In last month’s column I alluded to the Pittsburgh Principles of 1999 in which Reform Rabbis set what was intended to be the direction for the Reform Movement at the turn of the century. These Principles defined what it is to be a Reform Jew in terms of Dialogue with God, Dialogue with Torah, and Dialogue with the Jewish Community. I mentioned then that William Isaacs, in his important book Dialogue, defines dialogue as ““a conversation with a center, not sides. It is a way of taking the energy of our differences and channeling it toward something that has never been created before.” Isaacs goes on to say that “The intention of dialogue is to reach new understanding and, in doing so, to form a totally new basis from which to think and act.”
In that context, what does it mean to say that a fundamental of Reform Judaism is dialogue with God? What is the center of the conversation, and what are the differences we will channel toward a new understanding, a new basis from which to think and act?
The other book I mentioned, which the Thursday night study group is using as a base text, A Vision of Holiness by Rabbi Richard Levy, makes short work of the naïve notion that a conversation or dialogue with God would take the form of a conversation between people, with each party speaking and listening. Rather, he places the center of the conversation on the human side, in a person’s communing with the Infinite, seeing God in nature, in ourselves, and in other people, from our side speaking with God, and trusting in listening from God’s side and even in God’s answering, though not in words or in a voice as we understand it (Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass said “if you speak to God, you’re praying; if God speaks to you, you’re crazy).
So if the center of the dialogue is within each of us, what are the differences that give the dialogue its energy? Well, first of all, God is God and we are not. God is infinite and we are finite. At the same time, as Jews, we live inside a covenant with God that we would be chosen to bring God’s word to the world and in turn we would be “a realm of priests and a holy people.” Levy notes that the Priests and Levites in the days of the temple wore a band on their forehead that read “Holy to God,” so that the were, in a sense, never off duty, and suggests that if we saw each ,people and to the world very differently. If we saw everything – people, sunsets, trees, empty bottles, oil, and even our enemies as “Holy to God” we would, indeed, have “a new understanding, a new basis from which to think and act.”
Most of us live here at Lake Tahoe out of some sense that the mountains, the lake, the weather, and the opportunities to live closer to nature are more to our liking than we would find most other places, particularly in cities. Levy suggests that the Dialogue with God may consist in appreciating God in each of these natural phenomena and recommends the Jewish practice of “a bracha for every occasion” as a kind of what the Buddhists would call a “mindfulness practice” to remind ourselves that yes, nature is awesome, but nature is a manifestation of God and we are no less a manifestation of God, created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image. So when we say Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha’olam, oseh ma’aseh v’reishit (Praised are you God, Ruler of the Universe, who continues the work of creation) we are creating a conversation with ourselves as the center, highlighting the difference between the Creator and the created, and creating a new basis from which we can interact with nature.
Similarly when at the end of Shabbat we wish for a good week for ourselves and others, and on the succeeding Shabbat we notice that it was a good week, we have created a conversation in the form of a request and God has answered. And if we have the thought that it wasn’t such a good week, but then we notice that at the week’s end we are here, we are healthy, and we have another opportunity to have a good week, we can take the opportunity to understand that, in God’s way, our prayer has been answered.
So the Dialogue with God the Rabbis created in the Pittsburgh Principles is, I believe, accessible to all of us – even those whose conception of God is not of an all-powerful old greybeard on a throne surrounded by angels singing hymns of praise and those who are not sure, and even those who do not believe in God – because even making the effort not to believe creates a dialogue.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Reform Judaism
Joining NTHC ten years ago was, as I’ve written before, my first serious foray into Reform Judaism. Over the years, and particularly since Rabbi Postrel came to us, I’ve gotten more and more interested in what RJ is, after a lifetime of defining it by what it is not. Recently I’ve discovered that the RJ movement itself began, in a sense, by defining itself by what it is not.
In 1885, a group of fifteen Rabbis met in Pittsburgh to deal with what they saw as a growing threat from the then-new Conservative. The document they produced, called the Pittsburgh Platform, declared that only the Torah’s moral laws were binding on Reform Jews, and that laws regarding diet and dress, for example, were not. There were several subsequent convocations to continue defining RJ, but no substantial change until 1999 when, again in Pittsburgh, North American Reform Rabbis convened to articulate anew the direction of the Reform Movement. At that meeting, they created a new document, the Pittsburgh Principles, that defines RJ in the 21st Century. In that meeting the Rabbis took back much of the tradition discarded in 1999, making the use of Hebrew and a commitment to mitzvot acceptable in RJ.
More than that, though, they placed God, Torah, and the Jewish Community (Klal Yisrael) including the State of Israel, at the foundation of RJ, with individual autonomy and informed choice as its guiding principles. In this column and in several to come over the next few months, I’d like to explore these four areas – first the guiding philosophy of RJ and then the Reform Jew’s tripartite dialogue, with God, with Torah, and with the Jewish People. I will be drawing on a number of sources for this conversation, but my primary one is an excellent book on the subject called A Vision of Holiness by Rabbi Richard N. Levy of Hebrew Union College, published by URJ Press in 2005.
What makes RJ unusual among Western religions is the centrality of individual autonomy and informed choice, and these are also, in my opinion, what makes it misunderstood. In the Western view, indeed in the view of most of the non-Buddhist world, religion is prescriptive – it tells its adherents what to believe and how to live. RJ, on the other hand, says the choices are ours to make and asks only that they be informed choices.
This single element of informed choice gives the lie to the view that RJ is “do it yourself” Judaism, or that RJ makes no demand on its followers. Yes, we are free to make choices, but to call ourselves Reform Jews, these choices need to be based on learning and thinking. One of the most fundamental commandments in the Torah is “na-ase v’nishma” – to act and to listen. RJ reverses the order of these: first we must listen – to God, to Torah, and to the Jewish Community – and then act.
The very act of studying Torah to inform ourselves before we make our choices makes us Jews rather than simply “spiritual” or “non-affiliated” people. The NTHC Board begin each of our meetings with a prayer by the Rabbi to dedicate our work to the study of Torah and a D’var Torah by one of the Trustees, so that the context for all of our deliberations as a Board is Torah.
I know people who consider themselves “cultural Jews” or “culinary Jews,” but I really don’t get it. To be a Jew is to be in a dialogue – in fact, the modern conception of dialogue draws heavily on the work of Jews, particularly Martin Buber and the physicist David Bohm. In a recent book, William Isaacs draws on both Buber and Bohm when he defines dialogue as “a conversation with a center, not sides. It is a way of taking the energy of our differences and channeling it toward something that has never been created before.” I believe it is in this sense of the term that the Pittsburgh Principles are framed as dialogues between the Reform Jew and God, Torah, and the Jewish People.
The notion of RJ as a dialogue also resolves, I think, the superficial contradiction between individual autonomy and informed choice. Yes, we have as individuals complete autonomy. Any one of us at any time can invent our own brand of Judaism or declare ourselves not Jews at all. But if to be a Jew is to be in dialogue with God, with the Torah, and with Klal Yisrael, then it behooves us to bring this autonomy to the dialogue, and to have the dialogue inform our choices rather than simply to make up what Judaism is based on our own prejudices or how it was where we were brought up, or how it is convenient for us to have it be. In the coming months I will address these three dialogues in detail.
In 1885, a group of fifteen Rabbis met in Pittsburgh to deal with what they saw as a growing threat from the then-new Conservative. The document they produced, called the Pittsburgh Platform, declared that only the Torah’s moral laws were binding on Reform Jews, and that laws regarding diet and dress, for example, were not. There were several subsequent convocations to continue defining RJ, but no substantial change until 1999 when, again in Pittsburgh, North American Reform Rabbis convened to articulate anew the direction of the Reform Movement. At that meeting, they created a new document, the Pittsburgh Principles, that defines RJ in the 21st Century. In that meeting the Rabbis took back much of the tradition discarded in 1999, making the use of Hebrew and a commitment to mitzvot acceptable in RJ.
More than that, though, they placed God, Torah, and the Jewish Community (Klal Yisrael) including the State of Israel, at the foundation of RJ, with individual autonomy and informed choice as its guiding principles. In this column and in several to come over the next few months, I’d like to explore these four areas – first the guiding philosophy of RJ and then the Reform Jew’s tripartite dialogue, with God, with Torah, and with the Jewish People. I will be drawing on a number of sources for this conversation, but my primary one is an excellent book on the subject called A Vision of Holiness by Rabbi Richard N. Levy of Hebrew Union College, published by URJ Press in 2005.
What makes RJ unusual among Western religions is the centrality of individual autonomy and informed choice, and these are also, in my opinion, what makes it misunderstood. In the Western view, indeed in the view of most of the non-Buddhist world, religion is prescriptive – it tells its adherents what to believe and how to live. RJ, on the other hand, says the choices are ours to make and asks only that they be informed choices.
This single element of informed choice gives the lie to the view that RJ is “do it yourself” Judaism, or that RJ makes no demand on its followers. Yes, we are free to make choices, but to call ourselves Reform Jews, these choices need to be based on learning and thinking. One of the most fundamental commandments in the Torah is “na-ase v’nishma” – to act and to listen. RJ reverses the order of these: first we must listen – to God, to Torah, and to the Jewish Community – and then act.
The very act of studying Torah to inform ourselves before we make our choices makes us Jews rather than simply “spiritual” or “non-affiliated” people. The NTHC Board begin each of our meetings with a prayer by the Rabbi to dedicate our work to the study of Torah and a D’var Torah by one of the Trustees, so that the context for all of our deliberations as a Board is Torah.
I know people who consider themselves “cultural Jews” or “culinary Jews,” but I really don’t get it. To be a Jew is to be in a dialogue – in fact, the modern conception of dialogue draws heavily on the work of Jews, particularly Martin Buber and the physicist David Bohm. In a recent book, William Isaacs draws on both Buber and Bohm when he defines dialogue as “a conversation with a center, not sides. It is a way of taking the energy of our differences and channeling it toward something that has never been created before.” I believe it is in this sense of the term that the Pittsburgh Principles are framed as dialogues between the Reform Jew and God, Torah, and the Jewish People.
The notion of RJ as a dialogue also resolves, I think, the superficial contradiction between individual autonomy and informed choice. Yes, we have as individuals complete autonomy. Any one of us at any time can invent our own brand of Judaism or declare ourselves not Jews at all. But if to be a Jew is to be in dialogue with God, with the Torah, and with Klal Yisrael, then it behooves us to bring this autonomy to the dialogue, and to have the dialogue inform our choices rather than simply to make up what Judaism is based on our own prejudices or how it was where we were brought up, or how it is convenient for us to have it be. In the coming months I will address these three dialogues in detail.
The War on “Holidays”
Not too long ago we used to hear concern among Jewish families about the “December dilemma,” wherein Jewish children, surrounded in school, in stores, and on TV with the iconography of Christmas, would suffer a kind of religious identity crisis and feel left out of the mainstream culture’s most important holiday.
Today we are seeing a different December dilemma. Most people in the United States have become aware of and sensitive to the fact that (a) this is probably the most religiously diverse country in the world and (b) the Framers of the Constitution intended expressly for the government to be neutral on the question of religious in order to ensure freedom of and (if desired) from religion for everyone in the United States. As a result of this increased awareness and sensitivity, the Christian Religious Right (hereafter “Christianists” – think “Islamists”) is crying “foul” and attempting to retake what they see as their right to declare the US a “Christian Country.” Fox News personalities Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson have decried what they call the “war on Christmas” and urged boycotts of stores such as Macy’s and Target, who use the word “holidays” in their ads and do not mention Christmas. (Wal-Mart, also a target, has already backed off and changed its ads to Christmas), and even the Bush White House has come under fire for its “holiday” cards and tree (The tree is now a Christmas tree).
Actually, this supposed war on Christmas is nothing new – Henry Ford, writing in 1929, blamed it explicitly on the Jews, and the John Birch Society in the ‘50’s updated it to the Communists (and we all know who they are, wink wink). Today’s Christian Right do not blame the Jews explicitly but rather what they consider the encroaching forces of secularism, conveniently ignoring that the country has been secular since 1789. Not aggressively secular like France, where no hint of religion is allowed in public, but inclusively secular – open to all religions and to the non-religious and anti-religious, while founded on the assumption that there is a God and that what God has granted to one God has granted to all.
The Christianists insist that this is a Christian Country, founded by Christians for Christians, and the rest of us are here out of their generosity and Christian love. The Supreme Court under both Conservative and Liberal leadership has repeatedly rejected the Christian country notion, but they are not deterred by this.
It seems to me that as Jews and as human beings we must resist this latest attempt to hijack the national culture by one group who claim to represent a majority view. The term “holidays” is inclusive of Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, Diwali, and unless it comes early as it did this year, Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr. Christmas does not even include Orthodox Christians who celebrate Jesus’ birth on January 7th or sects such as Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do not celebrate it as a holiday at all.
I know there are those, including some in this Congregation, who consider the Christianists our friends because they are pro-Israel, albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with the welfare of the Jews. I don’t think that’s relevant here and mention it only to forestall their cries of anguish as I risk insulting our “allies.”
By the time you read this, the holidays will be over, but the Christianist effort will not end there. This is a case where those supposed allies, led by the likes of O’Reilly, Gibson and Falwell are attempting to bend a quasi-religious argument to their own political ends. Edmund Burke said that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. We cannot afford to do nothing in this case or we will, indeed, find ourselves living in a “Christian Country.”
Today we are seeing a different December dilemma. Most people in the United States have become aware of and sensitive to the fact that (a) this is probably the most religiously diverse country in the world and (b) the Framers of the Constitution intended expressly for the government to be neutral on the question of religious in order to ensure freedom of and (if desired) from religion for everyone in the United States. As a result of this increased awareness and sensitivity, the Christian Religious Right (hereafter “Christianists” – think “Islamists”) is crying “foul” and attempting to retake what they see as their right to declare the US a “Christian Country.” Fox News personalities Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson have decried what they call the “war on Christmas” and urged boycotts of stores such as Macy’s and Target, who use the word “holidays” in their ads and do not mention Christmas. (Wal-Mart, also a target, has already backed off and changed its ads to Christmas), and even the Bush White House has come under fire for its “holiday” cards and tree (The tree is now a Christmas tree).
Actually, this supposed war on Christmas is nothing new – Henry Ford, writing in 1929, blamed it explicitly on the Jews, and the John Birch Society in the ‘50’s updated it to the Communists (and we all know who they are, wink wink). Today’s Christian Right do not blame the Jews explicitly but rather what they consider the encroaching forces of secularism, conveniently ignoring that the country has been secular since 1789. Not aggressively secular like France, where no hint of religion is allowed in public, but inclusively secular – open to all religions and to the non-religious and anti-religious, while founded on the assumption that there is a God and that what God has granted to one God has granted to all.
The Christianists insist that this is a Christian Country, founded by Christians for Christians, and the rest of us are here out of their generosity and Christian love. The Supreme Court under both Conservative and Liberal leadership has repeatedly rejected the Christian country notion, but they are not deterred by this.
It seems to me that as Jews and as human beings we must resist this latest attempt to hijack the national culture by one group who claim to represent a majority view. The term “holidays” is inclusive of Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, Diwali, and unless it comes early as it did this year, Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr. Christmas does not even include Orthodox Christians who celebrate Jesus’ birth on January 7th or sects such as Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do not celebrate it as a holiday at all.
I know there are those, including some in this Congregation, who consider the Christianists our friends because they are pro-Israel, albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with the welfare of the Jews. I don’t think that’s relevant here and mention it only to forestall their cries of anguish as I risk insulting our “allies.”
By the time you read this, the holidays will be over, but the Christianist effort will not end there. This is a case where those supposed allies, led by the likes of O’Reilly, Gibson and Falwell are attempting to bend a quasi-religious argument to their own political ends. Edmund Burke said that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. We cannot afford to do nothing in this case or we will, indeed, find ourselves living in a “Christian Country.”
Lech Lecha 05
The Torah Portion Lech Lecha (Genesis XII – XVII) begins with God telling Abram “I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great and you will be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless you and curse them that curse you and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”
Later in the portion come the story of Hagar and the birth of Ishmael and of the birth of Isaac – Ishmael is held to be the founder of the Arab peoples, and Isaac of the Jewish, and therefore the Christian peoples, so all three of the Western religions look to Abraham as their ancestor – he is a blessing to the world because he belongs to the world.
From this beginning, the history of animosity and persecution between the three Abrahamic faiths seems a distortion of God’s intent. Diversity, including religious diversity, must somehow factor into God’s plans for humanity, yet we continue to operate as if, somehow, religious differences are rooted in error, and only those who hold to the “true faith” are following God’s path.
Often our position as Jews in this religious conflict reminds me of the three monks who took a vow of silence. As night fell, one turned to a servant and told him to light a lamp. The second monk said “we are not supposed to talk,” and the third monk said “I’m the only one who hasn’t spoken.”
We Jews remind me of the third monk – when we speak of religious differences and persecution, we focus on what has been done to us, and say “we’re the only ones who don’t persecute.” In fact, though, throughout history we haven’t really needed the others to persecute us – we’ve done a good job on our own to our own. In the early years of the Common Era Pharisees argued and fought with Saducees, Hellenists were opposed by traditionalists, and divergent sects such as the followers of Jesus were hounded as heretics. Later, in the 18th Century Jewish enlightenment, the Maskilim, or “enlightened” Jews fought with Talmudists, and Mitnagim fought with Chasidim. Today in Israel the ruling Orthodox are still fighting a rear-guard action against all other approaches to Judaism, and of course we have the century-old antagonism between Jew and Arab that has cost both sides so much.
In modern times our internal antagonism has abated somewhat. Ashkenazim and Sephardim live side by side, and have adopted some of each others’ customs, food, etc. Western European Ashkenazim such as German and Austrian Jews have mostly dropped their antipathy toward those from Eastern Europe, and, outside Israel, at least, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews live peacefully together, and show signs of learning from each other.
Maybe it’s time for a genuine effort at interfaith outreach and understanding, and I can’t think of a better place for that to start than here In addition to the religious diversity in our own temple, we live in an area that is at least as religiously diverse as most outside the big cities. Just in this area I know, and I suspect you do as well, not only Jews but Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, agnostics, deists, and atheists, and we all seem to be living together pretty well.
