Category: Torah

The Text(s), the tribe, the learning, the being. (With a bit of random spirituality mixed in.)

Moral Dissonance

HERE’S THE AGONY: As an American, I am angered and appalled by the unilateral, unconstitutional, and undiscussed-with-Congress decision to bomb Iran.

As a Jew, however, I am abjectly disturbed to find myself not being more bothered by it.

To be clear, I believe warfare is the most hateful, destructive occupation we humans can engage in. It speaks from and to the darkest parts of our primate psyches. It doesn’t care who gets in the way or how – you’ve heard of “the fog of war?” – and in most cases, leaves nothing behind save broken bodies and broken souls. And while sometimes necessary, war should be the very last resort of diplomacy. It is too-often invoked by politicians who’ve never fought in one and who don’t care about the human waste involved.

And yet …

The Iranian government has been a deadly threat to Israel and the Jewish people since its emergence as a theocracy. It lines the pockets of enthusiastic murderers from Hamas to Hezbollah, in places as far apart as Bondi Beach and Buenos Aires, and has made very plain its desire to kill every last Jew on our planet. It is not this world’s only dangerous government – far from it – but it is one of the most far-reaching and single-minded, and (dare I say) successful.

So that’s my conflict. Do I want war? No. Do I want anybody to die? No. But I also don’t want the necessity of armed guards standing watch outside my place of communal worship. I don’t want to have to shield the kids I teach from the knowledge that there are people who want them dead, simply because of who and what they are. And I don’t want to live in a world where evil can take on such gleefully cruel forms.

These are my raw feelings, and to speak from my heart, they scare me. Deeply. My co-pilot the therapist says it’s possible, and even normal, to hold conflicting emotions at the same time. While I know that’s true, being directly opposed to and grudgingly but not-entirely okay with this war is shattering me.

365 Names: “The Eternal”

THE ETERNAL is one of the many, many translations for יהוה‎ – a mostly untranslatable Hebrew divine moniker or “theonym” (which term I just now learned – thank you, Wikipedia!) connected with a form of the cognate “to be.” It appears in the Torah (Exodus 3:15) right after another theonym, אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה (“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” or “I Will Be What I Will Be”) in Ex. 3:14, where Moses asks G?d what Name to tell the enslaved Jews who will question his authority to speak on G?d’s behalf. “The Eternal” takes the “to be” ball and runs with it, in the sense/concept of G?d existing forever and ever, outside of spacetime, infinite and unknowable. (We could get all mystical and Qabalistic at this point, nattering on about lofty Ain Sof (transcendence) v. folksy Shekhina (immanence), but let’s save that for another time – no pun intended.)

This is one of my favorite Names for that-which-some-people-call-God: some are creative, others traditional, each unique. If you want to see your favorite here, but haven’t, send it along with the subject line “365 Names” and let us know whether or not you want to be credited.

Zionist Pickle

RECENTLY, THE PRESTIGIOUS Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on a Jewish Federations of North America survey concerning whether or not American Jews self-identified as “Zionists” – a touchy topic in these touchy times. JTA’s editor asked JTA readers the same question, and I said this:

If identifying as a Zionist means supporting a Jewish state as a refuge and gathering-place, acting as a light unto the nations by setting a good example and living in peace with its neighbors – even if it means having to be well-armed in order to do that – then yes, most definitely count me in. If it means picking fights with defenseless civilians based on some tweaked notion of ethnocultural superiority, then no, I guess I’m out.

Put more simply: I fully support Israel’s existence and achievements, but decidedly not its current government. I don’t know what that makes me label-wise, but I get the feeling I’m not alone.

At least, I hope not. How about you?

Siddur Shenanigans

(A “Lunch & Learn” program following yesterday’s Shabbat-morning service. Feel free to skip it if liturgical wresting isn’t your thing.)

“Monotheism is not for wimps.” – James “Sputnik” Gjerde

Why am I beginning today’s “Lunch and Learn” with a favorite quote from one of my best and oldest friends? Because it begs a deeper question: Did our rabbis and sages alter our liturgy in response to what they thought others might think? In other words: Why did they change the unlovelier parts?

