Ed Gurowitz's Writings on Religion

Adult Forum class at St. Pat's: A Jewish View of Death and Dying

2010-10-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

Birth is a beginning
And death is a destination.
And life is a journey from childhood to maturity.
And youth to age;
From innocence to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion and then, perhaps, to wisdom;
From weakness to strength
Or strength to weakness - and often back again;
From health to sickness and back, we pray, to health again;
From offence to forgiveness,
From loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude,
From pain to compassion,
And grief to understanding -
From fear to faith;
And from defeat to defeat to defeat -
Until, looking backward or ahead,
We see that victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey, stage by stage, a sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning.
And death a destination.
And life is a journey,
A sacred pilgrimage to life everlasting.

That poem expresses in about 140 words the Jewish view of life and death. One of the fundamental beliefs of Judaism is that life does not begin with birth nor end with death. (Ecc. 12:7). In fact, Jewish thought anticipated the first law of thermodynamics – that energy is never created or destroyed, but simply assumes different forms – and so death is determined by the soul no longer animating the body, not the body expressing the soul, though this is mitigated by considerations such as whether the individual is suffering pain, and Judaism holds that we have an obligation to alleviate pain, even if it contradicts keeping the person alive as long as possible.

For Jews the soul is immortal and eternal – it exists both before and after death and passes from one phase to another. First there is the wholly spiritual existence of the soul before it enters the body, then physical life, then post-physical life in heaven or paradise, and finally life in the world to come that will follow the resurrection of the dead.
The second phase, the time spent on the earth in a body, is considered crucial, but we have to at least consider the possibility that, since this whole cosmology was made up by people in this phase, they may be giving it undue importance. Nevertheless, the ultimate purpose of the soul is considered to be fulfilled during the time it spends in this phase, presencing God in this world by finding and expressing Godliness in everyday life.

The Rabbis teach that there is a paradox in this in that for our actions in this world to make a difference, they must be the product of our free will. If we were to directly experience the power and beauty of God’s presence as we manifest it in this world, we would always choose what is right and lose our autonomy – so they teach that the soul is fully aware and cognizant up until birth, when it enters a condition of total spiritual blackout. We enter a world where the Divine reality is hidden, in which our purpose in life is not clear, and in which there is the appearance of evil and wickedness. In this condition of spiritual darkness, our positive and Godly actions are truly our own choice and achievement.

What we have to guide us in these choices is that the soul is fully saturated with Divine wisdom, knowledge, and vision – herein lies the paradox – we can’t see the truth, and we can’t know it with any certainty, but at the same time we do know it deep down – deep enough that we can choose to ignore it, but also deep enough that we can always access it – this is the choice; to pursue the Godly knowledge within us or to suppress it.

So the very physicality of our everyday life – its opaqueness, its self-centeredness, obsures all knowledge and memory of our Divine Source. This is what Einstein was referring to when he said:

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living things and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Because of this veil of illusion, we never experience the full satisfaction of our achievements in manifesting the divine will – achievement and satisfaction exist in different realms – achievement in the physical, and satisfaction in the spiritual – so Judaism teaches that the full reward for good works in this life will come in the next.

The third phase is what we call “heaven and hell,” but the Jewish conception of these is very different from the usual conception. After death, the soul returns to the Divine Source, together with all the Godliness it brought to the physical world by its manifestation of God. It also brings all its negative achievements – the result of the times it suppressed the “yetzer tov” – the Godly impulse – and gave in to the “yetzer hara” – the evil impulse. The soul now relives its experiences and experiences the good it accomplished during its incarnation as incredible happiness and pleasure and the negative as incredibly painful.

This is not punishment or reward, but simply what is called a “cheshbon ha-nefesh” – an accounting of the soul. The accounting is done by the heavenly court; the “judgment” comes by the soul itself confronting a reality of its own life from which it was sheltered in this world. The soul’s experience of the Godliness it brought into the world by its positive actions is the pleasure of heaven (Gan Eden), and its experience of the destructiveness it created through its lapses and transgressions is the pain of “Gehenna” or Purgatory.

The truth hurts, and it also cleanses and heals. The spiritual pain cleanses the soul of the blemishes it accumulated on earth and heals it; thus freed from its accumulated negativity, the soul is now able to experience the good it did and to “bask in the Divine Presence” created by the Godliness it brought into the world. Because the soul is, at its core, unadulteratedly good, the good we accomplish is infinite and the evil we do is superficial and shallow. So even the most wicked of souls experiences, at most, 12 months of Gehenna followed by an eternity of heaven. Also, the experience of Gehenna can be mitigated by the actions of those who are still alive – through prayers and good deeds performed in their memory. Similarly the soul of one who has passed remains involved in the lives of those it leaves behind, deriving pain or pride from their deeds and is able to intercede on their behalf before the Heavenly Throne.

The final phase is “the world to come.” Once humanity as a whole has completed its mission of making the physical world “a dwelling place for God,” comes the era of universal reward – the “next world.” Paradise or Gan Eden is a spiritual world inhabited by souls without bodies. The world to come is a physical world, inhabited by souls with (perfected) physical bodies.

But until then, we in this world experience death as loss, and Jewish tradition has combined this cosmology of death with the process of mourning. Studies of how people accept and move on from loss have shown that the first week, the first month, and the first year are critical. Jewish tradition calls for a week of intense mourning – the mourner does not leave their house, mirrors are covered, and the mourner sits on the floor or on a low bench. Others come to visit, entering without knocking, and bring food so that the mourner does not have to cook. Prayers (minyan) are held in the house of mourning. After the first week the mourner re-enters life, attending Synagogue daily to say the Mourner’s prayer in community and does this for a month. After that first month, the mourner is to resume their normal life and activities and prolonged grieving is forbidden. They say the memorial prayer weekly for a year, and after the first year annually and on specific holy days.

Sermon at St. Patrick's Episcopal Church 3 October 2010

2010-10-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

The boy was only ten years old – a child of a happy family, living comfortably in the English countryside. Then one day his father was suddenly incapacitated by a stroke. The loving, attentive man the boy had known for all of his life disappeared and what was left was a bed-ridden, paralyzed, unresponsive shell.

Trying to maintain as much normalcy as she could, the boy’s mother insisted that the boy, his older brother and his younger sister go to school the next day, and so they did, but without much hope of having their attention on schoolwork. One of the boy’s teachers, an Anglican Priest took him aside after class and suggested they pray for the boy’s father. “But sir,” the boy said, “I’m afraid my father doesn’t believe in God.” “That’s alright” said the teacher “God believes in him, and that’s all he needs.”

The boy was Tony Blair who went on to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and who, after his political career, founded The Tony Blair Interfaith Foundation with the goal of countering extremism in all six leading religions as well as doing charitable work. He never forgot the lesson in faith he learned on that day at school.

The philosopher Alan Watts drew an interesting distinction between belief and faith. Referring to the root of belief in Middle English (lief = wish), he said that belief is a heartfelt wish that things be or turn out a certain way – in other words, there is a way things should be and a way they shouldn’t be, and belief is a wish that they be the way they “should.” Faith, on the other hand is trust. Specifically, trust in the truth – things are the way they are, and that is what there is to work with. In other words, the only power I have is to play the particular hand that I’m dealt and trust that I can influence how it turns out. In a specifically religious context there is a popular phrase “The will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you.” While of unknown origin, this phrase is consistent with numerous Biblical passages from both the Hebrew and Christian Canons and points to the essence of faith as trust in God and the world God has created.

This week’s readings, particularly the Psalm and the Gospel passage, are among the most famous in the Bible and are all about faith. In the Gospel, Jesus calls the Apostles to account for having insufficient faith – he says “ If you had even as much faith as a tiny seed, you could command a tree to relocate to the sea and it would obey you,” yet, he says, not only do they lack even that much faith, but they seem to think that they should be rewarded of doing the minimum that they should do – following Jesus and asking him to teach them.

All of the readings point to the importance of faith – Paul’s message to Timothy is basically “have faith: Hold fast the words, you’ve heard from me, in faith and love.” And along with the poetry of the psalm, the readings from the Hebrew Canon express the Hebrew people’s steadfast faith in God even in the face of exile and torment.

But, faith in what? In Voltaire’s Candide, Dr. Pangloss blithely asserts, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that this is “the best of all possible worlds” and we could choose to go blithely along trusting that everything is OK no matter how awful it seems – we could be passive and stoical and call it trust, but that seems like a tall order when things are going very wrong. When the Babylonians conquered Judea and the Hebrew people were exiled “to the rivers of Babylon,” they might well have abandoned their faith in God, and their religious practices along with it. They might have felt that the world is a random place and nothing matters, or they might have decided that the way to get along is to go along and adapted their faith to that of their captors, but instead they held fast – “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither” is not so much a statement of allegiance to a city or state as to what Jerusalem represented, even with the Temple in ruins and the people in exile – the Jerusalem they would “set above their chiefest joy” and the city that sits alone and weeps is a metaphor for their faith in God. Martyrs, through the centuries, both Jewish and Christian have held to their faith in God, saying with Job “though He kill me, yet I have faith in Him.”

In today’s world, we might opt for the inflated ego of faith in ourselves as the answer to it all – that this life is all there is, and we can manipulate it for the good of ourselves and our own. Or we might choose blind unquestioning faith in we know not what, like someone I knew who said that faith is “believing what you know cannot possibly be true.”
My personal choice is faith in God – not some anthropomorphic God – the proverbial old man with a long beard - but faith in a supreme power that is at the same time immanent – present and active, interacting in the world through us and our actions - and transcendent – more than the sum of human activity and human experience can comprehend - and that God is the unity of all life expressed in an infinite variety of ways, moving toward its own realization in that unity being re-established. In the words of the old hymn, “We are one in the spirit we are one in the Lord, and we pray that our unity will one day be restored.”

Belief is a one-time event – you decide what you believe, that decision divides the world into two camps – those who believe what you believe, and those who don’t. Call them good and bad, God and Satan, the way it should be and the way it shouldn’t be, it doesn’t matter. Even situational ethics or moral relativism does this – black and white ethics or morals are bad, situational or relativistic ethics or morals are good. In this sense belief is easy – it reduces to a bumper sticker, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

With faith it’s not so easy. First of all, faith has no proof – even if you say you have faith in “the word of God,” the question arises, which word? The Scriptures of every religion, including the Hebrew and Christian Canons, the apocrypha, the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of it, is rife with contradictions. If I have been uprooted from the land that my family has lived on for generations and transplanted to “the Rivers of Babylon,” what evidence do I have that life will return to what it was? The Temple has been destroyed, we have been settled in a strange land where we are expected to live as a subject people – what is the faith so strong that I can say “If I forget thee, o Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill,” when “gone is from the daughter of Zion all her splendor; her princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.” If I am a follower of Paul’s, seventy years after his death, and someone writes to me in his name telling me to “have faith,” what evidence do I have that there is anything real to trust in?

Belief-based religion is notorious for picking and choosing among the “word of God” to support particular views of what is right and wrong. Faith is above all trust – trust that there is a truth that is in Paul’s words, seen “through a glass, darkly;” and that will reveal itself when one is open to its unfolding.

And that trust is not a one-time event, it’s a discipline. By nature and by learning, we are predisposed to the question “is this good for me or bad” about everything in the world, and the “me” in that question quickly becomes “us” – our family, tribe, nation, etc. In other words, we default to belief and a binary world, and it takes work to recover our faith from our immediate reaction and return to a created position of trust and openness to how things will unfold. Also, in my own faith in God, I have to continually remind myself that while God’s will operates immanently – here and now - God’s perspective is transcendent and outside of time, so what appears to be an utter disaster now may in the long view be an important contribution toward the realization of that unity that is God.
So for me the question becomes how quickly can I recover from the latest threat or trauma and resume the discipline of faith, accepting what God/life offers me and discovering its significance (or lack of significance) in the fullness of time, while at the same time trusting that the commitments I have taken on – to my family, to the world – are also worthy of trust and that events that appear to be setbacks to those commitments will, ultimately forward them.

It is that practice of recovery that is the discipline of faith and the speed of recovery that is the metric for how much we are growing in faith. We will suffer setbacks and challenges to our faith on a daily, maybe an hourly basis. We will be tempted by to take the easier path and just believe, falling into the trap of excluding those who don’t believe as we do, and we may even, from time to time, lose faith altogether. Nietzsche said “that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Faith cannot be killed, but every time it takes a blow, the quicker we recover, the stronger we become in faith.

Paul as "The New Abraham" - thoughts on descent

2010-09-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my friend Rafael for getting me off my ass to post this.

Paul considered himself the “new Abraham.” Abraham brought God to the pagan world as part of his covenant with God (“if you take me for your God I will make you the father of many nations”). Paul brought God (through Jesus) to the Gentiles, bringing the Gentiles into the Abrahamic covenant. This required a redefinition of descent from Abraham – Jewish tradition held (and holds) that Jews are the blood descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and that somehow this blood descent was transferred when non-Jews joined the faith.

Some thoughts about the whole issue of descent through consanguinity vs. descent through adoption.:

• Unquestionably, Isaac is the fulfillment/manifestation of God’s covenant with Abraham – no Isaac, no “father of many nations.”

• Equally unquestionably, Isaac is Abraham’s son by blood, then Jacob is Isaac’s, etc. However, with each marriage – Isaac to Rebecca, Jacob to Rachel and Leah, new DNA enters the bloodline. By the time you get to Moses, who also marries outside the tribe, there is an enormous admixture of “gentile” blood, and all of those people beginning with Rebecca are considered in the Hebrew bloodline. This goes on throughout the OT and throughout history, including Ruth, who is an ancestor of David, who is supposedly an ancestor of Jesus, presumably on his mother’s side.

• In most early societies, lineage is reckoned patrilinearly. While reflective of male dominance overall, this is problematic since only the mother can be known with absolute certainty, assuming the birth is witnessed. Starting around 1600, Jews began using matrilineal descent for this reason, but by then it didn’t matter. Reform Jews use both patrilineal and matrilineal descent to determine tribe membership.

• My point in all of this is that it’s essentially arbitrary. Judaism, while not a proselytizing religion, has always accepted converts (cf Ruth, again) and, incidentally, the Hebrew names given to converts are either Abraham and Sarah or ***** ben Abraham or ***** bat Sarah, emphasizing that even a “Jew by choice” is now considered to share in the inheritance of Abraham, i.e. the covenant.

So here’s what I’m thinking: The past is essentially an invention anyhow. Quantum physics suggests that past and future are both determined by present actions – see http://tinyurl.com/248xzqc and so we have a situation that is essentially made up from the jump.

Paul’s case that anyone who declares themselves into the covenant is in has a strong foundation – converts had already been doing so for a couple of millennia by his time, and while men had to be circumcised as a sign (and blood sacrifice) when they opted in, women didn’t have to do anything but say so (“whither thou goest,” etc.). What’s required is not a huge leap of logic or faith – God’s covenant with Abraham (individually) required nothing from Abe except to go where God sent him and make God his God. God’s later covenant with the Hebrew people through Moses was the one with 613 stipulations. Paul, whilst I don’t’ think he ever says so explicitly, is implicitly distinguishing between the two covenants – he says that Jesus’ message is that everyone can come to the Abrahamic covenant through recreating his relationship with God the Father, and Paul extends this invitation beyond where Jesus went by bringing it to the Gentiles. He also says that those in the Mosaic covenant can follow Jesus without any need for rejection or violation of the Mosaic covenant.

I think that this message, while controversial to some at the time, was within the ground rules of mainstream Judaism in the First Century – sects were forming all over the place, and since the Babylonian Captivity, all sorts of new stuff was happening – house worship, synagogues, Rabbinical study. Also, while the Torah explicitly states that not one word may be added or subtracted from it, the rise of the Rabbis (Tanaim) opened up interpretation and debate as a legitimate intellectual activity within Judaism, so in that context the Jesus Movement was just one more school of thought, particularly since Jesus never claimed to be the Jewish Messiah – it wasn’t so long after the Prophets that the notion of a new Prophet would have been too extreme or heretical. I think it was Paul who was controversial by extending the Abrahamic Covenant to the Gentiles without any requirement that they (a) take on the outward sign of that covenant, which was a command given to Abraham (Gen 17:10) and (b) take on the Mosaic Covenant as well.

