SQUEEZING THE GRAPES OF REDEMPTION.

Dvar Torah For Shvii Shel Pesach (Pesach, Day Seven), 5772.

Chag sameach.

During the first two days of Pesach, I explained that in each dvar Torah for the holiday I would discuss the four cups of wine at the seder, with a close look at their form, function, symbolism and where tradition derives them from. You may recall our having looked at Exodus, chapter 6:6-7, which contains four different verbs that refer to God’s promised liberation of the Israelites from slavery. The derivation of the four cups of wine from these four verbs is found in the Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Pesahim, 10:1. There, we learn about three other sources in the Bible that hint at our practice of the four cups. These include the mention of four cups of bitterness that will be drunk by the Jewish people when we are under the thumb of different rulers and the four cups of salvation that we will drink when God redeems us from oppression in the messianic era. Each of these references to four cups that are drunk by the Jewish people actually makes sense as a poetic basis for explaining the source of our seder ritual. According to the Mishnah, the oral Torah, we begin telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt bi-g’nut, in a state of degradation, and we finish telling the story bi-sh’vach, in a state of praise: we were once slaves, then we became free; we once were slaves to idolatry, then God made us God’s people. This Passover story is a paradigm for and a microcosm of the Jewish experience throughout history: we have drunk many cups of oppression and we continue to drink many cups of deliverance. We will finish doing this when we and the world are finally redeemed by God during the ultimate messianic redemption.

However, one more creative allusion to the four cups of seder wine is found in the Jerusalem Talmud, and at first glance it makes no sense at all in this context. If you open your Humashim to Genesis 40:9-11 on page 243, we will read a passage from the story about our ancestor Joseph’s encounter with the royal cup-bearer in prison:

Then the chief cup bearer told his dream to Joseph. He said to him, “In my dream, there was a vine in front of me. On the vine were three branches. It had barely budded, when out came its blossoms and its clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes, pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup, and placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand.

Notice that in telling his dream to Joseph, the cup bearer uses the word “cup” three times. Joseph, of course interprets his prison mate’s dream correctly. In three days’ time, Pharaoh celebrates his birthday by pardoning his cup bearer and restoring him to his former position. In fact, we read later on, in chapter 40:21, page 245:

Pharaoh restored the chief cup bearer to his cup bearing, and he placed the cup in Pharoah’s hand.

These four mentions of the word “cup” in our story are taken by the Jerusalem Talmud as a hint to the four cups of wine that we drink at the seder.

All of the Talmud’s explanations for the source of our seder drinking ritual are essentially asmakhtot, after-the-fact rationales based upon the Bible, in this case for what was likely already a very ancient Jewish seder practice. However, as I already mentioned, this one asmakhta about Pharaoh’s cup bearer seems to make the least sense of all of them. How can the four cups of the cup bearer’s story be connected at all to the four cups of wine at our seder? The cup bearer was a non-Jew who had the good fortune to meet Joseph at the right time in his life and to be pardoned by Pharaoh, likely on a capricious whim of the latter, so that his life was saved and he was able to go back to serving in the royal court. This is hardly the basis for the story of our Exodus from Egypt. Other rabbinic sources explain that the cup bearer’s whole account is actually a veiled reference to the redemption of the Jewish people from Egypt, with the cups of wine and the grape vine serving as symbols for the means by which God would vanquish Pharaoh and save us from his clutches.

Obviously, there is no arguing with this kind of poetic license, because that is what an asmakhta is: a poetic marshalling of biblical sources in a playful way to make a point after the fact and “prove” as it were that some tradition or innovation actually has its roots in an authoritative biblical text. This being the case, allow me to offer an asmakhta explanation of my own based upon the verses about the cup bearer’s dream from Genesis. I make no claims that our sages would have agreed with me about my interpretation, but as we say in the rabbinic world: ein m’shivin al ha-drash: creative interpretations on the stories and ideas of biblical narrative should abound without anyone critiquing the creativity of anyone else. I suggest that these verses we quoted from Genesis should actually be taken in their most universal sense. Joseph the Hebrew is about to interpret the dream of redemption of his non-Jewish prison mate who just wants to be rehabilitated by his boss, Pharoah. The cup bearer wants to get out of prison, to receive the king’s favor, and to get back to his old job that must have supported him pretty well. In the end, as Joseph predicts, this is what happens. Yet, implicit in this story of the cup bearer’s good fortune is a darker story about the caprices of a powerful king who can raise a man like the cup bearer out of prison or behead a man like the royal baker, the other character in the Genesis story who did not fare as well. The fortunes of these two men, like that of Joseph, were utterly dependent upon other all-powerful elites who, no matter how benign they appeared, could turn on an underling and make or break a man’s life as part of a trifling bit of entertainment for a birthday celebration. Perhaps the rabbis of the Talmud connected the four cups of wine of the seder to this story to teach a more ominous, universal lesson about slavery and redemption. Unchecked by a power greater than oneself, whether the fear of God or the rule of law, the best leader easily degenerates into a tyrant whose decisions about the fate of others are vindictive and destructive. In the shadow of absolute power, even those who could be considered politically and economically fortunate, really have little real control over their own lives; how much more so the members of society with no money, prestige, or connections. sitting at their seder tables under the thumb of Roman occupation, our sages may have wanted to connect the night of redemption from Egypt to this disturbing story about the cup bearer because it is a story about incomplete liberation and freedom. They may have wanted to remind us that human authority and power should never be left unchecked and that the Pesach celebration is not only about our successful liberation from Egypt, but also about the many Egypts that remain throughout the world for millions, not just Jews.

Last week, I prefaced my first dvar Torah with an informal discussion about modern-day slavery. Millions of people who are desperate for economic security wind up being illegally trafficked or abducted and forced into slave-like conditions as prostitutes, farm workers for cacao farmers who supply some of the world’s biggest chocolatiers, and many other circumstances of forced labor. An estimated 15-27 million people throughout the world are modern-day slaves, many of them are minors, and many of them are women living under the coercive authority of abusive men. Further, modern day slaves are even living here in the United States and in Israel, two of the freest places on earth. They are far worse off than the cup bearer in the Bible story quoted by the Jerusalem Talmud, but they share with him one common condition: they have no real power to chart their own destinies and they are robbed of their dignity. If you go to Brandeis University’s website, brandeis.edu, link to its Schuster Institute of Investigative Journalism, and you will find more resources than you can stand to read about modern day human trafficking and slavery. To learn more about women, poverty, and modern slavery and trafficking, look at Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu-Dunn’s excellent book, Half the Sky.

