the yud letter as a vowel. Without that letter, we could still pronounce the name Pinchas properly.
The second anomaly is found in the last word of Numbers, 25:12, shalom, which is on page 919. Again, our Humash version lacks this, so please imagine that you can see it. In the Torah scroll, the vav letter of the word shalom is actually split in half. It is known in scribal tradition as Vav Ketiyah, a snapped or broken vav. This broken vav may also have originally been a scribal error or the result of a crack in ancient parchment. Nonetheless, the tradition of writing this letter in this way is very ancient (it is mentioned by a Talmudic rabbi who lived in the 3rd or 4th century), and it obviously has stuck with us for millennia.
The final anomaly is found in the middle of Numbers, 25:19 and 26:1, on page 920. Our Humash clearly indicates this strange feature with a small star near the final word of verse 19, and by leaving out a colon next to that word that would normally indicate the completion of a verse. This is called Piska B’Emtza Pasuk: a sentence break in the middle of the verse. What this means is that the three words of 25:19 are actually the middle of a sentence, but we treat them as if they were their own separate verse. They form what grammarians call a dependent clause that, translated, reads simply, “When the plague was over…”
All three of these curiosities in our text are emphasized by the Baalei Hamesorah, the very exacting schools of scribal scholars who lived in the land of Israel between the 8th and 10th centuries. They assembled literally thousands of notes on features of the Torah scroll’s script and wording based upon even older traditions that have survived in the Jewish community for millennia. As I alluded to before, what is so amazing about these three is that they are all found in one short 13 verse passage of Parshat Pinchas. What might they be telling us, or more likely, screaming at us?
A good way to begin answering this question is to recall the back story to this morning’s Torah portion. Last week we read about how Pinchas engaged in vigilante justice by killing an Israelite chieftain who engaged in lascivious behavior with a Midianite woman in front of the Tent of Meeting. He did this to avert a virulent plague caused by God that was already in progress, the result of God’s anger at the Israelites for idolatrous behavior with the Midianites. When we reentered the Torah this morning, we encountered God granting Pinchas and his descendants a pact of peace and friendship, as well as the mantle of the priesthood in perpetuity. God did this, according to the Torah, because of Pinchas’es act of impassioned and zealous violence that calmed down God’s fury with the Israelites.
The comments in our Humash summarize the two main explanations for this covenant of peace and friendship given by God to Pinchas. The first one, that the Torah and a number of later commentaries on it, makes clear that God’s violent anger was averted by Pinchas’es violence. Presumably this is because Pinchas satisfied God’s need for one person to empathically feel and act upon God’s fury. It may also be that his curative act of violence is an echo of a distant, ancient belief that the two victims were some kind of a sacrificial offering to appease God. This is pure speculation on my part. However, it is clear that without Pinchas’es belligerent behavior, God would have continued plaguing and killing the people. For the Torah, his act was thus justified and desirable, even if shocking and unacceptable to our modern ears. Thus, the pact of eternal peace, friendship and favor was Pinchas’es reward. The second explanation is far more qualified in its praise of Pinchas. His passion and violent behavior were not good, because of the bloody destruction they wrought, and the way in which his vigilantism dangerously ignored the rule of law. The pact of eternal peace, friendship and favor was hardly a reward for his behavior, and more of an attempted antidote to his violent tendencies.
These two opposing explanations for God’s grant of peace to Pinchas actually give way to a third, more subtle explanation, one that members of our Monday morning minyan advanced the other day during the weekday Torah service. The Torah is quite clear that God’s wrath was averted when Pinchas killed the man and the woman. 24,000 people had already died from the plague, and Pinchas’es actions saved even more from being killed. He did what needed to be done for the sake of the entire community. However, his necessary act of violence had a horribly disruptive effect upon the rest of his life, because that is the price we pay for acting aggressively, even if the aggression is warranted in the name of peace. Thus, the small yud in his name symbolizes the way in which part of his identity shrunk after his drastic action. The broken vav in the word shalom indicates how broken Pinchas became after he acted, and how the peace he found in serving God and averting disaster was forevermore broken and incomplete. The strange interruption in the verse about the ending of the plague reminds us that Pinchas’es act of self sacrifice interrupted the peaceful flow of his life.