Take the example mentioned earlier during services. The second blessing in our Amidah, “Gevurot,” describing G?d as the One “Who gives life to all,” was altered from the traditional “Who gives life to the dead” in early (c. 19th Century) Reform Jewish prayerbooks. It wasn’t until 2007 that the phrase was restored, albeit as an option only, in Reform’s latest Mishkan T’filah siddur.

There’s a precedent for such liturgical substitution. Nearly two thousand years ago, our rabbis changed the quote from Isaiah they included in “Yotzer” (the first blessing after the Bar’chu). In chapter 45, verse 7 of Isaiah’s book, the prophet quotes G?d as saying “I form light and create darkness, make peace and create evil.” But our ancient liturgists changed that to “…Who makes peace and creates all” That’s the Artscroll translation; in Mishkan T’filah, it reads, “Who makes peace and fashions all things”).

Doesn’t that sound like G?d is only responsible for the good things we like, and not the bad things we don’t? But the Shema, and the Torah from which it’s taken, teaches that G?d is One! In whatever ways Jews think of G?d, this sort of dualism isn’t one of them. Yet isn’t that exactly what the liturgists’ changes seem to imply?

FOUR MORE QUESTIONS:

1. Why do you think these verses were changed, or in the case of Mishkan T’filah, optionalized?

2. How might these liturgical alterations affect our thinking about G?d?

3. Should we change those parts of our liturgy we find baffling and/or disturbing?

4. How much can we change our traditional prayers and still consider them authentic?

Dead Grateful

AT MY DAD’S shiva minyan tonight, came a moment that caught my breath.

Roughly two-dozen fellow congregants had turned out in our synagogue’s sanctuary to help my copilot and I navigate the choppy waters of fresh grief as Jews have done for millennia: tearing the black ribbon that we had pinned on each other, praying the ancient weeknight service, sharing memories of the decedent, saying the Mourners’ Kaddish, and sharing a post-service nosh. All very halachic, heimishe, and loving.

But what really touched me was just before saying Kaddish, our rabbi (who had popped in from sabbatical to conduct the service) asked for whom else the assembled mini-multitude were also currently saying Kaddish. As each name was quietly offered, I thought, So this is why we mourn together as a community. We are none of us alone – we’re also members of a dead-relatives club. And it helps to know that. Viscerally. And very much.

To quote Spider Robinson: “Shared grief is lessened; shared joy is increased.”

Looking forward to that latter. May it come not soon enough.

Time Life

(An adjunct and extension of the previous message, this one is a sermon I delivered Friday night [even though I’m writing this on Friday afternoon] – evidence of Time’s weird curling ways. As always, feel free to skip it if you’re not into this sort of thing.)

TIME. Is it really on our side? According to this week’s Torah portion, that’s all a matter of perspective.

In Exodus 12:2, G?d commands Moses and Aaron: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Having and marking a calendar was the first mitzvah given to us as a nation, even before we left Egyptian slavery.

Why is that important? Because free people need calendars to arrange their lives – slaves don’t.

In his book The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls Judaism “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” But what exactly is time?

On a micro-level, time is a property of the complex and mysterious motions of atoms. Up where we live, however, we need a more useful definition. Enter Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

Rabbi Sacks tells us that time can be conceived in two ways. The first is “cyclical” or “mythic” time. It’s the time referred to by Ecclesiastes: plants and people and weather and seasons pass from being to nonbeing and back again. This is also the time of Fate and Destiny – unchanging, monotonous, predictable.

The second sort of time Rabbi Sacks describes is “historical” time. This is more random and less predictable than the first: An unknown future flows into the present to become fixed in the past. Anything can happen, and often does.

Jews – optimists and outliers that we are – live by a third type of time. It’s helpful to think of it as “spiral” or “corkscrew” time – the latter an appropriate analogy for the wine-rich Valley of the Moon. Every birthday and anniversary, every holiday and Torah reading finds us having grown just a little bit more. Each recurring event brings us farther along from our humble past and, so our tradition teaches us, that much closer to the promise of a glorious future.