The four cups of wine at our seders are certainly intended to celebrate the redemption and liberation that we experienced in Egypt, as well as the redemption that we experience through our reliance upon God. Yet, they can also be seen as uncomfortable reminders to us free people of the liberation and redemption that remain to be achieved by so many throughout the world. God needs us to make this freedom a reality.

Chag sameach.

HOW ELSE CAN WE UNDERSTAND THE FOUR VERBS OF REDEMPTION?

Dvar Torah For Day Two Of Pesach, 5772.
Chag kasher v’sameach.

Yesterday, we began to look at the ritual of the four cups of wine at the seder, specifically how the four cups function as markers along the path toward physical and spiritual freedom that we take each time we celebrate Pesach. You may recall the Talmudic teaching about the hint of these four cups of wine that our sages found in the language of the Torah. You will notice the verses from the book of Exodus, 6:6-7 that we studied yesterday morning:

I am the Lord. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary judgments. And I will take you to be My people…

As we will see next week during Yom Tov, and as I alluded to yesterday, this four-verb hint used by the Talmud for rationalizing the practice of the four cups is not the only one that is taught. However, it is the one that is most popular and that is cited most often in traditional sources. For me, the big question about these arbaah leshonot geulah, these four mentions of redemption, is that they appear to be saying the exact same thing four times. Is there anything about each of these verbs, to free, to deliver, to redeem and to take that makes them distinctive? Are God and the Torah simply being verbose?

Let me suggest that we follow the sage advice of our sages: no word in the Torah is superfluous or mere verbal ornamentation. It all possesses significance, even the parts that speak colloquially, in the language of human beings, as our rabbis call it. The fun and meaning of Torah text are found precisely in the significance –manifest and hidden - of each word, even at times, each letter of Torah. That being the case, let’s learn more about these four mentions of redemption with one of the masters of Torah commentary, Rabbi Hayyim ben Attar, also known as the Or HaHayyim, after his commentary by the same name. Rabbi ben Attar lived in 17th century Morocco in what was then still a thriving Jewish community. His commentary is noted for very fine, subtle questions about the Torah as well as a great deal of application of Jewish mysticism to interpreting the text. Rabbi ben Attar wrote the following about the four mentions of redemption in Exodus that form the basis for the four cups of wine:

God told Moses, “Inform the people of Israel that My nature is one of mercy. I will be merciful toward them, and here is the list of good things I will do for them:

I will free them: this means that I will free them from the worst of the Egyptian oppression through the ten plagues, but the dread of Egyptian power will still be over them. Then…

I will deliver them: this means that I will free them finally from all oppression and forced labor prior to the Exodus. Then…

I will redeem them: this means that I will actually take them out of Egypt, through the Sea of Reeds, beyond the reach of persecution and enemies. Then…
I will take them to be My people: this means that at Mount Sinai I will give them the Torah, when they become singled out for relationship with Me.


Note what the Or HaHayyim appears to be doing. Each one of the verbs represents a different stage of the physical and spiritual redemption of the Israelites from Egypt. By itself, this idea is nothing new. The innovation that Rabbi ben Attar adds here is this: the process of liberation and redemption was taking place well before the event of liberation and redemption, when our ancestors finally went free during the Exodus. Whether you believe that God literally did the work of freeing us, or that the Exodus was a purely human endeavor, the Or HaHayyim reminds us that the transition from slavery to freedom doesn’t just happen all of a sudden, out of the blue. That is because human beings get so tangled in the dark chaos of oppression, both as oppressors and as the oppressed, that even God, as it were, has to move with relative slowness to disentangle us from the mess of persecution. Even God cannot redeem us when we ourselves are not fully ready to be redeemed or to take responsibility for our own redemption. In a more secular vein, people who have been oppressed generally need to take the time to develop political consciousness and conscience that allow them to see that they do not have to allow themselves to be abused by the power of others. Even when the overturning of oppressive power can and should be swift, - when political revolution is the better path than political evolution - the creation of new, more equal expressions of power and governance likely needs to move with thoughtful deliberateness; thus, no one is able to grab the reins of new power too quickly or self-righteously, which prevents newly freed people from meeting the new boss who just winds up being the same as the old boss.

For me, the most interesting ritual implication of Rabbi ben Attar’s explanation of the redemptive process is how it is reflected in the seder. We recline and drink the four cups of wine at the seder, like free people. Yet, as we drink each of those cups, we like our ancestors, are reenacting the experience of still being slaves as much as the drama of becoming free. We are in Egypt slowly shaking off oppression but not yet fully free, just like they were. This liminal experience of being both enslaved and free, of being on the threshold between both, is found throughout the seder: matzah is the bread of the Exodus and freedom, and it is the bread of affliction; we begin the telling of the Pesach story at the seder bi-g’nut, in a state of degradation, and only later do we journey to the end of the story bi-sh’vach, praising God for the dignity of freedom; we consume symbols of the Paschal sacrifice and bitter herbs and haroset, symbols of the bitterness of slavery. Each of these threshold rituals forces us to feel the discomfort of not being quite a slave yet not being quite free, even as we party through the seder night in celebration. That way, we never take freedom for granted, we never dismiss the possibility of slavery as merely a thing of the distant past, and we never lose our sense of humble gratitude to God for the blessings we have.

THE FOUR CUPS AT THE SEDER #1.

Dvar Torah For Day 1 of Pesach, 5772.

Shabbat shalom and chag kasher v’sameach.

I trust that your first seder was a joyous experience that not only involved a great feast with family and friends, but also an opportunity to literally taste slavery and freedom in one meal. One of the primary ritual and educational tools of the seder is the drinking of the four cups of wine. For this and the next three divrei Torah that span the four days of Yom Tov during Pesach, I want to explore this ritual of the four cups from different perspectives, ritual, halakhic, and symbolic. This is especially helpful today, the first day of Yom Tov, as we reflect upon our first seder and prepare for the second which will take place tonight.