So I think that the evidence for Paul seeing himself as an emissary from Abraham through Jesus is convincing. I think that the problem for Jewish followers of Jesus in his time was that, for them, the Mosaic Covenant was part and parcel of the deal – no Moses, no Abraham. A short time later, after the Romans returned and the Temple was destroyed, this notion became a problem for the Romans as well, first because it departed from the Jewish position of conciliation with whoever was oppressing them at the time. Rome had just gone through a period where that position was briefly and bloodily abandoned, so they weren’t anxious to see it abandoned again and second because of the fiscus Judaicus – if followers of Jesus had to become Jews, that was a whole new and expanding tax base for Rome; if they didn’t, then Paul’s teaching was essentially stealing taxpayers from them. Combine this with John and Luke who were basically distorting Paul’s teaching to create a new religion that, in addition to not paying as much in taxes to Rome was teaching that allegiance to God superseded allegiance to the Emperor and the Emperor was not divine, and you were bound to piss the Romans off as well as the Jews. Poor Paul.

Beware the Secular Taliban

2010-07-06T17:36:00.000-07:00

In my last article I posed some questions and shared some thoughts on faith and what I think is the difference between faith and belief. As was the case with two prior articles on the Religion section of HP, this article drew a large number of responses ranging from appreciative to caustic. Since that posting I’ve read a number of articles in the Religion section and am puzzled by a pattern I think I’ve detected.

Not to pull rank, but by way of a relevant context, I consider myself a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in Neuropsychology and have studied biology, pharmacology, and (at an amateur level) quantum physics. Additionally, I’ve made a study late in my life of philosophy and theology. I find no essential contradiction between being a scientist and inquiring into philosophical or theological questions or even having religious faith. In this I find myself in the company of Einstein, Freeman Dyson, Charles Darwin and others as detailed in a recent post by Krista Tippett.

My theological thinking is, without doubt, on the radical end of the spectrum, so I’m used to being attacked from the right – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, even Buddhist from time to time, conservatives are offended by my lack of orthodoxy and my view that all institutional religions are (a) aimed at the same target and (b) fundamentally corrupted to the extent that they hold power over their adherents. What did come as a surprise was the vituperation I drew from those who proclaim themselves to be anti-religion, atheistic, scientific, and intellectual. Somehow the very fact that I consider this to be a legitimate area of inquiry seems deeply offensive to these folks.

So I have to wonder, what is so offensive? If I engage in an exploration of my own faith (and I distinguish faith from religion or belief), how does that harm those who would have you believe that they have settled the question once and for all. There is no God, all religions are false, and all those who profess any level of faith and belief are stupid. So why bother going online to call them names (it’s not just me, it’s anyone who posts from a faith perspective including the aforementioned conservatives who come in for their share of calumny from these supposed superior intellects)? One fellow was honest enough to answer that he just likes to argue, but most don’t.

I’ve come to believe that there is a scientific/intellectual right that is no less fundamentalist and no more tolerant of other views than their religious counterparts. Their belief system is one of the secular churches – science, mathematics, philosophy, etc., and anyone who does not think as they do is ipso facto evil. Oh, they would never use a term like evil – they use their world’s terms for evil – stupid, benighted, brainwashed, you name it.

What I will call Secular Fundamentalism is no more consistent with what it claims as its roots than Religious Fundamentalism is consistent with its own roots. Christian fundamentalism bears very little resemblance to the teachings or life of Jesus Christ, extreme Orthodox Judaism is more concerned with following rules than with the moral teachings on which Judaism stands, and as for Islamic Fundamentalism, the Prophet (PBOH) would barely recognize it.

My studies in science, philosophy, and theology have led me to a conclusion I consider both basic and inescapable. We know nothing for sure, and everything we think we know will someday be shown to be either false or only part of the story. As human beings we are very sure of what we know and equally sure that when we discover something we don’t know, we will figure it out. We are equally sure that there is nothing we don’t know (and don’t know we don’t know) that is worth bothering with. As Schopenhauer said: “every man mistakes the limits of his vision for the limits of the world.”

So to those who take issue with my exploration I say “yes, I may be wrong.” But to those who feel the need to be insulting and condescending about it, I say “what are you afraid of?” The 17th Century mathematician Blaise Pascal is famous for his metaphorical wager: If God does not exist and I act as if he does, I lose nothing. But if God does exist and I act as if he doesn’t, I lose everything.” On the face of it this seems to me to be a pretty cynical basis for belief, but even so it points toward an open mind that the detractors of religion seem to lack. As a psychologist, when I see a reaction that seems (a) intellectually inconsistent and (b) out of proportion to the stimulus it suggests to me that something is being threatened. It is human to resist being dominated by anything, even our own beliefs, and that is one reason I tried to make the case for faith as a more difficult but superior basis for the inquiry than belief – my detractors seem to have missed that point.

Belief is Easy - Faith is a Discipline

2010-06-25T11:39:00.000-07:00

Alan Watts drew an interesting distinction between belief and faith. Referring to the root of belief in Middle English (lief = wish), he said that belief is a heartfelt wish that things be or turn out a certain way – in other words, there is a way things should be and a way they shouldn’t be, and belief is a wish that they be the way they “should.” Faith, on the other hand is trust in the truth – things are the way they are, and that is what there is to work with. In other words, the only power I have is to play the particular hand that I’m dealt and trust that it will work out. In a specifically religious context there is a popular phrase “The will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you.” While of unknown origin, this phrase is consistent with numerous Biblical passages from both the Hebrew and Christian Canons and points to the essence of faith as trust.

But even if we accept Watts’ definition of faith, we are left with some questions. First, faith in what? One might opt for a Panglossian faith that this is “the best of all possible worlds” and go blithely along trusting that everything is OK no matter how awful it seems, or one might abandon faith altogether for, on the one hand, belief or on the other hand the view that the universe is random and nothing matters, or one might opt for the inflated ego of faith in oneself as the answer to it all, or blind faith, à la someone I knew who said that faith is “believing what you know cannot possibly be true.”

My personal choice is faith in God – not the anthropomorphic God of Western religion, but a panentheistic faith in a supreme power that is at the same time immanent (present) and transcendent, and that is the unity of all life expressed in an infinite variety of ways, moving toward its own realization in that unity being re-established.

I am including this expression of my own faith not because I think it’s the right one or the best one but because I need an example for purposes of this essay and would not presume to use anyone else’s faith as my example. Which brings me to my point: belief is a one-time event – you decide what you believe, that divides the world into two camps – call them good and bad, God and Satan, the way it should be and the way it shouldn’t be, it doesn’t matter. Even situational ethics or moral relativism does this – black and white ethics or morals are bad, situational or relativistic ethics or morals are good. In this sense belief is easy – in the words of a bumper sticker, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

With faith it’s not so easy. First of all, faith has no proof – if one is to have faith in “the word of God,” the question arises, which word? The Bible, including the Hebrew and Christian Canons, the apocrypha, the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of it, is rife with contradictions. Belief-based religion is notorious for picking and choosing among the “word of God” to support particular views of what is right and wrong. Faith is above all trust – trust that there is a truth that is only dimly reflected in human beings’ attempts to represent it, and that will reveal itself when one is open to its unfolding.

And that trust is not a one-time event, it’s a discipline. By wiring and by learning, we are predisposed to the question “is this good for me or bad” about everything in the world, and the “me” in that question quickly becomes “us” – our family, tribe, nation, etc. In other words, we default to belief, and faith takes work to recover from our immediate reaction and return to the created position of trust and openness to how things will unfold. Also, in my own faith in God, I have to continually remind myself that while God’s will operates immanently, God’s perspective is transcendent and outside of time, so what appears to be an utter disaster now may in the long view be an important contribution toward the realization of that unity that is God.

So for me the question becomes how quickly can I recover from the latest threat or trauma and resume my discipline of faith, accepting what God/life offers me and discovering its significance (or lack thereof) in the fullness of time, while at the same time trusting that the commitments I have taken on – to my family, to the world – are also worthy of trust and that events that appear to be setbacks to those commitments will, ultimately forward them, and it is the practice of that recovery that is the discipline of faith and the speed of recovery that is the metric for how much I am growing in faith.

Talk at Tikkun Leil Shavuot, NTHC, May 18, 2010

2010-05-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

After many years of labor an inventor discovered the art of making fire. He took his tools to the snow-clad northern regions and initiated a tribe into the art – and the advantages – of making fire. The people became so absorbed in this novelty that it did not occur to them to thank the inventor, who one day quietly slipped away. Being one of those rare human beings endowed with greatness, he had no desire to be remembered or revered; all he sought was the satisfaction of knowing that someone had benefited from his discovery.
The next tribe he went to was just as eager to learn as the first. But the local priests, jealous of the stranger's hold on the people, had him assassinated. To allay any suspicion of the crime, they had a portrait of the Great Inventor enthroned upon the main altar of the temple, and a liturgy designed so that his name would be revered and his memory kept alive. The greatest care was taken that not a single rubric of the liturgy was altered or omitted. The tools for making fire were enshrined within a casket and were said to bring healing to all who laid their hands on them with faith.
The High Priest himself undertook the task of compiling a Life of the Inventor. This became the Holy Book in which the Inventor's loving-kindness was offered as an example for all to emulate, his glorious deeds were eulogized, his superhuman nature made an article of faith. The priests saw to it that the Book was handed down to future generations, while they authoritatively interpreted the meaning of his words and the significance of his holy life and death. And they ruthlessly punished with death or excommunication anyone who deviated from their doctrine. Caught up as they were in these religious tasks, the people completely forgot the art of making fire.
From Taking Flight by Anthony de Mello -

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק, תִּרְדֹּף--לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה וְיָרַשְׁתָּ אֶת-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ.
Deut 16:20 Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive, and inherit the land which Adonai your God is giving you.

The key to understanding this oft-quoted injunction is to understand what is meant by צֶדֶק.. The word can be translated as justice or righteousness. The latter, in the context of Biblical times did not carry the sense of arrogance or self-righteousness that the word carries today, or in the religious context an overly showy piety or religiosity that may be sincere, but often is not. Instead it meant something more like conforming one’s behavior to God’s expectations – to do what is right is to do what is just, and vice versa. Similarly, “justice” can be understood to have more to do with living in the spirit of God’s expectations than living according to a code or rituals. Throughout the Tanach we find the terms “justice” and “righteousness” used interchangeably, for example in Amos:
וְיִגַּל כַּמַּיִם, מִשְׁפָּט; וּצְדָקָה, כְּנַחַל אֵיתָן. But let justice well up as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
And we find, notably in Deuteronomy and in Jonah the terms חמלה,compassion, רַחוּם, compassionate, and חסד, grace or graciousness closely associated, even equated, with God’s justice or righteousness
But in modern times a number of different forms of justice have been distinguished – three of the main ones are retributive justice, restorative justice, and distributive justice.

Retributive justice is, as is clear from the name, about retribution – justice in the sense of payback or getting even for a wrong that was done. Thus retributive justice always looks to the past to determine what is the “right” payback in the present or for the future. In theology it refers to divine retribution – punishment for failing to live up to God’s standards.

Restorative justice is also concerned with righting a wrong – in this case not by retribution or punishment but by restoring what was lost or taken away or by compensating the person who was wronged for the value lost.
Distributive justice means the just distribution of what is needed for life – food, clothing, shelter, etc. In a religious context we can say that it means just distribution of God’s gifts – divinely mandated economic and social justice, that God is equally available to all, that God’s spirit is distributed freely to each and every person and everyone has the power to transform God’s world into a place of that same justice and equality. In this view, there is no hierarchy – men don’t take precedence over women, Jews over Gentiles (or vice versa), rich over poor, etc.

צֶדֶק, justice or righteousness is also the root of הַצדָקָה, justification – to make just, and in the sense of Distributive Justice, justification must assume a common divine law for all humanity. This in turn requires that we posit one God who is the same for all people, Jewish, Gentile, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and non-believer alike. If we bring together all these terms – צֶדֶק, הַצדָקָה, חמלה ,רַחוּם, חסד – justice or righteousness, justification, compassion, compassionate, grace or graciousness we come to a sense that we are justified, brought right with God as a gift of God – that is, by God’s grace.

One writer draws an analogy to the air we breathe – “it is always and equally available for everyone in any normal place or time. We do nothing to obtain it, nothing to merit it, and it is there unconditionally for good and bad people alike. On the one hand it is absolutely transcendent, since we depend on it totally. On the other, it is absolutely immanent, since it is everywhere inside and outside us, all around us.”
The same author goes on to point out that air is a free offer that only becomes a free gift when we accept it and cooperate with it. Should we abuse the gift – pursue asphyxiation or hyperventilation, that is our choice, not the air acting on us. With God, as with air, it is a matter of collaboration and participation with what is already there, everywhere.
צֶדֶק – God’s righteousness, that is God’s very character as distributive justice, is, like air, a free offer that becomes a free gift through our participation with it, through our collaboration with God in tikkun olam – transforming the world. It is from God’s free offer of God’s own spirit – the primary distributive justice - that the secondary distributive justice that transforms the world will come.

We accept God’s offer by faith. For example, Habakkuk says וְצַדִּיק,בֶּאֱמוּנָתוֹ יִחְיֶה – the righteous shall live by his faith. Faith is to justice as breathing is to air – we accept the offer by participating in it. Don’t hear “faith” here as “belief.” They are vitally different. Alan Watts points out that the root of belief in middle English is lief – to fervently wish for. Faith, on the contrary is commitment to a program. To have faith in צֶדֶק is to commit oneself to being God’s partner in transforming the world into a place of love, joy, and peace through engaging from our heart and spirit. One familiar example of this is צדקה – charity, but not just giving money once a week or even once a day, or giving clothes or food at different times of the year (though both of those are good and worthy forms of charity), but day to day, minute to minute engagement with being charitable – with recognizing that God’s justice includes the even distribution of God’s spirit to all as a free offer, and that whether they accept the offer or not (because unlike air, which we decline at the cost of our life, God’s grace can be accepted or declined), the next person is as worthy of it as I am.

It is only if we remember this last point that we can avoid the trap of righteousness, or what our Christian neighbors call “works without faith.” As Jews we have a great structure of law that can be seen as the external manifestation of our covenantal relationship with God – 613 commandments, of which probably no human alive can keep all of them. As Reform Jews we have chosen to look to the spirit of the Law rather than its letter – with Hillel the tolerant and liberal “loose constructionist” of the Law, “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary — and now go study.” And some of us do go study and others don’t. In either case, when we turn from “faith with works”– living in conformance with the spirit of God’s law however we understand it – to following the letter of the law in the belief that that alone makes us good people – “works without faith” we find instances of Hasidic Rabbis who steal and embezzle, Catholic Priests who molest children, and all the other so-called “abuses of religion” we have seen over the years.
To bring God’s justice to bear in this world is possible only for humans by virtue of our being created in God’s image in that we (and apparently only we among God’s creations) share with God the ability for what has been called time binding. This is a term coined by Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics. Korzybski posited that all living things engage in bindings at progressively more complex levels. Energy binding is what all life forms do in the process of converting ambient energy for use in their life processes. Space binding is performed by animals and to a much lesser degree by some plants in their various activities as they claim territory. Finally, through language and culture, human beings perform time binding by the transmission of knowledge and abstractions through time which become, by accretion, cultures.