This Fall we have had and will have some outstanding opportunities for interfaith encounters. On Wednesday, November 16, Rabbi Postrel and Father Jim Beebe of St. Patrick’s in Incline created an interfaith Thanksgiving service, held in our Temple. On Saturday, December 10, we will be hosting a celebration of the formal installation of Rabbi Postrel as our Rabbi, and we have invited not only Rabbis and Cantors from around the area and other parts of the country, but also local clergy as well. The next day Father Beebe will be installed as the new Rector of St. Patrick’s as well. Then at the end of December, Chanukah begins as Christmas Day ends – what an opportunity to share both holidays with our non-Jewish friends.
In business and in politics there is a growing recognition of the power of dialogue as a solution to problems that have seemed unsolvable. One author describes dialogue as “a conversation with a center rather than sides.” Maybe it’s time for the world’s religions to undertake a serious dialogue, one designed to celebrate and learn from diversity rather than to attempt to eradicate it by taking sides and trying to prove whose view of God is the “right” one, and maybe a place that dialogue can start is here.
We call the patriarch “Avraham avinu” – Abraham our father – but the Torah clearly says that Abraham is not exclusively our father any more than I am exclusively the father of one of my children and not of the others – the concept is ridiculous.
“I will make you a great nation…and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” Later in the parshah, God renames Avram Av raham – the father of a multitude of nations. “My covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.” I think we forget that part about all the families of the earth shall be blessed. God clearly does not intend to institute one single way of worship – Abraham is the founder of monotheism, and of all the Western religions. If the Jewish people are “chosen,” it is because we are singled out for the fulfillment of this mission. Perhaps it is not an accident that, of the three great faiths, we are the only one that has been persecuted, but not, for the most part been persecutors of anyone but ourselves - -maybe that has positioned us to be the brokers of peace and the agents of the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham. If not us, then who? If not now, then when? And if not here, then where?
Let’s start here, let’s start now.
Later in the portion come the story of Hagar and the birth of Ishmael and of the birth of Isaac – Ishmael is held to be the founder of the Arab peoples, and Isaac of the Jewish, and therefore the Christian peoples, so all three of the Western religions look to Abraham as their ancestor – he is a blessing to the world because he belongs to the world.
From this beginning, the history of animosity and persecution between the three Abrahamic faiths seems a distortion of God’s intent. Diversity, including religious diversity, must somehow factor into God’s plans for humanity, yet we continue to operate as if, somehow, religious differences are rooted in error, and only those who hold to the “true faith” are following God’s path.
Often our position as Jews in this religious conflict reminds me of the three monks who took a vow of silence. As night fell, one turned to a servant and told him to light a lamp. The second monk said “we are not supposed to talk,” and the third monk said “I’m the only one who hasn’t spoken.”
We Jews remind me of the third monk – when we speak of religious differences and persecution, we focus on what has been done to us, and say “we’re the only ones who don’t persecute.” In fact, though, throughout history we haven’t really needed the others to persecute us – we’ve done a good job on our own to our own. In the early years of the Common Era Pharisees argued and fought with Saducees, Hellenists were opposed by traditionalists, and divergent sects such as the followers of Jesus were hounded as heretics. Later, in the 18th Century Jewish enlightenment, the Maskilim, or “enlightened” Jews fought with Talmudists, and Mitnagim fought with Chasidim. Today in Israel the ruling Orthodox are still fighting a rear-guard action against all other approaches to Judaism, and of course we have the century-old antagonism between Jew and Arab that has cost both sides so much.
In modern times our internal antagonism has abated somewhat. Ashkenazim and Sephardim live side by side, and have adopted some of each others’ customs, food, etc. Western European Ashkenazim such as German and Austrian Jews have mostly dropped their antipathy toward those from Eastern Europe, and, outside Israel, at least, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews live peacefully together, and show signs of learning from each other.
Maybe it’s time for a genuine effort at interfaith outreach and understanding, and I can’t think of a better place for that to start than here In addition to the religious diversity in our own temple, we live in an area that is at least as religiously diverse as most outside the big cities. Just in this area I know, and I suspect you do as well, not only Jews but Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, agnostics, deists, and atheists, and we all seem to be living together pretty well.
This Fall we have had and will have some outstanding opportunities for interfaith encounters. On Wednesday, November 16, Rabbi Postrel and Father Jim Beebe of St. Patrick’s in Incline created an interfaith Thanksgiving service, held in our Temple. On Saturday, December 10, we will be hosting a celebration of the formal installation of Rabbi Postrel as our Rabbi, and we have invited not only Rabbis and Cantors from around the area and other parts of the country, but also local clergy as well. The next day Father Beebe will be installed as the new Rector of St. Patrick’s as well. Then at the end of December, Chanukah begins as Christmas Day ends – what an opportunity to share both holidays with our non-Jewish friends.
In business and in politics there is a growing recognition of the power of dialogue as a solution to problems that have seemed unsolvable. One author describes dialogue as “a conversation with a center rather than sides.” Maybe it’s time for the world’s religions to undertake a serious dialogue, one designed to celebrate and learn from diversity rather than to attempt to eradicate it by taking sides and trying to prove whose view of God is the “right” one, and maybe a place that dialogue can start is here.
We call the patriarch “Avraham avinu” – Abraham our father – but the Torah clearly says that Abraham is not exclusively our father any more than I am exclusively the father of one of my children and not of the others – the concept is ridiculous.
“I will make you a great nation…and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” Later in the parshah, God renames Avram Av raham – the father of a multitude of nations. “My covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.” I think we forget that part about all the families of the earth shall be blessed. God clearly does not intend to institute one single way of worship – Abraham is the founder of monotheism, and of all the Western religions. If the Jewish people are “chosen,” it is because we are singled out for the fulfillment of this mission. Perhaps it is not an accident that, of the three great faiths, we are the only one that has been persecuted, but not, for the most part been persecutors of anyone but ourselves - -maybe that has positioned us to be the brokers of peace and the agents of the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham. If not us, then who? If not now, then when? And if not here, then where?
Let’s start here, let’s start now.
Reform Judaism
Leading services weekly over a couple of months has been a really interesting experience for me. I’ve never really studied the Torah and commentaries on the Torah in depth, and so for each service I have had to do some studying to get behind the text to what it may have to teach us for life today, particularly for those of us who are not “commandment Jews.”
A Rabbi who visited recently, Oren Postrel, made the distinction in some teaching he did between “Commandment Judaism” and “Reform Judaism.” He made the point, and I think it’s a good one, that the fundamental difference between the two starts with each branch’s view of the Torah. Commandment Judaism holds that the Torah was given as a whole to Moses and the Jewish people at Sinai, and that every word was written by God. Reform Jews believe that the Torah was written over time, inspired by God and written by a variety of people.
Rabbi Postrel made the point that, if you believe as Commandment Jews believe, then it follows that you must obey every commandment in the Torah, if not literally, then as interpreted by the Rabbis, since Commandment Jews also hold that the Talmud is God’s word. Reform Jews’ position is not nearly so clear. Some hold that Reform is “pick and choose” Judaism – follow those injunctions and prohibitions that you like, don’t follow those you don’t. I, for one, reject this view – it’s just too facile for me.
I came to Reform Judaism late in life. I was raised Conservative, in a congregation that was just making the transition from Orthodox to Conservative; my parents were raised Orthodox. In my life I have engaged with both Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, with mixed results in terms of my own personal search for spiritual meaning. I have also engaged seriously in the study of Buddhism, less seriously studied Hinduism and could not help but learn about Christianity as one must in this country, though the nuances that separate the various branches of Christianity continue to elude me.
As I’ve engaged with Reform Judaism over the past ten years or so, I’ve become more and more interested in it because it seems to me to demand more engagement and thought, not to say faith, than do the more doctrinaire forms. In my personal development I have come to value inclusiveness very highly in all areas of life – the more of life, the more people and points of view I exclude, the less rich is my intellectual life – and I find RJ, and this congregation in particular to be explicitly inclusive, to the extent that even non-Jews are welcome and part of the community. This fits for me.
Mostly, though, RJ has caused me to really think about God and Torah, outside the bounds of doctrine. This has taken me, particularly lately, to thinking about what might be the fundamental message of the Torah – that which is behind the arcane rules about sacrifices and the stories of people being struck dead, that which is the real essence of being a Jew and maybe of being a human being. In preparing various divrei Torah over the past weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that underneath it all the Torah is teaching us two things: first, that God is One. Not that there is one God - that may have been news in Abraham’s time but not now – but that God is a whole – all of it, everything – that there is nothing outside God and that good and evil are under our control and consist of our choices to turn toward or away from God.
Second to the oneness of God is the admonition to “be holy, for God is holy.” Said another way, to live in imitation of God. For this, the Torah is an instruction manual, but one that is meant to be read metaphorically not literally. The dietary laws, for example, tell us which qualities God means for us to incorporate (e.g., cleanliness, humility, living together in peace) and which God wants us to reject (e.g., predation, isolation, ferocity). The repeated injunctions to remember our slavery in Egypt and the Exodus can be understood to be reminders to treat others with dignity and compassion and to remember that, though we were chosen by God, we have been at the bottom of the social ladder many times in our existence.
So I’ve come to really value and respect Reform Judaism – with its commitments to thinking for oneself, to inclusion, to equality of all genders and orientations, to tikkun olam, and most of all to being able to be Jews without divorcing ourselves from the modern world.
A Rabbi who visited recently, Oren Postrel, made the distinction in some teaching he did between “Commandment Judaism” and “Reform Judaism.” He made the point, and I think it’s a good one, that the fundamental difference between the two starts with each branch’s view of the Torah. Commandment Judaism holds that the Torah was given as a whole to Moses and the Jewish people at Sinai, and that every word was written by God. Reform Jews believe that the Torah was written over time, inspired by God and written by a variety of people.
Rabbi Postrel made the point that, if you believe as Commandment Jews believe, then it follows that you must obey every commandment in the Torah, if not literally, then as interpreted by the Rabbis, since Commandment Jews also hold that the Talmud is God’s word. Reform Jews’ position is not nearly so clear. Some hold that Reform is “pick and choose” Judaism – follow those injunctions and prohibitions that you like, don’t follow those you don’t. I, for one, reject this view – it’s just too facile for me.
I came to Reform Judaism late in life. I was raised Conservative, in a congregation that was just making the transition from Orthodox to Conservative; my parents were raised Orthodox. In my life I have engaged with both Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, with mixed results in terms of my own personal search for spiritual meaning. I have also engaged seriously in the study of Buddhism, less seriously studied Hinduism and could not help but learn about Christianity as one must in this country, though the nuances that separate the various branches of Christianity continue to elude me.
As I’ve engaged with Reform Judaism over the past ten years or so, I’ve become more and more interested in it because it seems to me to demand more engagement and thought, not to say faith, than do the more doctrinaire forms. In my personal development I have come to value inclusiveness very highly in all areas of life – the more of life, the more people and points of view I exclude, the less rich is my intellectual life – and I find RJ, and this congregation in particular to be explicitly inclusive, to the extent that even non-Jews are welcome and part of the community. This fits for me.
Mostly, though, RJ has caused me to really think about God and Torah, outside the bounds of doctrine. This has taken me, particularly lately, to thinking about what might be the fundamental message of the Torah – that which is behind the arcane rules about sacrifices and the stories of people being struck dead, that which is the real essence of being a Jew and maybe of being a human being. In preparing various divrei Torah over the past weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that underneath it all the Torah is teaching us two things: first, that God is One. Not that there is one God - that may have been news in Abraham’s time but not now – but that God is a whole – all of it, everything – that there is nothing outside God and that good and evil are under our control and consist of our choices to turn toward or away from God.
Second to the oneness of God is the admonition to “be holy, for God is holy.” Said another way, to live in imitation of God. For this, the Torah is an instruction manual, but one that is meant to be read metaphorically not literally. The dietary laws, for example, tell us which qualities God means for us to incorporate (e.g., cleanliness, humility, living together in peace) and which God wants us to reject (e.g., predation, isolation, ferocity). The repeated injunctions to remember our slavery in Egypt and the Exodus can be understood to be reminders to treat others with dignity and compassion and to remember that, though we were chosen by God, we have been at the bottom of the social ladder many times in our existence.
So I’ve come to really value and respect Reform Judaism – with its commitments to thinking for oneself, to inclusion, to equality of all genders and orientations, to tikkun olam, and most of all to being able to be Jews without divorcing ourselves from the modern world.
Tazria-Metzora
This week’s Torah portion is a double one - Thazria and Metzora (Leviticus XII - XIII and XIV – XV). After last week’s recounting of what animals are clean and unclean, we move into the rules for people – what constitutes being clean and unclean, and if one is unclean for whatever reason, how to become clean again.
In addition, this is Shabbat Hachodesh, the Shabbat at the beginning of the month of Nisan, when Passover occurs, and we also read the passage from Exodus XII: 1-20 that establishes the basis for Passover and Nisan as the first month of the calendar (though the spiritual year begins with Rosh Hashana).
My reading on the Torah portion suggested that there are two ways to look at the whole business of clean and unclean – hygienically and spiritually. Commandment Judaism takes these verses quite literally – every Orthodox community includes a Mikvah – a ritual bath – to be used for ritual cleansing, and the rules regarding childbirth, sexual contact, etc. are scrupulously adhered to. But most progressive Jewish scholars see the rules as more metaphorical. Remember, the context for the whole book of Leviticus is the injunction “You shall be holy; for I, the Lord your God am holy,” and the Shema, proclaiming that God is one – that there is no “other,” nothing that is outside God.
In this reading the rules of cleanliness and uncleanliness reflect the struggle of human beings between good and evil, between life and death. If there is nothing outside God, then, really, evil is an illusion – the choice people have is between moving toward God, being like God (‘holy for I am holy”) or moving away from God – not physically, that’s impossible, but in their minds and hearts. When we read about which animals are permitted to eat, the progressive interpretation was that what was in question was not the inherent worth or even the cleanliness of the animals, but the qualities of the animals that would bring us closer to God or, in the case, for example, of ferocious predators, take us farther from God.
In this regard, two things stand out for me from the Torah portions. First, the question that has troubled women and particularly feminists for a long time – it is the one that opens the chapter. When a woman has given birth, she is then unclean and must be cleansed and offer sacrifices both in thanksgiving and in atonement for sin before she can rejoin the community. Whatever they may have thought 5000 years ago, we know today that there is nothing sinful or unclean about childbirth. And could they really have thought so then? Not likely, given one of God’s first commandments to Adam and Eve was to “be fruitful and multiply.” So what then? One possibility that has been advanced is that the real issue is not cleanliness but life – creating life is a holy act – it brings us closer to God – and when a woman is carrying a baby, she has a double portion of life – hers and the baby’s. When the baby is born, while that life continues in the new person, the woman has lost a portion of the life she contained, and the cleansing, prayer, and sacrifices are a way for her to deal with the loss – kind of an early treatment for post-partum depression. Incidentally, a woman who gives birth to a girl has twice the atonement to do than one who gives birth to a boy. Because girls are more unclean? No – because in giving birth to a girl, a bearer of life, she gives up twice as much life that was in her than in giving birth to a boy.
The second area the portion deals with is more obscure. The Torah speaks of a disease called tzara’a. No one really knows what this disease is. It is traditionally translated as leprosy, but everyone agrees that this does not refer to the physical disease called Hansen’s Disease. Rather, the Torah refers to spots appearing first on the wall of a person’s house, then on the person’s clothes, and finally on the person’s skin. The Rabbis (and here commandment and progressive Judaism seem in agreement) interpret the Torah to be saying that the disease, whatever it was, was a consequence of spreading gossip or slander. In Hebrew this is called lashon hara – a bad tongue, and the prohibition against lashon hara is one of the oldest and strongest in Judaism. The Talmud says that we as Jews are forbidden to say anything bad or negative about a person even if it is true – an early version of “if you can’t say something good, don’t say anything at all.” Imagine – what a discipline. In fact, I suggest you try it for a couple of days or a week and see how hard it is – the only exception is if the purpose of saying it is to improve the condition you are referring to, and that means saying it to the person directly or not at all. The Torah recognizes in this the enormous destructive power of gossip and slander (slander is gossip that is not true). One of the things I’ve learned in my years as a psychologist and a consultant is how strongly we human beings are given to negativity. I have yet to tell me what possible benefit there could be in your coming to me to tell me what a jerk Joe is. What people usually say, if pressed, is either that “it’s true,” as if that somehow made it beneficial or valuable, or that they were “just talking” as if words had no power. But just imagine for a second. You come to me and tell me that Joe is a jerk. I then go and tell someone else, who tells someone else, and pretty soon Joe lives in a community consisting of people who, without knowing why, consider him a jerk, and are sure it must be true because, after all, “everyone says so!”
I worked with a consultant once who had a standing bet that he could bring down any organization of any size in six months to a year through gossip alone. People pooh-poohed the idea, but never, to my knowledge, did anyone take him up on the bet.
I don’t know if it’s possible to root out gossip – the lashon hara seems to be the most visible and one of the nastiest manifestations of the yetzer hara – the evil inclination in human beings. I do know, and can tell you from experience, that the more I try to live in the discipline of not speaking negatively about other people (and I probably fail as much as I succeed at this), the better my life seems to go.
The other Torah portion this week is the story of the first Passover. It is meant to remind us that Pesach is coming and we need to prepare. Again here, we have cleanliness as a connection to moving toward God – for Passover, instead of slaughtering and eating a lamb, we are to cleanse our house of chametz – anything that could contain leaven, particularly the five grains – barley, rye, oats, wheat, and spelt. Over the years, particularly among Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazim) this rule has been expanded to include rice, peas, peanuts, millet, beans, sesame seeds, and a variety of other things including some that make so sense at all – wild rice is forbidden to Ashkenazim because the Rabbis thought it was rice, when it is really a grass, and corn, which was unknown in Europe until the 16th Century, is forbidden, probably because “corn” sounds like “kern,” the Yiddish word for “rye.” Sephardim have it much easier – they are forbidden only the 5 grains and eat all the rest of that stuff.