The practice of drinking four cups of wine at the seder derives from the Mishnah, the oral Torah, specifically Tractate Pesahim, chapter 10. There, we read in the very first section that even the poorest members of the Jewish community must drink four cups of wine at the seder, and even if that requires taking assistance from the public charity fund that would be used only for those in the most dire financial straits. The rest of chapter 10 teaches us about the four times that each cup of wine is drunk: as part of Kiddush for Yom Tov evening, at the end of the recitation of the Passover story, right after Birkat HaMazon, or grace after meals, and at the conclusion of the Hallel prayer which is mandated by the rabbis of the Mishnah as a way of praising God for delivering us from Egypt. Each of these rituals to which wine drinking is connected is an obligatory practice that sanctifies our celebratory meal as a religious event.

The Mishnah never actually explains to us where it derives the drinking of the four cups from, only that each of the four major rituals of the seder is to be accompanied by the drinking of a cup of wine, over each of which the later rabbis of the Talmud required a blessing. Other rabbinic sources assert that this practice is based upon the four different verbs used to describe God’s redemption of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, which are mentioned in Exodus 6:6-7. There God explains to Moses God’s plan for freeing the people from Egypt:

I am the Lord. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary judgments. And I will take you to be My people…

God promises to free us, to deliver us, to redeem us, and to take us as God’s people. At first glance, this four-word emphasis upon liberation in the Bible is a sufficient explanation for the four cups of wine. Each celebratory cup that we drink serves as a reminder of God’s promises fulfilled in the past and of God’s promises to be fulfilled toward us in the future. However, as we will see later on during Pesach, other plausible four-fold explanations for the four cups exist, and the verses that I quoted before from Exodus can easily be interpreted to evoke five or even six words related to liberation, when the verse are quoted in full. Though these four words that evoke images of God liberating us are powerful, let me suggest a more basic reason for why we drink these four cups at the seder, as well as why we drink them when and how we do.

The seder is, as its name attests, literally an ordered ritual experience; it is intended to help us feel like we are slaves leaving Egypt, not simply have us retell the Exodus story as someone else’s story from an inaccessible and distant past. Everything about the seder is conducted with an eye toward helping us to act and feast like newly -freed people. In the Greco-Roman world of ancient Palestine where the seder liturgy was developed, it was common for the upper classes to hold symposia, in which they mixed heavy amounts of eating, drinking, and not always wholesome partying with light intellectual discussions about philosophy, science or the arts. A common misconception is that the seder was modeled directly after the symposium. Though the form of the Roman symposium was likely the skeletal model for the structure of the seder, the content of the seder was anything but an imitation of the symposium. My teacher Professor Barukh Bokser, of blessed memory, wrote many years ago that the Mishnah I mentioned above reflects our sages’ efforts to create a distinctively Jewish spiritual experience through the seder. Their true model was the first Passover meal that the Israelites engaged in as slaves on the verge of freedom that night before the Exodus millennia ago. Of course, their second true model was the great Passover offering celebrated in Jerusalem by thousands of pilgrims who would worship at the Bet Hamikdash, the holy Temple, as one free community, prior to the Temple’s destruction by the Romans. Rabbi Bokser and other scholars point out where our sages chose to pointedly make changes in the symposium model or to ignore it altogether. First, they insured that everyone, men, women and children, rich and poor alike would be part of the seder experience, particularly the drinking of the four cups of wine and reclining in the manner of free people. The seder became a rehearsal for radical egalitarianism, something to be tasted by all members of the community within the larger values framework of redemption, even if only for one night. Egalitarianism and inclusiveness were hardly the fare of the typical symposium. Second, while they certainly expected seder participants to feast and drink as free people do, they placed the discussion of the Exodus first in the order of the evening, before the revelry and the drinking, which were considered of secondary importance in some respects. In fact, the revelry and drinking were highly regulated by the Mishnah, so that the seder did not degenerate into the bacchanalian nonsense for which Roman symposia were apparently infamous. Third, and I think most relevant, the four cups of wine were placed by the sages in the seder as ritual markers of transitions, rather than simply opportunities for a good, stiff drink. Look at where each of the four cups of wine is found. The first cup ushers in the holiday through Kiddush, which proclaims Pesach and the people of Israel holy, something that is hard to do when a people is being beaten down by an oppressor. The second cup concludes the mitzvah of telling and re-living the story of the redemption from Egypt, which is what defines us on the night of liberation. More specifically, after the telling of the story we now define ourselves as free, rather than having our identities handed to us by Pharaoh, thus leading us to a celebratory drink. The third cup follows the grace after meals, in fulfillment of the traditional requirement according to Halakhah, something not often done anymore. Significantly, this third cup of wine seems to be one more reminder to us free people that our freedom is not license for anarchy in eating, drinking and partying, but a reminder that we have the capacity to discipline our behavior voluntarily and freely. Finally, the fourth cup completes the recitation of the second part of the Hallel prayer, which our sages required us to chant as a final hymn of thanks to God, who is the real center of the Exodus story. We who are physically free can once again exercise our spiritual freedom by recognizing God, not a human being, as the supreme ruler, yet another reason for a celebratory drink within appropriate limits. Each of these transitions or stations follows a larger pattern that the four cups of wine and the text of the Haggadah reflect: first, we needed to be physically liberated from Pharaoh. Only then could we liberate ourselves spiritually and morally by exercising freely our relationship with God and a life of self-imposed discipline, the ultimate form of freedom.

Thus, far from being opportunities for making the seder a happy hour, the four cups of wine concretize and ritualize order and structure, while at the same time allowing us a certain amount of space to unwind, have fun, and celebrate the literal and symbolic taste of freedom. Ultimately, they parallel beautifully the four verbs from Exodus that are their literary basis: At Kiddush, we thank God for literally freeing us from Egypt. During the telling of the story, we praise God for literally delivering us from Egypt. After Birkat Hamazon, we recognize that God gives us the tools for spiritual redemption. After Hallel, we revel in the One who takes us to be that One’s own, which is the deeper purpose of the Exodus—to freely accept a life of mission and partnership with God in repairing the world.

WHY DID GOD TAKE US OUT OF EGYPT ANYWAY?

Dvar Torah For Parshat Tetzaveh and Shabbat Zakhor 5772.

