“WHEN WILL THEY LEAVE US ALONE?!?”
Tag: Being Jewishly
Living Judaism with heart, soul, and all we have.
The Way It Works
“For Jews, reflection and renewal … are elicited through text study. Our most enduring words do not simply remind us of who we once aspired to be; they press us to ask how well we have lived up to them and how they might yet speak with urgency in our own time.”
– Rabbi Leon A. Morris, Talmud of America
A G?d With No Name
IT HAS BEEN said many times, including by me, that Judaism is the most misunderstood religion, and Jews the most misunderstood people, this planet has to offer.
Take this conversation I had with someone the other day. It should first be noted that this someone is one of the most inclusive, bighearted, and real human beings I’ve ever met; I both respect him tremendously, and regard him with a good deal of collegial affection. The context was how to big-tent the Jewish attendees at a local public event where he delivered an address containing various names for the Divine. But we ran aground on this point:
“What is the Jewish name for G?d?” he asked. “Is it ‘Yahweh?'”
“Well, that’s a great question,” I replied enthusiastically. “That particular name is a transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning ‘to cause to be.’ But most Jews don’t use it. Jews have more than one name for G?d, and like anything else Jewish, the answer depends on who you ask. Some would even say that G?d really has no name.”
He regarded me with a very polite and sincere version of a blank stare. And I don’t blame him.
Judaism is complex, in the way that any millennia-old, culturally adaptive, self-reinventing, participatory art project is complex. Not only do we not call G?d* by a single name, we can’t even agree on who should be called “a Jew.” There are a few basic things that most Jews hold in common – monotheism, if they believe in any deity at all, and a self-identity as Jews – but that’s where the similarities end. For me, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (mid-20th Century) said it best: “Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish People.” But not everyone would agree with that definition, either.
At its heart, Judaism requires a certain comfort with ambiguity that’s challenging for many Westerners to grasp. (For various reasons, the Western worldview often tends to think a thing either is or isn’t; there’s not much room for the excluded-and-fuzzy middle of “sometimes.”) Jewish tradition wallows in the ambiguity of contextuality – it doesn’t teach definitive answers so much as how to ask better and better questions.
I yearn for, and dread, the day when someone somewhere can define Jews and Judaism in a soundbite. I yearn, because it would be kind of nice for people to more easily “get” Jews and Judaism – and I dread because it would reduce something transcendentally beautiful to a fossilized factoid. The Talmud, that thousand-year-long record of rabbinical arguments, settles its otherwise unsettle-able questions with the word “teiku” – an anagram of the four-word Aramaic phrase roughly meaning “Elijah the Prophet will answer this when he announces the coming of the Messiah.” May that day swiftly, and never, come.
* I spell it this way to remind myself that the Divine is a Mystery. YMMV.
Industrial Strength Peoplehood
A sermon I delivered this morning. Feel free to skip it if ethnoparticular rallying cries aren’t your thing.
DO GOOD FENCES really make good neighbors – or just a bad impression?
Let’s review the piece of Torah that our rabbi just chanted, specifically the part where the Canaan-bound spies report back to our assembled ancestors: “The people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.”
Sounds hopeless, doesn’t it? Powerful people living in fortified cities. The spies can perhaps be forgiven for freaking out over the prospect of future conquest.
But Rabbi Jonathan Sacks sees the situation differently. He says the spies drew the wrong conclusion: that if the cities are strong; then the people are strong. But that’s not accurate: if the cities are strong, the people must be weak.
It’s like this: If the people were truly strong, their city walls wouldn’t need to be, because they could trust to their own strength to defend themselves against interlopers.
Rabbi Sacks says that this can be an analogy for Jews in the modern age. We couldn’t possibly build enough walls to keep out occasional threats. And anyway, Judaism teaches us to engage with the world, not retreat from it. Even when faced with our most ancient enemy, Jew-hatred.
From Pirkei Avot, that digest of rabbinical wisdom, comes this advice: “Rabbi Elazar teaches: Be diligent in the study of Torah, and know what to answer a heretic.”
In simpler language: Know who you are. Why you are. Where you come from. And how to take care of yourself in a non-ideal situation.
It may not be easy. But Rabbi Sacks assures us that Judaism is strong enough to withstand any challenge. We are, all of us, almost 4,000 years’ worth of strong. It’s a hard-won strength, gained from resisting some very severe attempts to marginalize or vanquish us. And though resistance isn’t always easy, either then or now, we’ve done it – and are still here to prove it.
So my question today is: “How do you strengthen and maintain your sense of Jewish identity?”
[pass mic: some of the dozen-or-so answers included studying our textual tradition, attending services, and cooking (and teaching!) Jewish recipes]
Thank you, everyone. Shabbat shalom.
Put Your Hand on the Radio
A RABBINICAL ASSISTANT, two deacons, and a lay mystic walk into a radio studio.
Seriously.
Welcome to the Sonoma Valley Interfaith Radio Hour, a years-old, live and lively round-robin every Thursday afternoon from 3-4pm Pacific Time on Sonoma Valley’s independent station KSVY (91.3 FM and streaming/archived at ksvy.org). It features one Jew (me), the deacons (Presbyterian and Roman Catholic), and a Christian Science practitioner. (With occasional guesting by my rabbi, by an Irish Catholic priest, and by whoever else we can grab from our local ecumenical Cobb salad.)
Our informal discussions cover broad ground: e.g., different faith traditions’ understandings and manifestations of moral and ethical ideals; life-cycle events such as birth, coming of age, marriage and divorce, and dying/mourning; the multiform flavors of our worship services; observing holidays and holy days; encounters with the Bible and other holy books; and how we ourselves each came to our respective “ministries.” We have deep respect for each other’s religious backgrounds and deep attachments to our own – as our Presbyterian emcee puts it, “We’re all swimming in the same direction” – and are on the air not to convert or proselytize, but to educate, enlighten, and (we hope) edify.
What also makes the show work, I think, is that outside of our collegial collective, the Valley prides itself on a thriving interfaith fellowship; we’re so geographically isolated, it’s to our evolutionary advantage to get along as well as we do. It helps, too, that through our long association we have become quite close – itself a byproduct of sharing intensely real conversations every week. And speaking personally, I find that learning about others’ sacred practices makes me understand and appreciate my own that much more. Tune us in and see if that’s true for you!
Identity 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?
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 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.