But whatever you do or don’t eat, what is important is the separation of Passover from the rest of the year in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, the turning toward God and remembering what He did for us. In my view that’s what all of this is about – turning toward God and having the turning create a separation between clean and unclean, good and bad, sacred and profane – because that is what it is to “be holy” – to be kadosh is to be distinct, to be separate from those things that turn us away from God – that is the real choice we have as human beings – which way we turn.
In addition, this is Shabbat Hachodesh, the Shabbat at the beginning of the month of Nisan, when Passover occurs, and we also read the passage from Exodus XII: 1-20 that establishes the basis for Passover and Nisan as the first month of the calendar (though the spiritual year begins with Rosh Hashana).
My reading on the Torah portion suggested that there are two ways to look at the whole business of clean and unclean – hygienically and spiritually. Commandment Judaism takes these verses quite literally – every Orthodox community includes a Mikvah – a ritual bath – to be used for ritual cleansing, and the rules regarding childbirth, sexual contact, etc. are scrupulously adhered to. But most progressive Jewish scholars see the rules as more metaphorical. Remember, the context for the whole book of Leviticus is the injunction “You shall be holy; for I, the Lord your God am holy,” and the Shema, proclaiming that God is one – that there is no “other,” nothing that is outside God.
In this reading the rules of cleanliness and uncleanliness reflect the struggle of human beings between good and evil, between life and death. If there is nothing outside God, then, really, evil is an illusion – the choice people have is between moving toward God, being like God (‘holy for I am holy”) or moving away from God – not physically, that’s impossible, but in their minds and hearts. When we read about which animals are permitted to eat, the progressive interpretation was that what was in question was not the inherent worth or even the cleanliness of the animals, but the qualities of the animals that would bring us closer to God or, in the case, for example, of ferocious predators, take us farther from God.
In this regard, two things stand out for me from the Torah portions. First, the question that has troubled women and particularly feminists for a long time – it is the one that opens the chapter. When a woman has given birth, she is then unclean and must be cleansed and offer sacrifices both in thanksgiving and in atonement for sin before she can rejoin the community. Whatever they may have thought 5000 years ago, we know today that there is nothing sinful or unclean about childbirth. And could they really have thought so then? Not likely, given one of God’s first commandments to Adam and Eve was to “be fruitful and multiply.” So what then? One possibility that has been advanced is that the real issue is not cleanliness but life – creating life is a holy act – it brings us closer to God – and when a woman is carrying a baby, she has a double portion of life – hers and the baby’s. When the baby is born, while that life continues in the new person, the woman has lost a portion of the life she contained, and the cleansing, prayer, and sacrifices are a way for her to deal with the loss – kind of an early treatment for post-partum depression. Incidentally, a woman who gives birth to a girl has twice the atonement to do than one who gives birth to a boy. Because girls are more unclean? No – because in giving birth to a girl, a bearer of life, she gives up twice as much life that was in her than in giving birth to a boy.
The second area the portion deals with is more obscure. The Torah speaks of a disease called tzara’a. No one really knows what this disease is. It is traditionally translated as leprosy, but everyone agrees that this does not refer to the physical disease called Hansen’s Disease. Rather, the Torah refers to spots appearing first on the wall of a person’s house, then on the person’s clothes, and finally on the person’s skin. The Rabbis (and here commandment and progressive Judaism seem in agreement) interpret the Torah to be saying that the disease, whatever it was, was a consequence of spreading gossip or slander. In Hebrew this is called lashon hara – a bad tongue, and the prohibition against lashon hara is one of the oldest and strongest in Judaism. The Talmud says that we as Jews are forbidden to say anything bad or negative about a person even if it is true – an early version of “if you can’t say something good, don’t say anything at all.” Imagine – what a discipline. In fact, I suggest you try it for a couple of days or a week and see how hard it is – the only exception is if the purpose of saying it is to improve the condition you are referring to, and that means saying it to the person directly or not at all. The Torah recognizes in this the enormous destructive power of gossip and slander (slander is gossip that is not true). One of the things I’ve learned in my years as a psychologist and a consultant is how strongly we human beings are given to negativity. I have yet to tell me what possible benefit there could be in your coming to me to tell me what a jerk Joe is. What people usually say, if pressed, is either that “it’s true,” as if that somehow made it beneficial or valuable, or that they were “just talking” as if words had no power. But just imagine for a second. You come to me and tell me that Joe is a jerk. I then go and tell someone else, who tells someone else, and pretty soon Joe lives in a community consisting of people who, without knowing why, consider him a jerk, and are sure it must be true because, after all, “everyone says so!”
I worked with a consultant once who had a standing bet that he could bring down any organization of any size in six months to a year through gossip alone. People pooh-poohed the idea, but never, to my knowledge, did anyone take him up on the bet.
I don’t know if it’s possible to root out gossip – the lashon hara seems to be the most visible and one of the nastiest manifestations of the yetzer hara – the evil inclination in human beings. I do know, and can tell you from experience, that the more I try to live in the discipline of not speaking negatively about other people (and I probably fail as much as I succeed at this), the better my life seems to go.
The other Torah portion this week is the story of the first Passover. It is meant to remind us that Pesach is coming and we need to prepare. Again here, we have cleanliness as a connection to moving toward God – for Passover, instead of slaughtering and eating a lamb, we are to cleanse our house of chametz – anything that could contain leaven, particularly the five grains – barley, rye, oats, wheat, and spelt. Over the years, particularly among Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazim) this rule has been expanded to include rice, peas, peanuts, millet, beans, sesame seeds, and a variety of other things including some that make so sense at all – wild rice is forbidden to Ashkenazim because the Rabbis thought it was rice, when it is really a grass, and corn, which was unknown in Europe until the 16th Century, is forbidden, probably because “corn” sounds like “kern,” the Yiddish word for “rye.” Sephardim have it much easier – they are forbidden only the 5 grains and eat all the rest of that stuff.
But whatever you do or don’t eat, what is important is the separation of Passover from the rest of the year in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, the turning toward God and remembering what He did for us. In my view that’s what all of this is about – turning toward God and having the turning create a separation between clean and unclean, good and bad, sacred and profane – because that is what it is to “be holy” – to be kadosh is to be distinct, to be separate from those things that turn us away from God – that is the real choice we have as human beings – which way we turn.
9/11/2001
On a wall in a cellar in Cologne, Germany, where Jews had hidden from the Nazis, there was found an inscription. The anonymous author who perished with his fellow victims left behind these words: "I believe in the sun even when it's not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it. I believe in God even when He is silent."
Normally on Rosh Hashana I address the state of our congregation and our community, kind of an “state of NTHC” report. I will try to touch on this in my remarks on Yom Kippur, but today I want to address something more pressing, namely the need for us as Jews to speak out in the current national crisis.
The world is a bit less than it was a week ago.
· A little less safe
· A little less certain
· A little less civilized
· A little less human.
People have compared the attack on September 11th to Pearl Harbor, but the similarities are superficial at best. Pearl Harbor was an attack by an established, military force against military targets; yes there were civilian casualties – too many of them – but they were collateral to the military nature of the operation. Sneak attack, yes, but sneak attacks as a military tactic go back to the Trojan Horse and before. The attack on America last week was a cowardly assault on targets that can only be seen as civilian in nature. Even the Pentagon has many more civilians than military personnel.
I was in the San Francisco Bay Area when the attack occurred, and was astonished at the degree to which this attack, 2500 miles away seemed to have personally touched each person I met. Our son Eric’s office is across the street from the World Trade Center. He was there just after the second plane hit and (thank G-d) got home safely to Brooklyn before the buildings collapsed. Others I spoke with had friends, family, and relatives in New York, at the World Trade Center, in Washington. One man who lives barely 5 minutes from the Pentagon did not know, as late as 5 pm our time, that anything had happened.
Within hours, US residents of Arab descent or extraction and US Arab groups were attacked, a mosque in Seattle was burned, shots were fired, and yesterday a Sikh in Arizona was shot – a Sikh is about as related to anything that has happened as is a Tibetan Buddhist. Within days right-wing talk radio was filled with callers using the occasion to beat the drums for their favorite racist cause – close the borders to Mexicans, stop supporting Israel, you name it.
Within hours, the fringe on the left was also heard, lamenting that we (the U.S., Israel, the West, whoever “we” are) had driven the poor oppressed terrorists to this extreme. I heard many times that “we have to get to the origin of this – what makes people into terrorists.” One person even said that Osama bin Laden (may his name be erased) was once an 8 or 10 or 12 year old boy and somehow this meant he should not have come to such a place as he is in now. No mention was made of the people on the planes or in the buildings or the rescuers who were, presumably also once 8 or 10 or 12 years old, and who did not deserve to die on September 11th.
What nonsense. What unadulterated, self-serving, myopic drivel on both sides. The facts are plain here, a week later. Fanatics, using religion as the content of their fanaticism, perpetrated the most heinous act of mass murder in history, and in so doing created a de facto state of war, not only with the United States but with all of humanity that is deserving of the name. No decent human being, regardless of race, religion, culture or ethnicity can fail to condemn this atrocity against innocent civilians, without regard to the race, religion, culture, or ethnicity of those victims. No decent human being can fail to condemn an attack on innocent victims, using other innocent victims as weapons. No decent human being can fail to condemn the use of suicide bombing as a tactic. In World War II we were appalled at the Japanese military personnel who committed suicide raids as kamikaze bombers, but those were military men, making a personal decision, and taking only their own life in the attempt. These arrogant cowards took innocent airline passengers with them to add to the horror of the event.
And no decent human being can stand any longer for the teaching of hate and the glorification of terrorism in elementary and secondary schools. Anyone asking “how are terrorists created?” need look no farther than the schools of Gaza, and the West Bank, and the massaras of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Talmud teaches that each individual human life is sacred, that he who saves one life saves all of humanity. Clearly the version of Islam that the terrorists subscribe to does not hold to this truth. They have forfeited the right to be considered decent human beings, to be considered anything but criminals comparable to those who stood in the dock at Nuremberg.
Last week one individual lost no time writing a letter to the Bonanza and the Reno Gazette-Journal blaming this terrorist act on US support of Israel. My response to this anti-semitic diatribe will be published in tomorrow’s Bonanza and in the Gazette Journal, signed in my capacity as president of your congregation. That same day other ignoramuses sought to use the occasion to vent their spleen against other groups. No one, to my knowledge, has attacked Jews directly, but “Israel” and “Zionism” have long been code words for “Jews” for anti-semites.
We must not be silent. It will be too easy for right- and left-wing fringe reaction to this to turn on us as Jews, particularly if, as is likely, President Bush’s declared war on terrorism results in American losses and/or further terrorist acts and attempts against the US. We must learn from the mistakes of American and European Jewish communities before World War II, who remained silent too long. We must speak out in support of President Bush, regardless of our domestic politics or parties. The war against terrorism is a war against the enemies of Israel and of Judaism. I ask that you look for opportunities to speak out as individuals and for your Board and officers to speak out for the congregation. Write letters, call talk shows, do what you can.
Edmund Burke, the 18th century English statesman said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Let us not contribute to the triumph, or even the temporary victories of evil through our silence.
Normally on Rosh Hashana I address the state of our congregation and our community, kind of an “state of NTHC” report. I will try to touch on this in my remarks on Yom Kippur, but today I want to address something more pressing, namely the need for us as Jews to speak out in the current national crisis.
The world is a bit less than it was a week ago.
· A little less safe
· A little less certain
· A little less civilized
· A little less human.
People have compared the attack on September 11th to Pearl Harbor, but the similarities are superficial at best. Pearl Harbor was an attack by an established, military force against military targets; yes there were civilian casualties – too many of them – but they were collateral to the military nature of the operation. Sneak attack, yes, but sneak attacks as a military tactic go back to the Trojan Horse and before. The attack on America last week was a cowardly assault on targets that can only be seen as civilian in nature. Even the Pentagon has many more civilians than military personnel.
I was in the San Francisco Bay Area when the attack occurred, and was astonished at the degree to which this attack, 2500 miles away seemed to have personally touched each person I met. Our son Eric’s office is across the street from the World Trade Center. He was there just after the second plane hit and (thank G-d) got home safely to Brooklyn before the buildings collapsed. Others I spoke with had friends, family, and relatives in New York, at the World Trade Center, in Washington. One man who lives barely 5 minutes from the Pentagon did not know, as late as 5 pm our time, that anything had happened.
Within hours, US residents of Arab descent or extraction and US Arab groups were attacked, a mosque in Seattle was burned, shots were fired, and yesterday a Sikh in Arizona was shot – a Sikh is about as related to anything that has happened as is a Tibetan Buddhist. Within days right-wing talk radio was filled with callers using the occasion to beat the drums for their favorite racist cause – close the borders to Mexicans, stop supporting Israel, you name it.
Within hours, the fringe on the left was also heard, lamenting that we (the U.S., Israel, the West, whoever “we” are) had driven the poor oppressed terrorists to this extreme. I heard many times that “we have to get to the origin of this – what makes people into terrorists.” One person even said that Osama bin Laden (may his name be erased) was once an 8 or 10 or 12 year old boy and somehow this meant he should not have come to such a place as he is in now. No mention was made of the people on the planes or in the buildings or the rescuers who were, presumably also once 8 or 10 or 12 years old, and who did not deserve to die on September 11th.
What nonsense. What unadulterated, self-serving, myopic drivel on both sides. The facts are plain here, a week later. Fanatics, using religion as the content of their fanaticism, perpetrated the most heinous act of mass murder in history, and in so doing created a de facto state of war, not only with the United States but with all of humanity that is deserving of the name. No decent human being, regardless of race, religion, culture or ethnicity can fail to condemn this atrocity against innocent civilians, without regard to the race, religion, culture, or ethnicity of those victims. No decent human being can fail to condemn an attack on innocent victims, using other innocent victims as weapons. No decent human being can fail to condemn the use of suicide bombing as a tactic. In World War II we were appalled at the Japanese military personnel who committed suicide raids as kamikaze bombers, but those were military men, making a personal decision, and taking only their own life in the attempt. These arrogant cowards took innocent airline passengers with them to add to the horror of the event.
And no decent human being can stand any longer for the teaching of hate and the glorification of terrorism in elementary and secondary schools. Anyone asking “how are terrorists created?” need look no farther than the schools of Gaza, and the West Bank, and the massaras of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Talmud teaches that each individual human life is sacred, that he who saves one life saves all of humanity. Clearly the version of Islam that the terrorists subscribe to does not hold to this truth. They have forfeited the right to be considered decent human beings, to be considered anything but criminals comparable to those who stood in the dock at Nuremberg.
Last week one individual lost no time writing a letter to the Bonanza and the Reno Gazette-Journal blaming this terrorist act on US support of Israel. My response to this anti-semitic diatribe will be published in tomorrow’s Bonanza and in the Gazette Journal, signed in my capacity as president of your congregation. That same day other ignoramuses sought to use the occasion to vent their spleen against other groups. No one, to my knowledge, has attacked Jews directly, but “Israel” and “Zionism” have long been code words for “Jews” for anti-semites.
We must not be silent. It will be too easy for right- and left-wing fringe reaction to this to turn on us as Jews, particularly if, as is likely, President Bush’s declared war on terrorism results in American losses and/or further terrorist acts and attempts against the US. We must learn from the mistakes of American and European Jewish communities before World War II, who remained silent too long. We must speak out in support of President Bush, regardless of our domestic politics or parties. The war against terrorism is a war against the enemies of Israel and of Judaism. I ask that you look for opportunities to speak out as individuals and for your Board and officers to speak out for the congregation. Write letters, call talk shows, do what you can.
Edmund Burke, the 18th century English statesman said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Let us not contribute to the triumph, or even the temporary victories of evil through our silence.
13 Attributes
When I am going to lead services, I give a lot of thought and consult a lot of sources for the Dvar Torah. I’m always a little self-conscious about this part, because I don’t’ consider myself a scholar, and yet I want to have something valuable and relevant to say, beyond simply recounting the content of the Torah portion.
The last time I led services, the Torah portion, Ki Tisa, was an extremely difficult one. It includes the conclusion of the instructions for building the Mishkan, the tabernacle of worship, a strong repetition of the importance of Shabbat, Moses’ ascending Mt. Sinai to receive the Law, the episode of the Golden Calf, and Moses’ breaking (or dropping) the tablets, repenting for the people, receiving the second tablets, and having God pass before him, declaring the 13 divine attributes that make repentance possible and cement the renewed covenant between God and Israel. Phew!
That’s a lot to deal with, and most of the sources I looked at seemed to concentrate on Shabbat as the key message. But I was taught to look at Torah portions as a whole, so I asked myself what to make of this sequence of events. The segue from the Mishkan to Shabbat seems to be an admonition that Shabbat was not to be broken, even for the building of the Mishkan, which God had given to Israel as a sacred and immediate mission.. So here we have the Hebrew people, as well as a group of non-Hebrews who came with them out of Egypt, just weeks away from the miracles of the plagues and the parting of the Sea, engaged with the charge from God to build a tabernacle, and with their leader, Moses, having ascended Mount Sinai and gone for 40 days, so they prevail upon Aaron to build “a god that can go before us.” He does, and when Moses comes down with the tablets he is enraged and, depending on the version of the story you read, smashes the tablets or drops them as they become too heavy to bear.
Moses then reascends the mountain and puts his life on the line with God to ask that the people be forgiven, which God grants. Moses then asks God to support his (Moses’) ability to lead by revealing to him a deeper insight into God’s nature and the Divine will – God tells Moses that he cannot see God directly, but will be allowed to see God’s “back” – the manifestations of God’s work. While Moses sees this, God speaks to him and declares His moral attributes:
Adonai, Adonai, El rachum v’chanun, erech apayim rav chesed, v’emet. Notzer chesed la’alafim, noseh avon vafeshah, v’hata’ah vnakay.
The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and acquitting the penitent.
This new relationship between God and Moses renews and strengthens the covenant between God and Israel, even in the face of the people’s having strayed, and God gives Moses the second set of tablets that Moses brings back with radiant light coming from his face.