Even with Purim on our doorstep, we are already looking past the Hamentaschen and the madness of the Megillah reading toward Pesach, which will find us whether or not we are ready to find it. As you may know, I just returned from our biennial congregational pilgrimage to Israel, the ultimate symbol for us of Jewish freedom, power, and self-expression. Experiencing Israel always makes me do more thinking about the nature and purpose of the Jewish people, whose journey really begins with the Exodus from Egypt, that pit of slavery and oppression. So, as I begin to think about my celebration of Pesach and my telling of the story of the Exodus at the Seder, I am wondering once again: why did God take us out of Egypt, anyway?

This morning in the Torah, we completed our reading of God’s very long, complex, elegant instructions to Moshe and the Israelites concerning the construction of the Mishkan, the portable desert sanctuary, as well as of the sacred clothing to be worn by Aaron and his sons during their service in that sacred building. God began these instructions in last week’s portion, Terumah, with an explanation for all of this construction: Let the Israelites build Me a holy place and I shall dwell in their midst. Numerous are the repeated explanations of commentators that God never says that He will dwell in the sanctuary, for what mere physical building could hold God? Rather, they point out, the Mishkan is there to help us feel God’s presence dwelling among us as a community. In this week’s Torah portion, Tetzaveh, as we near the end of all the instructions for the construction, God takes the idea of the Mishkan one step further. Please look with me at Humash Etz Hayyim, Exodus 29:45-46, on pp. 516-517:

(Through the Mishkan) I will abide among the Israelites, and I will be their God. And they will know that I the Lord am their God, who brought them out from the land of Egypt that I might abide among them; I the Lord their God.

According to this passage, God not only uses the Mishkan as an opportunity to dwell among the people, God’s whole purpose in taking them out of Egyptian slavery was to be able to dwell among them and be their God. This appears at first glance to contradict Bible passages such as Genesis, chapter 15, in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will leave Egypt in order to escape suffering under Pharaoh’s thumb, and then in order to enter the land of Canaan that has been promised to them by God. Further, framing the purpose of the Exodus as being about following a portable sanctuary around nomadically in order to experience God’s presence is a very diaspora-like idea. What is the focus of our freedom and formation as a people: to be in relationship with God as we move around the world or to be in relationship with God, to quote HaTikvah – Israel’s national anthem – as a free people in our land?

I am, of course, oversimplifying the Torah here. Since we take the text as a united whole, we know perfectly well that the Torah emphasizes both divine aspirations. God took us out of Egypt not so much for the purposes of freedom itself, but in order to give us the opportunity to experience God’s presence fully so that we could be God’s servants in a covenantal relationship and a shared mission: this is the essence of the “chosen people” idea, and it applies wherever Jews are, from Jerusalem to Albany and everywhere in between. But God also made clear from the moment that God called Abraham to start a new life that this new people we call the Jews would find the greatest fulfillment of its mission and its life in the land that we today call Israel. This dual sense of our mission as the Jewish people is quite ancient and it forms the basis for contemporary religious Zionism; however, it underlies even secular thinking about Zionism which may not emphasize traditional ideas about God making us a nation, but which certainly emphasizes the need for the Jewish people to have its own home in which to thrive, express itself and make a positive difference in the world.

Having just tasted the richness of both aspects of this great Jewish mission by being in Israel, what am I going to bring to my seder table this year and how is my celebration of Pesach going to be different? Part of what makes pilgrimage to Israel so enriching for me is that, paradoxically, it leaves me feeling deeply challenged and somewhat incomplete. I have made my home in our Jewish community, my family and I are firmly rooted here, and I need not explain to you how good America has been to the Jewish people. Nonetheless, I refuse to pretend that somehow our Jewish lives in America and Jewish life in Israel are equal, for they really aren’t. Without whitewashing or idealizing Israeli life and society, I feel drawn to the rhythms and routines of Jewish identity and culture that are commonplace in Israel; its entire civil life, however secular it may be, is Jewish in a way that even the most intensive Jewish community in America simply cannot be by virtue of the fact that we are a minority here. Saturday is Shabbat, the whole country celebrates Purim almost with a passion, advertisements, street signs, and protest slogans that draw off of three millennia of Jewish sacred literature abound. Even more important, the existential anxieties of American and Israeli Jewry are vastly different, however much our two communities are intertwined as part of world Jewry. We Jews in America may feel physically safe, but we are constantly preoccupied with the threat of cultural suicide that is the result of being an assimilating minority. The Jewish state may always have to be vigilant about its physical safety, but as a living, sovereign Jewish state it can devote its spiritual and cultural energies to far more productive concerns: these include, among others, what to do with power, how to create a just society founded upon Jewish values, and the role that Israel plays as the center of the Jewish world and as a modern nation in the international community. For me, Israel is this nagging goad that I hope will never stop nagging me. It keeps whispering in my ear, “Dan, you are the descendant of those who left Egypt to enter a relationship with God in the desert, and then to enter the homeland that God gave us as an inheritance for building that relationship. You may be comfortable in the disapora, but aren’t you really still trying to follow God as a nomad like your ancestors did? That Israelite caravan with its portable sanctuary left the Sinai desert a long time ago. Why don’t you come home, and fulfill both parts of God’s plan for us when God took us out of slavery?” I will be listening for this nagging voice that is Israel when I lift up the matzah, tell the story of the Exodus, drink the four cups of wine, and finally sing “L’shanah Ha-baah Bi-Yerushalayim,” next year in Jerusalem.

I hope you will not think that I am simply blathering starry-eyed, post-trip nonsense that will wear off in a couple of weeks. I am not. I have felt this way about my place and our place in ancient and contemporary Jewish history for a long time, and my biennial trips to Israel only refine my sense of cognitive and spiritual dissonance. I am not making aliyah tomorrow, and I am fully aware of how much the State of Israel relies upon America and its Jews, however much some Israelis are into the myth that they are entirely self-sufficient. Further, I would not be doing the work that I do if I did not value what we have as a Jewish community here, and if I was not fully aware of how much Jewish life outside of Israel has yielded over the past two millennia. Nonetheless, I am happy to be challenged and pushed to remember where ideally I should be, through my encounters with the grit and the miracle of Israel, past, present, and please God, future.