This interpretation of the aftermath of Pinchas’es actions underscores the paradox of peacemaking, something I suspect every soldier understands all too well. It is all well and good to love peace and detest war, which of course we should. But, until the Messiah arrives, military intervention often remains the only feasible option for protecting fragile democracies, thwarting thug leaders who oppress their own people in rogue states, containing genocidal violence between warring groups, and defending one’s borders and one’s citizens. Our American soldiers –and our brothers and sisters in the Israel Defense Forces as well- are similar to Pinchas in the following way. They perform the dirty, hand bloodying tasks of peace keeping that everyone wants done, but that no one else wants to do. They depart from family and friends for long periods of time with no guarantees of safe return. This is traumatic enough. During their tour of duty they are faced with helping Iraqis and Afghanis to build peaceful, democratic lives, while being forced to take their lives into their own hands and to take the lives of terrorists and Taliban. At times they are tragically killed while defending others. At times, they return home broken by the bloodiness of their peacekeeping efforts, and forced into the living death of disabling war injuries, deep depression, drug use and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Right after President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about the acceptance speech that he wished the president would give. It went like this:
“Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know — and I want you to know — that there is no peace without peacekeepers. Until the words of Isaiah are made true and lasting — and nations never again lift up swords against nations and never learn war anymore — we will need peacekeepers. Lord knows, ours are not perfect, and I have already moved to remedy inexcusable excesses we’ve perpetrated in the war on terrorism. But have no doubt, those are the exception. If you want to see the true essence of America, visit any U.S. military outpost in Iraq or Afghanistan. You will meet young men and women of every race and religion who work together as one, far from their families, motivated chiefly by their mission to keep the peace and expand the borders of freedom. So for all these reasons — and so you understand that I will never hesitate to call on American soldiers where necessary to take the field against the enemies of peace, tolerance and liberty — I accept this peace prize on behalf of the men and women of the U.S. military: the world’s most important peacekeepers.”
This July 4 weekend, as we enjoy, and perhaps take for granted, the blessings of liberty and peace, let’s take a moment to think of, thank, and find ways to support our soldiers. Like Pinchas, they enter the paradox of peacekeeping every day. We are better off for their efforts.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Shavuot Sermon 5770
NO SHAME WHEN GOD’S FACE IS WITH YOU.
Dvar Torah For Shavuot, Day 1, 5770.
As enigmatic and mysterious as the story of the Sinai revelation is, the content of that revelation –what we call the Ten Commandments- is equally puzzling and mysterious. Consider just a few examples of its enigmatic nature. The first “commandment” is not a commandment at all, but a kind of preamble to the other commandments. In it, God self-identifies as the Redeemer Who took the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. The last “commandment” does not prohibit behavior, but feelings: you are forbidden from covetously desiring what others have. Finally, these commandments are not even identified as such, but as devarim or dibrot, words or utterances of God, even though functionally they are clearly mitzvot: binding commandments and obligations.
This first morning of Shavuot, I want to focus with you on one of these ten divine utterances that I find most interesting. Let’s look for a moment at the second commandment, specifically the first part of it. Please open Humash Etz Hayyim to page 443, at verse 3:
לא יהיה לך אלהים אחרים על פני:
You shall have no other gods beside Me.
In his classic listing of all 613 commandments, Sefer HaMitzvot, Maimonides lists this one as the very first negative commandment, and as the one that is the anchor for all the others: “By this prohibition, we are forbidden to believe in, or ascribe deity to, any but God, exalted be He. It is contained in His words…’You shall have no other gods beside me.’” What I find troubling about this second of the ten commandments, at least as it is stated by Maimonides, is that –like the prohibition against coveting- it seems to be about what a person thinks or believes, not about what a person does. It does not necessarily possess any behavioral content. Maimonides himself acknowledges this when he teaches elsewhere (MT Hilchot Teshuva ch. 3) that a person who believes in the existence of many gods or deities is branded a min, a heretic who is denied access to the world to come. Implicit in his teaching is the recognition that a traditional court of Jewish law could not punish such a person, mi shum she lo asah maaseh: he or she has not actually done anything prohibited, only thought or believed something that is presumably unacceptable.