What do we make of all this? One thing I like to look at is where the various critical parts of the Torah show up in the liturgy of Shabbat and Holidays. At the start of the passage, we find the verse “you shall keep my Sabbath, for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctify you. You shall keep the Sabbath therefore, for it is holy unto you…six days work shall be done; but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord…for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and on the seventh day He ceased from work and rested.” This verse is the basis of the v’shomru, which we sang earlier.
The 13 moral attributes of God occur often in services, and are central to the High Holiday liturgy. In fact some of the Rabbis trace the whole concept of t’shuvah, repentance, and the observance of Yom Kippur to this passage, where God, in the face of flagrant desecration by the Hebrew people, emphasizes not only His justice, but even moreso his mercy and willingness to “acquit the penitent.” Yet there is a balance here – the Rabbis explain that he 13th attribute is really venakkeh lo yenakkeh – venakkeh – acquitting the penitent, lo yenakkeh – but not acquitting the impenitent. God is merciful and forgiving, but also just and justice requires punishment under law and will not shield the wrongdoer from the consequences of his misdeeds, and the penalty may span generations. Indeed, God’s forgiveness comes only after the Levites have killed all those who worshipped the Golden Calf, because the penalty for idolatry is death.
Finally, we have the Haftarah, where Elijah challenges 450 priests of Baal to show which God is the true God by making a burnt offering with their God lighting the fire. After a day of trying and failing by the Baalites, Elijah soaks the sacrifice and the stone altar in water and calls upon God who consumes sacrifice, altar and all in fire, after which the assembled people proclaim “Adonai hu, ha-Elohim! Adonai hu, ha-Elohim! Adonai hu, ha-Elohim!”, which is one of the final prayers of the Yom Kippur service.
So we have a God who is demanding yet compassionate, just, yet merciful, and who demands our allegiance while that the same time charging us with being “a nation of priests, a holy people.” The Rabbis teach that if we take the demand to be a holy people along with this passage, particularly the clear statement of the 13 moral attributes of God, what we have is the source of the principle of the imitation of God. We are to be like God, and this is how – by being merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in goodness and truth; just and forgiving, and to allow us the time for self-examination and contemplation of these principles, God has given us Shabbat as a weekly pause to remember what is important, and I can think of no better way to honor that gift than to come to services.
The last time I led services, the Torah portion, Ki Tisa, was an extremely difficult one. It includes the conclusion of the instructions for building the Mishkan, the tabernacle of worship, a strong repetition of the importance of Shabbat, Moses’ ascending Mt. Sinai to receive the Law, the episode of the Golden Calf, and Moses’ breaking (or dropping) the tablets, repenting for the people, receiving the second tablets, and having God pass before him, declaring the 13 divine attributes that make repentance possible and cement the renewed covenant between God and Israel. Phew!
That’s a lot to deal with, and most of the sources I looked at seemed to concentrate on Shabbat as the key message. But I was taught to look at Torah portions as a whole, so I asked myself what to make of this sequence of events. The segue from the Mishkan to Shabbat seems to be an admonition that Shabbat was not to be broken, even for the building of the Mishkan, which God had given to Israel as a sacred and immediate mission.. So here we have the Hebrew people, as well as a group of non-Hebrews who came with them out of Egypt, just weeks away from the miracles of the plagues and the parting of the Sea, engaged with the charge from God to build a tabernacle, and with their leader, Moses, having ascended Mount Sinai and gone for 40 days, so they prevail upon Aaron to build “a god that can go before us.” He does, and when Moses comes down with the tablets he is enraged and, depending on the version of the story you read, smashes the tablets or drops them as they become too heavy to bear.
Moses then reascends the mountain and puts his life on the line with God to ask that the people be forgiven, which God grants. Moses then asks God to support his (Moses’) ability to lead by revealing to him a deeper insight into God’s nature and the Divine will – God tells Moses that he cannot see God directly, but will be allowed to see God’s “back” – the manifestations of God’s work. While Moses sees this, God speaks to him and declares His moral attributes:
Adonai, Adonai, El rachum v’chanun, erech apayim rav chesed, v’emet. Notzer chesed la’alafim, noseh avon vafeshah, v’hata’ah vnakay.
The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and acquitting the penitent.
This new relationship between God and Moses renews and strengthens the covenant between God and Israel, even in the face of the people’s having strayed, and God gives Moses the second set of tablets that Moses brings back with radiant light coming from his face.
What do we make of all this? One thing I like to look at is where the various critical parts of the Torah show up in the liturgy of Shabbat and Holidays. At the start of the passage, we find the verse “you shall keep my Sabbath, for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctify you. You shall keep the Sabbath therefore, for it is holy unto you…six days work shall be done; but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord…for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and on the seventh day He ceased from work and rested.” This verse is the basis of the v’shomru, which we sang earlier.
The 13 moral attributes of God occur often in services, and are central to the High Holiday liturgy. In fact some of the Rabbis trace the whole concept of t’shuvah, repentance, and the observance of Yom Kippur to this passage, where God, in the face of flagrant desecration by the Hebrew people, emphasizes not only His justice, but even moreso his mercy and willingness to “acquit the penitent.” Yet there is a balance here – the Rabbis explain that he 13th attribute is really venakkeh lo yenakkeh – venakkeh – acquitting the penitent, lo yenakkeh – but not acquitting the impenitent. God is merciful and forgiving, but also just and justice requires punishment under law and will not shield the wrongdoer from the consequences of his misdeeds, and the penalty may span generations. Indeed, God’s forgiveness comes only after the Levites have killed all those who worshipped the Golden Calf, because the penalty for idolatry is death.
Finally, we have the Haftarah, where Elijah challenges 450 priests of Baal to show which God is the true God by making a burnt offering with their God lighting the fire. After a day of trying and failing by the Baalites, Elijah soaks the sacrifice and the stone altar in water and calls upon God who consumes sacrifice, altar and all in fire, after which the assembled people proclaim “Adonai hu, ha-Elohim! Adonai hu, ha-Elohim! Adonai hu, ha-Elohim!”, which is one of the final prayers of the Yom Kippur service.
So we have a God who is demanding yet compassionate, just, yet merciful, and who demands our allegiance while that the same time charging us with being “a nation of priests, a holy people.” The Rabbis teach that if we take the demand to be a holy people along with this passage, particularly the clear statement of the 13 moral attributes of God, what we have is the source of the principle of the imitation of God. We are to be like God, and this is how – by being merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in goodness and truth; just and forgiving, and to allow us the time for self-examination and contemplation of these principles, God has given us Shabbat as a weekly pause to remember what is important, and I can think of no better way to honor that gift than to come to services.
Shemini 05
This week’s Torah portion, Shemini, deals with two things: First, the installation of the priests with the attendant deaths of the sons of Aaron, and second the laws of Kashrut.
The installation of the priests consisted of a series or ritual sacrifices, not in itself remarkable. But what is interesting is two instances of timing. First, when it was time to prepare the sacrifices, Aaron hesitated and had to be urged by Moses to step up to the altar and perform the ritual. The Rabbi’s tell us that the reason for Aaron’s hesitation was his doubts about his own worthiness, given his role, however minor, in the incident of the golden calf. The lesson they draw from this is that God does not expect or demand perfection of us, but rather repentance and learning from our mistakes.
After the sacrifices have been consumed by a fire of divine origin, Nadab and Avihu, the sons of Aaron, decide bring incense that they will burn into the sanctuary, and mix it with the divine fire. The result of this good idea is that they are killed, again by divine fire. The rabbis’ interpretation of this is twofold: first, they did not consult with Moses or Aaron about the idea, thus violating their father’s and uncle’s primacy in matters of religion, possibly because they were anxious for Moses and Aaron to die so that they themselves could take over as the priests, and second, because the account of their deaths is followed by God telling Aaron that the priests are not to come drunk to their duties, they may have been punished for lubricating the execution of their good idea with wine. So we have the contrast of Aaron’s humility and self-deprecation with his sons’ arrogance and placing themselves ahead of their station, not to mention their rather casual attitude toward the divine presence, which they first demonstrated at Sinai.
The second part of the portion deals with dietary laws – the laws of Kashrut. Here we find the rules on which animals and birds are permissible to eat and which are forbidden, and we find something very curious. The Torah says that the only mammals fit to eat are those that chew their cud and have a cloven hoof, and notes that there are many animals that chew a cud but do not have a cloven hoof, e.g., the camel, but only one animal, the pig, that has a cloven hoof and does not chew a cud. There have been many attempts to show that the Torah was not divinely given by proving that it was wrong about this – after all, how could the presumably human writers of the Torah know all of the animals on earth? Surely in Australia or New Zealand or South America scientists would find at least one other animal with cloven hooves that chewed its cud! But lo and behold, there is not. The pig is the only animal in the world that has this combination of traits.
Similarly, some time ago when a new species of fish was discovered, scientists were debating whether it was safe for people to eat. A rabbi, seeing that the new fish had scales and fins (i.e., it met the criteria for kashrut), volunteered to eat it and show that it was not poisonous, and it wasn’t.
The interpretation of the requirement of Kashrut under commandment Judaism is simple – God said what we can and cannot eat, and that’s the way it is. Liberal or progressive Jews look for the meaning in the commandments. Many people feel that the laws of kashrut are metaphorical or symbolic. The point is not that we are forbidden to eat certain creatures, but that God is telling us what is expected of us – what qualities we are not to incorporate in ourselves. Pigs, at least in biblical times, were dirty and ate garbage and we are to be clean. Birds of prey and predatory mammals such as hawks, eagles, bears and lions are fierce and aggressive and we are to be compassionate and peaceful. Crows and ravens eat carrion and filth. Fish were spared destruction in Noah’s flood and so are pure – fish with scales and fins tend to live in cleaner waters near the surface, while others and shellfish live near the bottom where it is not as clean.
Finally we have the Haftarah, which is the story of King David’s establishment of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish nation and his returning the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. The Ark is being transported on an ox-cart, which is insufficiently dignified and reverent given the holiness of the cargo, and when the oxen stumble Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark and is killed by God for this sacrilege. The Ark then proceeds in proper state, borne on the shoulders of Levites and is taken to Mount Zion where King David, dressed in the robes of a priest, dances and celebrates in the procession.
So in the Torah portion and the Haftarah we have three deaths all related to sacrilege – Nadab and Avihu are insufficiently reverent in God’s presence, and Uzzah is insufficiently respectful. Some would say that Uzzah was trying to prevent the greater sacrilege of the Ark falling to the ground and possibly breaking and spilling out the tablets of the law, but this would not have been necessary if the Ark was being properly transported in the first place. Then we have the teaching, though the metaphor of dietary laws, of what kind of people God wants us to be and the incidental lesson that “you are what you eat.” What are we, as 21st Century Jews, to make of all this?
I believe that the Torah is built around two fundamental messages: First, God is unity or said another way God is inclusive, not exclusive. Many Rabbis have asked if God is everything, why the creation of the world and of human beings, and have concluded that God created human beings in order to have something to which God could give. Others have said that human beings are not a separate creation from and by God, but that God and human beings arise together – that God cannot exist without humanity and humanity cannot exist without God; in that interpretation, the Shema takes on a whole other dimension of meaning, where “the Lord is One” means there can be nothing separate from God, and humans are simply an aspect of God.
The second underpinning of the Torah seems to me to be the injunction to “be holy as your God is holy,” i.e. to live in emulation of God, and the Torah can be seen as a set of instructions on how to do that. In this Torah portion, we find the instructions to be reverent and respectful, to be appropriate, and to have every aspect of our lives be mindful of our relationship to God and of how God expects us to be.
The installation of the priests consisted of a series or ritual sacrifices, not in itself remarkable. But what is interesting is two instances of timing. First, when it was time to prepare the sacrifices, Aaron hesitated and had to be urged by Moses to step up to the altar and perform the ritual. The Rabbi’s tell us that the reason for Aaron’s hesitation was his doubts about his own worthiness, given his role, however minor, in the incident of the golden calf. The lesson they draw from this is that God does not expect or demand perfection of us, but rather repentance and learning from our mistakes.
After the sacrifices have been consumed by a fire of divine origin, Nadab and Avihu, the sons of Aaron, decide bring incense that they will burn into the sanctuary, and mix it with the divine fire. The result of this good idea is that they are killed, again by divine fire. The rabbis’ interpretation of this is twofold: first, they did not consult with Moses or Aaron about the idea, thus violating their father’s and uncle’s primacy in matters of religion, possibly because they were anxious for Moses and Aaron to die so that they themselves could take over as the priests, and second, because the account of their deaths is followed by God telling Aaron that the priests are not to come drunk to their duties, they may have been punished for lubricating the execution of their good idea with wine. So we have the contrast of Aaron’s humility and self-deprecation with his sons’ arrogance and placing themselves ahead of their station, not to mention their rather casual attitude toward the divine presence, which they first demonstrated at Sinai.
The second part of the portion deals with dietary laws – the laws of Kashrut. Here we find the rules on which animals and birds are permissible to eat and which are forbidden, and we find something very curious. The Torah says that the only mammals fit to eat are those that chew their cud and have a cloven hoof, and notes that there are many animals that chew a cud but do not have a cloven hoof, e.g., the camel, but only one animal, the pig, that has a cloven hoof and does not chew a cud. There have been many attempts to show that the Torah was not divinely given by proving that it was wrong about this – after all, how could the presumably human writers of the Torah know all of the animals on earth? Surely in Australia or New Zealand or South America scientists would find at least one other animal with cloven hooves that chewed its cud! But lo and behold, there is not. The pig is the only animal in the world that has this combination of traits.
Similarly, some time ago when a new species of fish was discovered, scientists were debating whether it was safe for people to eat. A rabbi, seeing that the new fish had scales and fins (i.e., it met the criteria for kashrut), volunteered to eat it and show that it was not poisonous, and it wasn’t.
The interpretation of the requirement of Kashrut under commandment Judaism is simple – God said what we can and cannot eat, and that’s the way it is. Liberal or progressive Jews look for the meaning in the commandments. Many people feel that the laws of kashrut are metaphorical or symbolic. The point is not that we are forbidden to eat certain creatures, but that God is telling us what is expected of us – what qualities we are not to incorporate in ourselves. Pigs, at least in biblical times, were dirty and ate garbage and we are to be clean. Birds of prey and predatory mammals such as hawks, eagles, bears and lions are fierce and aggressive and we are to be compassionate and peaceful. Crows and ravens eat carrion and filth. Fish were spared destruction in Noah’s flood and so are pure – fish with scales and fins tend to live in cleaner waters near the surface, while others and shellfish live near the bottom where it is not as clean.
Finally we have the Haftarah, which is the story of King David’s establishment of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish nation and his returning the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. The Ark is being transported on an ox-cart, which is insufficiently dignified and reverent given the holiness of the cargo, and when the oxen stumble Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark and is killed by God for this sacrilege. The Ark then proceeds in proper state, borne on the shoulders of Levites and is taken to Mount Zion where King David, dressed in the robes of a priest, dances and celebrates in the procession.
So in the Torah portion and the Haftarah we have three deaths all related to sacrilege – Nadab and Avihu are insufficiently reverent in God’s presence, and Uzzah is insufficiently respectful. Some would say that Uzzah was trying to prevent the greater sacrilege of the Ark falling to the ground and possibly breaking and spilling out the tablets of the law, but this would not have been necessary if the Ark was being properly transported in the first place. Then we have the teaching, though the metaphor of dietary laws, of what kind of people God wants us to be and the incidental lesson that “you are what you eat.” What are we, as 21st Century Jews, to make of all this?
I believe that the Torah is built around two fundamental messages: First, God is unity or said another way God is inclusive, not exclusive. Many Rabbis have asked if God is everything, why the creation of the world and of human beings, and have concluded that God created human beings in order to have something to which God could give. Others have said that human beings are not a separate creation from and by God, but that God and human beings arise together – that God cannot exist without humanity and humanity cannot exist without God; in that interpretation, the Shema takes on a whole other dimension of meaning, where “the Lord is One” means there can be nothing separate from God, and humans are simply an aspect of God.
The second underpinning of the Torah seems to me to be the injunction to “be holy as your God is holy,” i.e. to live in emulation of God, and the Torah can be seen as a set of instructions on how to do that. In this Torah portion, we find the instructions to be reverent and respectful, to be appropriate, and to have every aspect of our lives be mindful of our relationship to God and of how God expects us to be.
London 05
Having led services a lot for the past couple of years, I am struck by the Torah as a bottomless well of opportunities for learning. We read the same parshot at about the same time every year; the words don’t change, the stories are the same. What changes is the context in which we read them – a new reader, a different person studying and writing a d’var Torah, and most importantly a different world in which we are living. There is an analogy here to what the Rabbis have taught is the origin of death. There is a view that death is not an inevitable consequence of being alive, but arose when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge – death was then part of their and their descendants’ punishment for disobeying God’s order. At that point, there was set up a conflict between the soul, which is eternal and open to God’s light, and the body, which is finite, material, and opaque to God’s light. The soul now feels confined by the body and longs to escape and return to direct connection with the Eternal, and eventually death frees it. In the same way, the Torah is eternal and is both a source of and connection to God’s light, and the day to day world is finite, material, and an impediment to our connection with God. As we study the unchanging words of the Torah from year to year, we attempt to bring God’s light into our lives.
That seems particularly hard to do today. When innocent people leave for work in the morning and board a train or a bus or go to their office or just walk down the street and die that day for no reason other than some other people’s need to make a dubious political point, it is hard to find God’s light through the smoke.
In the Torah, God is not averse to using death, even death on a large scale, to make a point, but there is always a point, and death is visited in such a way that the point is clear. Those who persistently fight against God’s commands die, those who follow God live, and those who are unsure now have a clear basis on which to make up their mind. Six million died in the Holocaust, but those who perpetrated that great crime were destroyed at every level – physically, ideologically, politically, and nationally. Somehow, despite all the death, destruction, and exile visited on us, the Jews have survived physically, ideologically, politically and nationally. No other people in the history of the world have survived exile, dispersion, and assimilation in this way, and we have seen most of those who would destroy us die while “am Yisrael chai,” the people Israel live.