As we get ready for Pesach, what can you and I do to respond to that nagging, goading challenge, short of uprooting ourselves, Exodus-style, and living in Israel? First, if you have not been to Israel or you have not been there in a long time, begin to make plans to go there. You can go with Ohav in 2014, you can volunteer there, you can plan a family trip around a bar or bat mitzvah, you can connect with another organized tour or program. The point is for you to go, and if you won’t go, to facilitate your children and grandchildren going. Plan on having a lot of safe, wholesome fun, prepare to retrace the steps of our ancestors, and stay open to the fact that such a trip is more than a trip, it is a pilgrimage that echoes, howbeit faintly, the pilgrimages to the Jerusalem Temple from long ago. Second, if you are filled to the brim with anxieties about Israeli politics, Iranian threats, and conflicts with the Palestinians, set them aside for a while, and just reconnect with Israel as a blessing, as our extended family whom we love, just because. I am frankly so tired of the way that American Jews, on the left and the right, have reframed the Jewish state as one huge problem, as if it were a bunch of sick, dysfunctional relatives we fret over but never see or enjoy. Israelis mouth off plenty about politics and other vital issues, and they struggle with issues aplenty, but first and foremost they live their lives in their country. We Jews in the diaspora are so frightened at times of our own shadows that we can’t seem to get past this “Israel as huge problem” narrative, which is unhelpful to us and to Israel. We try not to spend all of our time talking about our loved ones in terms of what ails them and what they are not. Why, then, do we seem to do this almost obsessively when talking about our “loved ones” who are the State of Israel? Finally, be ambassadors for the Jewish state: learn more about her ancient and contemporary history, get the facts and share them with our friends, neighbors and family, Jewish and non-Jewish who just don’t know those facts. Most of all, convey your love for Israel to them with your stories, your ideas, your values, not a naïve, ignorant love of an Israel that can do no wrong, but a mature love of an Israel that gets so much right.

Today is Shabbat Zakhor, when we remember Amalekite aggression and the way that Haman the Amalekite tried to destroy the diaspora Jewish community of Persia. These themes of Purim resonate so strongly with us Jews and with all people who have tasted oppression that even in Israel, the ultimate anti-diaspora, Purim is celebrated with gusto. Just as the different passages of the Torah about the Exodus help us to do, so too, Purim and Pesach hold us in a creative tension between our experience as Jews outside of Israel and our connection to Israel: the cultural, political, physical, and spiritual center of the Jewish people. Let’s use this next month of remembrances and celebrations to remember why God liberated us from Egypt, to enjoy the sacred privilege of being Jewish that God has given us where ever we are in the world, and to never stop striving to return to the place from which Torah goes forth: Zion and Jerusalem.

SCENES FROM A JOURNEY.

Vignettes From A Pilgrimage To Israel.

The following meditations are a sampling of some of my thoughts upon returning from two weeks in Israel with Congregation Ohav Shalom’s biennial mission.

Hebrew

Like Semitic languages in general, Hebrew is quite ordered and logical. Unlike English and other Germanic languages, the Hebrew vocabulary flows naturally from shorashim or word roots, three or four letter verb stems in the infinitive form that are the basis for different verb conjugations as well as nouns.
Consider the following examples. In Hebrew, the shoresh or verb root khazar (KH, Z, R) consisting of the letters khet, zayin and resh, means to return. If I want to say “I am returning,” an intransitive verb form, I say, “ani KHoZeR.” If I want to say “I am returning the ball,” a transitive verb form, I say “ani maKHaZiR et ha-kadur.” However, these shorashim are even more versatile. If I want to say “reconstruction,” I say “sheeKH-ZuR.” If I want to say “recycling,” I say “meeKH-ZuR.” All of these words are completely different from each other, but if you listen carefully to them, you hear echoes of the original verb stem, KHaZaR, to return.

Returning on one’s own, returning someone else’s belongings, reconstruction, recycling: they are all about return, coming back to something, bringing back something, rediscovering that which was, is, and will be.
I notice these kinds of words as I leave Ben Gurion Airport and walk the streets of Israel once again. The words of Hebrew, the street signs, the protest slogans, the Hebrew newspapers all point to a pervasive truth that is Israel, a truth brought to life by the language: to come to Israel is to return to the source, the root, to come home.

The Torah Scroll.

In Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, there is a Torah scroll on display, which had been saved from destruction at the hands of the Nazis during Kristallnakht, the Night of Broken Glass which took place on November 9, 1938. That night, on the orders of Hitler’s regime, Nazi party members all over Germany looted Jewish businesses, vandalized synagogues, raped, assaulted, and murdered German Jews across the country, as their fellow citizens - friends and neighbors – looked on in fear, apathy, or approval. This was a foretaste of the hell to come for European Jewry and millions of other people.

The scroll is now the property of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, opened up for everyone to see that the Jewish people and its God passed through the fire, badly burned but alive nonetheless. I am always intrigued by Torah scrolls, but I have been most intrigued this year as our congregation proceeds with the writing of our own new scroll. I look closely at the passage to which it has been opened, the ancient priestly blessing that Jews recite on different occasions.
May God bless you and guard you; may God cause the light of God’s face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may God lift up God’s face to you and grant you peace.

What was the intent of the person who opened the scroll to this passage? To make a cynical point? “How wonderful, Jews. Look at the blessings bestowed upon you by your God who died at Auschwitz along with you! And yet you still believe.” To make a statement of profound faith? “Jews, we and our Torah are still here. The blessing and its God are still alive.” I cannot know what the museum curator who did this was thinking. All I know is that no more than an hour’s drive from Jerusalem, in the Israeli city of Ashkelon, our sofer (Torah scribe) is slowly writing our new scroll in black ink, in this nation that grew out of the dark ashes of the Holocaust like a weed poking through a pile of rocks, yet whose attachment to this land is far older and greater. May God bless us and guard us.

The Kotel.

In his poem, “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He then wrote a painful reflection upon the forced boundaries placed between him and his neighbor, ones that defy the natural impulse for things and people to connect with one another. What would Frost have thought if he had visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem? Also known as the Kotel, it is a magnet for the faithful, the faithless, the curious, the lost, the sick, the broken, an endless humanity that streams towards it day after day, all day from every faith, every corner of the earth. They place written prayers in the Kotel’s cracks and crevices, desperate as they are – as perhaps we all are – for healing, to be heard by God, for guidance, for forgiveness. Sometimes, the prayers are not pleas, but offerings of pure gratitude, words of praise given unconditionally. The sea of people that visits loves this wall, needs this wall, looks forward to imagining an intimate conversation between each person and God at this wall, the very last vestige of the ancient Jerusalem Temple that stood on the Temple Mount. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, are there perhaps also no rational skeptics at the Kotel?