The sages of the early rabbinic period, who preceded Maimonides by many centuries, offer a more concrete, behavioral interpretation of this prohibition. They translate “other gods” to mean literally, “the gods of other people”, or “the gods who become like others to their worshippers by being proven worthless,” or even “the gods who transform their worshippers into the other—someone who becomes less than human through enslavement to idolatry.” In other words, God is not prohibiting a personal belief, feeling or thought as much as prohibiting active physical and emotional servitude to false deities. What counts for the sages is the behaviors of false servitude that lead to the spiritually enslaved mentality of false servitude.
Another refreshing way of understanding this second of the Ten Commandments is that it is not a commandment at all, but a promise or a reassurance concerning the results of faith. The popular Hasidic Torah commentary, Noam Megadim explains our verse by first referring us to the very last commandment: do not covet. The author of Noam Megadim asks, how is it that God could require us not to covet? We may not want to feel covetous feelings, but they will sweep over us anyway, against our will. His answer? Do not covet is not a prohibition but a promise: if we follow the first nine commandments and align ourselves with a life of holiness in God’s presence, we will be able to master (not extirpate) that covetous impulse that often results from our belief that we are the center of the world and that we have coming to us everything that we want. So too, “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” Read in a creatively literal way, the Hebrew of our verse can be understood as God saying to us : “You will not have any other gods.. as long as you are in the presence of PANAI, My face.” That is, as long as we discipline ourselves to keep God’s face – God’s immanent presence- right before us, the other false gods won’t become our gods. What gods in particular is the Torah speaking about here? Other human beings who try to coerce a person of faith into embarrassed conformity to their views of the world and perspectives on life: they assume a kind of god-like mastery over many a person who is seeking a life in God’s presence but who is made to feel stupid, backward, or humiliated because he or she dares to embrace a life of religious values and consciousness.
I am no fan of extremes, whether they be of the religious or the secular variety, and I certainly have no use for the way that extremists of either camp carry truth with a capital T in their pockets, attempting to denigrate others who do not share their worldviews. Like you, I am terrified by the way a small but virulent group of young Muslims are using Islam as the match that lights weapons of terror and mass destruction against innocent human beings. Admittedly in a different way, though with growing concern, I fear how growing number of secular thinkers are reacting to religious extremism. Rather than focus critically on what has become corrupted and dangerous in organized religion, they are throwing out the spiritual baby with the political bath water by condemning all religious faith, all religious community and values, and all mention of God, as backward and toxic. With an almost puritanical fervor borne of understandable fear, they are developing a rhtetoric of anti-religion that is just one more false god seeking to cow adherents of religious tradition into silence by branding all of us adherents of dangerous fundamentalism. They do no justice to the wisdom and insights of millennia of religious teaching and quest; they also do no justice to the billions of truly decent human beings whose decency derives in great part from religious living.
The teachings of the Noam Megadim are especially applicable in responding to both forms of extremism. To religious extremists we need to say: “Your fervor for God needs to be balanced with respect for God’s laws that require you to treat all of God’s creations with respect.” To secular extremists we need to say: “Your fervor for law and freedom needs to be balanced with a humble recognition that these great traditions of law and liberty have their sources in the even greater traditions of religion.” To ourselves, as religious modernists seeking to contribute spiritually and morally to promoting peace and human rights, we need to say: place the God of peace and justice before you every day; make God –however you understand God- the basis of your decision to live in the world and better it; and recognize that, all the false gods of human arrogance and contempt notwithstanding, you have nothing for which to be ashamed, when God is facing you.
Dvar Torah For Shavuot, Day 1, 5770.
As enigmatic and mysterious as the story of the Sinai revelation is, the content of that revelation –what we call the Ten Commandments- is equally puzzling and mysterious. Consider just a few examples of its enigmatic nature. The first “commandment” is not a commandment at all, but a kind of preamble to the other commandments. In it, God self-identifies as the Redeemer Who took the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. The last “commandment” does not prohibit behavior, but feelings: you are forbidden from covetously desiring what others have. Finally, these commandments are not even identified as such, but as devarim or dibrot, words or utterances of God, even though functionally they are clearly mitzvot: binding commandments and obligations.