Put more simply, animals, which bind energy and space, simply repeat the same instinctive actions over and over again, and each generation must acquire the same learned behaviors for itself. A dog today does not behave very differently from a dog in Biblical times. Human beings, on the other hand, pass on the lessons they have learned from generation to generation, and each generation builds on the learnings of those that have gone before. In the Tanach, particularly in the Torah, God is not static and unchanging. Rather, the God of Noah, who destroys most of life on Earth becomes the God of Abraham, who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and is at least open to possibly sparing the cities, becomes the God of Moses who tries nine non-lethal plagues before destroying the Egyptian first-born, the God of Jonah who spares Nineveh. In Exodus we are introduced to the attributes of God:

1. Adonai — compassion before man sins;
2. Adonai — compassion after man has sinned;
3. El — mighty in compassion to give all creatures according to their need;
4. Rachum — merciful, that mankind may not be distressed;
5. Chanun — gracious if mankind is already in distress;
6. Erech appayim — slow to anger;
7. Rav chesed — plenteous in mercy;
8. Emet — truth;
9. Notzer chesed laalafim — keeping mercy unto thousands;
10. Noseh avon — forgiving iniquity;
11. Noseh peshah — forgiving transgression;
12. Noseh chatah — forgiving sin;
13. Venakeh — and pardoning.

Which Maimonides asserted are the essential ways God operates. As Maimonides interpreted these 13 attributes, they are the essence of God’s justice and therefore of the justice we are to pursue – compassion, mercy, graciousness, truth, forgiveness.

Einstein said “All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they have not behind them a living spirit." Following the rules, whether the 613 mitzvot, the principles of Reform Judaism, or the 13 attributes of God must be an expression of faith, not a substitute for faith. It’s an uneven proposition – works without faith is easy, but if I may borrow from the Christian canon, faith without action is no faith at all. Action is the natural expression of faith – it’s almost an oxymoron to talk about faith without action. The living spirit that Einstein is referring to is God’s own nature, offered to us through God’s distributive justice – it is God making us “just” like God,– this is what is meant, I believe, by human beings being created b’tzelem Elohim in the image of God, and like God we are free by nature – free to accept the offer or to decline the offer. To accept it is what we Habakkuk means by ֶאֱמוּנָ – faith – working toward a reclaiming of the world in partnership with God.

Working for justice, mercy, equality, and the equal value of every human being regardless of race, gender, sexual preference, skin color, economic status, religious belief, or any of the other irrelevant external factors that fool us into forgetting the Shema – that God is Unity.

The Question of Jesus and Christ: Part 2

2010-04-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

My posting in this section a couple of weeks ago (I’m Down with Jesus, it’s Christ that Gives Me a Problem) drew immediate responses and a larger number of responses than anything I’ve written on HP to date – like twice as many. The nature of the responses varied greatly, from serious engagement with the questions I raised to doctrinaire chiding that I was attempting, through “over-intellectualizing” to deny the deity of Christ. Some were appreciative of the inquiry, others snarky to downright nasty. A number attempted to deny that Jesus was a “mere Jew,” which is somewhat astonishing to me.

A predominant strain in the critical responses was to quote Scripture to disprove what I was saying, even though I made it clear that my inquiry began with a commitment to distinguishing what we (and scholars and theologians) can reasonably agree are likely to represent Jesus’ actual words (what Jesus said) versus what others such as John, Luke, and the early Church Fathers wrote and attributed to Jesus (what others said Jesus said and what others said about Jesus). I think it is the failure to make this distinction that is at the heart of the difference between those who would describe themselves or be described as “fundamentalists,” those who are more or less in the mainstream of Christianity and those who are making a serious study of Christianity.

Fundamentalism in America is generally considered to have begun with the Niagara Bible Conference (1878–1897) and is based in what are called the "five fundamentals"
• The Inerrancy of Scripture
• The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus
• The doctrine of substitutionary atonement by God's grace and through human faith
• The bodily resurrection of Jesus
• The authenticity of Christ's miracles (or, alternatively, his pre-millennial second coming)

My post addressed the second, third and fourth of these (though not the virgin birth), and by distinguishing what Jesus said from what others said he said or said about him, the first by implication or assumption, and this is what seemed to strike a nerve amongst my critics. Somehow fundamentalists seem to be able to reconcile the “inerrancy” of Scripture with the massive contradictions that there are between different accounts of the supposedly same events.

Also, the notion of inerrant scripture is, to me, untenable based on transcription and translation. In his book Misquoting Jesus Bart Ehrman makes the point that Scripture began as oral transmission that was then written down. In the absence of printing or other means of consistent reproduction, it was copied by hand, with inevitable errors in transcription. Translation of the writing into languages other than those in which it originated also led to errors of translation and differences of interpretation, raising the question of “which scripture?”

Finally, there were clear political agendas in some of the translations – for example, the King James Version translates Matthew 26:28 as “For this is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” Leave aside for the moment that the statement (at the Last Supper), if made by Jesus at all, would have been made in Aramaic but is rendered by Matthew in Greek. The Greek is “Touto gar estin to aima mou tēs diathēkēs to peri pollōn ekchunnomenon eis aphesin amartiōn” (This is my blood of the covenant which is shed on behalf of many for forgiveness of sins). There are two glaring differences here between the KJV “translation” and the Greek “original.” First is the substitution of “testament” for “covenant” διαθήκης (diathēkēs) can mean either and also “will” (in the sense of “last will and testament”) in Greek, but in English the two words have different meanings. A testament is a witnessing (cf “testimony”) or a statement of how one’s possessions are to be distributed after death. A covenant is a binding pact. The terminology “blood of the covenant” echoes Exodus 24:8 "So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people and said 'Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with these words.'”

More troublesome, though is not the questionable translation but the insertion of a word that is not there in the original – “new testament (or covenant)” for “testament.” By adding the word new and obscuring the reference to Exodus, the KJV translators drove a wedge into the already wide gap between Jesus and his Jewish roots.

I will say again that, in the teachings we can reasonably attribute to Jesus himself, there is nothing – not one thing – that contradicts or breaks with the Judaism of what came to be (thanks to the KJV) the “old” testament. In this most moving of statements of his legacy, Jesus tied the events of his life and imminent crucifixion to the seminal event of Judaism, the making of the covenant with God at Mount Sinai.

So as I said in my earlier post, I have no problem with Jesus. I’m just trying to understand the Christ event – the crucifixion and resurrection in the context of Jesus’ life and teachings as a Jew who never claimed to be anything but “the son of man,” a term which is not understandable except in the context of the time when that term (in Aramaic bein enosh) simply meant “a human being,” and was in common usage. It was not unusual for people in those times and that language to refer to themselves in the third person, and “son of man” was a common way to do this. The prophets use that term as did other people, and it manifestly does not mean “son of God.” Jesus may have been using the term to emphasize that, even as a prophet and teacher he was a human being among human beings.

I believe that Jesus’ message was what he said it was – asked what was most essential in God’s teachings, Jesus replied “to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your power,” which is the verse in Deuteronomy at the heart of the Shema(“Listen Israel, the Lord, your God, is unity”) and to love your neighbor as yourself. As to the Christ event, whatever happened there, the message seems clear to me – never lose hope.

I'm Down with Jesus, It's Christ that Gives Me a Problem

2010-04-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

As a Jew it took something for me to come to terms with Jesus the Jew. For the past several years I've made an avocational study of Jesus and his followers in their historical context, namely the two hundred years from 100 BCE to 100 CE, with particular attention to the question of what we can reasonably think Jesus said versus what others said he said or said about him. That study led me to the conclusions that (a) the teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, was a Jew and never intended to be anything but a Jew; (b) as a thinking Jew of his time, he took the view that what would become known as the "Hebrew Canon" (the Torah, writings, and prophets) was a starting place for interpretation and application, not the limit of thinking. In this he was consistent with the Pharisees, the Essenes, and, a bit later, the Tanaim, the Rabbis who created the Talmud and what is today Normative Judaism.

Viewed in this light, I have asserted that Jesus was the first Reform Jew - in his view of the Law as subject to interpretation, he anticipated the Pittsburgh Platform of 1899 that founded the Reform (or Liberal or Progressive) movement and in his radical approach (e.g. "it is not what goes into your mouth that makes you unclean, it is what comes out of it") the revision of the 1899 platform in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1999 that is the source document for the modern movement.

As a result, as Jew, I have no problem presenting myself as a follower of Jesus in the tradition of the ekklesia of James in Jerusalem around 50 CE. I endorse Jesus' extension of the Law in the so-called Antitheses and find that, in my own being it rings true that if I hate in my heart, that is the equivalent of committing murder, and that if I lust in my heart, that is, in principle, adultery. I find Jesus' messages of love, charity, caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and the prisoner consistent with the Judaism I grew up in, and his insistence on God's egalitarian love for the just and unjust consistent with my read on the essence of Judaism, Buddhism, and what Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy.

So far, so good. I can be a Jew who follows the teacher Jesus as easily as (or more easily than) I can be a Jew who follows, say, the Lubavitcher Rebbe or the teacher A. J. Heschel. I can easily avoid the troublesome question of messianism - the term has been blown out of proportion not by Jesus' words but by the likes of Luke, Paul, and the early Church for reasons that seem suspiciously political to me, so I choose not to deal with it, and I avoid what I consider the simplistic "Jews for Jesus" or so-called messianic Judaism problem.

Unfortunately as I study theology, and particularly the works of Christian theologians I respect, from C.S. Lewis to Walter Wink, say, there is an issue I cannot avoid so easily. This is the issue of what these theologians call "the Christ event," the resurrection and post-resurrection activities attributed to Jesus in all the Gospels and by Paul in his account of the event on the road to Damascus.

If I hold to a strict rule of only giving credence to what we can reasonably attribute directly to Jesus, the Christ event is not a problem, and neither is the Messiah question. By this standard Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah and never concretely referred to his bodily resurrection. In short, Jesus never claimed the title Christos (the anointed one, the messiah), it was attributed to him. But both as a psychologist and as a student of history I cannot escape the thought that something must have happened. Like the parallels between the story of the Biblical flood and other myths, e.g., Gilgamesh, the similarities are too great to be coincidental. Oh sure, we can say that the Gospel writers colluded, but that's a bit too Oliver Stone for my taste. There is too much evidence in a comparative reading of the Gospels that the writers did not always give the same account of events and often blatantly disagreed - why collude in this one area?

So what happened? On the one hand if Jesus was crucified, entombed, and that was the end of him (except for a putative incident of grave robbing), then Christianity is the greatest fraud in the history of the world - one that has taken in billions and cost the lives of millions. On the other hand, if Jesus did rise on the third day, and then simply continued to teach what he had always taught (but with the added authority of having risen), what does that mean to us?

By any pre-Christian definition of the Messiah, it does not mean that Jesus was the (or even a) messiah. The messiah of the times was a political leader, a revolutionary who would break the yoke of Gentile rule over the Jewish nation - clearly that has not happened yet and certainly did not happen then. If we accept the latter-day postulate of an eschatological messiah - one that will usher in the end of times and the kingdom of God, when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war anymore," when "the lion will lie down with the lamb," then Jesus fails this messianic test as well, the the doctrine of the "second coming" seems like an explanation that is both post hoc as well as tautological.

So if we assume that something happened and ask "what does it mean," I think that intellectual honesty and rigor requires that we attempt to answer that question in the light of Jesus' teachings, and in that regard I believe that his teachings regarding the "kingdom of God" are particularly relevant. Jesus preached a particularly strange eschatology - he taught that "the kingdom of God is (within/among) you" and that access to this kingdom (or to heaven, if you will) lay in how we treat each other in this world, now. He not only taught these principles, by all accounts he lived them. If we take his teaching at face value, and we look at his teaching methods - parables, stories, metaphors, mostly hyperbolic in the Near Eastern tradition, it is absolutely consistent that he would return from the dead to emphasize that it is in this world that his (God's) work must be done; if we take the Christ event as given, then God incarnated in Jesus not once but twice - what better way to communicate that God's work is to done here, among us, if the kingdom of heaven is to be realized?

2009-11-07T07:53:00.000-08:00

This week’s Torah portion is Vayera – it begins vayera eilav adonai – and God appeared to him, “him” in this case being Abraham. The Rabbis teach that this is a continuation of last week’s parsha which ended with Abraham and his household being circumcised, so God is visiting Abraham during his convalescence, from which we derive the sacred duty of bikur cholim, visiting the sick.

Then three travelers appear in the distance and Abraham breaks off the visit from God to greet them and invite them to rest and share a meal in his camp. From this the Rabbis infer that the mitzvah of hospitality to strangers is so important that Abraham puts it ahead of being in the presence of God (and God doesn’t seem to mind). Of course the strangers are malachim – angels – one who will proclaim the miracle of Sarah having a child at age 99, one who will visit God’s wrath on Sodom and Gomorrah, and one who will oversee the sacrifice of Isaac. Angels play a big part in this parshah.

Something also worth noting is that each of these angels play a part in an incident where Abraham interacts with God to make something happen. In fact, while the story of Abraham occupies a relatively small portion of Genesis, it’s interesting that whenever Abraham goes up against God, God changes.

In the ancient world view, there is heaven above, hell below, and earth in between. Until Abraham, the relationship to God was transactional - God gives, we take, we ask, God grants, we sin, God punishes, we sacrifice, God is appeased. In the early parts of Genesis, God’s relationship to humanity is parent-child – with Adam and Eve, with Cain, even with Noah the relationship is superior-subordinate. With Abraham we see a new relationship – what is called in Latin mutatis mutandur – in the act of changing, the changer is changed.

This view of God begins with Abraham and comes to full flower with Moses which is more of a partnership, particularly in the desert. We could say that the God of Genesis and Exodus moves through stages of development:

Creative (the creation)
Idealistic (Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel)
Destructive (Noah, Sodom & Gomorrah)
Collaborative (Moses, Joshua, Prophets)

and that Abraham is the catalyst for this development

Most divrei Torah on Vayera concentrate on the Akeda – the binding of Isaac, and almost all look at it from Abraham’s point of view – imagine the horror of being commanded to sacrifice your son, the son you and your wife had longed for and finally had when you had given up hope. Some Rabbis consider the akeda a test of Abraham on God’s part, others a provocation or punishment for signing a treaty with the King of the Philistines instead of wiping out the inhabitants of the land as God had commanded.

Occasionally we get an interpretation from Isaac’s point of view – remember Isaac is not a child at the time of the akeda – he is about 35 years old, yet he goes along without complaint.

But what about God’s point of view? For whatever reason, God decides to command Abraham to kill his son; Abraham obeys without cavil, even though this is the son he and Sarah prayed and wished for and that God himself granted. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that God is appalled that Abraham would obey such a heinous command and realizes the power he holds over his creation. He relents with regard to Abraham and is changed by the experience – God is confronted with the fact that (to quote Spiderman’s Uncle Ben) “with great power comes great responsibility,” and is changed in the process. God begins to mature from the idealistic God of Eden to the God of Moses who is a partner and is open to discussing his conclusions with his creation.

This idea engenders a very different worldview than that of the ancients, a worldview we subscribe to today. Today we consider the view of heaven above and earth below simplistic. We know that if heaven exists it is in a different cosmos than ours, and that the reality in which there is God and angels and heaven is in a realm that is other than the physical reality of planets and space and time. Quantum physics validates the notion of multiple “realities” and we accept that, at least conceptually, even if we don’t understand it.

Similarly, I think we have to challenge the traditional view of God as omnipotent, omniscient, unchanging, and detached from humanity. If we are created b’tzelem Elohim – in the image of God, is it too much of a stretch to suggest that we interact with God? In the words of Process Theology, God is not only transcendent – operating beyond the limits of experience (the traditional view), but also immanent – present, operating in this domain. Process theology holds that God is changed by interacting with God’s creation as much as that creation is changed by its interaction with God.

It seems to me that if we take b’tzelem Elohim and Shema Yisrael seriously, we are led to the process view. You’ve heard me espouse that there is a translation of the Shema that is more accurate than the traditional one of “Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God is One.” If you’ll forgive my repeating it, there are two words in Hebrew that translate as “one” – echad and yachid. Echad is a unity greater than its parts, as in "one+one+one is three", and as in "God is one" - not one as in "one and only," but rather a unity of multiples becoming one as, for example, a man and woman are “made one flesh” in marriage. Yachid - means individual, single, singular, as in "every single one of them", Yachid does not have the denotation of "whole" that echad has, but does mean "unique” or “singular." In the Yigdal hymn we find the phrase “echad v’eyn yachid” in reference to God – oneness without severalness. So a better translation of the Shema would be “Listen, Israel, God is Unity.”