Seen this way, the moments of our lives are more like souvenir stands than destinations, more like crossroads than dead ends. So my question tonight is, “What souvenirs have you collected? In other words, what events or moments helped shape you from the person you were to the person you’re becoming?”

[pass mic]

Thank you, everyone. May your road ahead be familiar enough for comfort, yet unusual enough for exploration. Shabbat shalom.

Time Clock

WHY IS A calendar important? (Aside from telling us when to spring forward and fall back, that is.)

One answer comes from our Torah, where G?d tells Moses and Aaron that “this month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Exodus 12:2). The context: Nine plagues have been sent against Pharaoh and his country. Following a hint of the final and most terrible plague – the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn, in direct consequence of Pharaoh’s identical edict against Jewish infants – G?d wants the Jews to mark forever afterward our going-forth from slavery.

But to do that, we first require a calendar – the first mitzvah given to us as a nation.

Slaves don’t need a calendar. They work when ordered to, until commanded to stop. Free people, on the other hand, can organize their time however they wish, so our ancient sages organized the Jewish calendar to be both lunar and solar. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, its months follow the phases of the moon, with seasons following the position of the sun. In seven years out of nineteen, we add an extra month so as not to, for example, eventually celebrate Pesach (Passover) in the wintertime.

The communal Pesach lamb-feast is the second mitzvah given to us as a nation. So important is this event to our identity that this week’s Torah portion also includes four different directives commanding us to tell our children just what happened on this most momentous of dates.

Perhaps that’s why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls Judaism “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” And that’s the perfect kavvanah (intention) to hold as we enter into Shabbat!

More Better

A KEY PHRASE in this week’s Torah portion of Va’eira (Exodus 6:2-9:35) reveals much about the state of mind of our centuries-long Egyptian slavery. It happens after G?d tells Moses to proclaim that G?d will liberate our ancestors and bring them home to the Land of Promise.

However, nobody pays attention: “Moshe spoke to the B’nei Yisrael, but they would not listen to Moshe because of [their] shortness of wind and hard labor” (Exodus 6:9; Metsudah Publications translation).

The Hebrew word translated by Metsudah as “wind” is “ruach,” which can also mean “breath” or “spirit;” Jewish mystical tradition teaches that ruach is the spiritual element connecting our physicality (“nefesh”) to our inner spark of G?dliness (“neshama”). Rabbi Jonathan Sacks translates our verse’s second half as “…but in the brokenness of their spirit and brutal labor they did not listen to him.”

It’s very hard for the continually (and generationally) traumatized to work toward, or even hope for, better days. Rabbi Sacks puts it like this: “If you want to improve people’s spiritual situation, you must first improve their physical situation. … Alleviating poverty, curing disease, ensuring the rule of law, and respecting human rights: these are spiritual tasks no less than prayer and Torah study. To be sure, the latter are higher, but the former are prior. People cannot hear G?d’s message if their spirit is broken and their labor harsh.”

Words to ponder as we all continue to hope for, and work toward, a better world.

Home (not) Alone

A d’var Torah – sermon – I delivered at our synagogue yesterday morning. If you’re not into hortatory Jewish fuzzies, better skip it.)

My dad was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, long enough ago for him to have cheered on the Dodgers at the legendary Ebbets Field. My dad’s also the world’s greatest baseball fan – at least the greatest I’ve ever met. He can quote statistics, games, and players like a seasoned sportswriter. I once asked him why the Brooklyn Dodgers’ native stadium had such allure for his ten-year-old self.

He thought for a moment, smiled, and said, “It’s holy ground … and it was my second home.”

The concept of home is important to us. Be it ever so humble, it’s where the heart is, where you hang your hat, and there’s no place like it. A real home is wherever we feel safe to be our best, and even sometimes worst, selves.

Our Torah portion, Shemot, the beginning of Exodus, describes a similar-but-different kind of safety. We find the baby Moses tucked into a basket among the bulrushes of the Nile, escaping Pharaoh’s cruel edict of death for all Jewish first-born males.