This first morning of Shavuot, I want to focus with you on one of these ten divine utterances that I find most interesting. Let’s look for a moment at the second commandment, specifically the first part of it. Please open Humash Etz Hayyim to page 443, at verse 3:
לא יהיה לך אלהים אחרים על פני:
You shall have no other gods beside Me.
In his classic listing of all 613 commandments, Sefer HaMitzvot, Maimonides lists this one as the very first negative commandment, and as the one that is the anchor for all the others: “By this prohibition, we are forbidden to believe in, or ascribe deity to, any but God, exalted be He. It is contained in His words…’You shall have no other gods beside me.’” What I find troubling about this second of the ten commandments, at least as it is stated by Maimonides, is that –like the prohibition against coveting- it seems to be about what a person thinks or believes, not about what a person does. It does not necessarily possess any behavioral content. Maimonides himself acknowledges this when he teaches elsewhere (MT Hilchot Teshuva ch. 3) that a person who believes in the existence of many gods or deities is branded a min, a heretic who is denied access to the world to come. Implicit in his teaching is the recognition that a traditional court of Jewish law could not punish such a person, mi shum she lo asah maaseh: he or she has not actually done anything prohibited, only thought or believed something that is presumably unacceptable.
The sages of the early rabbinic period, who preceded Maimonides by many centuries, offer a more concrete, behavioral interpretation of this prohibition. They translate “other gods” to mean literally, “the gods of other people”, or “the gods who become like others to their worshippers by being proven worthless,” or even “the gods who transform their worshippers into the other—someone who becomes less than human through enslavement to idolatry.” In other words, God is not prohibiting a personal belief, feeling or thought as much as prohibiting active physical and emotional servitude to false deities. What counts for the sages is the behaviors of false servitude that lead to the spiritually enslaved mentality of false servitude.
Another refreshing way of understanding this second of the Ten Commandments is that it is not a commandment at all, but a promise or a reassurance concerning the results of faith. The popular Hasidic Torah commentary, Noam Megadim explains our verse by first referring us to the very last commandment: do not covet. The author of Noam Megadim asks, how is it that God could require us not to covet? We may not want to feel covetous feelings, but they will sweep over us anyway, against our will. His answer? Do not covet is not a prohibition but a promise: if we follow the first nine commandments and align ourselves with a life of holiness in God’s presence, we will be able to master (not extirpate) that covetous impulse that often results from our belief that we are the center of the world and that we have coming to us everything that we want. So too, “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” Read in a creatively literal way, the Hebrew of our verse can be understood as God saying to us : “You will not have any other gods.. as long as you are in the presence of PANAI, My face.” That is, as long as we discipline ourselves to keep God’s face – God’s immanent presence- right before us, the other false gods won’t become our gods. What gods in particular is the Torah speaking about here? Other human beings who try to coerce a person of faith into embarrassed conformity to their views of the world and perspectives on life: they assume a kind of god-like mastery over many a person who is seeking a life in God’s presence but who is made to feel stupid, backward, or humiliated because he or she dares to embrace a life of religious values and consciousness.
I am no fan of extremes, whether they be of the religious or the secular variety, and I certainly have no use for the way that extremists of either camp carry truth with a capital T in their pockets, attempting to denigrate others who do not share their worldviews. Like you, I am terrified by the way a small but virulent group of young Muslims are using Islam as the match that lights weapons of terror and mass destruction against innocent human beings. Admittedly in a different way, though with growing concern, I fear how growing number of secular thinkers are reacting to religious extremism. Rather than focus critically on what has become corrupted and dangerous in organized religion, they are throwing out the spiritual baby with the political bath water by condemning all religious faith, all religious community and values, and all mention of God, as backward and toxic. With an almost puritanical fervor borne of understandable fear, they are developing a rhtetoric of anti-religion that is just one more false god seeking to cow adherents of religious tradition into silence by branding all of us adherents of dangerous fundamentalism. They do no justice to the wisdom and insights of millennia of religious teaching and quest; they also do no justice to the billions of truly decent human beings whose decency derives in great part from religious living.