So what do we get if we combine “in the image of God” and “God is unity?” For me, this evokes the notion of a hologram – in a hologram, each part of the image contains all the information of the whole image, and the more of them you combine, the clearer and sharper is the resulting image. What if we are all – and I mean “all,” not just Jews or Christians or Muslims, but all, are like holograms of God, and the more we connect to each other, the clearer is the immanence, the presence, of God?

There is a bit of folklore that the Messiah will come when one of two things happen:

When every Jew in the world observes Shabbat on the same day
When every Jew in the world violates Shabbat on the same day.

Maybe it’s not the observance, it’s the unity.

Proof of the Existence of God

2009-08-07T10:52:00.000-07:00

I think the cognitive/emotional/cultural development of the human race is the strongest argument imaginable for the existence of God.

I’ve had occasion recently to attend two events – one a concert by a young (in her ‘30’s) violin virtuosa, Elizabeth Pitcairn, playing the three-hundred year old “Mendelssohn Stradivarius” – the “red violin” of movie fame – and the other the Reno Philharmonic with its new conductor, Laura Jackson, playing Gershwin, also brilliantly.

It’s not just the music I’m talking about, though that was itself inspired, but so much more. As I looked around the two halls at hundreds of people sitting engaged with the music, I was struck by the sheer diversity – young, old, men, women, all races, you name it.

The other thing that struck me (and know that other than liking to listen, I am about as musical as a rock) is how remarkable it is that a large group of people can play a diverse lot of instruments in perfect coordination. It was fascinating to watch the conductors – what, exactly, do they do? I see a lot of body language, intense concentration, and nothing short of a miracle as they orchestrated (pun intended) a perfect blend of instruments, voices, and soloists.

So what does that have to do with the existence of God? I don’t know, really, but when I think about the evolution of the human race, from the caves and jungles through the middle ages, through the present day, and I see this kind of coordination and the ability to produce beauty so exquisite I can hardly be in the presence of it, I really understand where the “intelligent design” folks are coming from – this can’t be an accident.

Don’t get me wrong – I think creationism and intelligent design is a crock, but I can understand that it is impossible to think that all this happened by accident or a series of lucky coincidences – natural selection in a vacuum won’t cut it. It’s too much of a stretch to find a “survival of the fittest” explanation for the creation of music – music, art, artistic brilliance have no survival value that I can find credible, and while I can see survival value in collaboration, this is way beyond that.

So I choose to see the hand of a Great Unity behind it. If I’m wrong, then I think we’re poorer for it.

Why Did Adam Need Eve?

2009-05-17T07:39:00.000-07:00

God said “it is not good that man shall be alone. I will make a help meet for him.” Why was it not good? What did God see, in this Western creation myth, that gave God second thoughts about his initial idea, which was to create one man?

For most scholars and most of us, the Bible, particularly the early parts of the Hebrew Canon, are considered metaphors and parables, written sometime around the Sixth Century BCE, well after most of the events described in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible took place. It’s possible that much of the creation myth was written in a post hoc attempt to explain life as the writers knew it. There were men and women – they must have come from someplace. Taking the cultural primacy of men as a given, what better explanation (and justification) than primacy of creation? Men had to work hard, women gave birth in pain, how to account for that. They were close enough to pre-axial times that an angry God who exacted punishment would not be a leap of reasoning.

If we set aside this post hoc explanation, what else might be possible? How do we account for God’s judgment that “It is not good that man shall be alone, and given God’s omniscience, why didn’t God see that in the first place and create two men (the “Adam and Steve” hypothesis)? Or why not fashion man so that it was good for man to be alone?

If we take the entire Garden of Eden story – from Adam’s creation to the expulsion – as a metaphor, what does it tell us? God creates a man from the Earth, thereby joining Heaven and Earth in humanity. No other animal was created this way; only humans are part Heaven and part Earth. Further, this being is created b’tzelem Elohim – “in the image of God.” Then God creates a woman from the substance of the man, so she simultaneously embodies the unity of Heaven and Earth as the man does, but also the unity of humanity – men and women are not different in substance, only in form, but they are different, and difference is the point.

What was different when Eve was created? If we assume for a moment the spiritual unity of humans with God and with each other, then God and the world could now be approached from two different angles, two points of view. We could argue that until there was a second point of view, Adam really had no choices to make – whatever he did was what there was to do, not unlike an animal that follows its passing attention to this or that path. As soon as Eve was created, humanity became capable of choice – there were two views of everything – so we could say that if it was God’s intention to give humanity free will, then a second being – similar enough to be connected with but different enough to have a distinct view of the world – was needed. It was “not good for man to be alone,” and the “help” she would provide would be the most essential help – another view to make them both smarter.

So far, so good. But this was Eden – there were no “wrong” choices, except one – the metaphorical tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or we could say the tree of the awareness of choice. I say the tree is metaphorical because, in this view, it was not the fruit that provided the choice, but the existence of the tree itself. God created the possibility of choice when God created Eve. God created the reality of choice with the command not to eat of that particular tree, placed carefully in the center of the garden.

Anyone who has raised children knows that the surest way to get a child to do something is to tell them they are not allowed to do it. With that injunction, this tree, theretofore distinguished only by its placement in the center of the garden, became a shining temptation. No serpents needed. Adam and Eve were confronted with choice and it was Eve – the embodiment of difference – who made the choice and Adam who followed, and humanity was realized in its fullness as the entity that chooses and that learns through exploring differences. From there we can read much of Genesis as an exploration of how we dealt with differences – Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and his father Terah, Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and his father-in-law Laban, and Joseph and his brothers.

One story that is particularly interesting in this regard is in Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel. According to this account, after the Flood humanity had achieved the Divine ideal of unity, united by a universal language. In what is clearly an allegory inspired by Babylonian myth and architecture, we are told that human arrogance and materialism resulted in the dispersion of humanity and a great diversity of human language. Now God became known by different names – in today’s terms, Adonai, God, Allah, Buddha-nature, Brahma, Krsna, etc.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger said that “language is the house of being – in it, man dwells.” It was a short step from calling God by different names to thinking we were talking about different gods. Somehow we have no problem with the fact that what we call a chair is, in various places, called a silla, chaise, kisay, sedia, stuhl, or stol. We understand that these are simply signifiers for the same object. We seem to have a great deal of trouble, however, understanding that God and Allah and Krsna, and Buddha-nature could likewise be the same.

It is an accepted view in communication theory today that differences can make us smarter. James Surowiecki, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds presents ample evidence that a group, if it is diverse, will come up with smarter answers to a question or problem than its smartest member could have thought of. On the other side of the question, the report on the Challenger disaster, analysis of how we got mired in the Vietnam War, and other analyses of failed efforts show that “groupthink” – the tendency of a group with insufficient differences to stop thinking once they all agree – makes groups less smart. The historic tendency of religious institutions to demand conformity to their view of God, humanity, and nature flies in the face of this evidence. It would not be an exaggeration to say that religious dogma and religious institutions have tried for centuries to undo the work that God did in making us diverse.

If we accept the Christian Canon, then there are two instances in which God recreates Godself in humans – the first is Adam, the second is Jesus. If we accept the idea of b’tzelem Elohim, we can take this to mean that the qualities of God are invested in human form. However, if we start from the Creation, then this is true of all humans – Adam is the progenitor and is infused with both Heaven and Earth, and Eve, formed fully from Adam’s substance, is the same. If Jesus is “the new Adam,” that quality lies not in his being a unique creation, but in his consciousness of his unity with God, a unity all people share but of which they are less aware. If we postulate that the route to this unity with God is through unity with each other (this is consistent with both the Hebrew Canon and those parts of the Christian Canon that we can reasonably attribute to Jesus’ teaching, as well as with Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim teaching), then institutional religion, in its attempt to get everyone thinking the same, is its own worst enemy, or at least the enemy of that which it professes to promote.

Sermon at St. Patricks March 29, 2009

2009-03-31T16:33:00.000-07:00

There was a bad accident on Mt. Rose Highway last Sunday. Just past the Mt. Rose ski area as you go from here to Reno, the road very quickly became a sheet of ice, and cars began to skid and spin out as they hit it. It was around the curve just below the ski area, so cars going toward Reno would hit it unawares, and in just a short time there were 8 or 9 cars around the sides of the road, and more skidding past. People don’t always act in the smartest way in these situations, and some got out of their cars to look at the damage or talk to a driver of a car they’d hit or that had hit them. One such fellow, early on in the pile-up, got out of his car and was hit by a skidding car. He lay on the snowy ground, face down, bleeding and not really conscious.

A young man – pretty ordinary type, snowboarder clothes, driving an old pickup that had been hit and was in a snow bank, went over to the man to see if he was alright, and just as he reached him and was trying to decide what to do, whether to move the man, another car came skidding right toward them. The young man grabbed the injured man and moved him out of the way, then getting out of the way himself. All his indecision and worry about moving the man vanished, and he just acted, and in so doing he saved the man’s life.

The theme of today’s readings is service, particularly service when it’s uncomfortable, or difficult, or dangerous to serve. In the Gospel, Jesus says “Now my heart is troubled---and what shall I say? Shall I say, 'Father, do not let this hour come upon me'? But that is why I came---so that I might go through this hour of suffering.” Remember. In Hebrews, Paul says:”In his life on earth Jesus made his prayers and requests with loud cries and tears to God, who could save him from death. Because he was humble and devoted, God heard him. But even though he was God's Son, he learned through his sufferings to be obedient.” In the reading from Jeremiah, we see that God is so committed to people following his Law that he will “write it on their hearts, and they will all know God.”

Jesus also says “Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.”

When he was near death, Joshua, who had led the Children of Israel, confronted the fact that, now that they had reached the Promised Land, the Hebrews were attracted by the local gods and the local worship. Toward the end of the Book of Joshua God, through Joshua, gives them a capsule history of their covenant back to Abraham, and then demands their total commitment. Joshua then adds:

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell;

And then Joshua makes this ringing declaration:

Va’anochi uvayti, na-avod et Adonai!

but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24:15)

But what does it mean to “serve the Lord?” the word Joshua used is instructive in this regard. נעבד (na’avod) is from the Hebrew root עבד, (avod) which means “work,” so to serve God is to work for God – to do God’s work.

In his sermon a couple of weeks ago, Jim mentioned Albert Schweitzer – Schweitzer was quite a guy – a Physician, philosopher, theologian, and musician, and expert in all four fields. He wrote, lectured, played the organ at a virtuoso level, and – oh yes – in 1913 he founded a hospital in what is now Gabon in West Africa and spent the rest of his life ministering to the poorest of the poor until he died at the age of 90 in 1965.His philosophy was called “reverence for life” and he never hesitated to take on the “powers that be” on behalf of the poor, animals, and the environment. As a young man he preached a famous sermon that began Our culture divides people into two classes: civilized men, a title bestowed on the persons who do the classifying; and others, who have only the human form, who may perish or go to the dogs for all the "civilized men" care. After that introduction, he got really nasty about it, and then left for Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his philosophy. This is what he had to say about service:

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."

The Prophet Mohammed said “to serve God is to serve your fellow man.” Jesus, by his words and his example, seems to make it clear that we’re expected to serve even when it’s hard, uncomfortable, or dangerous, to the extent that he likens it to a kernel of wheat – it must die to its current form in order to be of use. Jesus exemplifies doing the right thing, the ethical thing, the compassionate thing, even when we don’t want to. In Luke, he says “Father, if you’re willing, let this cup pass from me. Nonetheless, not my will, but yours be done.” So a good question at the end of the day (or the end of days) might be “how have I served today, and if we find in the answer we’ve done the easy thing, the comfortable thing, the safe thing, maybe to resolve that tomorrow we will look for a better way to serve.

That young man on Mt. Rose Highway earned the accolade “good and faithful servant.” Can we say the same?

Pittsburgh Principles

2009-01-27T12:22:00.002-08:00

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.

Reform Judaism

2009-01-27T12:22:00.001-08:00

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.

The War on “Holidays”

2009-01-27T12:20:00.001-08:00

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.”

Lech Lecha 05

2009-01-27T12:19:00.001-08:00

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.

Reform Judaism

2009-01-27T12:17:00.001-08:00

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.

Tazria-Metzora

2009-01-27T12:16:00.002-08:00

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.

9/11/2001

2009-01-27T12:16:00.001-08:00

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.

13 Attributes

2009-01-27T12:15:00.001-08:00

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.

Shemini 05

2009-01-27T12:13:00.003-08:00

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.

London 05

2009-01-27T12:13:00.001-08:00

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.

Chukat 05

2009-01-27T12:12:00.001-08:00

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

Beha'alotecha 06

2009-01-27T12:11:00.001-08:00

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.

April 09

2009-01-27T12:10:00.001-08:00

· 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.

Ekev 07

2009-01-27T12:09:00.001-08:00

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.

Ekev

2009-01-27T12:08:00.001-08:00

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.

Matot-Masei

2009-01-27T12:07:00.004-08:00

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.

Balak

2009-01-27T12:07:00.003-08:00

This week’s Parshah, Balak, is home to one of the most famous and also problematic stories in the Torah, that of Balaam and his talking donkey. Here’s a short summary:

The Hebrews have defeated that Amorites and Amalekites and settled on the borders of Moab. Balak, king of Moab, is worried that he is next, and goes to the king of Midian for advice, particularly about Moses, since Moses lived in Midian during his self-exile from Egypt after he killed a slavemaster.

The king of Midian tells Balak that Moses’ power is in his relationship with God. To counter this power, Balak sends for the sorcerer Balaam, who is known to be on good terms with God and who seems to have sufficient power to bless and to curse that he can offset Moses’ power.

Balaam, confronted with that unfailing combination, flattery (those whom you bless are blessed, those whom you curse are cursed) and large amounts of money is definitely interested, but communes with God and God tells him not to go, so he declines. Balak asks him to think about it and sweetens the deal, and Balaam begs God to let him go, which God reluctantly does, but warns Balaam again that he is not to curse those whom God has blessed.

On the way to Moab, Balaam’s donkey balks on the road and Balaam beats him – this happens three times before it is revealed to Balaam that the reason the donkey is balking is that there is an angel in the road with a sword ready to kill Balaam for going against God’s wishes. Balaam is remorseful and offers to turn back, but the angel tells him to go on, but to speak only what God has given him to speak, namely that he may only bless, not curse, the people he is going to be brought to pronounce on (he doesn’t yet know it’s Israel).

When Balaam comes to Moab, King Balak brings him to hilltops overlooking the Hebrew camp, builds him altars and sacrifices and bids him curse Israel, and Balaam blesses them saying that he can only say what God gives him to say. Balak keeps upping the ante, taking him to other sites hoping something will change, and on the third try, Balaam pronounces the final blessing, Ma hatovu ohalecha Yaacov, mishkenotecha Yisrael – how good are your tents O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel and Balak sees it is hopeless and sends Balaam home.

In studying various writings on this parshah I was unable to find anything close to a definitive interpretation, Talmudic or modern. The various writers focus on what seem trivial details to me – the fact that the donkey was stopped and beaten three times, that Balaam was given three opportunities to curse the people, that the places where the angel stopped the donkey were each narrower than the last – none of this speaks to me. One thing that does seem significant, though, is that each time Balaam talks to God or to the angel, nothing changes. God starts out saying that Balaam is not to curse those whom God has blessed, and this doesn’t change. Even after the dramatic episode of the donkey and the angel, Balaam is left where he started.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the “still, small voice” in which God was revealed to Elijah. On the High Holy Days, the Unetane Tokef prayer says that on the Day of Judgment “The great Shofar is sounded and a still small voice is heard.” In my earlier remarks I said that I thought that faith is responding to that still, small voice, but what is that voice?

Jewish teaching holds that human beings have two conflicting impulses, the yetzer hara or impulse toward doing bad things and the yetzer hatov or impulse toward doing good things, and for me the story of Balaam is about this. Rather than merely an impulse, I think that that internal voice is where God lives in all of us. In my personal spiritual journey over the past 40 years or so I’ve come to believe less and less in the notion of God as some supernatural being sitting somewhere called heaven and watching us, as the song says, “from a distance.” Rather, I believe that each of us is a manifestation of God and that God in toto is all of us – said another way, each of us is God acting in the world from one point of view and if we could get together enough to share and respect all of our points of view, that would be God realized as God. That gives a whole other dimension to the Shema, where God is one, God is unity, might mean that God is realized when we are unified as one humanity.