With all this, the Kotel is wrapped in irony. This most sacred place began as nothing more than the outer retaining wall of the newly renovated second Temple of King Herod the Great, one of the most brutal men to rule over the land of Israel in behalf of the Roman Empire. Perhaps equally ironic is that this place which draws people from the four corners of the earth to worship together is also a physical and social boundary between Jews who worship at it below the Temple Mount, and Muslims who worship on the Temple Mount. I feel the Kotel almost heaving, reeling from the seismic tensions between Jews and Arabs, struggling to retain not only the earth behind it but to keep peace as well, by keeping us tucked in behind safe boundaries.

The Kotel is a wall, and the Kotel is the world: an endless paradox of separation and togetherness, boundaries and oneness, peace and conflict, the sacred and the profane living in the same space, the same time. And flying above its stones, traveling straight to God’s throne of glory, are words, the tools of creation and destruction given to us by God, who waits to hear what we have done with them.

At the Entrance To the Carmel Market…

A young man, thin, lithe and agile, tap dances skillfully for money to the tunes on his boom box at the entrance to Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market. Friday afternoon here reveals a sea of colorful humanity and insanity, as even the largely secular residents of this city rush about to prepare for Shabbat and the closing of the market stalls for one day. I sit on a bench at the entrance, watching the dancer tap, tap, tap away on his wooden board like a clock tick-tocking too quickly, as he entertains the passersby who appreciatively throw in a few shekels after they clap in admiration.

In my head, I am moving in time with him, shouting to him: “Dance my friend, move swiftly against the tide of despair, the hatred of the nations, the mortal threats. Dance faster and faster, quicken your pace, and quicken the pulse of all who dance with you, this seemingly endless flow of people who are Israel, who know that they must never stop dancing, never stop moving, never stop hoping; for at the moment that they stop, they cease to live!”

He stops tapping, scowls at me and says, “Idiot, I’m not your American Zionist poster boy, so cut the crap. I’m just out here trying to make a buck like everyone else.”

Khaval Al Ha-Z’man

Lior, our group’s bus driver, has the boyish look of a sixteen year old and the swarthy dark skin of his Yemenite ancestry. His appearance is like Israel itself, old and young. To look at him, listen to his soft voice, and appreciate his modest demeanor, you would not know that in Tzahal (The Israel Defense Forces) his job was to operate a critical missile defense system using complex mathematics and computer models, something he cannot and will not say much about.

Because I am fluent in Hebrew, Lior and I converse easily. When I talk about all the great places to see and do in Israel, something about which he knows quite a bit, he greets my enthusiasm with the Hebrew saying, khaval al ha-z’man. Roughly translated, it means, “time’s a-wasting.” It normally is used to express regret that one is running out of time or to push someone else to get moving on your behalf. However, Lior seems to be using the phrase to mean, “I agree, ‘X’ is so cool.” I keep meaning to ask him how this phrase took on a new meaning, but I figure it out on my own: ‘X’ is so cool and so worth making the time for, but khaval al ha-z’man, time is sadly so tight that we can’t do or see everything that interests us.

Perhaps I never get around to asking Lior about what he is saying, because I sense what else this phrase means to Israelis at a deeper level, and I don’t feel right asking him about it. Rightly or wrongly, Israelis have the reputation for being fatalists. Though Israel is a strong, world-class nation, Israelis live with a sense that time is never really on their side, even more than the rest of us do. However, this fatalism does not seem to breed collective despair, as anyone spending time in this turbulent, thriving, energetic country can tell you. Israelis go about their daily business, no less or more meaningfully than the rest of world…but possibly feeling greater compulsion to see more, say more, get more, give more, love more, hate more in less time, for who can know what tomorrow or even the next hour will bring them? Khaval al ha-z’man: we who live outside of Israel don’t really get the sad slippage of time the way that they do.
Khaval al ha-z’man: time’s a-wasting. We grow older, and if we are lucky we will reach seventy or maybe even eighty, as the psalms remind us; who knows if we will even be healthy, wealthy, with it enough to enjoy all the years we are given. For the Jews, being a free people in our own land is a blessing, a miracle, but have each of us tasted that blessing, experienced that miracle? If you support the State of Israel and care for Her, that is wonderful. But to truly know Israel, to be transformed by Israel, you need to be in Israel, even if only for a short period of time. Khaval al ha-z’man: hopefully, Israel will continue to defend herself from her enemies, will find peace with her neighbors, and will live for another thousand years. But you and I will not. Don’t wait to come home until you no longer have the strength to come home. Come to Israel. Khaval al ha-z’man.

CIRCUMCISION, SEDERS AND IDENTITY

A Dvar Torah for Parshat Bo 5772

The very first seder, about which we read this morning in the Torah, must have been a somewhat uncomfortable affair in more ways than one. Certainly, it was filled with anxiety, as the Israelites consumed the Passover offering in a rush to prepare for the Exodus from Egypt that would happen the next morning, then awoke to the sounds of anguished suffering of their Egyptian neighbors immersed in the plague of the firstborn at midnight. However, the latter part of Exodus, chapter 12, points to what may have been a different source of discomfort, by mentioning different categories of people, men more specifically, who could not consume the Passover offering. These included any non-Israelite, specifically any non-circumcised male such as one’s slave, a resident alien, two categories of employed laborers, and any Israelite who was not circumcised. The Torah makes clear that circumcision is the distinction that determines eligibility for consuming the Passover offering. We might imagine the absurdity of the scene at that first seder in Egypt: households preparing for this major feast before the Lord in anticipation of real freedom, suddenly in an uproar as male celebrants are forced to show their credentials at the door, or to submit to circumcision before they can be part of the celebration. A passage like this likely offends liberal Western sensibilities because it emphasizes exclusivity of membership in the Israelite clan as well as the primitive blood ritual of circumcision, what we call brit milah, as the price to be paid for acquiring membership. Isn’t the seder experience supposed to celebrate the universality of freedom and the struggle against oppression in which all good people are included? Further, why would the Torah demand that a man undergo a ritual such as circumcision in order to be part of what should be a beautiful reenactment of the quest for freedom?