The teachings of the Noam Megadim are especially applicable in responding to both forms of extremism. To religious extremists we need to say: “Your fervor for God needs to be balanced with respect for God’s laws that require you to treat all of God’s creations with respect.” To secular extremists we need to say: “Your fervor for law and freedom needs to be balanced with a humble recognition that these great traditions of law and liberty have their sources in the even greater traditions of religion.” To ourselves, as religious modernists seeking to contribute spiritually and morally to promoting peace and human rights, we need to say: place the God of peace and justice before you every day; make God –however you understand God- the basis of your decision to live in the world and better it; and recognize that, all the false gods of human arrogance and contempt notwithstanding, you have nothing for which to be ashamed, when God is facing you.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Passover Sermons 5770
IN EVERY GENERATION, PART 3: HALLELUYAH!
Dvar Torah For Day Eight Pesach/Yiskor 5770.
Everyone, say Halleluyah! Don’t be shy, all it means is, “Praise God!” What… you don’t believe in God, or you’re not sure you do? You don’t like overt, maybe over the top, expressions of piety? You think that shouting Halleluyah is sanctimonious, posturing, self promoting, religiously preening, hypocritical? You think that you dare not shout Halleluyah when you’re a nothing, a humble nobody? Huh, look who thinks he or she is a nobody! Come on, get out of your comfort zone, stop rationalizing, live a little. Your life may not be perfect, you may even be quite unhappy right now, you may be a confirmed atheist, you may not be feeling well, you may think that this little exercise is leading us right down the path to being a…Baptist church…but so what? Stretch your vocal chords and your spirit, move your body and shout Halleluyah! Let me hear you! Halleluyah!
How ironic that a word like Halleluyah, an authentically Jewish word that comes from, and is found all over, our Bible, should be so uncomfortable for Jews to say with passion and gusto. Some of this is the result of our overall discomfort with emotion laden spiritual expression. Yet, I think that we are also uncomfortable with shouting Halleluyah because we have bought the myth that it is something that Christians do, not us. How untrue this is. Please look with me at a famous passage from the Mishnah, Judaism’s oral tradition, Tractate Pesahim, 10:5; this is a passage we have been studying together since the Shabbat preceding Pesach.
Rabban Gamliel said: “Whoever has not referred to these three matters connected to the Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (to tell the Passover story), and these are they: Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
Passover: because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.
Unleavened bread: because our ancestors were redeemed in Egypt.
Bitter herbs: because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt.
In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt, since it is said (in the Torah), “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)’”
Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, honor, exalt, extol, and bless the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles. God brought us forth from:
Slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festival, darkness to great light, subjugation to redemption.
So, we should say before God Halleluyah (that is, the psalms of Hallel, Ps. 113-118.)”
As we have been learning throughout Pesach, this teaching of Rabban Gamliel is found in its entirely in the Passover Haggadah. In the first two parts of the passage, he reminds us to talk about the ancient Passover sacrifice with its accompanying matzah and bitter herbs, so that we relive that great feast at the seder, even if we can no longer perform it ourselves. Further, our teacher asks us to place ourselves at the scene of that very first seder when, as slaves about to become free, we offered that very first paschal sacrifice in grateful preparation for liberation. Then, notice that Rabban Gamliel concludes with one more instruction. Because we owe God a huge debt of gratitude and praise for transforming us into free people, we should chant before God the Halleluyah psalms of the Hallel prayer, also known as the Egyptian Hallel because it thanks God for redeeming us from there. (In fact, Hallel is sung in two segments as part of the seder service according to the traditional Haggadah.)
I imagine Rabban Gamliel as a Baptist preacher shouting “Halleluyah, praise the Lord!” to his congregants in the pews. He jumps up and down, with sweat streaming from his beet red face as the faithful get riled up, catch the spirit, fall down, start writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues. For all we know, the context of his teaching was something akin to this: he wanted his fellow Jews not only to practice the rituals of the seder as if they were in that exact moment of liberation from Egypt. He also wanted them to feel the exhiliaration of that moment, to scream and shout Halleluyah as they charged Egypt’s gates en masse and walked out into freedom. However, it is just as likely that Rabban Gamliel exhorted us to sing the Halleluyah psalms of the Hallel because he was copying what our ancient ancestors did during the Passover sacrifice in the Holy Temple. An earlier passage of the Mishnah, Pesahim 5:7, teaches us that the Jewish pilgrims would eat the Passover in three shifts, all of which would sing the Hallel prayer as the Temple priests distributed pieces of the sacrificial meat to them. The Talmud, Tractate Pesahim 117a explains that the Egyptian Hallel goes back in time as far as the crossing of the Red Sea itself. As the Israelites embarked on their dangerous journey to freedom, the prophets among them taught them to sing Hallel as a way of asking God to protect them from trouble. After they were finally saved from Pharaoh, those prophets taught them to sing Hallel again in thanks to God for redeeming them. Thus, Rabban Gamliel’s spontaneous exhortation to his fellow Jews was actually a well thought out pedagogic strategy for –once again- helping us to relive the Passover Temple service, and by extension, that terrifying moment at the Red Sea when we were caught in that transitional space between shedding our skin of slavery and dressing ourselves in the robes of freedom.