So that “still small voice” is our communion with God. When Balaam speaks to God and doesn’t like the answer he gets, he goes back for another conversation and gets an answer he likes better, albeit one that is conflicting – you can go, but you cannot curse these people. How familiar is that? We know from our better nature, our yetzer hatov, what is the right thing to do, and yet there is that nagging urge to do something that sounds better – the yetzer hara in action. So we go ahead and do what we want to do, and that little voice keeps stopping us, slowing us down, and causing us conflict. Like Balaam in his encounter with the angel, every time we engage in the argument with ourself, we are left where we started, pulled between the two arguments with no one to resolve it but ourselves.

And finally, like Balaam, we come to the moment of truth when we hope that we, like Balaam, will in the end do the right thing. Balaam finds himself unable to curse those whom God had blessed – he opens his mouth and what comes out, three times, is a blessing. If those of great faith in the Torah teach us anything, it is that the yetzer hatov, the voice of God within us, will ultimately win out. Abraham is the model of listening to God – to the point of circumcising himself and being willing to sacrifice his son. The Torah never suggests that Abraham did not have second thoughts or doubts, only that, in the end, he did the right thing. Moses questioned his fitness for the task God gave him, but went ahead based on God’s word. Daniel entered the lion’s den, Job accepted his trials, and David went to face Goliath. None of them would have been human if they had not had doubts and second thoughts. Prophets – Elijah and Jonah, to name two, tried to run from what God gave them to do, only to return and do what was right.

One question that I and others have wondered about is why God stopped talking to people around the time the Second Temple was destroyed. Up till then God spoke to the prophets either directly or through angels or in dreams and visions, but since then no one, not even the great rabbis such as Maimonides, Rashi, or the Baal Shem Tov have claimed direct communication with God. Does that make sense? Not to me. I believe that God never stopped talking to people – rather we abandoned a metaphor, the metaphor of a disembodied God speaking to us in a conversation as a person would. I believe that God has always spoken in that internal, still, small voice and continues to do so if only we will listen.

Chukat

2009-01-27T12:07:00.001-08:00

This week’s Torah portion, Chukat, contains two difficult stories and a break in continuity. The break in continuity consists in the fact that the parshah begins where last week’s parshah, the story of Korach’s rebellion, left off, but midway through the parshah, the time frame jumps 37 years to the last years of the sojourn in the Desert. The Rabbis teach us that this is because after all the rebellion and complaining, the children of Israel had learned to get along and got along for all that time. Nonetheless, after 37 years we still find them complaining and that is one of the stories.

My mother (z”b) had a saying she was fond of – “even kreplach you get tired of if you eat it every day.” This saying went with a story about a mother who served her child’s favorite food, kreplach, every day until the child gently suggested that maybe they could have something else. To which the mother replied “Monday, you like kreplach, Tuesday, you like kreplach, Wednesday, you like kreplach, Thursday, you like kreplach – all of a sudden on Friday you don’t like kreplach. Similarly after almost 40 years of eating manna, the people complain that they are tired of it. In addition, they are in a place where there is even less water than usual, and complain about that, so God tells Moses to take his staff and speak to a certain rock and then gather water from the rock. Moses, angry at the people’s complaining and at their lack of trust in God rebukes them saying “do you think that we (Moses and Aaron) could get water from this rock?” He then strikes the rock twice and water flows. God, in turn, rebukes Moses for not following instructions and punishes him by telling him he will see the Promised Land but not lead the people in.

The second story in the parshah seems unrelated – every parshah in Numbers has some ritual instructions or Chukim in it and in this parshah contains the chukat of the red heifer with reference to the purification of people who have been in contact with dead bodies. The chukat of the red heifer, says in short to find a heifer (a cow that has not had a calf) that is absolutely pure red in color – the Talmud says that even two hairs that are not red disqualify the animal – sacrifice it, burn it, grind the ashes and sprinkle them on the contaminated person. The Talmud and even King Solomon considers this to be the most difficult, impenetrable piece of Torah and no scholar has ever claimed to have figured it out, and neither have I.

But when I look for themes the Parshah gets interesting. The Rabbis have many interpretations of why Moses error was so great as to deserve such a severe punishment – these range from disobeying the literal commandment of God to the fact that he was angry, to a lack of faith in God himself by saying “do you think we could get water from the rock” rather than “do you think God could get water from the rock.?” All of these are plausible and none hit the bull’s-eye (or heifer’s eye) for me. In the parshah, God is (once again) exasperated with the Hebrew people for their constant complaining and doubting, as is Moses. One could argue that depriving the people of Moses’ leadership just when they might need him most punishes them as much as it does Moses, but let’s assume that God does not punish to be punitive but to teach a lesson – what lesson is taught here. Some would say the lesson is strict, literal obedience to God’s word, but again I don’t find that tenable. If I did, and if those who hold this view really did, then I would kill my son when he was insolent (he’d never have made it past 12), stone adulterers, and keep slaves so I could treat them the way the Torah prescribes. So I’m looking for a more likely lesson.

That search brings me to the juxtaposition of the story of Moshe hika al tzur – Moses struck the rock – and the whole business of contact with the dead and purification with the ashes of the red heifer. Why, in Judaism, do we make such a big deal about contact with a dead body? Why does such contact make one so impure that they have to be put outside the camp unitl purified? And why is the purification so difficult and arcane? True, many religions such as Hinduism also consider contact with the dead to be contaminating, but others do not. Buddhist monks meditate over corpses to practice non-attachment, and many of our Christian brethren embalm and display the dead as an act of respect and remembrance.

The Rabbis teach that the Torah counsels, along with Aristotle, moderation in all things. Saul was punished by God for dishonoring himself by an excess of humility. A penitent is not to go to extremes such as self-mutilation or suicide to atone for sins, and we are commanded that mourning for the dead, even for a loved one, is to be a finite process. So, for example, the Hindu practice of suttee, where a widow throws herself on her dead husband’s funeral pyre and dies with him would be frowned upon, as would the practice of mortification of the flesh. But why? As intellectual heirs of Aristotle we in the West generally accept moderation as a good thing, but what makes it so?

I think the message of Chukat and of most of the Torah is one of acceptance rather than of obedience. By acceptance I don’t mean submission, but rather a kind of relationship to the world that does not involve either resistance or submission, but rather an attitude that this is what has happened and our job now is to deal with it. The Buddhists say that the source of all suffering is attachment, and that attachment can take the form of grasping or rejecting what happens.

To take loss as an example, it has been shown that grieving takes a natural course – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Research has also shown that the acute stages – denial, anger, and bargaining, if allowed to run their course, take about a month and the rest about a year. That sequence, however, can be prolonged if the mourner resists it and tries to pretend it is not there or indulges it and stays in any stage (particularly depression) not allowing it to end. The Rabbis intuitively recognized this long before Dr. Kübler-Ross, and set the rituals for mourning as 7 days of intense mourning (shiva), a month of less intense mourning, still saying Kaddish daily, and 11 months of less intensity saying Kaddish weekly. Research also shows that grieving reoccurs on the anniversary of the loss, hence the Yahrzeit custom or rememberance and on family holidays, hence Yizkor. This is a recipe for acceptance – I have suffered a loss, I will observe it and allow my natural grieving process to run its course – experience it fully – and when it is over I will move on.

Moses’s error? He did not accept what God decreed – take your staff, speak to the rock, and I will show the people. God’s exasperation with the people? They refused to accept that God had promised to look out for them – they demanded proof after proof and more and more. The contaminative quality of dead bodies – so that we accept our loss, bury our dead, and move on.

We speak of faith or trust in God, but what does that mean – about five years ago, just before New Years, I got a call from my doctor – some tests done that week on my liver function looked questionable – would I please come in after New Years for further tests? Well, needless to say that was not the best New Years I’ve ever had. By a few hours after my doctor’s call I was sure I had liver cancer and was going to die. I went through denial, anger, and bargaining in record time and spent most of the rest of the holiday in conversation with God, as usual taking both sides of the conversation myself. Finally, after some time in contemplation, the thought came to me as clear as a bell, “not my will, God, but yours” I realized two things as I had this thought: first, that it was my absolute commitment – I meant it with all my heart, and my anguish ceased as though a switch had been thrown. Second, I recognize that I was not the first to say it – it was a quote from a great Jewish teacher, Yeshua ben Yosef. That bothered me some, but after all, he was a Jew and if he could accept God’s will even in the matter of his own death, he seemed like a pretty good role model to me, notwithstanding what others had done, supposedly in his name.

Obviously I didn’t die, and I didn’t have liver or any other cancer, thanks be to God. What did happen was a profound realization of how powerful acceptance was. Quite suddenly I was free to go on with my life – I didn’t have to like it or enjoy the prospect of what might be my imminent demise, but I was released from obsessing over what, why, and what it all meant. None of that mattered. I was free to live again for as long as I did.

Traditionally, going all the way back at least to the Exodus, Jews aren’t very good at acceptance. Abraham was – all the way to going to circumcising himself and going to sacrifice his son, but it kind of went downhill from there to all the kvetching in the desert. There’s a story of a Jewish mother who was walking on the beach with her son…..[HAT STORY] – that kind of sums it up for us culturally.

But I’d like to think that 21st Century Judaism, particularly Reform, Reconstruction, and Jewish Renewal, is about accepting what God has given us and making the most of it. For me, that started with the commitment that my life was not really mine to control – that all my plans could be shattered by an illness or an accident or a terrorist plot that put me in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once I accepted that, it became a question of what I was going to do with what God gave me, be it time, or resources, or the opportunity to influence something in a positive direction, or the opportunity to learn something that would make a difference.

Beha'alotecha

2009-01-27T12:06:00.001-08:00

This week’s Torah portion, Beha’alotecha, has a great deal of beautiful imagery based on the Menorah and on light, but Rachell is going to talk about those tomorrow and so you’ll have to come back if you want to hear about that part.

There are two parts of the Torah portion and Haftarah I do want to mention, though, and they are particularly apt, I think for the weekend of a Bat Mitzvah. Much of the Torah portion is concerned with the dedication of the Levites to service to God, a theme that is repeated in the Haftarah the Prophet Zechariah has a vision of Joshua being invested by God as the High Priest.

We could read both of these as the establishment of a religious hierarchy – Priests and Levites to serve God on behalf of the Jewish people, and indeed for much of our history it has been read that way. During Temple times there were services and ceremonies that only the Priests and Levites could perform and places in the Holy Temple where only they could go. To this day Orthodox and some Conservative congregations reserve the first two Aliyot – being called up to the Torah – for Kohanim, priests, and Levi’im, Levites. Reform and other modern forms of Judaism have done away with this hierarchy.

I prefer to see it as an investiture of the entire Jewish people with holiness. As we read a few weeks ago, God’s commandment to Israel is to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people,” and for me that places the Kohanim and Levi’im in a different light – they are no holier than anyone else, but rather were designated by God as the exemplars of holiness and administrators (ministers) of the procedures, e.g., sacrifices, cleansings, etc., that God provided as means and signs of holiness.

I think a Bat Mitzvah serves a similar purpose. People have recognized since ancient times that children cannot be held fully responsible for their actions –self-control, a sense of morality, and the ability to think about matters such as right and wrong as abstractions rather than concrete or inflexible rules develop gradually, and don’t begin to come into their full complexity until the age of 12 give or take a few years, so most cultures developed rituals to acknowledge this coming to an age of responsibility. Sometimes, by reason of coincidence, we think of these as related to sexual maturity, but I think they are much more closely related to emotional and intellectual maturation. A Bat Mitzvah is such a rite of passage into adult responsibilities, if not adult privileges. It is a ceremony much like those in this week’s Parshah, that invests the young person with the mantle of and the responsibility for the commandment “you shall be holy, for I, your God, am holy.”
But what does that responsibility mean? Sometimes we think of it as responsibility as obligation – from now on Rachell will be obligated to follow God’s commandments, to put on Tefillin (though there is no prohibition on a younger person doing so, they are not required to). With this view of responsibility, holiness takes on what the late Fritz Perls used to call a “shouldistic framework” – a life constrained and restricted by rules and prohibitions. Like most liberal thinkers I’m not much called to that interpretation.

Rather, I think responsibility means what it says – response ability – the ability to respond and to respond maturely and intelligently. As I’ve studied the Torah every week for these services, I’ve been struck by how many paragraphs and chapters begin as this week’s does with the words “Vayidaber Adonai” – and God spoke. You really get the impression that in Torah times God was pretty chatty – but why? Oftentimes when someone repeats themselves or talks a lot it’s because the person they are talking to hasn’t given them any indication that they’ve heard and understood. In other words, the response they’re getting, if any, isn’t adequate, so I wonder of the point of a Bat Mitzvah is not to underscore for Rachell and for the community that she is now able to respond when God calls, and that if she chooses not to respond, that is also a choice for which she can be fully accountable. In other words, she is responsible for herself, and is free to make her own choices (though her parents may not wholly agree, that is the Jewish position, at least on religious matters).

When I was young, that kind of freedom sounded like a pretty good deal. After my Bar Mitzvah it meant no more religious school – I’d see the Rabbi when I wanted to and on my own terms. When I went off to college that meant freedom from my parents’ oversight and sounded even better.

Funny thing, though. At Cornell, where I went to college in the early ’60’s, it wasn’t long before I encountered a phrase that was pretty much a mantra for people dealing with us cocky freshmen – the phrase was “freedom with responsibility.” I found out that the good news was that I could make up my own mind; the bad news was that whatever I made up my mind to do, the consequences of that decision were also mine. In some cases those consequences were very clear – I chose to sleep through many an 8 am calculus class, and my grades at the end of the semester reflected the knowledge I didn’t have as a result.

In other cases it wasn’t so clear-cut. Passover came in the Spring of my Freshman year, and it was all up to me. At home my mother cleaned the house and stocked it with Passover foods, she cooked meals that were kosher for Passover, and my father made the Seder. I was expected to stay home from school on the first, second, and seventh day and to go to services. To go to school or not to go to services would cause that most dreaded of imaginary events: a shande fur die goyim!! A shame in front of the Gentiles. After all, would they go to school on Christmas?
Now it was, as I said, up to me. I could eat ham sandwiches three meals a day all through Passover and no one would notice. Classes went on, and if I didn’t go, there would be no more allowance made for my non-attendance than there was when I slept through 8 o’clock calculus. There was a Seder at Hillel that I could go to or not, and if I didn’t, no one in that free-thinking community would have given it a second though.

The problem was that, unlike cutting classes, there was no clear effect of my choice either way. It was, essentially, between me and God, and God is notoriously hard to read in these internal theological debates. And if you’re wondering, in my four years at Cornell sometimes I chose one way, sometimes the other.

So I think the responsibility we’re talking about here is different from the responsibility for going to class or listening to one’s parents. I think it’s a responsibility of spirit. I’ve been wrestling with being ordained as a Rabbi, and I notice that in Judaism we don’t have as clear an idea of a “calling” that my friends who are Christian clergy have. In the Tanach I find instances of God calling people to service – Abraham, Moses, Samson, and later Jonah and Daniel and others – but not to ministry. When the Rabbis address ministry they address it as everyone’s job. Indeed, the idea of an ordained clergy is relatively recent in Judaism and serves as an indication that a person is qualified to interpret and rule on issues of law and custom. One publication I have that deals with Jewish law and ritual practice notes that issues in this area are rife with local customs and that the question of what is acceptable under halachah should be brought to the Rabbi who “as mara d’atra the local decisor, has the authority to determine such issues.” The same publication states very clearly that in the case of the shaliach tzibur, the person leading community prayer, “the rabbi may function as a guide; however a rabbi is not necessary fro the conduct of public worship.” This is very different from what you would find in liturgical manuals for many other faiths.