Our contemporary seder is a ritualized re-telling of the Exodus story that has been generously reinterpreted over millennia through the prisms of many different individuals and groups seeking to find their own stories of slavery and freedom in it. Today’s seders, even among plenty of Orthodox Jews, include non-Jewish colleagues, friends, and family for whom this re-telling is often their first encounter with Judaism and the power of the Jewish experience. However, the actual consumption of the ancient Passover offering was an exclusive affair of the Jewish community; its ticket of admission was circumcision. This reflects one major value of Judaism that many people do not like but about which the Torah is unabashed: Jewish identity and community are at times highly particularistic. Further, unlike Christianity whose major criterion of membership is what or how you believe, a major criterion of Jewish membership is how you behave and what you do, including what you do with your body to show that you are part of the Jewish people.

Asserting the distinctiveness of Jewish identity and community has never been an easy thing for the Jews. It has been the major source of anti-Semitism and persecution of our people for many thousands of years, beginning with pagan and early Christian refusals to accept that the Jews have a right to be different. From the time of the Spanish Inquisition all the way through to the development of modern anti-Semitism and Nazism, this same hatred of Jewish distinctiveness took on virulent racial and blood-line overtones: being Jewish wasn’t simply a curse that could be overcome through the abandonment of Judaism, it was an inherent state of imperfection, even pathology, that could never be eradicated without physically destroying the Jewish people.

One of the most telling examples of these enormous challenges to Jewish distinctiveness has been circumcision. When they occupied the land of Israel many centuries ago, the Greeks derided this Jewish practice as a barbaric mutilation of the body that stood in stark contrast to the Hellenistic emphasis on the body’s perfection as living sculpture. Eager to fit in at the Greek gymnasium, many Jewish men of that time sought to hide this mark on their bodies, while others practiced it even under the threat of persecution and death at the hands of some Greek authorities. Later rabbis living in the land of Israel under the Romans’ occupation energetically taught their fellow Jews that circumcision is what makes the body beautiful, rather than what the dominant culture asserts is beautiful, because this is what God asks of us.

In our time, this age-old debate over circumcision has taken on a very destructive tone. Anti-circumcision activists, under the cover of child advocacy, have turned their guns on the freedom of Jews and Muslims to practice our religions by attempting to put anti-circumcision laws on city and statewide ballots across the country. They argue mostly that circumcision is mutilation no different from mutilation forced upon young girls in developing nations. Further, since there is no evidence that circumcision has any medical benefits, all it does it cruelly rob a person of full sexual fulfillment in his adult life; a person is perfect as he is from birth and not in need of such barbaric procedures. These arguments are both old and new, but they are all, in my opinion, disingenuous, and some are motivated by pure bigotry. Brit milah is a profoundly embodied sign of a new Jewish boy’s relationship with God, Jewish history and our people, as the Torah shows us in numerous passages. It bears no real resemblance to female genital mutilation which is used in some cultures to utterly, brutally control women’s sexuality and lives. Further, the argument that circumcision robs men of their sexual capacities wrongly assumes that this can somehow be measured and tested. It obsessively focuses on the anatomy and physiology of a body part as the exclusive determinant of sexuality, an offensively reductionistic way of thinking about relationships, love and desire, and it sends a crude, insidious message that Jewish men are somehow weak and disabled by virtue of their Jewishness. Finally, though circumcision’s benefits are not medically undisputed, there is a body of research indicating that it may be beneficial. However, even if this were not the case, it would be religiously irrelevant: Jews and Muslims don’t circumcise their kids for medical reasons, we do this because this is how we connect to God, history, peoplehood, our values, and our identities.

Obviously, not everyone who opposes circumcision is an anti-Semite, and I respect any Jewish family’s right not to perform brit milah on their own children, as long as they don’t try to tell me or my community what to do as religious people. However, I would ask them the following questions before they make such a decision. Is your decision motivated by a well-thought out opposition to brit milah based upon careful study of its history and meaning? Are you opposed to brit milah on the basis of misinformation that often terrorizes parents of newborns into believing that they are hurting their kids? Do you really want one of the most basic rites of passage into the Jewish family, whose power is precisely its primitiveness, to be a mere matter of choice? Can you stay open to the fact that, within the bounds of safety and parental responsibility, not every act and ceremony needs to be rational or fit the dominant culture’s demands? That religion is sometimes about leaps of faith of a whole community into a different way of living in the world, one that lends a depth of meaning to its adherents’ lives? Do you recognize that as a Jewish family the most potent way for you to be a part of the world is at times to live apart from the world, to embrace the universal by living proudly within what makes us particular?

Like the Passover offering, brit milah is an uncomfortable yet powerful reminder that to be Jewish is to choose to be more than just an individual, it is about choosing to be part of a sacred people called forth by God with a huge mission to heal the world, throughout the dimensions of time and space. It is one permanent symbol that helps us to literally embody that mission in our lives as individuals and as a community.

STALKING TZIPPORAH

Dvar Torah For Parshat Shmot 5772.

You know the old sexist saw that behind every great man is a great woman? One way to think about Moses whom we met once again in the Torah this morning, is that behind him and his success stand a number of even greater women; some of them are never given names by the Torah, and almost all of them can only carry out their missions through subterfuge, since they lack the power of men in their society. The first two chapters of Exodus offer us a bonanza of these incredibly courageous women who toil quietly and subversively to resist Pharoah’s genocidal decree and to save Moses, the savior of Israel. Whether or not they are Hebrew midwives or non-Jewish midwives to the Hebrews, Shifrah and Puah exploit their expertise and their proximity to women in labor to save innocent children from being murdered; Pharaoh’s daughter exploits her position of power to violate her father’s laws, as she knowingly brings this Hebrew baby into the royal palace and raises him right under her father’s nose, even to the point of giving him a name; Moses’ as-yet unnamed sister intervenes with Pharaoh’s daughter by offering her their mother as a wet nurse to feed and care for baby Moses. All of these women enter a conspiracy of compassion against Pharaoh and the Egyptian state, using their intelligence and love for this one child and for all the children at risk, to disrupt the apparatus of a terrorist regime. The rabbis of the Talmud are so impressed by the role of women in these Torah narratives that they tell all sorts of tales about how all the Hebrew women encouraged their despondent husbands to not lose hope or the desire to bear more children. The Talmud even declares that women should not be exempted from the obligation of being part of the Pesach seder - a time –bound, positive commandment from which Jewish women would normally be exempted according to Jewish law. They reason historically that women were also active participants in the redemption from Egypt, and they too must be part of the seder experience.