I am drawn to the Talmud’s twofold understanding of Hallel: we chant it as we walk through breath holding, heart stopping danger; we chant it after we live through that danger. It accompanies us on both parts of our life journeys because –as the Talmud points out- its most important word-Halleuyah- compounds a command to praise (Hallelu) with a straightforward reference to God –known here by God’s Hebrew name, Yah. We are not asked or encouraged, we are commanded, to carry an attitude of praise with us wherever we are and through whatever we experience. A view of life that is suffused with praise does not usually come naturally: we have to inculcate it within ourselves through the hard work of waking each day –no matter how we feel, no matter what a day brings us- and recognizing that day as one more precious opportunity to breathe, to live, to be in this mixture of madness and magnificence that is our world, the world created by God, the never ending source of all life in all of its complexity, mystery, and imperfection. A Halleluyah perspective on the world sees God’s creative power and compassionate presence in everything: danger and redemption, sadness and joy, life and death. A Halleluyah perspective praises God for life as it is, because it is holy and worthwhile simply by virtue of being life!
In a moment, when we chant Yizkor, we will actually be reciting an extended Halleluyah. Yes, we will be remembering our loved ones who have died, some naturally in their time, and others tragically and before their time. But we will also be remembering their precious legacies, feeling their palpable, endless presence, and praising God for the people they were and the people they have helped us to become. For the love that they gave us and allowed us to give them, we say Halleluyah! For the complex, imperfect but loving relationships that we had with them, we say, Halleluyah! For our ability to remember them without the varnish of false piety, we say Halleluyah! For their having lived in our world, in God’s world, we say Halleluyah!
Dvar Torah For Day Eight Pesach/Yiskor 5770.
Everyone, say Halleluyah! Don’t be shy, all it means is, “Praise God!” What… you don’t believe in God, or you’re not sure you do? You don’t like overt, maybe over the top, expressions of piety? You think that shouting Halleluyah is sanctimonious, posturing, self promoting, religiously preening, hypocritical? You think that you dare not shout Halleluyah when you’re a nothing, a humble nobody? Huh, look who thinks he or she is a nobody! Come on, get out of your comfort zone, stop rationalizing, live a little. Your life may not be perfect, you may even be quite unhappy right now, you may be a confirmed atheist, you may not be feeling well, you may think that this little exercise is leading us right down the path to being a…Baptist church…but so what? Stretch your vocal chords and your spirit, move your body and shout Halleluyah! Let me hear you! Halleluyah!
How ironic that a word like Halleluyah, an authentically Jewish word that comes from, and is found all over, our Bible, should be so uncomfortable for Jews to say with passion and gusto. Some of this is the result of our overall discomfort with emotion laden spiritual expression. Yet, I think that we are also uncomfortable with shouting Halleluyah because we have bought the myth that it is something that Christians do, not us. How untrue this is. Please look with me at a famous passage from the Mishnah, Judaism’s oral tradition, Tractate Pesahim, 10:5; this is a passage we have been studying together since the Shabbat preceding Pesach.
Rabban Gamliel said: “Whoever has not referred to these three matters connected to the Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (to tell the Passover story), and these are they: Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
Passover: because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.
Unleavened bread: because our ancestors were redeemed in Egypt.
Bitter herbs: because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt.
In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt, since it is said (in the Torah), “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)’”
Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, honor, exalt, extol, and bless the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles. God brought us forth from:
Slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festival, darkness to great light, subjugation to redemption.