In the absence of any notion in Judaism of a “calling” or a specific inspiration from God, to what does the “response able” person respond? When Eliyahu Hanavi, the Prophet Elijah, fled from Jerusalem because the Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab, was out to kill him, he hides in a cave until God asks him “what are you doing here?” that is, why is he not preaching as God told him to. He is told to go outside the cave and "stand before the Lord." A terrible wind passes, but God is not in the wind. A great earthquake shakes the mountain, but God is not in the earthquake. Then a fire passes the mountain, but God is not in the fire. Then a "still small voice" comes to Elijah and asks again, "What doest thou here, Elijah?"

I think it is to that “still small voice” that the response-able person must respond. We have to quiet all the clamor outside and inside us to hear that voice, and that quieting is what we mean by faith. Faith is not loudly proclaiming our goodness or condemning others’ wrongdoing, it is becoming quite enough in ourselves to hear what God wants for us. As Zechariah says in this week’s Haftarah, “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says the LORD of hosts,” and that spirit is what we hear when we listen and what we respond to when we are able.

Naso

2009-01-27T12:05:00.004-08:00

This week’s Torah Portion is Naso, the second parshah in the book of Numbers. Also Wednesday and Thursday were Shavuot and Monday is Memorial Day, so I’ve been thinking about how to tie all these together.

Among all the rules and regulations that constitute most of Leviticus and Numbers, the Torah Portion contains two elements that stand out for me. One relates to a story you may have heard me tell around Passover – after the census of all 12 tribes in last week’s Parshah, this week the four groups that were central to worship in the Temple were numbered and brought offerings. The first to do so was one Nachshon ben Aminadav of the tribe of Judah – the same Nachshon that, when the Hebrews were fleeing from Egypt, was the first to jump into the Red Sea, after which the waters parted. For this “leap of faith,” Judah was given primacy among the tribes and Nachshon brought the first offering. Those of you who have heard me tell this story at Passover know that Nachshon is one of my favorite characters in the Torah because he was willing to act on faith and trust in God’s word.

In the Haftarah this week we see the birth of Samson, the great hero and another case of an elderly, barren couple being granted a child by God, who commands that the child be, from birth, a Nazirite – an ultra-observant Jew who never cuts his hair, eats meat, etc., and the rules for Nazirites are also in this Parshah.
Shavuot is the anniversary of the revelation at Sinai and of the Ten Commandments. While it is one of the three pilgrimage festivals in the Jewish year, it isn’t well-known or widely observed – no special meals, no big services, no home ceremonies. Traditionally we eat dairy in observance of the promise of a “land of milk and honey” and some Jews stay up all night studying Torah to make up for the legend that the people fell asleep while Moses was on Mt. Sinai. And we read the Book of Ruth – the story of a woman gentile woman who converted and was loyal to her mother-in-law after her husband’s death. Ruth then married a man named Boaz, and was an ancestor of King David.

So how does this all tie together? Actually, to tie it up we have to go several generations forward from Sinai. Nachshon was an ancestor of Boaz, who was an ancestor of King David, who according to the story of the Christian Bible was an ancestor of Jesus, as the prophets foretold the Messiah would be. Whatever you believe about Jesus, the lineage of the whoever the Messiah is will reach back through King David to Nachshon at Sinai and at the Red Sea.

But for me the focus of Parshat Naso is the reappearance of Nachshon and the realization that his otherwise unheralded act at the Red Sea brought the Tribe of Judah to the forefront of the twelve tribes, setting the stage at least for King David, who was really the first to create the nation of Israel. We know very little about Nachshon personally – he was a prince of Judah and he must have had great faith, when others were afraid to enter the sea, to the point of being willing to make a hopeless stand against the Egyptian army, he jumped in. God had said they would cross the sea, but I’ve always found it interesting that God did not part the sea until this one man had the faith and courage to jump in – perhaps the origin of the saying that God helps those who help themselves.

Jews don’t talk much about why we are supposed to do what we’re supposed to do. Maybe it’s the influence of being brought up by Jewish mothers, but mostly it seems to be “do it because God said so.” We even say to God in Exodus that we will obey, then we’ll understand. But why? There are intimations in the Bible about a “world to come” – ha’olam haba – the next world, but this isn’t spelled out very clearly, and the prophets allude to the possibility of resurrection of some kind, but again it’s vague. Mostly, we are supposed to do the right thing in this world because it’s the right thing to do – Judaism is, perhaps above all, an ethical system. Halachic Jews try to keep all of the 613 mitzvot in the Torah, and Karaite Jews say that that’s the most important thing – follow the letter of the law. Some Jews, especially in post-Temple times, have said that the Law is impossible to follow, so it’s no use following any of it. Reform Jews and those very early reform Jews who followed Jesus, said that on the one hand the Law doesn’t go far enough – it’s not enough to do the right thing, you have to do the right thing with the right heart behind it – and on the other hand, it goes too far – for example, why would anything God made be unclean to eat? – and so what counts is faith and morality – from there you will do the right thing.
I’m fond of quoting the Prophet Micah who said “You have been told what is good and what God requires of you: only to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.” The Talmud says in several places that this, like Hillel’s “what is hateful to you, do not do to someone else” is a good concise summary of the Law. If we take Nachshon as an exemplar, clearly he meets Micah’s and Hillel’s criteria – what could be more humble before God than to act on faith alone? He was a prince of Judah, but would not have his tribe do something he would not do, and we could argue that his leap was an act of mercy in that it spared many on both sides from being killed in the fight that would have happened had the people taken their stand on the west shore of the sea instead of singing and rejoicing on the east shore. That the Egyptians chose to follow and were drowned goes on them, not on Nachshon or the Hebrews.

In the Pirke Avot, Rabbi Tarphon says “The day is short, the task is hard, the workmen are sluggish, the reward is great, and the Master of the work is demanding.” He also said, It is not for you to finish the work, nor are you free to abandon it.”;

When I was young I wondered about that passage. It seemed to mean something along the lines of “life is hard, and you’re stuck with it.” As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to a different appreciation of it
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I think it means that if your life is going to mean something, if you’re out to make a difference in the world, you’ll need to take on something that is beyond what you think you can do – to take on tasks that seem impossible and, like Nachshon, leap in on faith. If you do, you’ll soon find that you don’t have enough time – the day is short – the task is hard, the people you work with and for seem to be dragging their feet sometimes, and the importance of the work will demand that you stay with it.

Most importantly, you will learn that the things in life that are truly worth doing, whether it’s raising children, serving your community, fighting disease, ending hunger, fighting injustice, or whatever you take on, are things you can’t expect yourself to finish, and yet you’re not free to abandon them. You could say that, where the big problems of the world are concerned, we are the keepers, the stewards of those problems, not the solvers.

That brings me to Memorial Day. I hate war. I'm not quite a pacifist – I recognize that sometimes war is the only possible course of action, but I view it as a failure of faith, a failure of humanity, and a failure of communication. I avoided Vietnam and I don’t know what I’d advise my children if I had children of military age today. But I do think that for the individual enlistee or draftee, to go to war is an act of faith. Faith in the justness of your country’s stand, faith in your fellow soldiers, and faith in yourself, and so it’s like Nachshon’s leap, and so it’s right and an honorable thing to remember our war dead and to honor their sacrifice, as much as we might deplore that the sacrifice was called for. It is an act of stewardship – the soldier’s hope is to leave the world a better place, even if what it takes to do that is something as horrific as war.

The main thing, I think, in Micah’s terms is to “walk humbly,” even in the extreme of going to war. I have never believed that God is on our side, or anyone’s sides. Why would God take sides? If God really took sides, there would be no sides. The multiplicity of religions, philosophies, nations, views, creeds, are all part of God’s plan, or God is not who we think he is. Clearly, God favors diversity and is at least willing to tolerate the conflict that diversity brings, and that conflict and the creativity that it engenders may be part of God’s plan.

So that’s my wish for us this Shavuot/Memorial Day. That we take on big problems - hard tasks that are worth doing. That we demand much of ourselves, and dedicate ourselves and our lives to making a difference in something that will matter. To leap like Nachshon into the uncertainty that comes with taking on more than we know we can do and that what we take on is doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.

I’ll close with another quote, from the great humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who had this to say about people who take on big jobs: “Existence will thereby become harder for them in every respect than it would be if they lived for themselves. But at the same time it will be richer, more beautiful and happier. It will become, instead of mere living, a real experience of life.

Emor 2007

2009-01-27T12:05:00.003-08:00

The Torah Portion, Emor, read a couple of weeks aga, deals with a number of things all around the theme of holiness – the regulations for the Priests and the Sanctuary, the issues of Chillul Hashem – profaning God’s name – and Kiddush Hashem – sanctifying God’s name, the Holy Days (Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot as well as Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur), the Ner Tamid or eternal light and the altar bread for the Temple. It also contains one of the best known parts of the Torah, what is called in Latin the Lex Talionis or Law of Retaliation, an eye for an eye, and the penalties for blasphemy.

In studying the commentary on this parsha, one word kept coming up; honor in Hebrew Kavod. The overarching theme of this parsha and the parashot around it is holiness – here specifically the holiness of God’s name, the holiness of the holidays and of justice. So we have to ask, what is the relationship of holiness and honor?

I keep coming back to the Exodus Chapter 19: Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. While we could read this as God offering an incentive for following God’s commandments, the Rabbis have generally taken it as a commandment – indeed the preceding week’s Parsha, Kedoshim, begins You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy. Now in Emor we are enjoined against Chillul Hashem and directed toward Kiddush Hashem – away from dishonoring God’s name and toward sanctifying it – making it holy.

But how can we make God’s name holy? We are told over and over again that God’s name is holy – so holy that we cannot know God’s true name, represented by the tetragrammaton יהוה and only refer to God by various titles and metaphors. I think the connection lies in kavod – honor. When we honor God’s name by our actions we respect the holiness of God’s name by making ourselves more holy, and when we dishonor God’s name we tarnish the holiness of God’s name in others’ eyes and make ourselves less holy.

“Chillul Hashem” means “Desecration of G-d’s Name.” Colloquially, it refers to anything that gives God, Judaism, Torah/Mitzvot or Jews a bad name and a bad reputation.
But in a stricter, legal sense, it refers to when a Jew is faced with the choice of committing one of the three cardinal sins - accepting another god or religion, committing murder, or engaging in certain illicit sexual relations – with refusal to do these meaning they will be killed , Chillul Hashem consists in choosing survival over doing what is required.. Why is this Chillul Hashem? Why should he die? Because belief in the one God, respect for human life, and sexual decency are the three core pillars of society, and a person giving in to these is essentially saying that the Truth is not really the truth after all.

Very importantly, these three are the ONLY Torah laws that a Jew must die for. If your life depended on it, you may eat non-Kosher, steal, violate the Shabbat or smack your best friend, because they’re not societal pillars like those Big Three.
Chillul Hashem is more loosely translated as a desecration of G-d's name. However, the Orchos Tzaddikim, an anonymous classic work on Jewish ethics, explains that a chillul Hashem is when someone does something wrong, and other people take example from him and also do wrong. This teaches us a powerful life lesson: The more a person is looked up to, be it in spiritual, business, or social circles, the more careful he must be not to set the wrong example.
As a 14th century Torah commentary points out, the answer is in this week’s parsha when God says And ye shall not profane My holy name; but I will be hallowed among the children of Israel: I am the LORD who hallow you. In other words one can get partial atonement for a chillul Hashem by performing a kiddush Hashem - by making a public sanctification of G-d's name. A kiddush Hashem is the opposite of a chillul Hashem. So if a chillul Hashem is doing a wrong action which others will take example from and follow, a kiddush Hashem would be doing a correct action which others see and are inspired by to do likewise.
But so often in my work I talk with people about leadership and their response is “but I’m not a leader – no one follows my example.” In fact, though, all of us have the opportunity to set an example for others. If we notice that we’ve been undercharged in the super market and we don’t go back to have it corrected just as we would have done if we were overcharged, we are setting an example for our children, our friends, and anyone around us. As importantly, psychologists know that we are “setting an example” for ourselves – when we commit a chillul Hashem, large or small, we betray ourselves, and psychologically we then have to justify that by rationalizing it so that we are right and, inevitably, others are wrong – then the next time we are in a similar situation we are more likely to repeat our actions, compounding the aveirah.

This is a tough row to hoe. The Rabbis point out that, contrary to our modern relativistic view, there is no gray here – every act, however small is either a chillul Hashem or a Kiddush Hashem. Every act is either honorable or dishonorable. As I often point out, I think that halachic Jews have it easier in this regard. Just about every part of everyday life is covered by some halacha, by at least one of the 613 mitzvot, and so they have a clear compass to guide them. For Progressive or Reform Jews, though, we must find our own moral compass and this requires something very difficult for many people – it requires being true to ourselves and not buying our own, very reasonable, rationalizations. In Hamlet, Polonius’ last piece of advice to Laertes is This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. This really says it all –the only way we can commit Chllul Hashem is to be untrue to – to ignore and rationalize away – what in our own hearts we know is the right thing to do.

So in the last analysis I think that Kedusha – holiness and Kavod – honor are the same thing. When we act honorably, that is Kiddush Hashem, whether it is the extreme of “death before dishonor” or the small act of kindness or justice or charity.

Yom Hashoah

2009-01-27T12:05:00.001-08:00

This week’s Torah portion is Shemini, from the book of Leviticus, which tells the story of the Priests taking on their office for the first time and particularly about Aaron, the High Priest. On what should have been the happiest day of Aaron’s life, his eldest sons Nadab and Abihu, themselves priests, possibly having had too much to drink, change an important part of the Service and are killed by God. One commentary says that the moral of this story is “Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” Also the commentaries make much of Aaron’s silence in the face of his two sons’ deaths – there is debate over whether it was a silence of surrender or of struggle, but Aaron was, unquestionably, silent. Naturally, given that tonight’s service focuses on the Shoah, the Holocaust, I thought about the Parshah in that context. First of all, clearly the Shoah was a case of “knowing not what a day may bring forth.” Jews in Europe, and particularly in Germany, were happy and assimilated. German Jews were famously certain that “it can’t happen here” and that they were “Germans first, then Jews,” but they were in for a big shock.

Thinking about the Shoah I went back to a talk I gave on Rosh Hashana in 2001, a week after 9/11. I said then:

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.

The same could be said of the Shoah, more than 60 years later – the world is a bit less than it was 60 years ago. The Shoah was not exclusively a Jewish event – as Jews we remember the 6 million Jews who died – perhaps as many as 1.2 million of them children – but we must also remember that others – Gypsies, the disabled, gay people, Communists and other political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, Polish citizens, and Soviet POWs. Taking into account all of the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably: estimates generally place the total number of victims at 9 to 11 million. Still for us as Jews it is Die Endlösung der Judenfrage – the final solution to the Jewish Question – that we remember most.

Yom Hashoah was originally meant to be observed on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising – April 19, 1943, or the 15th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar – but this was the first day of Passover, so the Israeli Parliament set the date at the 27th of Nisan or 8 days before Israel Independence Day on the 6th of Iyar. Its full name is Yom Hashoah v’Hag’vurah – the day of remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism, so it is appropriate that we remember the heroes and survivors as well as the martyrs.

Yet the Shoah was not the beginning nor was it the end of genocide or attempted genocide – the wiping out of a people and its culture. Going back only 500 years we find genocides reported historically in Argentina, Canada, The United States, Australia, Congo, German South-West Africa, Ireland, Tokugawa Japan, Philippines, Russian Empire, Croatia, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), the Soviet Union, Communist China, Bangladesh, Burundi , Cambodia, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, Tibet, Papua New Guinea, Bosnia, Rwanda, and today in Darfur. One could say the history of the human race is a history of our attempting to wipe each other out. In order to do that, we first have to dehumanize those we hate. According to the organization Genocide Watch, there are 8 stages of Genocide: Classification, Symbolization, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Identification, Extermination, Denial. And these proceed sequentially. This means that we can see the beginnings of genocide and catch it early, and the earliest stage is when a society begins to classify itself as “us” and “them.”