Because of all the courageous, quick-thinking behavior of these heroines, Tzipporah’s arrival on the scene in this Torah portion stands out as an enigma. She and her sisters are portrayed initially as shepherdesses- in-distress whom Moses the Egyptian stranger must save from the male thugs hassling them at the local well. When Reuel, her father, questions her about why she did not offer Moses hospitality after his brave act of kindness, we get the feeling that she is a somewhat passive, perhaps not-too-bright eldest daughter, or that she is perhaps a rather young girl. We read that Moses marries Tzipporah, in accordance with ancient near eastern marriage laws requiring the eldest daughter to be married first. After that, all we are told is that Moses takes leave of his father-in-law to return to Egypt on a mission from God to redeem his people, and that he takes Tzipporah and their son, Gershom with him into the heart of the danger. We never hear about Tzipporah’s reaction to her husband’s decision, and later rabbinic writers have to supply an imaginative dialogue in which her father tells his son-in-law that putting his wife and child in the way of harm is a really bad idea. Later rabbinic interpretations of the Torah suggest that Moses becomes celibate as he gets closer to God during the forty years’ wandering in the desert, thus presumably leaving Tzipporah in a miserable married state with an emotionally and sexually unavailable spouse. A very late midrashic source even imagines Tzipporah lamenting to Miriam, her sister-in-law, about the terrible situation of the wives of communal leaders.

It seems that only one biblical story, an extremely strange and elliptical one, offers us a much more forceful, complex view of who Tzipporah really is. Turn back with me to this morning’s Torah portion in Humash Etz Hayyim, pages 336-337, verses 24-26:

At a night encampment on the way, the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him. So Tzipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when He (God) let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”

Everything about this bizarre, chilling story hints at even more ancient tales of the angry God or gods being warded off by blood, which serves as an apotropaic, a magical ritual or device that protects people from evil. For a parallel example, think about the blood of the first Pesach offering being splashed on the doors of the Israelites to ward off the impending plague of the firstborn. In our scene, at least as it is understood by many commentators, Moses has failed to perform brit milah, circumcision, on his son, who is now presumably the one imperiled by God’s desire to kill him. Circumcision is the sign of the covenant, and without it a person cannot be part of the covenanted community.

A lot is unclear in these verses: is Moses in danger or is their son in danger? Does Tzipporah take the foreskin and touch it to Moses’ leg or to their son’s leg? What is a bridegroom of blood, and who does it actually refer to, Moses or the child? What is very clear is that Tzipporah not only acts in this crisis situation, she acts quickly and decisively to stop God from hurting her family. How astounding it is that only Tzipporah is named here, along with God, with no men intervening. She and God are alone in a life-and-death battle that requires the actual drawing of blood, not for death but for life. Even more astounding is that Tzipporah takes the radical initiative of performing a brit milah, a religious circumcision, one of the most sacred, mysterious Jewish rituals that focuses exclusively and publicly on the religious identities and power of Jewish men. The Rabbis take this mysterious biblical tale and expand it into an even wilder tale in which Tzipporah sees God’s angel swallow Moses, from his head to his genitalia, and she then realizes that her family is in mortal danger because of Moses’ dereliction in carrying out the mitzvah of circumcision on their son, a mitzvah she values highly.

This portrayal of Tzipporah is refreshingly paradoxical: she is deeply faithful to her adopted religion, including its male-centered rituals and leadership, yet within that framework she is an aggressive advocate for her family, she takes bold religious initiatives, and she fights openly with God! Though they make many patriarchal assumptions and rules about women’s status, the Torah and its rabbinic interpreters recognize Tzipporah’s public activism as a normative role model for traditional Jewish women. Sadly, this model is being seriously threatened in parts of the Jewish world today, as Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy (in Hebrew, Haredi) grows increasingly belligerent and misogynistic. Using Jewish laws of modesty as an excuse, some rabbinic authorities and lay leaders here and especially in Israel have intensified their campaign to utterly segregate men and women in ways frightfully reminiscent of Jim Crow laws in the south. These have included sex-segregated private bus lines that are publicly franchised by New York City in Brooklyn and public bus lines in Israel that are illegally segregated in religious neighborhoods. In both circumstances, women are literally relegated to the back of the buses. Another recent example of brutal sex segregation was the sickening harassment of 8 year old Naamah Margolis of the Israeli city of Bet Shemesh, who was spat upon and verbally abused as she walked to the new Orthodox girl's yeshivah that she attends in that city. Her harassers, members of a violent Haredi faction, claim that she and other girls were not dressing modestly enough to be allowed to walk in public. The outcry from all segments of the Israeli street, including some in the Haredi community, as well as community leaders and politicians, has so far been significant, and peaceful protests against the encroachment upon women's rights -and upon democratic protections- within Israeli society have been growing. Still, such brazen public attempts at repressing women are chilling.

The Haredi community has never supported the religious equality of men and women; it is not egalitarian, and it is not our right to tell Haredi Jews that they must practice Judaism as we do. However, what I am describing is not traditional religious practice, but the perversion of Jewish law in an effort to forcefully silence the public voices and presence of women, even if American and Israeli law and culture forbid someone from doing so. Particularly in Israel, where aggressive Haredi political parties often have their fragile government coalitions by the throat, the growing repression of women is encroaching upon public space and the rest of Israel’s citizenry. This adds to an already contentious relationship between religious and secular Jews around a wide variety of issues that engender deep resentment and divide Israeli society. We are not Israeli citizens, yet as Jews, Zionists, and supporters of democracy, we have a genuine vested interest in helping all women in the State of Israel to live freely and without fear. The increased public repression of women is one canary in the coal mine of Israeli democracy that is facing increasing challenges from political and religious ultra-rightists in the Israeli government and religious community. Under the guises of security and religiosity they are slowly eroding basic protections for women, minorities, and those with differing political view points. This is not good for Israel as a democracy. Yet it is also not good for Israel as a young, vibrant society. Israel needs Shifrah and Puah, the daughter of Pharaoh, Miriam and Yocheved: women who have the strength and the courage to work with men and challenge men to continue to build a state and a Jewish people founded upon justice. Most of all, Israel, the Jewish people and the world need Tzipporah: women for whom Judaism matters vitally, and who are also not afraid to speak their minds and act forcefully in behalf of others in the midst of crisis, when the gravity of the hour calls for it.