As a psychologist I have spent a lot of time trying to understand terrorism and the mind of the terrorists, and my understanding of these individuals is very limited. In her post-war study of the Nazis, and particularly of Eichmann, Hannah Arendt was most surprised by what she called the “banality of evil.” She went to Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem expecting to see great, dramatic evil, and saw instead a man who looked and acted like a clerk, and whose defense was “I was only following orders,” and she was struck by how ordinary he was – not tragic or dramatic, but banal – lacking originality, freshness, or novelty. The same could be said of Bin Laden and his cohorts, but with one addition – they seem to have no capacity for self-doubt and an almost infinite ability to rationalize their own contradictions. Al-Zawahiri is a physician –presumably, at some time he dedicated himself to healing and saving lives. Bin Laden sees himself as a devout Muslim, but rejects the teaching of any Imam who disagrees with his policy of terrorism, yet none of this seems to slow them down.
If the Torah teaches us anything, it teaches us that the values it describes as good ultimately triumph. It may take 400 years of slavery in Egypt or 40 years of wandering in the desert, but in the end those who would destroy life are defeated. Ancient Jewish teaching prophesied that the Jews would be expelled from our homeland, return, be expelled again, and return again, and it has happened just that way.
There are those today of every religious faith, including Judaism, who distort the message of the Torah to their own ends, and who try to turn that message from one of life, love, and peace to one of death, hate, and war. In the Vietnam War our leaders were heard to say that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Today extremist Jews say they need to destroy conservative and liberal Judaism for Torah to survive, fundamentalist Christians say that the world has to end for the souls of the righteous to survive, and Islamic terrorists seem to be out to destroy the 95% of more of the world that does not agree with them in order to impose their perverted view of Islam on those who are left. None of these will succeed.
The clear message of the Torah and of History is that God, whatever you conceive God to be, has designed the world such that the values of life, love, and yes even peace always triumph in the long run. The Pharaohs, the Torquemadas, the Ku Klux Klans, the Hitlers, the Pol Pots, and the Bin Ladens rise up one after the other and they may have their day, but in the long run their message and their methods are seen for the evil that they are.
Our hearts go out to the people of London and to the people of Israel as they live on a continuing basis with what New York, London, Madrid, and others have experienced and hopefully will experience only once. And to the terrorists we say “you can not prevail” in the face of a God who, whatever his wrath may bring, is at the source the author of life, love, and peace. Ose shalome b’mromov, hu ya’aseh shalom alenu, v’al kol ha-olam. May God who makes peace in the heavens grant peace to us and to all the world.
That seems particularly hard to do today. When innocent people leave for work in the morning and board a train or a bus or go to their office or just walk down the street and die that day for no reason other than some other people’s need to make a dubious political point, it is hard to find God’s light through the smoke.
In the Torah, God is not averse to using death, even death on a large scale, to make a point, but there is always a point, and death is visited in such a way that the point is clear. Those who persistently fight against God’s commands die, those who follow God live, and those who are unsure now have a clear basis on which to make up their mind. Six million died in the Holocaust, but those who perpetrated that great crime were destroyed at every level – physically, ideologically, politically, and nationally. Somehow, despite all the death, destruction, and exile visited on us, the Jews have survived physically, ideologically, politically and nationally. No other people in the history of the world have survived exile, dispersion, and assimilation in this way, and we have seen most of those who would destroy us die while “am Yisrael chai,” the people Israel live.
As a psychologist I have spent a lot of time trying to understand terrorism and the mind of the terrorists, and my understanding of these individuals is very limited. In her post-war study of the Nazis, and particularly of Eichmann, Hannah Arendt was most surprised by what she called the “banality of evil.” She went to Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem expecting to see great, dramatic evil, and saw instead a man who looked and acted like a clerk, and whose defense was “I was only following orders,” and she was struck by how ordinary he was – not tragic or dramatic, but banal – lacking originality, freshness, or novelty. The same could be said of Bin Laden and his cohorts, but with one addition – they seem to have no capacity for self-doubt and an almost infinite ability to rationalize their own contradictions. Al-Zawahiri is a physician –presumably, at some time he dedicated himself to healing and saving lives. Bin Laden sees himself as a devout Muslim, but rejects the teaching of any Imam who disagrees with his policy of terrorism, yet none of this seems to slow them down.
If the Torah teaches us anything, it teaches us that the values it describes as good ultimately triumph. It may take 400 years of slavery in Egypt or 40 years of wandering in the desert, but in the end those who would destroy life are defeated. Ancient Jewish teaching prophesied that the Jews would be expelled from our homeland, return, be expelled again, and return again, and it has happened just that way.
There are those today of every religious faith, including Judaism, who distort the message of the Torah to their own ends, and who try to turn that message from one of life, love, and peace to one of death, hate, and war. In the Vietnam War our leaders were heard to say that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Today extremist Jews say they need to destroy conservative and liberal Judaism for Torah to survive, fundamentalist Christians say that the world has to end for the souls of the righteous to survive, and Islamic terrorists seem to be out to destroy the 95% of more of the world that does not agree with them in order to impose their perverted view of Islam on those who are left. None of these will succeed.
The clear message of the Torah and of History is that God, whatever you conceive God to be, has designed the world such that the values of life, love, and yes even peace always triumph in the long run. The Pharaohs, the Torquemadas, the Ku Klux Klans, the Hitlers, the Pol Pots, and the Bin Ladens rise up one after the other and they may have their day, but in the long run their message and their methods are seen for the evil that they are.
Our hearts go out to the people of London and to the people of Israel as they live on a continuing basis with what New York, London, Madrid, and others have experienced and hopefully will experience only once. And to the terrorists we say “you can not prevail” in the face of a God who, whatever his wrath may bring, is at the source the author of life, love, and peace. Ose shalome b’mromov, hu ya’aseh shalom alenu, v’al kol ha-olam. May God who makes peace in the heavens grant peace to us and to all the world.
Chukat 05
This week’s Torah portion is Chukat, and is a major transition portion in the Torah. Last week we read about the revolt of Korach and how he and his followers were destroyed and the rest of the Hebrews were condemned to die in the desert, never reaching the Promised Land, with the exceptions of Moses and Aaron. This week’s portion takes place 38 years later after the “Exodus” generation had died off and with the “Israel” generation nearing the second attempt to enter the Promised Land. What happened in between the Torah doesn’t tell us, and some Rabbis teach that this is because, once condemned, the “Exodus Generation” was beneath notice.
The theme of Parshah Chukat is death, so it is perhaps very appropriate for this terrible week in 2005. It includes the death of Miriam and Aaron, the condemnation of Moses to die without entering the Promised Land, the conquest of Canaanites and Amalekites, and most enigmatically, the Chukkat (statute) of the red heifer. The 613 mitzvot of the Torah divide into two kinds – chukim, or statutes, and mishpatim or ordinances. The mishpatim are generally clear and understandable – this or that is unclean and unfit to eat, God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th, therefore honor Shabbat, etc. The chukim are less clear and understandable and often must be taken on faith. The chukat of the red heifer is the least understandable of the chukim. King Solomon declared he would never understand it, and therefore called into question his understanding of the other 612 mitzvot.
The chukat of the red heifer starts from the regulation that anyone who comes into contact with a dead human body, or even is under the same roof as a dead body, is unclean for seven days and must be purified. The means of purification is to take a heifer, a young cow, that is pure red in color – even two black or white hairs are enough to disqualify an animal – kill it, and burn it along with cedar wood, hyssop wood, and a particular kind of scarlet wool. Then mix the ashes with water from a running stream, and use the mixture to purify the impure individual. None of this is explained – not the significance of red, the use of a heifer (for example vs. a full-grown cow or a calf), nor the importance of the cedar, hyssop, and scarlet. All this is left to speculation. In addition there is the oddity that anyone who is involved in preparing the purification becomes himself impure until the next day – the impure becomes pure and the pure becomes impure by the same ritual.
The Rabbis, naturally, have speculated at length about all of this, starting from the premise that it is a command to be obeyed, not understood. Nevertheless, the red of the heifer and the scarlet has been taken to symbolize sin, the heifer as expiation for the golden calf, etc., etc. With the destruction of the temple, the ritual of the red heifer fell into disuse and lives today mainly as a biblical mystery, although in Israel the discovery of a pure red heifer is treated as a newsworthy event.
When the parshah resumes its tale of the Hebrews in the desert, it begins with Miriam’s death. In the 40 years in the desert, the well that was created when Moses struck a rock in the desert followed the wanderers through the desert, and this benefit was ascribed to Miriam’s goodness. When she dies, the well dries up and the people, who seem to be slow learners when it comes to the issue of complaining and revolting, once again rise up against Moses and Aaron. This drives Moses to the breaking point, and instead of following God’s instructions to talk to a rock, he again hits the rock and while water is forthcoming, this loss of his composure costs Moses his entry into the Promised Land and ensures that he will die within a couple of years as the exile is almost over. Then Aaron dies, passing the priesthood to his son Eliazar, and the only one left who was in Egypt is Moses. Finally, with more complaining and more dying, the three million Hebrews move on toward the Promised Land, making and defeating enemies along the way.
Having led services a lot for the past couple of years, I am struck by the Torah as a bottomless well of opportunities for learning. We read the same parshot at about the same time every year; the words don’t change, the stories are the same. What changes is the context in which we read them – a new reader, a different person studying and writing a d’var Torah, and most importantly a different world in which we are living. There is an analogy here to what the Rabbis have taught is the origin of death. There is a view that death is not an inevitable consequence of being alive, but arose when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge – death was then part of their and their descendants’ punishment for disobeying God’s order. At that point, there was set up a conflict between the soul, which is eternal and open to God’s light, and the body, which is finite, material, and opaque to God’s light. The soul now feels confined by the body and longs to escape and return to direct connection with the Eternal, and eventually death frees it. In the same way, the Torah is eternal and is both a source of and connection to God’s light, and the day to day world is finite, material, and an impediment to our connection with God. As we study the unchanging words of the Torah from year to year, we attempt to bring God’s light into our lives.
That seems particularly hard to do today. When innocent people leave for work in the morning and board a train or a bus or go to their office or just walk down the street and die that day for no reason other than some other people’s need to make a dubious political point, it is hard to find God’s light through the smoke. In the Torah, God shows remarkable patience with those who go against His word, but only up to a point, and at that point God is not averse to dealing out death on a massive scale. Nine of the 10 plagues on Egypt were mostly annoying until Pharaoh proved so intractable that the first-born had to die, and when that was insufficient and the Egyptians pursued the escapees, thousands died in the Red Sea. Similarly thousands were swallowed up in the revolt around the Golden Calf, and again in Korach’s rebellion, and in this week’s parshah, when the people, after all this, complain about being bored with manna, God sends fiery serpents that kill off large numbers of them.
So God is not averse to using death, even death on a large scale, to make a point, but there is always a point, and death is visited in such a way that the point is clear. Those who persistently fight against God’s commands die, those who follow God live, and those who are unsure now have a clear basis on which to make up their mind. Six million died in the Holocaust, but those who perpetrated that great crime were destroyed at every level – physically, ideologically, politically, and nationally. Somehow, despite all the death, destruction, and exile visited on us, the Jews have survived physically, ideologically, politically and nationally. No other people in the history of the world have survived exile, dispersion, and assimilation in this way, and we have seen most of those who would destroy us die while “am Yisrael chai,” the people Israel live.
As a psychologist I have spent a lot of time trying to understand terrorism and the mind of the terrorists. Understand, I am not speaking here of the poor fools who get on a bus and blow themselves and everyone around them up. For me those are not terrorists but the tools of the terrorists. The true terrorists never get into the line of fire. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri sit in relative comfort somewhere and pull the strings that send true believers to their deaths, but are rarely in any danger themselves. They cloak themselves in distorted religious dogma, but they are no different from Hitler or Mengele or Eichmann, who cloaked themselves in perverted political/racial dogma.
My understanding of these individuals is very limited. In her post-war study of the Nazis, and particularly of Eichmann, Hannah Arendt was most surprised by what she called the “banality of evil.” She went to Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem expecting to see great, dramatic evil, and saw instead a man who looked and acted like a clerk, and whose defense was “I was only following orders,” and she was struck by how ordinary he was – not tragic or dramatic, but banal – lacking originality, freshness, or novelty. The same could be said of Bin Laden and his cohorts, but with one addition – they seem to have no capacity for self-doubt and an almost infinite ability to rationalize their own contradictions. Al-Zawahiri is a physician – he took the Hippocratic Oath and, presumably, at some time dedicated himself to healing and saving lives. Bin Laden sees himself as a devout Muslim, but rejects the teaching of any Imam who disagrees with his policy of terrorism, yet none of this seems to slow them down.
If the Torah teaches us anything, it teaches us that the values it describes as good ultimately triumph. It may take 400 years of slavery in Egypt or 40 years of wandering in the desert, but in the end those who would destroy life are defeated. Ancient Jewish teaching prophesied that the Jews would be expelled from our homeland, return, be expelled again, and return again, and it has happened just that way.
There are those today of every religious faith, including Judaism, who distort the message of the Torah to their own ends, and who try to turn that message from one of life, love, and peace to one of death, hate, and war. In the peace movement of the 70’s we had a saying that fighting for peace is like [having sex] for chastity. In the Vietnam war our leaders were heard to say that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Today extremist Jews say they need to destroy conservative and liberal Judaism for Torah to survive, fundamentalist Christians say that the world has to end for the souls of the righteous to survive, and Islamic terrorists seem to be out to destroy the 95% of more of the world that does not agree with them in order to impose their perverted view of Islam on those who are left. None of these will succeed.
The clear message of the Torah and of History is that God, whatever you conceive God to be, has designed the world such that the values of life, love, and yes even peace always triumph in the long run. The Pharaohs, the Torquemadas, the Ku Klux Klans, the Hitlers, the Pol Pots, and the Bin Ladens rise up one after the other and they may have their day, but in the long run their message and their methods are seen for the evil that they are.
Our hearts go out to the people of London this week, and to the people of Israel every week as they live with on a continuing basis what New York, London, Madrid, and others have experienced and hopefully will experience only once. And to the terrorists we say “you can not prevail” in the face of a God who, whatever his wrath may bring, is at the source the author of life, love, and peace. Ose shalome b’mromov, hu ya’aseh shalom alenu, v’al kol ha-olam. May God who makes peace in the heavens grant peace to us and to all the world. Amen
The theme of Parshah Chukat is death, so it is perhaps very appropriate for this terrible week in 2005. It includes the death of Miriam and Aaron, the condemnation of Moses to die without entering the Promised Land, the conquest of Canaanites and Amalekites, and most enigmatically, the Chukkat (statute) of the red heifer. The 613 mitzvot of the Torah divide into two kinds – chukim, or statutes, and mishpatim or ordinances. The mishpatim are generally clear and understandable – this or that is unclean and unfit to eat, God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th, therefore honor Shabbat, etc. The chukim are less clear and understandable and often must be taken on faith. The chukat of the red heifer is the least understandable of the chukim. King Solomon declared he would never understand it, and therefore called into question his understanding of the other 612 mitzvot.
The chukat of the red heifer starts from the regulation that anyone who comes into contact with a dead human body, or even is under the same roof as a dead body, is unclean for seven days and must be purified. The means of purification is to take a heifer, a young cow, that is pure red in color – even two black or white hairs are enough to disqualify an animal – kill it, and burn it along with cedar wood, hyssop wood, and a particular kind of scarlet wool. Then mix the ashes with water from a running stream, and use the mixture to purify the impure individual. None of this is explained – not the significance of red, the use of a heifer (for example vs. a full-grown cow or a calf), nor the importance of the cedar, hyssop, and scarlet. All this is left to speculation. In addition there is the oddity that anyone who is involved in preparing the purification becomes himself impure until the next day – the impure becomes pure and the pure becomes impure by the same ritual.
The Rabbis, naturally, have speculated at length about all of this, starting from the premise that it is a command to be obeyed, not understood. Nevertheless, the red of the heifer and the scarlet has been taken to symbolize sin, the heifer as expiation for the golden calf, etc., etc. With the destruction of the temple, the ritual of the red heifer fell into disuse and lives today mainly as a biblical mystery, although in Israel the discovery of a pure red heifer is treated as a newsworthy event.
When the parshah resumes its tale of the Hebrews in the desert, it begins with Miriam’s death. In the 40 years in the desert, the well that was created when Moses struck a rock in the desert followed the wanderers through the desert, and this benefit was ascribed to Miriam’s goodness. When she dies, the well dries up and the people, who seem to be slow learners when it comes to the issue of complaining and revolting, once again rise up against Moses and Aaron. This drives Moses to the breaking point, and instead of following God’s instructions to talk to a rock, he again hits the rock and while water is forthcoming, this loss of his composure costs Moses his entry into the Promised Land and ensures that he will die within a couple of years as the exile is almost over. Then Aaron dies, passing the priesthood to his son Eliazar, and the only one left who was in Egypt is Moses. Finally, with more complaining and more dying, the three million Hebrews move on toward the Promised Land, making and defeating enemies along the way.
Having led services a lot for the past couple of years, I am struck by the Torah as a bottomless well of opportunities for learning. We read the same parshot at about the same time every year; the words don’t change, the stories are the same. What changes is the context in which we read them – a new reader, a different person studying and writing a d’var Torah, and most importantly a different world in which we are living. There is an analogy here to what the Rabbis have taught is the origin of death. There is a view that death is not an inevitable consequence of being alive, but arose when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge – death was then part of their and their descendants’ punishment for disobeying God’s order. At that point, there was set up a conflict between the soul, which is eternal and open to God’s light, and the body, which is finite, material, and opaque to God’s light. The soul now feels confined by the body and longs to escape and return to direct connection with the Eternal, and eventually death frees it. In the same way, the Torah is eternal and is both a source of and connection to God’s light, and the day to day world is finite, material, and an impediment to our connection with God. As we study the unchanging words of the Torah from year to year, we attempt to bring God’s light into our lives.