As Jews we have always been “them” except in Israel. Over 400 years in the United States we have gradually come to be “us” for the majority of the population, but for a hard core of anti-semites and for some of the so-called religious right in this country we remain “them.” For Mel Gibson and his less well-known tribe, we are still the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy who control the media and start all the wars. For them, the Shoah was not the epitome of evil but a plot by Jews to cause the United States to go to war against the country that could have protected us from the Communist threat – also a Jewish conspiracy.

What nonsense. What unadulterated, hateful drivel. The facts are clear. Fanatics, particularly those who use religion as the basis of their fanaticism, have perpetrated acts of mass murder throughout history, and in so make war on all of humanity that is deserving of the name. No decent human being, regardless of race, religion, culture or ethnicity can fail to condemn genocide against innocent people, without regard to the race, religion, culture, or ethnicity of those victims. No decent human being can fail to condemn an attacks on innocent victims, often using other innocent victims as weapons. No decent human being can fail to condemn the use of suicide bombing as a tactic of genocide.

So if there is a lesson from the Shoah it is that we must not be silent. There is a famous statement by a Protestant Minister, Pastor Martin Niemoller:
In Germany they first come for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me—and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Whatever the source of Aaron’s silence, and I believe with Nachmanides that it was a silence of struggle and contemplation, we cannot afford to be silent in the face of hatred and genocide. Edmund Burke, the 18th century English statesman said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” It is for us as descendants of the heroes and martyrs of the Shoah to stand up and bear witness – “never again.” Never again not only for Jews but for all humanity. If we have a mission as “a kingdom of priests and a holy people,” if we are “to be holy for our God is holy,” it is this – to bring humanity together under a God whose name is unity and who does not care how he is worshipped – as Adonai, as God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as Allah, as the Tao – God only cares that the human race recognize that it is one people created by one God and therefore all united in our common humanity. There is no “us and them,” there is only us. Paradoxically, that is the lesson of the Shoah – Adonai echad u’shemo echad – God is unity and God’s name is unity.

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." God may be silent; let us not be.

Chol Hamoed Pesach 07

2009-01-27T12:00:00.001-08:00

This Shabbat is the Intermediate Shabbat of Passover – Chol Hamoed Pesach – and has special Torah readings and a special Haftarah associated with it. The Torah portion is, as you might expect, from Exodus and really introduces the Pesach – Shavuot season. Shavuot is 50 days after the first day of Passover and marks the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, 50 days after the Exodus. As you probably know, this involved two trips up the Mountain for Moses – when he came down the first time he found the people worshiping the golden calf they’d made and broke the first set of tablets.

On his second trip up the mountain, which is what this Torah portion covers, Moses is discouraged and begs God to make Himself known to the people in a way that will ensure that they know that it’s not just Moses talking to them, and to give Moses a clearer idea of who God is. This is where God passes by Moses and Moses is allowed to see God’s back. While God passes by, He declares Himself more explicitly than ever before in what have come to be called the 13 attributes of God
· Adonai, Adonai – God before and after
· El – Lord
· Rachum compassionate
· V’chanun merciful
· Erech apayim – slow to anger
· Rav chesed – abundant in mercy
· V’emet – and truth
· Notzer chesed l’alafim – bringing mercy to the thousandth generation
· Nosay avon – forgiving iniquity
· Va pasha – and transgression
· V’hata-ah – and sin
· V’ nakay – punishing the guilty

After that, God once again inscribes the tablets and Moses brings them down the mountain.

In the Haftarah we have the vision of the Prophet Ezekiel of the valley of dry bones rising up and coming to life which at the least symbolizes the rebirth of the Jewish people and, some say, the resurrection of the dead in the time of the Messiah.

All in all, a very upbeat, positive message for Passover. Of the attributes of God, all but one are about mercy and forgiveness and compassion, and even the last one – punishing the guilty – has to do with consequences of wrongdoing – the Torah tells us that the penitent is forgiven for the sin, just not exempt from the consequences.

So why all this compassion, mercy, and forgiveness? It certainly was not the norm for cultures at that time and the gods they worshipped, most of which were ferocious, demanding, and punitive – far from the picture the Torah paints of God. In my view, all of this is the direct result of monotheism – the belief in one God. Later in Deuteronomy when Moses repeats the story of the Ten Commandments, he clarifies the first two commandments by declaring the central tenet of Judaism, “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad.” “Listen up, Israel, the Lord our God is One.” And goes on to emphasize the importance of that tenet by the commandments to say the Shema upon arising and retiring, to bind them between our eyes and near our heart, to post them on our doors, etc.

That phrase and the first two commandments are sometimes seen simplistically as a declaration of difference – all those other guys worship multiple gods and argue about which gods hold precedence over others, but for Jews there’s only one God. And that’s true, but I think there is a deeper meaning here as well. Yes, we believe there is one God but another, equally valid translation of the Shema is “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is Unity.” In this view, if we are the people of God, then not only is God one, but we are called to be one with God and with each other. Said another way, anything that unites is God, anything that divides is against God. Seen that way, the 13 attributes take on a whole new dimension – all of them, even the last one, are about inclusion. God does not turn the sinning or the suffering away, but abounds in mercy, compassion, and forgiveness and even forgives the sinner while punishing the sin.

To bring the discussion to a more human scale, our job as followers of this God is to unite people – to be uniters, not dividers. Martin Buber, one of the greatest modern philosophers (who happened to be Jewish) talked about two kinds of relationship – I-It and I-Thou. I-It describes a self-absorbed, guarded way of being; when in the I-It mode we regard others as if they existed primarily in relationship to us and the relationship is rarely a positive one. In contrast is the sensitive, responsive way of being he calls I-Thou, signifying how we are when we regard others as having an inner life of hopes and needs that we respect as we do our own. In the terms we are discussing, I-It would be divisive, I-thou inclusive. In a series of books I’ve been studying recently the I-It way of being is called “a heart at war” and the I-You “a heart at peace.” When we are being inclusive – compassionate, merciful., sympathetic, sensitive, our heart is at peace with others; when we are defensive, blaming, justifying our heart is at war – after all, isn’t that how we are in a war? We delegitimize the “enemy” and justify ourselves, our position, and ultimately our destroying them. It would be very hard to go to war if we considered the other side as human, and legitimate, as ourselves. Hitler, Pharoah, Stalin, Torquemada among others were masters at getting their followers to see Jews and others as illegitimate and sub-human, justifying torture and killing.

The root of I-It lies, I think, in betrayal – betrayal of ourselves and betrayal of God. God never said to us “you are my people and they’re not.” God said “you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy people, for I, your God, am holy.” But what is holy? My etymological dictionary says it is related to the word “whole” - “that must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be transgressed or violated,” so again, we find that holy and unity are intertwined. When we say (or act as if) we are holy and ___________ (fill in the blank – Christians, Muslims, Gay people, other races) are not, we betray the very essence of holiness, the very essence of God’s charge to us.

To bring this home to us in NTHC, we have seen a lot of division over the past years. We hold to our opinions – of services, of the Temple leadership, of Rabbis, of policies – as if they were both true and sacred, but every opinion we hold this way divides us and goes against the fundamental spirituality of Judaism. Not that it’s wrong to have opinions – we all have them – but I think it’s a betrayal of ourselves and of God when we treat our opinions of other people or their actions as if those opinions were attributes of the person – it’s not that I think so-and-so is an idiot, they ARE an idiot – I’m just calling it like it is.

There was a famous baseball umpire years ago named Jocko Conlon. Late in his career Sports Illustrated did a joint interview with Jocko, grizzled veteran that he was, another umpire who had been in the big leagues for some time, maybe 10 years, and a rookie umpire. One of the questions the interviewer asked was “how do you call balls and strikes?” The rookie replied in the best traditions of umpiredom “I call ‘em like I see ‘em.” The experienced umpire said “I call ‘em like they are.” After a long pause, Jocko said “They ain’t nothin’ until I call ‘em.”

Now I don’t think other people are nothing, but I think that once we call them they become something, and I mean some thing. That in the act of “calling them” – of treating our opinion of them as fact – we make them an It to which we then relate. There are two things I’ve learned that I think are important here – one is a statement from a book called “The Mature Mind” by Harry and Bonaro Overstreet – “to the immature, other people are not real.” The other came from a Mormon friend of mine who asked a question that has haunted me since he asked it and that I invite you to have haunt you: “Are you willing to grant to others the same good intentions you grant to yourself – even in the face of evidence to the contrary?”

That question pierced me to the root – I realized that I never question my good intentions – the stupidest, most bone-headed things I do come, for me, from the best of intent. Yet I see evil and the worst motives in others’ actions. Surely, though, they don’t – for them the actions that seem evil and mal-intended to me must be coming from what for them are the best of motives. When I can grant that good intent to them, I shift from I-It to I-Thou and the world changes.

So maybe we can look at where we are dividing and where we are uniting, starting with our own private thoughts and moving out from there. When we do that, I think, we are fulfilling our destiny to be a kingdom of priests and a holy people.

Fathers Day

2009-01-27T11:59:00.001-08:00

This week’s Torah portion, Be’haalot’cha, could very well be called the Kvetch parsha. With a couple of notable exceptions, the chapter deals with complaining – the Israelites complain that they left all the wonderful food in Egypt, and now all they have is manna. Aaron and Miriam complain about Moses and about God speaking to Moses and not to them – everybody complains.

I guess that’s not a bad parsha for Father’s Day weekend. After all, in most families who does everyone complain about? Dad.

Actually, in looking into the Bible we find that Dad’s don’t do so well. Avraham Avinu – Abraham our father – was much more devoted to God than to Isaac, and after the incident of the binding of Isaac, Isaac never spoke to Abraham again (for that matter neither did God – kinda makes you wonder…). Of course Abraham had another son, Ishmael, whom he sent away.

Isaac favored his manly son, Esau, over the more effete Jacob, and then allowed himself to be tricked into disinheriting Esau nonetheless, and Jacob raised 10 sons, nine of whom sold the tenth into slavery. When we get to Joseph we find a good father who raised his sons Ephraim and Menashe well enough that now, when fathers bless their sons they pray that the sons will be k’efraim v’chi menashe.

Later on things don’t improve a lot. King Saul is a pretty good father to Jonathan, but David’s son Absalom rebelled against him and was killed. How David’s second son, Solomon, got along with his son Rehobam we don’t know.

Since the Bible doesn’t offer much inspiration when it comes to fathers, I decided to look closer to home. My father has been gone for almost 30 years now, and I’ve found a lot of truth in Mark Twain’s observation When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years” and even more in Gabriel Garcia Marquez; “A man knows he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”

My father was a small man – maybe 5’5” if he stretched, and it’s sort of customary when remembering such men to say something like that he was a giant in a small body, but really my dad wasn’t. He was a modest man, quiet, maybe even shy. He was self-educated beyond high school, very well read, but didn’t discuss ideas much. Looking at him, knowing him was hard to square with the story of how he escaped Russia in the 20’s by hiding in a boxcar on the Trans-Siberian railroad, how he lived in Shanghai and then came to the United States, to New York.

I guess he was a salesman – I never knew him to do anything else. When he lived in Shanghai he sold wine for Carmel Israel Wine Company and I have a letter from Baron Rothschild recommending him to anyone who was considering him for a job when he got to America. He had his own store – I guess you’d say he was a small business owner – that was the kind of joke he would have appreciated. The store was nothing grand or fancy – the fancy stores were on Main Street, downtown in our little town, and his store was just outside the main business district and catered to working people. He sold clothes, or as he would have it “pants,” though really he had everything short of suits and dress clothes – dresses, jeans, slacks and work pants, nylons, shoes, whatever you needed. His customers ranged for blue collar to poor, and for the latter he had a seemingly unending piece of paper where he would record what they bought and couldn’t pay for right now. Farmers, mechanics, black and white, Gentile and Jew, “Jack’s” was where they could go and know that no one would look down on them, no one would snub them, and no one would turn them away.

He went to Shul rarely – Friday night and Saturday were big days and he had to mind the store – but everyone there knew him and respected him. He wasn’t Rothschild, but he wasn’t Tevye either. He was just a little guy who raised his family and went home to a homemade pizza on Saturday night.

He didn’t play golf or ski or swim or bicycle, but he was a mean hand at checkers and could hold his own in a pinochle game and he loved to fish – sometimes he even remembered to bait the hook.

But mostly, in contrast to those dramatic Bible stories, he loved his sons, and if he had an ounce of pride it was pride that he raised two Ph.D.’s. If he were here in this Temple, wearing his fedora (never a yarmulke) he’d be paying less attention to praying than to the fact that it was his son leading the service.

So it’s Father’s Day. And if your Father is still around, or even if he’s not, take a few minutes and just look at the old guy and see if you can see who is there – it took me a long time and I didn’t fully see him until after he was gone, first in mind and then in body. Now my brother and I sit around and laugh about the Old Man and the funny stuff he did, and the memory is almost as good as if he were here. Almost.

Have a happy Father’s Day.

Passover

2009-01-27T11:58:00.000-08:00

Passover is the most elaborate of holidays – of the three Pilgrimage Festivals, Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot, it requires the most work and the most preparation and is arguably the most disruptive of our daily lives. Halachic Jews observe the first two days and the last day as full holidays, and the last day includes a Yizkor service. We clean our houses, change our dishes and silver, eat differently, have at least one, usually two elaborate meals with guests and a full service at each meal. We may read the Megilla on Purim, but Pesach is a groyse megilla. Tonight I want to examine with you a question we’re all familiar with – why is this festival different from all other festivals?

The Talmud teaches us that it is obligatory for every Jew to relate the story of the Exodus on Passover Eve – zacher l’tsiyat mitzrayim – to remember the exodus from Egypt. Why?

This reminder can be an historical commemoration or it can have meaning for us in the present day. The Haggadah says that “even if we were all wise beyond our years, even if we were all educated in the ways of Torah, we would still need to tell this story.” Why? Later in the Seder we are told “In every generation, each of us must see ourselves as if we, ourselves came out of Egypt.” Why? We eat bitter herbs and Matzah to remind us of the bitterness and privation of slavery. Why?

I think Passover is more than a reminder of events 4000 years ago, more than a commemoration, a remembering together. I think Passover is there to remind us that, having been slaves and having been subject to injustice and brutality, it’s our responsibility to stand against slavery, injustice, and brutality today as Moses stood against it then, and that as Moses had God empowering him to stand against Pharoah, we have God empowering us toward tikkun olam – healing the world of the wrongs we have suffered.

What wrongs? Well, let’s start with slavery. What an archaic concept. Slavery ended in the 19th Century, didn’t it? No. Today, every year, 600,000 to 800,000 adults, are forcibly taken across national borders to be put to work for little or no wages. 1.2 million children and babies are trafficked every year, including into Western Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and the number is increasing. Gangs involved in child and people trafficking make an estimated profit of US$32 billion per year
Child prostitution
At any one time across the world, around 1.8 million children are being abused through prostitution, child pornography and sex tourism
In the UK there are 5,000 child prostitutes. 75% of them are girls

Bonded child labor
Millions of children are forced to work away their childhood in horrific conditions to pay off debt, or simply the interest on it
In India alone, estimates suggest up to 15 million children could be enslaved by somebody else's debt, many involved in illegal, hazardous and dangerous work
Forced work in mines
One million children are risking their lives in mines and quarries in more than 50 African, Asian and South American countries
In the Sahel region of Africa, 200,000 children are daily risking their lives in gold and mineral mines

Agricultural labor
132 million children under 15 are trapped working in agriculture, often exposed to pesticides, heavy machinery, machetes and axes
In Kazakhstan, children work in cotton and tobacco fields and factories for up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week
Child soldiers
300,000 children under 15 are involved with fighting forces, including government armies. Boys and girls in at least 13 countries are actively being recruited as child soldiers or as army 'wives'
Around 11,000 children in Democratic Republic of Congo are currently being held by fighting groups
Forced child marriage
Child marriage, which often includes mail order and internet brides, is one of the most widespread - yet hidden - forms of slavery. Girls as young as four are forced to live and have sex with their husband, and are often kept trapped indoors
Girls under 15 are five times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than women over 20. In Afghanistan more than half of all girls are married before they are 16
Domestic slavery
Millions of children across the world, some as young as six, are forced to work up to 15 hour days as domestic workers. Many are beaten, starved and sexually abused
There are 200,000 child domestic workers in Kenya, 550,000 in Brazil and 264,000 in Pakistan.
And that’s just the beginning. What about drug addiction that enslaves millions? What about the hundreds of thousands here in America who are slaves to debt? What about women enslaved by abusive relationships they are too terrorized to leave, and hundreds of thousands of men and women enslaved by diseases such as AIDS and to starvation?