So, we should say before God Halleluyah (that is, the psalms of Hallel, Ps. 113-118.)”
As we have been learning throughout Pesach, this teaching of Rabban Gamliel is found in its entirely in the Passover Haggadah. In the first two parts of the passage, he reminds us to talk about the ancient Passover sacrifice with its accompanying matzah and bitter herbs, so that we relive that great feast at the seder, even if we can no longer perform it ourselves. Further, our teacher asks us to place ourselves at the scene of that very first seder when, as slaves about to become free, we offered that very first paschal sacrifice in grateful preparation for liberation. Then, notice that Rabban Gamliel concludes with one more instruction. Because we owe God a huge debt of gratitude and praise for transforming us into free people, we should chant before God the Halleluyah psalms of the Hallel prayer, also known as the Egyptian Hallel because it thanks God for redeeming us from there. (In fact, Hallel is sung in two segments as part of the seder service according to the traditional Haggadah.)
I imagine Rabban Gamliel as a Baptist preacher shouting “Halleluyah, praise the Lord!” to his congregants in the pews. He jumps up and down, with sweat streaming from his beet red face as the faithful get riled up, catch the spirit, fall down, start writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues. For all we know, the context of his teaching was something akin to this: he wanted his fellow Jews not only to practice the rituals of the seder as if they were in that exact moment of liberation from Egypt. He also wanted them to feel the exhiliaration of that moment, to scream and shout Halleluyah as they charged Egypt’s gates en masse and walked out into freedom. However, it is just as likely that Rabban Gamliel exhorted us to sing the Halleluyah psalms of the Hallel because he was copying what our ancient ancestors did during the Passover sacrifice in the Holy Temple. An earlier passage of the Mishnah, Pesahim 5:7, teaches us that the Jewish pilgrims would eat the Passover in three shifts, all of which would sing the Hallel prayer as the Temple priests distributed pieces of the sacrificial meat to them. The Talmud, Tractate Pesahim 117a explains that the Egyptian Hallel goes back in time as far as the crossing of the Red Sea itself. As the Israelites embarked on their dangerous journey to freedom, the prophets among them taught them to sing Hallel as a way of asking God to protect them from trouble. After they were finally saved from Pharaoh, those prophets taught them to sing Hallel again in thanks to God for redeeming them. Thus, Rabban Gamliel’s spontaneous exhortation to his fellow Jews was actually a well thought out pedagogic strategy for –once again- helping us to relive the Passover Temple service, and by extension, that terrifying moment at the Red Sea when we were caught in that transitional space between shedding our skin of slavery and dressing ourselves in the robes of freedom.
I am drawn to the Talmud’s twofold understanding of Hallel: we chant it as we walk through breath holding, heart stopping danger; we chant it after we live through that danger. It accompanies us on both parts of our life journeys because –as the Talmud points out- its most important word-Halleuyah- compounds a command to praise (Hallelu) with a straightforward reference to God –known here by God’s Hebrew name, Yah. We are not asked or encouraged, we are commanded, to carry an attitude of praise with us wherever we are and through whatever we experience. A view of life that is suffused with praise does not usually come naturally: we have to inculcate it within ourselves through the hard work of waking each day –no matter how we feel, no matter what a day brings us- and recognizing that day as one more precious opportunity to breathe, to live, to be in this mixture of madness and magnificence that is our world, the world created by God, the never ending source of all life in all of its complexity, mystery, and imperfection. A Halleluyah perspective on the world sees God’s creative power and compassionate presence in everything: danger and redemption, sadness and joy, life and death. A Halleluyah perspective praises God for life as it is, because it is holy and worthwhile simply by virtue of being life!
In a moment, when we chant Yizkor, we will actually be reciting an extended Halleluyah. Yes, we will be remembering our loved ones who have died, some naturally in their time, and others tragically and before their time. But we will also be remembering their precious legacies, feeling their palpable, endless presence, and praising God for the people they were and the people they have helped us to become. For the love that they gave us and allowed us to give them, we say Halleluyah! For the complex, imperfect but loving relationships that we had with them, we say, Halleluyah! For our ability to remember them without the varnish of false piety, we say Halleluyah! For their having lived in our world, in God’s world, we say Halleluyah!
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