That seems particularly hard to do today. When innocent people leave for work in the morning and board a train or a bus or go to their office or just walk down the street and die that day for no reason other than some other people’s need to make a dubious political point, it is hard to find God’s light through the smoke. In the Torah, God shows remarkable patience with those who go against His word, but only up to a point, and at that point God is not averse to dealing out death on a massive scale. Nine of the 10 plagues on Egypt were mostly annoying until Pharaoh proved so intractable that the first-born had to die, and when that was insufficient and the Egyptians pursued the escapees, thousands died in the Red Sea. Similarly thousands were swallowed up in the revolt around the Golden Calf, and again in Korach’s rebellion, and in this week’s parshah, when the people, after all this, complain about being bored with manna, God sends fiery serpents that kill off large numbers of them.
So God is not averse to using death, even death on a large scale, to make a point, but there is always a point, and death is visited in such a way that the point is clear. Those who persistently fight against God’s commands die, those who follow God live, and those who are unsure now have a clear basis on which to make up their mind. Six million died in the Holocaust, but those who perpetrated that great crime were destroyed at every level – physically, ideologically, politically, and nationally. Somehow, despite all the death, destruction, and exile visited on us, the Jews have survived physically, ideologically, politically and nationally. No other people in the history of the world have survived exile, dispersion, and assimilation in this way, and we have seen most of those who would destroy us die while “am Yisrael chai,” the people Israel live.
As a psychologist I have spent a lot of time trying to understand terrorism and the mind of the terrorists. Understand, I am not speaking here of the poor fools who get on a bus and blow themselves and everyone around them up. For me those are not terrorists but the tools of the terrorists. The true terrorists never get into the line of fire. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri sit in relative comfort somewhere and pull the strings that send true believers to their deaths, but are rarely in any danger themselves. They cloak themselves in distorted religious dogma, but they are no different from Hitler or Mengele or Eichmann, who cloaked themselves in perverted political/racial dogma.
My understanding of these individuals is very limited. In her post-war study of the Nazis, and particularly of Eichmann, Hannah Arendt was most surprised by what she called the “banality of evil.” She went to Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem expecting to see great, dramatic evil, and saw instead a man who looked and acted like a clerk, and whose defense was “I was only following orders,” and she was struck by how ordinary he was – not tragic or dramatic, but banal – lacking originality, freshness, or novelty. The same could be said of Bin Laden and his cohorts, but with one addition – they seem to have no capacity for self-doubt and an almost infinite ability to rationalize their own contradictions. Al-Zawahiri is a physician – he took the Hippocratic Oath and, presumably, at some time dedicated himself to healing and saving lives. Bin Laden sees himself as a devout Muslim, but rejects the teaching of any Imam who disagrees with his policy of terrorism, yet none of this seems to slow them down.
If the Torah teaches us anything, it teaches us that the values it describes as good ultimately triumph. It may take 400 years of slavery in Egypt or 40 years of wandering in the desert, but in the end those who would destroy life are defeated. Ancient Jewish teaching prophesied that the Jews would be expelled from our homeland, return, be expelled again, and return again, and it has happened just that way.
There are those today of every religious faith, including Judaism, who distort the message of the Torah to their own ends, and who try to turn that message from one of life, love, and peace to one of death, hate, and war. In the peace movement of the 70’s we had a saying that fighting for peace is like [having sex] for chastity. In the Vietnam war our leaders were heard to say that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Today extremist Jews say they need to destroy conservative and liberal Judaism for Torah to survive, fundamentalist Christians say that the world has to end for the souls of the righteous to survive, and Islamic terrorists seem to be out to destroy the 95% of more of the world that does not agree with them in order to impose their perverted view of Islam on those who are left. None of these will succeed.
The clear message of the Torah and of History is that God, whatever you conceive God to be, has designed the world such that the values of life, love, and yes even peace always triumph in the long run. The Pharaohs, the Torquemadas, the Ku Klux Klans, the Hitlers, the Pol Pots, and the Bin Ladens rise up one after the other and they may have their day, but in the long run their message and their methods are seen for the evil that they are.
Our hearts go out to the people of London this week, and to the people of Israel every week as they live with on a continuing basis what New York, London, Madrid, and others have experienced and hopefully will experience only once. And to the terrorists we say “you can not prevail” in the face of a God who, whatever his wrath may bring, is at the source the author of life, love, and peace. Ose shalome b’mromov, hu ya’aseh shalom alenu, v’al kol ha-olam. May God who makes peace in the heavens grant peace to us and to all the world. Amen
Beha'alotecha 06
This week’s Torah Portion is from the Book of Numbers (Bamidbar) and is called Beha’a lot’cha, which means “When you light,” referring to G-d’s commanding Aaron to light the Menorah in the Temple.
Actually, this chapter is pretty complex in that it deals with a number of issues that don’t seem related at first. First of all, the Menorah – the chapter gives very specific instructions for the construction of the Menorah itself and for the lighting of it.
Second, it deals with the role of the Levites and instructs them as to how to prepare, behave, etc.
Third, it is in this chapter that the instructions for Pesach Sheni are given.
Fourth, this chapter describes the departure from Sinai and particularly how the people were guided by a fiery cloud that went in front of them by day (when they were to move) and settled on the Mishkan at night or when they were to remain camped.
Fifth, and related to the departure from Sinai, the chapter describes how the people became discontented and began complaining, particularly about having to eat Manna three times a day and having nothing else to eat, and how G-d became angry at this complaining and sent a fiery punishment into the camp until Moses prayed to stop the fire.
Sixth and finally, the chapter describes how Miriam came to Aaron and spoke ill of Moses behind Moses’ back, and the terrible punishment that G-d visited on Miriam for this. It is also here that G-d proclaims Moses the greatest prophet ever to be because G-d spoke to Moses directly, not in visions or dreams as He did the other prophets.
So what do we make of all this complexity? In studying the various Divrei Torah and commentaries that I was able to find, I think there are several themes:
First of all, there is the theme of sufficiency. When the people left Sinai, they did not travel for one day as G-d had commanded, but for three days’ journey. The teachers say that they did this because, having received the 613 commandments from G-d, they were afraid that if they stuck around, G-d would give them more! Later, in the wilderness, G-d provided Manna every day when the dew fell (and a double portion on Friday for Shabbat). The Manna could be prepared a variety of ways and provided a variety of tastes and textures, but still it was Manna every day and the people complained, remembering the fish and vegetables they had in Egypt. Even after the fiery punishment they kept complaining and cried for meat, so G-d provided so much meat that they gorged on it and sickened and died.
The Midrash suggests that the Israelites became embittered for two reasons: First, because they did not know whether the manna would descend the next day – that is they lacked faith in G-d; and second because although the manna had many and varied tastes, it did not contain the vegetables they remembered from Egypt. In other words, a miracle wasn’t miraculous enough for them. They lacked a consciousness of sufficiency, that what they had, what G-d had provided, was enough for them to be happy. By contrast, the chapter makes a point of the fact that the people would always move when the fiery cloud moved and would camp when it stood still, even though this meant moving from good campsites, travelling on consecutive days, etc. In this case the people accepted G-d’s judgement as sufficient. The teachers say that if we could only accept this concept, we would avoid most hardship. We have exactly what G-d want us to have, not an iota less. Any more is like wanting a sixth finger. Why, then, be jealous? Why steal or envy?
The second theme is that of humility. In the last chapter, when the princes of the tribes of Israel brought valuable gifts for the Mishkan, Aaron and the tribe of Levi were excluded. Aaron was upset about this, feeling it was G-d’s punishment for his participation in the affair of the Golden Calf. G-d told Aaron that this was not so, that he and the Levites would have a far greater honor, that of lighting the Menorah (for Aaron) and attending the Kohanim in the Temple for the Levites. In lighting the Menorah, the teachers tell us, Aaron used a step-stool with three steps. These steps represent the three evil personality traits of Jealously, Lust, and Pursuit of Honors, which drive a person away from G-d which must be overcome to truly serve G-d. Also on this theme of humility is Moses himself, who is described as the most modest man in the world. When Miriam and Aaron spoke ill of Moses, G-d Himself intervened because Moses would not have. Similarly, when, at G-d’s command, Moses created a Sanhedrin of 70 elders to help govern the people, and these elders were seized with an ecstasy and began to prophesy and teach the people, Moses, rather than being jealous, said: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” The other example of humility is when two of the people who had been engaged with burying Nadab and Avihu, Aaron’s sons, during the first Passover came to Moses and proposed a second Passover for themselves and others who were unable to observe, Moses took their proposal to G-d, who approved it.
The third theme is reflected in the establishment of the Menorah that opens the chapter. Why light the Menorah? G-d does not need our light – there is no darkness before G-d. In a house, windows are narrower on the outside and on the inside – this allows the most light to enter the house through the window. The Temple was constructed the opposite way, to allow the internal light of the Temple to radiate outwards. So G-d doesn’t need our light; what He wants is for Jews to be a light to others. The teachers say that, as Jews, we are obligated to light a candle if we find one that is not burning, and that if we find a soul that is “dim” it is our obligation to enlighten it. The Menorah opens the chapter, and the story of Miriam ends it. I believe that this indicates that gossip, Lashon Hara, dims the soul. Miriam is severely punished by G-d, but Moses’ plea that she has learned her lesson, that her soul is no longer dimmed by her lack of regard for the consequences of what she says, lightens G-d’s punishment.
Sufficiency, humility, and being a light to the world are the themes of this week’s Torah portion. In her book “A Return to Love,” Marianne Williamson could have been speaking of this chapter:
Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others.
Actually, this chapter is pretty complex in that it deals with a number of issues that don’t seem related at first. First of all, the Menorah – the chapter gives very specific instructions for the construction of the Menorah itself and for the lighting of it.
Second, it deals with the role of the Levites and instructs them as to how to prepare, behave, etc.
Third, it is in this chapter that the instructions for Pesach Sheni are given.
Fourth, this chapter describes the departure from Sinai and particularly how the people were guided by a fiery cloud that went in front of them by day (when they were to move) and settled on the Mishkan at night or when they were to remain camped.
Fifth, and related to the departure from Sinai, the chapter describes how the people became discontented and began complaining, particularly about having to eat Manna three times a day and having nothing else to eat, and how G-d became angry at this complaining and sent a fiery punishment into the camp until Moses prayed to stop the fire.
Sixth and finally, the chapter describes how Miriam came to Aaron and spoke ill of Moses behind Moses’ back, and the terrible punishment that G-d visited on Miriam for this. It is also here that G-d proclaims Moses the greatest prophet ever to be because G-d spoke to Moses directly, not in visions or dreams as He did the other prophets.
So what do we make of all this complexity? In studying the various Divrei Torah and commentaries that I was able to find, I think there are several themes:
First of all, there is the theme of sufficiency. When the people left Sinai, they did not travel for one day as G-d had commanded, but for three days’ journey. The teachers say that they did this because, having received the 613 commandments from G-d, they were afraid that if they stuck around, G-d would give them more! Later, in the wilderness, G-d provided Manna every day when the dew fell (and a double portion on Friday for Shabbat). The Manna could be prepared a variety of ways and provided a variety of tastes and textures, but still it was Manna every day and the people complained, remembering the fish and vegetables they had in Egypt. Even after the fiery punishment they kept complaining and cried for meat, so G-d provided so much meat that they gorged on it and sickened and died.
The Midrash suggests that the Israelites became embittered for two reasons: First, because they did not know whether the manna would descend the next day – that is they lacked faith in G-d; and second because although the manna had many and varied tastes, it did not contain the vegetables they remembered from Egypt. In other words, a miracle wasn’t miraculous enough for them. They lacked a consciousness of sufficiency, that what they had, what G-d had provided, was enough for them to be happy. By contrast, the chapter makes a point of the fact that the people would always move when the fiery cloud moved and would camp when it stood still, even though this meant moving from good campsites, travelling on consecutive days, etc. In this case the people accepted G-d’s judgement as sufficient. The teachers say that if we could only accept this concept, we would avoid most hardship. We have exactly what G-d want us to have, not an iota less. Any more is like wanting a sixth finger. Why, then, be jealous? Why steal or envy?
The second theme is that of humility. In the last chapter, when the princes of the tribes of Israel brought valuable gifts for the Mishkan, Aaron and the tribe of Levi were excluded. Aaron was upset about this, feeling it was G-d’s punishment for his participation in the affair of the Golden Calf. G-d told Aaron that this was not so, that he and the Levites would have a far greater honor, that of lighting the Menorah (for Aaron) and attending the Kohanim in the Temple for the Levites. In lighting the Menorah, the teachers tell us, Aaron used a step-stool with three steps. These steps represent the three evil personality traits of Jealously, Lust, and Pursuit of Honors, which drive a person away from G-d which must be overcome to truly serve G-d. Also on this theme of humility is Moses himself, who is described as the most modest man in the world. When Miriam and Aaron spoke ill of Moses, G-d Himself intervened because Moses would not have. Similarly, when, at G-d’s command, Moses created a Sanhedrin of 70 elders to help govern the people, and these elders were seized with an ecstasy and began to prophesy and teach the people, Moses, rather than being jealous, said: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” The other example of humility is when two of the people who had been engaged with burying Nadab and Avihu, Aaron’s sons, during the first Passover came to Moses and proposed a second Passover for themselves and others who were unable to observe, Moses took their proposal to G-d, who approved it.
The third theme is reflected in the establishment of the Menorah that opens the chapter. Why light the Menorah? G-d does not need our light – there is no darkness before G-d. In a house, windows are narrower on the outside and on the inside – this allows the most light to enter the house through the window. The Temple was constructed the opposite way, to allow the internal light of the Temple to radiate outwards. So G-d doesn’t need our light; what He wants is for Jews to be a light to others. The teachers say that, as Jews, we are obligated to light a candle if we find one that is not burning, and that if we find a soul that is “dim” it is our obligation to enlighten it. The Menorah opens the chapter, and the story of Miriam ends it. I believe that this indicates that gossip, Lashon Hara, dims the soul. Miriam is severely punished by G-d, but Moses’ plea that she has learned her lesson, that her soul is no longer dimmed by her lack of regard for the consequences of what she says, lightens G-d’s punishment.
Sufficiency, humility, and being a light to the world are the themes of this week’s Torah portion. In her book “A Return to Love,” Marianne Williamson could have been speaking of this chapter:
Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others.
April 09
· Two double portions from Leviticus this week and next:Thazria deals with purification after childbirth, laws of leprosyMetzora deals with more on leprosyAcharey Mot deals with Yom Kippur and the laws of sexual behaviorKedoshim deals with the laws of holiness and being am kedoshim, including the admonition to love thy neighbor as oneself
· These portions at first glance seem unrelated and a bit out of sequence with what has gone before in Leviticus.
· When you read them more closely, however, you start to see that they are, in part, metaphorical. Leprosy, for example does not refer to the modern disease. Rather, the teachers say that it was a miraculous disease that was visited on people who speak evil – lashon hara – or gossip. The Talmud says that the Metzora – leper – is isolated because he undermines the peace in society. This type of behavior is not worthy of having anything in common with human society, as a result he is afflicted with a disease that isolates him. The Talmud goes on to say that the sin of lashon hara is not like other sins that can be explained or justified by emotion or impulse – it is a sin that is thought out and committed in cold blood, just as the snake in Gan Eden intentionally defamed G-d and undermined Adam and Eve.The declaration of impurity had to be made by a Kohen, upon the advice of a scholar who was versed in these matters. Why, then, did the scholar not make the declaration, rather than a Kohen who was in this regard, ignorant? Because the Kohen would first come from his love for his fellow human being, including that, after declaring the person impure, he would then see to his purification. If we do not first probe our love for the person we are talking about, or if this love is lacking, or if we are not deeply committed to working with the person to correct the fault that we are pointing out, then to speak ill of another is a reflection of our own faulty character.
· In Acharey Mot, amidst the laws governing Yom Kippur, is the law of the scapegoat. The High Priest, as part of the Yom Kippur observance, would bring out two goats. One he would sacrifice, and he would speak the sins of the people over the head of the other, which was then driven into the wilderness. Here again we have an instance of isolation and banishment being associated with sin. (this of course led to the modern use of the term scapegoat as one to blame things on, an instance of lashon hara).
· Finally, all of this comes together in Kedoshim, which the sages consider the central portion of Leviticus, and therefore of the whole Torah. They said that the essentials of the law are in this chapter, and the Ten Commandments are repeated in this chapter. The essence of Kedoshim is in the very beginning: (read v. 1 & 2 in Hebrew and in English), and it goes on to state clearly the rules to follow to be a holy people. From this, Hillel, said that the basic principle of the Torah is “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another.” Rabbi Akiva said it this way: Love your neighbor as yourself.” A thousand years later Maimonides said “The Torah was given in order to create peace in the world.”
· Bad thoughts against another person lead to bad words, the lashon hara that destroys another person’s image and reputation. The sages tell us that the Temple was destroyed through lashon hara and causeless hatred. Modern teachers say that the Temple will be rebuilt through causeless love. If we can defeat our human tendency to speak ill of others, to gossip and to hate, we will then be am kedoshim, a holy people.
· These portions at first glance seem unrelated and a bit out of sequence with what has gone before in Leviticus.
· When you read them more closely, however, you start to see that they are, in part, metaphorical. Leprosy, for example does not refer to the modern disease. Rather, the teachers say that it was a miraculous disease that was visited on people who speak evil – lashon hara – or gossip. The Talmud says that the Metzora – leper – is isolated because he undermines the peace in society. This type of behavior is not worthy of having anything in common with human society, as a result he is afflicted with a disease that isolates him. The Talmud goes on to say that the sin of lashon hara is not like other sins that can be explained or justified by emotion or impulse – it is a sin that is thought out and committed in cold blood, just as the snake in Gan Eden intentionally defamed G-d and undermined Adam and Eve.The declaration of impurity had to be made by a Kohen, upon the advice of a scholar who was versed in these matters. Why, then, did the scholar not make the declaration, rather than a Kohen who was in this regard, ignorant? Because the Kohen would first come from his love for his fellow human being, including that, after declaring the person impure, he would then see to his purification. If we do not first probe our love for the person we are talking about, or if this love is lacking, or if we are not deeply committed to working with the person to correct the fault that we are pointing out, then to speak ill of another is a reflection of our own faulty character.
· In Acharey Mot, amidst the laws governing Yom Kippur, is the law of the scapegoat. The High Priest, as part of the Yom Kippur observance, would bring out two goats. One he would sacrifice, and he would speak the sins of the people over the head of the other, which was then driven into the wilderness. Here again we have an instance of isolation and banishment being associated with sin. (this of course led to the modern use of the term scapegoat as one to blame things on, an instance of lashon hara).