If slavery is unwillingly working and being deprived of the fruits of your labors, then we have to consider all that and more when we talk about slavery, and we have to recognize that slavery is alive and well in 2007.

If Passover holds meaning for us 4000 years after the Exodus, I think it is this – Avadim Hayinu – we were slaves. As one Haggadah points out, to say that we celebrate our deliverance from slavery is both an oversimplification and an understatement. On the one hand we celebrate freedom on a political, physical, and national scale. On the other hand, we also celebrate the spiritual, personal, and religious aspects that are the overriding reason for trhe Exodus – God’s choosing Israel as God’s witnesses – as a result of the Exodus, we became a nation dedicated to God’s service.

I choose to believe it was not by accident that the occasion of God’s fulfilling the covenant made a thousand years before with Abraham was a repudiation of slavery. In liberating our people from slavery, God made a number of clear statements that are repeated again and again throughout the Bible
· That God favors the oppressed over the oppressors
· That freeing the enslaved is literally God’s work
· That service to God is available only after freedom is attained – first Moses has to free himself of his attachment to the Egyptian ruling class, then of his lack of confidence in himself as a leader, and finally of his own ego. The Hebrews must first be freed from slavery, then from their longing to return to the comfort of Egypt, and finally from their fear of the warlike nations that surround them and occupy the promised land.
· That no one is truly free as long as anyone is enslaved

The notion of the “Chosen People” has been the subject of a lot of mischief and humor over the years, but the core question has always been “chosen for what?” The Biblical answer is “to be a kingdom of priests, a holy people,” which isn’t much help. Also “you shall be holy for I your God am holy,” which is still a little vague. What does “holy” mean in this context?

For Halachic Jews, holy means to keep all 613 mitzvoth – to live according to a rigid structure of rules, laws, and observances at the very least. I’ve known Halachic Jews who not only did their best to keep the mitzvoth but also tried to live in the spirit of God’s laws and I’ve known those who kept to the letter of the law and seemed unfamiliar with the spirit.

For me as a Reform Jew, the spirit of the law is everything – the basis of Reform is that we are bound by the moral code of Judaism, not the ceremonial code – and this spirit is nowhere better summed up in my view than by Hillel who, when challenged to explain the Torah while standing on one foot, said “Do not unto others that which is hateful to you; the rest is commentary.” Surely, under this rubric slavery is unacceptable to the slaveholder as much as to the slave, and to stand aside when confronted with slavery is as much a sin as to hold slaves oneself.

So what, then of Passover. “Even if we were all wise beyond our years, even if we were all educated in the ways of Torah, we would still need to tell this story.” “In every generation, each of us must see ourselves as if we, ourselves came out of Egypt.” We eat bitter herbs and Matzah to remind us of the bitterness and privation of slavery.

But if that’s all we do – tell the story, see ourselves as if we came out of Egypt, eat bitter herbs and Matzoh – can we say at the end of the Seder, “Our seder is complete, all the rituals fulfilled?” Yes, the rituals may have been fulfilled, but have we fulfilled the spirit of Passover. If we ignore the fact that slavery, particularly child slavery, still exists, have we seen ourselves as if we, ourselves came out of Egypt?” If we turn a blind eye to the number of people that are brought to the “land of the free” from Asia, Mexico, and South America and forced to “work off” their passage, a debt that will never be paid, are we remembering the bitterness of slavery? If we shake our heads sadly at 11 year olds carrying guns to war and millions starving in Africa but don’t demand that our government do something about it, we’ve told the story, but have we heard it?

For me, Passover is an occasion to rededicate myself to tikkun olam, particularly in these areas – I invite you to have it be that for you and yours as well and to include these thoughts in your Seder Monday night.

Vayekhel-Pekuday

2009-01-27T11:57:00.000-08:00

This week’s Torah portion is one of those tedious recountings of long lists of things, in this case the materials that were gathered together to build the Mishkan – the tabernacle or sanctuary. Oddly, though, it begins with Moses repeating the commandment that Shabbat is to be kept as a holy day. This odd introduction is usually taken to mean that Moses was reminding the people that nothing, not even the construction of the Mishkan, was holier than Shabbat – that the rules of Shabbat observance have primacy over almost everything else.

Part of the fun of Torah study is assuming that nothing in the Torah is there by accident, that it all means something. One interpretation of the reiteration of the laws of Shabbat at this point is the idea that the end of any activity or cycle is a time to stop and take stock. This parsha comes at the end of a bad period – Moses has been up on the mountain receiving the Law for a second time – after the first time, when he descended with the Tablets of the Law, he found the people had made and were worshipping a golden calf, and in a fit of rage he smashed the first set of tablets. He then went back up and got the second set, and again descended on the day that would from then on be observed as Yom Kippur, and immediately called the people together to give them the instructions for building the Mishkan.

So at the end of this bad period, Moses repeats the laws of Shabbat. Shabbat is rooted in God’s creation of the world, so one interpretation of this is that the end of any cycle is an imitation of God’s creation of the world and a time to stop and take stock as we do on Shabbat as we look back at the week that just ended. Similarly on Yom Kippur we take stock of the year and the last day of each month, the day before Rosh Chodesh, is called Yom Kippur katan – little Yom Kippur for the same reason. We have the concept of a cheshbon hanefesh – an accounting of the soul – only by keeping track can we really know what we have done and have a chance to change what we wish to change. The rabbis say that if you want to, say, stop gossiping, if you make a note of each time you gossip, in about 80 days you will be a different person – one who does not gossip.

This is also, and I think not coincidentally, the last reading of the Book of Exodus – again a time to take stock. In Exodus we had the entire cycle of the Egyptian captivity from Joseph through Moses and at the end of Exodus we are on our own, in the desert, we have received the Torah, and the people give their possessions to build the Mishkan. It’s interesting to note that this was a voluntary subscription – God does not require that we give anything to God, though later in Leviticus we learn that giving to the poor is not voluntary, it is required. Still people give gold, silver, fine cloth and all they can to build the Mishkan. In Hebrew, Mishkan means a place to live, a dwelling place. In the Book of Numbers, Balaam, a priest of Baal, is called on to curse Israel and when he looks over the Hebrew camp he says “Ma tovu ohalecha Ya’akov, mishkenotecha Yisrael!” How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob, mishkenotecha – your mishkans – your dwelling places – O Israel!” The term Mishkan has come to mean tabernacle because it is used in the Torah to refer to the tabernacle, but its real meaning is a dwelling place. The rabbis tell two stories about this:

A king gave his daughter in marriage to a prince of another land. As the newlyweds were about to leave for their new home the king said to them “I can’t bear to part with you, and I can’t ask you to stay here, so in your new home would you please make a small place for me to stay when I can come there?” Similarly God could not bear to part completely with the Torah and could not keep it, so he asked the people to make a place for him to live among them.

The other story is that, after the sin of the Golden Calf, God could not bear to stay with the people but could not let them go completely, and so asked the same thing.

So whether God’s wish for a dwelling place with the Jewish people was out of his love for us or as punishment for our transgression, we made a place for God to live, and the Torah tells us how this was constructed and decorated down to the finest detail along with telling us in equal detail how affairs were to be conducted there. Why all the detail, particularly when much of it repeats things that have been told earlier in the Torah?

I think the answer lies in the idea of cheshbon hanefesh – in taking account of our actions and keeping track of what we do, think, and say in just the kind of detail with which we are told the plans for the Mishkan. It’s a kind of Zen notion of imbuing every action, every thought, everything that we say with purpose just as, in creating the world, God reviewed everything he created and “saw that it was good.” If the Mishkan is where God dwells with us, then our nefesh, our soul, is where God lives within us. If our soul is God within us, then every action we take, every thought we think, every word we say could be seen as Godly acting, thinking, and speaking, creating our world. That’s not so farfetched, really. Did you ever notice how when you get up and think it’s going to be a really lousy day it usually is? Or when you expect to have an argument you usually do?

We’ve known for a long time that parts of our brains are extremely sensitive detectors of threat in our environment – so sensitive in fact that a lot of the time we “detect” threat that isn’t even there and react to it as if it was. Well it turns out that our brains are also wired up in a way that both senses and affects others very directly. Turns out there are these things called mirror neurons that sense what others are feeling, their mood, etc., and then affect in turn how we act, perceive, etc. Take those two interesting neuropsychological facts together and you go a long ways toward the idea that if we don’t exactly create reality, we definitely color it, and how we color it has a great effect on our lives.

So try an experiment – this week, just give some thought to the idea that your thoughts, actions, and speaking are not just random or reactions to what is outside you, and might just be that inner voice of God thinking, speaking and acting through you, then next Shabbat look back and see if that small cheshbon hanefesh affected you at all.

Bereshith 08

2009-01-27T11:53:00.001-08:00

Tonight we begin anew our annual reading of the Torah. In the Orthodox tradition, the entire Torah is read every year, in fifty-four sedrot or portions. Today many congregations, ours included, actually take three years to read the entire Torah, reading a third of each portion, the first third in the first year, the second in the second year, etc. Either way, the Torah marks an important annual cycle, and the readings are timed to begin and end on Simchat Torah, twelve days after Yom Kippur and the conclusion of the High Holy Day season. So tonight is a beginning, and that’s probably a good thing to observe given the state of affairs that look to so many people like the end of their world.
Bereshith bara Elohim et ha-shamayim v’et ha aretz. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. What does that mean, “in the beginning?” We are told that God has no beginning and no end – in Adon Olam we sing b’li reshit, b’li tachlit – without beginning and without end, and also v’hu haya, v’hu hoveh, v’hu yihyeh, b’tifara – God was, God is, God will be, glorious in majesty. So the opening of the Torah can’t mean in God’s beginning, but rather in the beginning of the world. Or it could indicate, as many scholars think, that God was a baseball fan and created the world in the big inning.
The familiar story in today’s Parshah recounts the creation of the world in six days. Again, this can’t mean what we familiarly call “days.” For one thing the Sun wasn’t created until the fourth day, so it can’t mean a solar day. Psalm 90 says that with God “a thousand, or even a million years are but as a day that is past.” Rather, the beginning of each period of creation is called morning, and the end evening in much the same way that we speak of “the dawn of an age” or “the evening of life.” Importantly, the order of these is “there was evening and there was morning,” and that’s why we begin our days as Jews in the evening and end them at sundown.
The other very familiar refrain in Bereshith is that with each cycle of creation God looked at what was created and called it “good.” Judaism at its source is optimistic. The world is not something at odds with God or independent of God – God did not wind the world up like a clock and then let it tick. Rather everything exists for, in, and because of God. There is a school of theology called panentheism – all in God. Don’t confuse it with pantheism – all is God. Panentheism has God pervading the universe – God is in everything and everyone and is also greater than the sum of all things. The technical terms are immanent (present) and transcendent. From this school comes the view that humanity and God are in a state of developing together – neither is finished, both are evolving or becoming – as humans strive to realize and fulfill the immanence of God – to recognize in themselves and others the divine spark, God also evolves and is fulfilled in transcendence. When both humanity and God are fully realized, the immanent will become the transcendent. In Judaism this is the Messianic Age, in Christianity it is the second coming, in Buddhism Nirvana – in every case, the unity of humanity and God is restored.
All of this is very abstract unless we tie it to our own experience, and that’s hard to do. In her account of a massive brain hemorrhage in which she temporarily lost the function of her left hemisphere, the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes the experience of the right hemisphere as “being at one with the universe” and uses terms like “I lost the sense of where I ended and the world began.” Her book is an eloquent description of this experience and how, as she regained full functioning of her brain, the experience became harder and harder to hold on to. You see, the left hemisphere of the brain is conceptual and logical it’s the home of both concrete and abstract thinking – in fact thinking at all, and the right brain experience can’t be fully and accurately expressed in thinking terms. It is in this right brain experience of “being at one with everything” that, I believe, the immanence of God is realized. It is there that we experience connection – connection with God, with other people, with the physical world, and with our self. It is, I contend, the primary religious experience that is then expressed via the left brain as religious teaching, and that degenerates into religious dogma, but that’s a subject for another time.
It is this oneness, this interconnectedness of all things that is the essence of Bereshith. God creates and divides – light from darkness, water from land, fish from fowl – but God pointedly does not set anything against anything else. On the sixth day, after everything including people has been created, Bereshith I, 31 says: “And God saw every thing that God had made and, behold, it was very good.” The commentary says that each created thing is “good” in itself, but when combined and united, the totality is proclaimed “very good.” One commentator said “this harmony bears witness to the unity of God who planned this unity of nature.” In Hebrew, unity is echad – as in Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai echad. There are two words in Hebrew that translate as “one” – echad and yachid. Echad is a unity greater than its parts, as in "one+one+one is three", and as in "God is one" - not one as in "one and only," but rather a unity of multiples becoming one as, for example, a man and woman are “made one flesh” in marriage. Yachid - means individual, single, singular, as in "every single one of them", Yachid does not have the denotation of "whole" that echad has, but does mean "unique” or “singular." In the Yigdal hymn we find the phrase “echad v’eyn yachid” in reference to God – oneness without severalness.
So the first full chapter of Genesis is about the creation of this “very good” unity. In the first chapter there is only ‘good” and ultimately “very good.” We are used to thinking in opposites – if there is good, there must be bad, if there is up there must be down. And in the physical, left-brain world in which we live that is basically true, although we tend to ignore the unity of opposites – you can’t have the a front without a back, a black without a white. In the world of the first chapter of genesis this is not so – the apparency of opposition is created by the act of l’havdil – to separate. In the second act of creation, after God has created the heaven and the earth, God said “va-y’hi or” – let there be light – v’haya or – and there was light…and God divided the light from the darkness and called the light day and the darkness night.” God did not set the light in opposition to the darkness, he just assigned each to its time in the cycle of days. Was there darkness before there was light? Not possible – the light and the darkness were created together by dividing them, and each had its place.
So in this first chapter there is only good and no evil – this is the “good” of transcendence, the “good” of the primary religious experience where we experience “being at one with everything” – being part of everything and everything being a part of us. Think about it – is one part of your body better than another? Is your right arm good and your left bad? No. And when we are in touch with the immanence and transcendence of God, there is only good, no bad. It is only when the left brain comes into play that we get opposites.
In the second chapter of Genesis we have the story of Gan Aden – the Garden of Eden and Adam v’Chava – Adam and Eve, and the first instance of something other than good. God has put the fruit of one tree, in the center of the garden, off limits to Adam and Eve. The serpent, for reasons of hissss own, makes something up – if you eat that fruit you will be the equal of God because you know only good, but God knows both good and evil. We don’t have time to go into everything that is wrong with most ordinary interpretations of this simple concept, but for our purposes suffice to say that in that interaction, evil was born. Not in any act of immorality or perfidy on Eve’s part, but in the serpent’s planting the idea that there was a disconnect between God and the world – that there was something other than the purity of spirit that was inborn in Adam and Eve and that if Eve turned her back on that spirit there would be something to be gained that God had hidden from them. The traditional interpretation is that, when she ate the apple, Eve became conscious of sin and its conflict with the will of God which brought in its wake shame, fear, and the attempt to hide from God, to hide from her true nature. I think it’s even simpler than that – I think Eve discovered the distinctly human ability to pretend that we are separate from God and therefore separate from each other and from nature. In that separation lay the Fall.
There is an old, I believe Talmudic, story that says that the Messiah will come under one of two conditions – one Shabbat sees every Jew in the world observe Shabbat or when one Shabbat sees every Jew in the world fail to observe Shabbat. You see, the key is not observance, not even observance of Shabbat, it’s unity.
Shabbat Shalom.