The Hebrew word translated here as “basket” is “teivah.” There’s only one other teivah in Torah. It’s found in Genesis, in parashat Noach. There, teivah is translated as “ark” – yes, the one with Noah’s family and all the paired animals. The Talmud calls this juxtaposition – an identical word or phrase occurring in different verses – “gezeirah shava,” Aramaic for “similar verdicts.” A gezeirah shava exists to reveal the word or phrase’s deeper meaning.

So let’s explore this puzzling and holy ark-basket.

Both teivahs are containers. That one is large and one small isn’t as important as their function. For Noah, his pitch-caulked ark carried the world’s wildlife population. In Moses’ case, his pitch-caulked basket carried the leader of a spiritual revolution. Two boxes of life, each floating amidst swirling chaos, each protecting the seeds of new beginnings.

Our world at present can be fairly described as a swirling chaos. Politics, economics, technology, civility, culture, climate – everything seems to be spiraling into some very strange and very scary places. But a teivah can protect us long enough to gather our strength, cope, and continue.

Sonoma has a long-established and vital teivah that does just that. And though small, it contains multitudes.

There’s a Hebrew school. Sisterhood. Men’s club. Book clubs. Adult education. Social action. Care for our physically and spiritually beset. Annual and life-cycle celebrations. Study groups devoted to our most sacred texts. Occasional cooking classes. The welcoming warmth of authentic, heimishe Yiddishkeit. And worship services like these, where we can come together twice-monthly to ritually affirm our religious peoplehood.

Our little Anatevka-among-the-vines offers each of us a little hard-won and welcome shelter from the surrounding storm. So my questions to you today, especially as we enter our 30th year, are, “What’s your Shir Shalom shelter story? How does our do-it-yourself teivah give you strength and support?”

[pass microphone]

Thank you everyone. And thank you for helping each other keep our heads above choppy water – as our people have done for the past 4,000 years and counting. Shabbat shalom.

Round About

“One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” – Charles Fort

The first chapter of the Book of Exodus tells a grim tale: “A new king arose over Egypt … and he said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.’ So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them … (Exodus 1:8-10)

This may be the first recorded instance of antisemitism. Sadly, it’s a pattern that repeated itself throughout the ensuing 3,000 years: a period of Jewish prosperity, followed by a host country’s regime-change, followed by Jewish victimization. We can be forgiven for being fed up and tired of it; after all, how much suffering can one people take?

It’s tempting to measure this apparently endless circle at its lowest point. But thinking of oneself and/or one’s tribe as a perpetual victim is neither healthy nor sustainable. It’s a shaky foundation on which to build an identity, and it reduces our multi-millennial history to a dismal common denominator. It doesn’t leave room for Jewish pride, Jewish celebration, or Jewish joy.

My copilot the therapist cautions survivors not to define themselves by the worst thing that ever happened to them. That doesn’t mean ignoring the trauma – which would only make it worse – but rather balancing it with a decent appraisal of our many, many achievements.

The Torah verses quoted above continue: “… But the more [the Israelites] were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out.” As the Yiddish proverb goes, “Jews are like eggs. The more hot water they’re in, the tougher they get.” Let’s hope we retain our toughness while remaining tender enough to pass on the best part of ourselves, and our people, to the next generation.

Restful Strength

WITH THIS WEEK’S Torah portion of Vayechi, we bid farewell for another year to the Book of Genesis and the saga of the Jewish people’s ancestral and tribal beginnings.

Whenever Torah students finish the weekly reading of one of the Torah’s five books, it’s traditionally followed by a rousing shout of “Chazak! Chazak! V’nitchazek! (Strength! Strength! And may we be strengthened!)” The idea is that intense Torah study can be wearisome, and we thus need a boost to get back to ourselves. But as we actually always finish the books on Shabbat, perhaps it’s also a call to fully enjoy the revivifying rest that only Shabbat can bring.

So as you light candles tonight (or do whatever you do to mark this most frequent of Jewish holidays), and whether or not you yet study Torah, remember to take a deep breath or three – and slip into some grateful and strength-giving peace. Shabbat shalom.

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