· Finally, all of this comes together in Kedoshim, which the sages consider the central portion of Leviticus, and therefore of the whole Torah. They said that the essentials of the law are in this chapter, and the Ten Commandments are repeated in this chapter. The essence of Kedoshim is in the very beginning: (read v. 1 & 2 in Hebrew and in English), and it goes on to state clearly the rules to follow to be a holy people. From this, Hillel, said that the basic principle of the Torah is “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another.” Rabbi Akiva said it this way: Love your neighbor as yourself.” A thousand years later Maimonides said “The Torah was given in order to create peace in the world.”
· Bad thoughts against another person lead to bad words, the lashon hara that destroys another person’s image and reputation. The sages tell us that the Temple was destroyed through lashon hara and causeless hatred. Modern teachers say that the Temple will be rebuilt through causeless love. If we can defeat our human tendency to speak ill of others, to gossip and to hate, we will then be am kedoshim, a holy people.
Ekev 07
The following is a D’var Torah I delivered on August 10th.
This will be the last service I’ll be leading for a while and so my last D’var Torah as well, and like the fellow who watched his mother-in-law go over a cliff in his new car, I have mixed feelings. I am very happy and relieved that the Search Committee did such a great job and in six months’ to the day from the departure of Rabbi Postrel, we have a new Rabbi starting next week. In addition, I’m thrilled with the selection of Rabbi Persin – she is young, energetic, creative, and will be a breath of fresh air.
At the same time I am sad about handing over the reins of which I’ve been caretaker for so long – I’ve loved leading services, preparing divrei Torah, and have even had the opportunity to officiate at life cycle events, a rare privilege indeed. And I’m concerned as well, and in this d’var Torah I’m going to attempt to communicate my concerns.
This week’s Torah Portion, like all Parashot, is named for its opening words or in this case word, Re-eh – see. The full first verse is “”See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day.” The Rabbis make much of the use of the word “see” here rather than “hear.” They say that the difference is that when the Torah says “hear,” we are called to understand deeply, and to contemplate – as in “Shema Yisrael,” but when we are told to “see,” we are meant to act – what we understand we may think about, but what we see in our mind’s eye we are moved to act upon.
So let me call upon you – Re-eh. See. See what our congregation could be like a year from now as we approach our second High Holidays with Rabbi Persin and after she and we have been together for a year. First, see what that will be like if, for the next year, we watch critically to see how this new young Rabbi will fit in with us – how well does she fit our pictures of what a Rabbi should be, how much do her services match dim memories of what it was like when we were kids, how do we like her, do we agree with her on everything, you get the idea.
Not long ago someone (who shall remain unnamed) said to me that he didn’t like Mishkan Tefila, the new Siddur. Now as you know we’ve been working for almost two years now with a copy of the galleys of a small part of this new prayer book, a situation I don’t much like, but by and large we’ve had good feedback on it. The transliterations next to the Hebrew, the progressively more poetic translations of the prayers, the gender-neutral language all seem to work pretty well, but this individual didn’t like it. OK, he’s entitled to his opinion, but here’s the kicker. This is a very good guy, a friend of mine, and someone who has contributed a lot of time and energy to the Temple but he doesn’t come to services!! He comes on yontiff, when we don’t use that Siddur, he comes to Bnai Mitzvah and other life cycle events, when by and large we don’t use it, but I can’t remember the last time I saw him on a Friday night when we do use it.
Don’t get scared, this isn’t going to be a “come to services” rant. I have a different purpose in sharing this story – this gentleman is entitled to his opinion – we all are – and we are a people for whom 100 members of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, are said to cast 150 votes on any issue. Still, as I’ve always wanted to tell the Pope on another subject, “if you’re not going to play the game, don’t try to make the rules!”
My point is this – we Jews and we NTHC members in particular, can be awfully critical, and on some pretty flimsy grounds. Like my father, when someone gets 95% we first ask “what happened to the other 5 points,” and then, maybe, we bestow a compliment. Our relationship with Rabbi Postrel was difficult, and he certainly contributed to the difficulty, but so did we, and if we approach Rabbi Persin in the often well-meant spirit of telling her how she can improve, I fear things will not go well for her or for us.
Now, again, Re-eh. See. Picture a year from now and see what it will be like if, for the next year we engage with Rabbi Persin like she was God’s gift to us and just what we need and want. If we support her and encourage her and be sure to tell her every way she’s doing a great job and let her know what we like about her and what she’s doing. I’m not saying there’s no place for feedback and requests – as chairs of the Rabbi Liaison Committee and the Ritual Committee, respectively, Greg Shorin and I solicit and will welcome your input. But I am suggesting that we have our eye on the 95% first and that feedback and even criticism is very different when it is given in a context of satisfaction and support than when it is given in a context of complaint and judgment and disliking what is going on.
I teach a lot in my work about the importance of appreciation, and one of the things I emphasize is that the word appreciation has two meanings – to regard positively is one, and the other is to increase in value. Criticism has only one meaning in everyday usage – to evaluate negatively, to find fault with. As my Korean dry cleaner in Oakland said in a sign by their cash register, “none of us is perfect but God,” and I am certain this includes Rabbi Persin and every one of us. In my d’var Torah last week I suggested that separation is an important issue. Adam and Eve’s recognition that they were separate from God was the knowledge that they gained from the Tree of Knowledge, and I believe with many Jewish and Christian thinkers that sin is really anything that separates us from God. Given we are b’tzelem Adonai, in the image of God, I think that sin is also anything that separates us from each other as well. “See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day.” Said another way, blessing if you draw close to God and stay close to each other and curse if you separate from God and from each other.
The month of Elul, the last month of the Hebrew year, which began on August 15th. Traditionally in Elul we prepare for the High Holidays by undertaking a Cheshbon Ha-nefesh – an accounting of the soul. We look with God at what we have done and left undone over the past year, whom we have wronged to whom we must make amends, and where we have fallen short of God’s, others, and our own expectations. Next year at this time we will look back at the first year with our new Rabbi. I invite you, I ask you, I plead with you, g’mar chatima tova – let us be inscribed for a good year – in this regard.
So See, this day God sets before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you embrace and join with the Rabbi God has sent us and curse, if insist that your critical view is so important that it must be delivered forcefully, and let someone else handle the positive stuff.
This will be the last service I’ll be leading for a while and so my last D’var Torah as well, and like the fellow who watched his mother-in-law go over a cliff in his new car, I have mixed feelings. I am very happy and relieved that the Search Committee did such a great job and in six months’ to the day from the departure of Rabbi Postrel, we have a new Rabbi starting next week. In addition, I’m thrilled with the selection of Rabbi Persin – she is young, energetic, creative, and will be a breath of fresh air.
At the same time I am sad about handing over the reins of which I’ve been caretaker for so long – I’ve loved leading services, preparing divrei Torah, and have even had the opportunity to officiate at life cycle events, a rare privilege indeed. And I’m concerned as well, and in this d’var Torah I’m going to attempt to communicate my concerns.
This week’s Torah Portion, like all Parashot, is named for its opening words or in this case word, Re-eh – see. The full first verse is “”See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day.” The Rabbis make much of the use of the word “see” here rather than “hear.” They say that the difference is that when the Torah says “hear,” we are called to understand deeply, and to contemplate – as in “Shema Yisrael,” but when we are told to “see,” we are meant to act – what we understand we may think about, but what we see in our mind’s eye we are moved to act upon.
So let me call upon you – Re-eh. See. See what our congregation could be like a year from now as we approach our second High Holidays with Rabbi Persin and after she and we have been together for a year. First, see what that will be like if, for the next year, we watch critically to see how this new young Rabbi will fit in with us – how well does she fit our pictures of what a Rabbi should be, how much do her services match dim memories of what it was like when we were kids, how do we like her, do we agree with her on everything, you get the idea.
Not long ago someone (who shall remain unnamed) said to me that he didn’t like Mishkan Tefila, the new Siddur. Now as you know we’ve been working for almost two years now with a copy of the galleys of a small part of this new prayer book, a situation I don’t much like, but by and large we’ve had good feedback on it. The transliterations next to the Hebrew, the progressively more poetic translations of the prayers, the gender-neutral language all seem to work pretty well, but this individual didn’t like it. OK, he’s entitled to his opinion, but here’s the kicker. This is a very good guy, a friend of mine, and someone who has contributed a lot of time and energy to the Temple but he doesn’t come to services!! He comes on yontiff, when we don’t use that Siddur, he comes to Bnai Mitzvah and other life cycle events, when by and large we don’t use it, but I can’t remember the last time I saw him on a Friday night when we do use it.
Don’t get scared, this isn’t going to be a “come to services” rant. I have a different purpose in sharing this story – this gentleman is entitled to his opinion – we all are – and we are a people for whom 100 members of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, are said to cast 150 votes on any issue. Still, as I’ve always wanted to tell the Pope on another subject, “if you’re not going to play the game, don’t try to make the rules!”
My point is this – we Jews and we NTHC members in particular, can be awfully critical, and on some pretty flimsy grounds. Like my father, when someone gets 95% we first ask “what happened to the other 5 points,” and then, maybe, we bestow a compliment. Our relationship with Rabbi Postrel was difficult, and he certainly contributed to the difficulty, but so did we, and if we approach Rabbi Persin in the often well-meant spirit of telling her how she can improve, I fear things will not go well for her or for us.
Now, again, Re-eh. See. Picture a year from now and see what it will be like if, for the next year we engage with Rabbi Persin like she was God’s gift to us and just what we need and want. If we support her and encourage her and be sure to tell her every way she’s doing a great job and let her know what we like about her and what she’s doing. I’m not saying there’s no place for feedback and requests – as chairs of the Rabbi Liaison Committee and the Ritual Committee, respectively, Greg Shorin and I solicit and will welcome your input. But I am suggesting that we have our eye on the 95% first and that feedback and even criticism is very different when it is given in a context of satisfaction and support than when it is given in a context of complaint and judgment and disliking what is going on.
I teach a lot in my work about the importance of appreciation, and one of the things I emphasize is that the word appreciation has two meanings – to regard positively is one, and the other is to increase in value. Criticism has only one meaning in everyday usage – to evaluate negatively, to find fault with. As my Korean dry cleaner in Oakland said in a sign by their cash register, “none of us is perfect but God,” and I am certain this includes Rabbi Persin and every one of us. In my d’var Torah last week I suggested that separation is an important issue. Adam and Eve’s recognition that they were separate from God was the knowledge that they gained from the Tree of Knowledge, and I believe with many Jewish and Christian thinkers that sin is really anything that separates us from God. Given we are b’tzelem Adonai, in the image of God, I think that sin is also anything that separates us from each other as well. “See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day.” Said another way, blessing if you draw close to God and stay close to each other and curse if you separate from God and from each other.
The month of Elul, the last month of the Hebrew year, which began on August 15th. Traditionally in Elul we prepare for the High Holidays by undertaking a Cheshbon Ha-nefesh – an accounting of the soul. We look with God at what we have done and left undone over the past year, whom we have wronged to whom we must make amends, and where we have fallen short of God’s, others, and our own expectations. Next year at this time we will look back at the first year with our new Rabbi. I invite you, I ask you, I plead with you, g’mar chatima tova – let us be inscribed for a good year – in this regard.
So See, this day God sets before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you embrace and join with the Rabbi God has sent us and curse, if insist that your critical view is so important that it must be delivered forcefully, and let someone else handle the positive stuff.
Ekev
This week’s Torah portion is Ekev, the third Parsha in the Book of Deuteronomy or D’varim. In last week’s Parsha we encountered the Shema, which was given as and has been for 3400 years the center of Judaism. Now in this Parsha we have a whole set of admonitions under the general rubric in one of the early verses that “as a man disciplines his son, so God disciplines you. The verb יסו can be translated as discipline (verb), chastise, punish, or admonish. So in last week we are commanded to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might,” and this week we are commanded not only to love but also to obey.
I was brought up on the Orthodox side of Conservative Judaism, and was taught that the Torah was, in its entirety, God’s word – אל פי יי ביד משה – and I never really gave that much thought at t the time. Later I came to question it, mainly because there are so many contradictions and inconsistencies in the Torah. It just didn’t seem to me that God would be quite that inconsistent or that, as the Talmudists did and still do, we were to treat God’s word as a riddle to be endlessly unraveled, with the “correct” answers forever hidden from us. Also, while Moses was a great prophet, it stretches belief to think that he not only wrote the entire book, which is a reiteration and emendation of the first four books, and particularly the story of the Exodus and the journey in the Desert, including his own death and burial and ending with the statement that there has never come to Israel an prophet that was Moses’ equal.
Actually, Bible scholars have said that the Book of Deuteronomy was written much later than the rest of the Torah, probably sometime in the 7th Century BCE. This means, of course, that it could not have been written by Moses, but rather is some scholar or scholars’ recap of what they feel is important in the Torah – one may argue that it is divinely inspired, but in any case it was written in a very different cultural setting than that of the earlier books, particularly if we assume that the first four books were written at the time they occurred, which was some 700 years earlier than the scholars say that Deuteronomy.
I think the important point here is that cultural difference. The world of the time of the Exodus was a very different one from that of the 7th Century – the first was a world of tribes and small communities – cities were unknown and kings ruled small areas and relatively small numbers of people – they were more like tribal chiefs. By the time of the writing of Deuteronomy Israel was a nation, there were cities, and the country had been ruled by kings for at least 300 years since Saul. This was the context in which Deuteronomy was written, and I think that’s important.
Next week will be the last service I lead, at least for a while, and the experience of writing and delivering divrei Torah almost weekly has been an interesting opportunity to develop some thinking and to study the Torah in a much more continuous and integrated way than I had done before. One of the themes that has emerged from me both in these Friday night talks and also in my classes with Jim Beebe on Saturday morning is what I experience as a huge gulf between the teachings of religion, including Judaism, and the institutions of religion. A key element in which I feel the teachings have been distorted is in divisions, separations, and hierarchies.
The Shema teaches us that God is unity – conversely that in unity, one-ness, we find God. Yet in the very next parsha we are told that God is somehow separate, will chastise us, and expects our obedience. Let’s see if that makes sense in terms of the earlier parts of the Torah.
Go all the way back to Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve, and let’s assume that this whole episode is a metaphor – we aren’t meant to believe literally that there were two people who were the origin of the human race – the inbreeding issue alone would make that unlikely and a bit unpalatable. So we have this story of a man and a woman, i.e, the whole of humanity, in a state of blissful ignorance and naïveté, living in a perfect environment, with only one fly in the ointment – that there is a fruit that will, on the one hand, give them knowledge they don’t have and on the other hand take away the perfection of their world. We are told that the knowledge is of “good and evil,” but never told what, exactly that means, but the consequence of their gaining that knowledge is that they are expelled from and forever barred from Paradise.
I think it may be that it was not that Adam and Eve gained some new information or knew something different than they knew before, but rather that it was the symbolic act of eating the fruit that was the source of the change in their world. As long as they were one with their world, wandering around the Garden, encountering God from time to time for a chat, generally not knowing there was any “other” they lived in perfection. To “disobey God” is to separate oneself – God is God and I am me, and we are separate and different. That is, for me, the nature of sin – anything that separates us from God is evil, anything that brings us closer to God is good, and that was the “knowledge of good and evil” that was not just gained, but created in the so-called fall. God is unity, unity is God, and separation is, at heart, an illusion, but a powerful one that has been with us since the dawn of consciousness.
A consequence of this original separation (“original sin”) is that it became pervasive for humanity – parents became separate from their children, men from women, rich from poor, educated from uneducated, etc. From separation to hierarchy is a small step – if we are separate from God and God is great, all-powerful, our Father our King, then we are less than God, and if “less than” is inherent in separation, and power differential is the basis of “less than,” then anyone who is more powerful is above those who are less powerful. Men are stronger than women, so men rule women; the rich can buy more than the poor, so the rich rule the poor. The educated have more knowledge and information than the uneducated so the educated rule the uneducated. One scholar divides society in Biblical times into the destitute, the poor, the merchant class, the retainers and the rulers. By the 10th Century BCE the Jewish people were sufficiently enculturated to hierarchy to demand that a kingdom be established.
This is one major area where teaching and religion part company. The teaching is unity – we are all one and one with God, sin is that which separates us from God (and by extension from each other), and hierarchy is institutionalized separation; thus says the teaching. Might is right, the powerful rule the powerless, the king rules by divine right – the higher up the hierarchy you go, the closer you come to God, and those near the bottom are farthest from God, therefore sinful and to be ruled by those closer to God; thus says religion, and so we have kings, popes, and presidents, and clergy with the supposed authority to speak to us for God and vice versa. Great job security for clergy, but a perversion of the teaching.
And most importantly, with separation comes demonization of “the other.” Christianity supposedly supercedes Judaism as the “true faith,” Christian denominations quarrel over whose version of religion is right, Hindus and Moslems kill each other and create separate countries, and on and on, all in the name of God, but divorced from God’s teachings.
If God is unity, should we not all be unified? It’s entirely possible that the floods in various parts of the world are God weeping.
I was brought up on the Orthodox side of Conservative Judaism, and was taught that the Torah was, in its entirety, God’s word – אל פי יי ביד משה – and I never really gave that much thought at t the time. Later I came to question it, mainly because there are so many contradictions and inconsistencies in the Torah. It just didn’t seem to me that God would be quite that inconsistent or that, as the Talmudists did and still do, we were to treat God’s word as a riddle to be endlessly unraveled, with the “correct” answers forever hidden from us. Also, while Moses was a great prophet, it stretches belief to think that he not only wrote the entire book, which is a reiteration and emendation of the first four books, and particularly the story of the Exodus and the journey in the Desert, including his own death and burial and ending with the statement that there has never come to Israel an prophet that was Moses’ equal.
Actually, Bible scholars have said that the Book of Deuteronomy was written much later than the rest of the Torah, probably sometime in the 7th Century BCE. This means, of course, that it could not have been written by Moses, but rather is some scholar or scholars’ recap of what they feel is important in the Torah – one may argue that it is divinely inspired, but in any case it was written in a very different cultural setting than that of the earlier books, particularly if we assume that the first four books were written at the time they occurred, which was some 700 years earlier than the scholars say that Deuteronomy.
I think the important point here is that cultural difference. The world of the time of the Exodus was a very different one from that of the 7th Century – the first was a world of tribes and small communities – cities were unknown and kings ruled small areas and relatively small numbers of people – they were more like tribal chiefs. By the time of the writing of Deuteronomy Israel was a nation, there were cities, and the country had been ruled by kings for at least 300 years since Saul. This was the context in which Deuteronomy was written, and I think that’s important.
Next week will be the last service I lead, at least for a while, and the experience of writing and delivering divrei Torah almost weekly has been an interesting opportunity to develop some thinking and to study the Torah in a much more continuous and integrated way than I had done before. One of the themes that has emerged from me both in these Friday night talks and also in my classes with Jim Beebe on Saturday morning is what I experience as a huge gulf between the teachings of religion, including Judaism, and the institutions of religion. A key element in which I feel the teachings have been distorted is in divisions, separations, and hierarchies.
The Shema teaches us that God is unity – conversely that in unity, one-ness, we find God. Yet in the very next parsha we are told that God is somehow separate, will chastise us, and expects our obedience. Let’s see if that makes sense in terms of the earlier parts of the Torah.
Go all the way back to Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve, and let’s assume that this whole episode is a metaphor – we aren’t meant to believe literally that there were two people who were the origin of the human race – the inbreeding issue alone would make that unlikely and a bit unpalatable. So we have this story of a man and a woman, i.e, the whole of humanity, in a state of blissful ignorance and naïveté, living in a perfect environment, with only one fly in the ointment – that there is a fruit that will, on the one hand, give them knowledge they don’t have and on the other hand take away the perfection of their world. We are told that the knowledge is of “good and evil,” but never told what, exactly that means, but the consequence of their gaining that knowledge is that they are expelled from and forever barred from Paradise.
I think it may be that it was not that Adam and Eve gained some new information or knew something different than they knew before, but rather that it was the symbolic act of eating the fruit that was the source of the change in their world. As long as they were one with their world, wandering around the Garden, encountering God from time to time for a chat, generally not knowing there was any “other” they lived in perfection. To “disobey God” is to separate oneself – God is God and I am me, and we are separate and different. That is, for me, the nature of sin – anything that separates us from God is evil, anything that brings us closer to God is good, and that was the “knowledge of good and evil” that was not just gained, but created in the so-called fall. God is unity, unity is God, and separation is, at heart, an illusion, but a powerful one that has been with us since the dawn of consciousness.
A consequence of this original separation (“original sin”) is that it became pervasive for humanity – parents became separate from their children, men from women, rich from poor, educated from uneducated, etc. From separation to hierarchy is a small step – if we are separate from God and God is great, all-powerful, our Father our King, then we are less than God, and if “less than” is inherent in separation, and power differential is the basis of “less than,” then anyone who is more powerful is above those who are less powerful. Men are stronger than women, so men rule women; the rich can buy more than the poor, so the rich rule the poor. The educated have more knowledge and information than the uneducated so the educated rule the uneducated. One scholar divides society in Biblical times into the destitute, the poor, the merchant class, the retainers and the rulers. By the 10th Century BCE the Jewish people were sufficiently enculturated to hierarchy to demand that a kingdom be established.
This is one major area where teaching and religion part company. The teaching is unity – we are all one and one with God, sin is that which separates us from God (and by extension from each other), and hierarchy is institutionalized separation; thus says the teaching. Might is right, the powerful rule the powerless, the king rules by divine right – the higher up the hierarchy you go, the closer you come to God, and those near the bottom are farthest from God, therefore sinful and to be ruled by those closer to God; thus says religion, and so we have kings, popes, and presidents, and clergy with the supposed authority to speak to us for God and vice versa. Great job security for clergy, but a perversion of the teaching.
And most importantly, with separation comes demonization of “the other.” Christianity supposedly supercedes Judaism as the “true faith,” Christian denominations quarrel over whose version of religion is right, Hindus and Moslems kill each other and create separate countries, and on and on, all in the name of God, but divorced from God’s teachings.
If God is unity, should we not all be unified? It’s entirely possible that the floods in various parts of the world are God weeping.
Matot-Masei
This week’s double Torah portion, Matot and Masei are the final chapters in the Book of Numbers and cover several topics: The making of promises or vows, the war with the Midianites, the borders of the Promised Land and the establishment of refuge cities where those who accidentally harm someone else can go to be safe from revenge.
That seems like a wide range of topics, and wondering what ties them together, I noticed that this is really the end of the Torah –the final book, Deuteronomy, is really an extended reiteration by Moses of everything that has happened since the Exodus from Egypt, so really the narrative of the Torah ends with Numbers. Given that, what we have here is the final establishment of how the people will settle in the Promised Land, both physically in terms of boundaries and the relationships between the tribes, politically in the decisive defeat of the Midianites, and ethically or socially in the emphasis on the importance of promises and the provision for refuge from vengeance.
A lot of this parshah is about boundaries – the boundaries of the land to be inherited, the two tribes that wanted to live outside the boundaries, etc. and that got me wondering why this was important. When God made the covenant with Abraham back in Genesis, he had Abraham walk the length of the land of Canaan to secure his descendants’ inheritance. Now that that inheritance is to be realized, God carefully details the boundaries. I wonder why.
Actually this was a major break with the prevailing culture. First of all, very few countries had set boundaries other than those set by geography, and secondly any area that was organized enough to be called a nation generally tried to claim as much territory as it could and to conquer its neighbors. Here we have the Hebrews, with an already-established culture of being chosen by God to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people” – what Isaiah would later call “a light unto the nations” – why would God be so explicit about their boundaries?
I believe that God’s message here is that diversity is part of God’s plan. That the “choice” of the Jewish people is not because they have the “right” relationship with God or because everyone should be Jewish, but because we are to be responsible for one important aspect of God’s teaching for humanity – we are to maintain our identity and our integrity as a people, but not impose our way of life or our way of thinking on others – we can be an example, we can bring God’s message, but except where necessary to maintain ourselves, we are not to force it on anyone or persuade anyone. The Exodus ended around 1400 b.c.e. For several hundred years the Hebrews lived relatively quietly in Canaan, and, perhaps as a result of this extended period of peace and normalcy developed not only religiously and culturally but also nationally, producing prophets, sages, and judges and finally, a King, Saul. The period of the kingdom was a kind of Golden Age in which we have David the warrior and poet and Solomon the Wise Man, and under Solomon the first Temple, by tradition about 480 years after the end of the Exodus. From there the state begins to break down with invasions, corrupt kings, and ultimately the rise of the synagogue and the dispersion of the people around the world as the boundaries God set broke down.
At around the time of the kingdom we also know that Gautama Buddha began teaching in India and after the breakdown of the kingdom we have the advent of Christianity and some centuries later Islam. All teaching basically the same God, all teaching the same basic lessons, yet with clear boundaries establishing who belongs to what school of teaching. Why? Why, if God’s message is (a) universal and (b) pretty consistent no matter which teaching you receive it through, do we have boundaries and nations and philosophies and, ultimately the rigidification of God’s teachings into institutional religions that claim, as recently as this week, that theirs is the only true teaching, the only one with God’s personal seal of approval?
If the world is a reflection of God’s plan for humanity, then either God is a very poor planner or we are reading the plan wrong. As early as the 11th Chapter of Genesis we find the story of the Tower of Babel where it seems to me that God makes it very clear that a united humanity speaking with one voice is not part of God’s plan, yet our brother in Rome seems to want us to believe that everyone being Roman Catholic is what God is after and folks in the Middle East seem to think that he’s right about everything but the Catholic part and God’s plan will be realized when we are all subject to a Caliphate under Sharia law.
There has always been a strain of religious fundamentalism in the US, and there are those who believe that since the majority of people profess Christian faiths, America should be considered a “Christian Country,” whatever that means. They erroneously cite the Founders, many of whom such as Jefferson were avowedly non- or anti-religious, and conveniently ignore those such as Haym Salomon who were not Christians and who contributed to the founding as well. More importantly they ignore the Founders’ intent in making the anti-establishment clause the leading part of the leading amendment in the Bill of Rights.
Now Nevada Senator Harry Reid is a Mormon, and has while he does not wear his faith on his sleeve, he makes no secret of it either. Nonetheless, as Majority Leader of the US Senate, though, and as one of the two Senators from a state that is relatively diverse religiously, he takes the Constitution pretty seriously, so he invited Rajan Zed, a Hindu Chaplain and Director of Interfaith Relations at a Hindu Temple in Reno last Thursday to give the customary brief invocation that begins the Senate’s business every day. This was a first for a Hindu clergyman, but not for a clergyman who is not Christian – Rabbis, Imams and even Native American Shamans have given the prayer from time to time.
Here’s where it gets sticky: a fundamentalist Christian group, the Mississippi-based “American Family Association” urged its members to object to the prayer, and three protestors disrupted the invocation by shouting from the gallery. Here is what they objected to, in part: “We meditate on the transcendental glory of the Deity Supreme who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky, and inside the soul of the heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds.” Mr. Zed then closed with “Peace, peace, peace be unto all.” He said all this in English, by the way, and for this apparently the people in the gallery and the so-called “American Family Association” felt he should be shouted down and silenced.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion and preferences, but the supreme law of this country, the Constitution, makes it very clear that freedom of religious expression is a core value, and that no religious expression is to be given preference over any other. As a Jew I have no objection when, 90+% of the time the invocation in the Senate is given by a Christian clergyperson. I also have no objection if it’s a Hindu, a Jain, a Muslim, or a Buddhist. As a person of faith, I think it’s good for our Senators to be reminded that they are working “under God,” whether every one of them believes that or not, and I don’t much care what name the invoker gives to God – Deity Supreme, Adonai, Allah, God, Father, are, in my view, different words for the same entity. If I call the thing I’m sitting on a chair, une chaise, ein Stuhl, una stilla, kisei, una sedia, or any of hundreds of other words, it remains what it is, so surely God does not change from one language to another.
We seem to be regressing in this regard. The curve of religious pluralism and attendant religious tolerance that seemed to have been increasing since the Enlightenment seems to have taken a downward turn. In addition to the shameful display in the Senate last week we had the Pope proclaiming that any Christians who did not acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church were of a “wounded faith.”
I don’t think so. I just don’t think God has it that wrong or that the God who inspired such teachings as “don’t put a stumbling block in front of a blind person” has created a theological labyrinth that we are supposed to negotiate in order to find the right way. Rather, I’d like to propose a different theory. I think that at the creation all of God’s plan was invested in the whole of humanity. Each of us has access to all of it, but for the most part we can only access some part of the whole. If we could ever access the whole thing, God’s plan would be realized and we would move to whatever comes next, but that would require that we actually get together and pool our wisdom.
From time to time there have been people who saw a big enough picture that they realized this and pointed those who would listen to them in the direction of community. Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and others as well. Unfortunately there’s a paradox – in order to pool our points of view and see the whole, we have to be at least as interested in other points of view as we are in our own, and while most of us find our own point of view endlessly fascinating, we are not nearly as keen on others’ points of view. As a result we spend most of our time trying to get others to understand us and very little trying to understand them.
So good for Harry Reid and shame on those who see God as so small.
That seems like a wide range of topics, and wondering what ties them together, I noticed that this is really the end of the Torah –the final book, Deuteronomy, is really an extended reiteration by Moses of everything that has happened since the Exodus from Egypt, so really the narrative of the Torah ends with Numbers. Given that, what we have here is the final establishment of how the people will settle in the Promised Land, both physically in terms of boundaries and the relationships between the tribes, politically in the decisive defeat of the Midianites, and ethically or socially in the emphasis on the importance of promises and the provision for refuge from vengeance.
A lot of this parshah is about boundaries – the boundaries of the land to be inherited, the two tribes that wanted to live outside the boundaries, etc. and that got me wondering why this was important. When God made the covenant with Abraham back in Genesis, he had Abraham walk the length of the land of Canaan to secure his descendants’ inheritance. Now that that inheritance is to be realized, God carefully details the boundaries. I wonder why.
Actually this was a major break with the prevailing culture. First of all, very few countries had set boundaries other than those set by geography, and secondly any area that was organized enough to be called a nation generally tried to claim as much territory as it could and to conquer its neighbors. Here we have the Hebrews, with an already-established culture of being chosen by God to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people” – what Isaiah would later call “a light unto the nations” – why would God be so explicit about their boundaries?
I believe that God’s message here is that diversity is part of God’s plan. That the “choice” of the Jewish people is not because they have the “right” relationship with God or because everyone should be Jewish, but because we are to be responsible for one important aspect of God’s teaching for humanity – we are to maintain our identity and our integrity as a people, but not impose our way of life or our way of thinking on others – we can be an example, we can bring God’s message, but except where necessary to maintain ourselves, we are not to force it on anyone or persuade anyone. The Exodus ended around 1400 b.c.e. For several hundred years the Hebrews lived relatively quietly in Canaan, and, perhaps as a result of this extended period of peace and normalcy developed not only religiously and culturally but also nationally, producing prophets, sages, and judges and finally, a King, Saul. The period of the kingdom was a kind of Golden Age in which we have David the warrior and poet and Solomon the Wise Man, and under Solomon the first Temple, by tradition about 480 years after the end of the Exodus. From there the state begins to break down with invasions, corrupt kings, and ultimately the rise of the synagogue and the dispersion of the people around the world as the boundaries God set broke down.
At around the time of the kingdom we also know that Gautama Buddha began teaching in India and after the breakdown of the kingdom we have the advent of Christianity and some centuries later Islam. All teaching basically the same God, all teaching the same basic lessons, yet with clear boundaries establishing who belongs to what school of teaching. Why? Why, if God’s message is (a) universal and (b) pretty consistent no matter which teaching you receive it through, do we have boundaries and nations and philosophies and, ultimately the rigidification of God’s teachings into institutional religions that claim, as recently as this week, that theirs is the only true teaching, the only one with God’s personal seal of approval?
If the world is a reflection of God’s plan for humanity, then either God is a very poor planner or we are reading the plan wrong. As early as the 11th Chapter of Genesis we find the story of the Tower of Babel where it seems to me that God makes it very clear that a united humanity speaking with one voice is not part of God’s plan, yet our brother in Rome seems to want us to believe that everyone being Roman Catholic is what God is after and folks in the Middle East seem to think that he’s right about everything but the Catholic part and God’s plan will be realized when we are all subject to a Caliphate under Sharia law.
There has always been a strain of religious fundamentalism in the US, and there are those who believe that since the majority of people profess Christian faiths, America should be considered a “Christian Country,” whatever that means. They erroneously cite the Founders, many of whom such as Jefferson were avowedly non- or anti-religious, and conveniently ignore those such as Haym Salomon who were not Christians and who contributed to the founding as well. More importantly they ignore the Founders’ intent in making the anti-establishment clause the leading part of the leading amendment in the Bill of Rights.
Now Nevada Senator Harry Reid is a Mormon, and has while he does not wear his faith on his sleeve, he makes no secret of it either. Nonetheless, as Majority Leader of the US Senate, though, and as one of the two Senators from a state that is relatively diverse religiously, he takes the Constitution pretty seriously, so he invited Rajan Zed, a Hindu Chaplain and Director of Interfaith Relations at a Hindu Temple in Reno last Thursday to give the customary brief invocation that begins the Senate’s business every day. This was a first for a Hindu clergyman, but not for a clergyman who is not Christian – Rabbis, Imams and even Native American Shamans have given the prayer from time to time.
Here’s where it gets sticky: a fundamentalist Christian group, the Mississippi-based “American Family Association” urged its members to object to the prayer, and three protestors disrupted the invocation by shouting from the gallery. Here is what they objected to, in part: “We meditate on the transcendental glory of the Deity Supreme who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky, and inside the soul of the heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds.” Mr. Zed then closed with “Peace, peace, peace be unto all.” He said all this in English, by the way, and for this apparently the people in the gallery and the so-called “American Family Association” felt he should be shouted down and silenced.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion and preferences, but the supreme law of this country, the Constitution, makes it very clear that freedom of religious expression is a core value, and that no religious expression is to be given preference over any other. As a Jew I have no objection when, 90+% of the time the invocation in the Senate is given by a Christian clergyperson. I also have no objection if it’s a Hindu, a Jain, a Muslim, or a Buddhist. As a person of faith, I think it’s good for our Senators to be reminded that they are working “under God,” whether every one of them believes that or not, and I don’t much care what name the invoker gives to God – Deity Supreme, Adonai, Allah, God, Father, are, in my view, different words for the same entity. If I call the thing I’m sitting on a chair, une chaise, ein Stuhl, una stilla, kisei, una sedia, or any of hundreds of other words, it remains what it is, so surely God does not change from one language to another.
We seem to be regressing in this regard. The curve of religious pluralism and attendant religious tolerance that seemed to have been increasing since the Enlightenment seems to have taken a downward turn. In addition to the shameful display in the Senate last week we had the Pope proclaiming that any Christians who did not acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church were of a “wounded faith.”
I don’t think so. I just don’t think God has it that wrong or that the God who inspired such teachings as “don’t put a stumbling block in front of a blind person” has created a theological labyrinth that we are supposed to negotiate in order to find the right way. Rather, I’d like to propose a different theory. I think that at the creation all of God’s plan was invested in the whole of humanity. Each of us has access to all of it, but for the most part we can only access some part of the whole. If we could ever access the whole thing, God’s plan would be realized and we would move to whatever comes next, but that would require that we actually get together and pool our wisdom.
From time to time there have been people who saw a big enough picture that they realized this and pointed those who would listen to them in the direction of community. Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and others as well. Unfortunately there’s a paradox – in order to pool our points of view and see the whole, we have to be at least as interested in other points of view as we are in our own, and while most of us find our own point of view endlessly fascinating, we are not nearly as keen on others’ points of view. As a result we spend most of our time trying to get others to understand us and very little trying to understand them.
So good for Harry Reid and shame on those who see God as so small.
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