“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
Tag: Learning Jewishly
“A little Torah is all anyone knows.”
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.
Portable Holiness
ONE OF THE more mysterious details of this week’s Torah portion, Naso (Numbers 4:21–7:89), concerns the “nazirite” – someone who decides to swear off of wine and other grape products, haircuts, and engaging with the deceased.
Why would anyone do such a thing?
The Torah doesn’t explain, but Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz offers three traditional viewpoints:
1. Out of gratitude for a gift or blessing from G?d.
2. To fulfill a vow to G?d.
3. To draw nearer the Divine by achieving a measure of personal holiness.
That last point takes a bit of unpacking. For our ancestors, closeness to G?d could normally be achieved in only two ways – either through bringing a sacrifice to the Tabernacle or Temple, or by being born into one of the Levitical families who serve in it.
However, not everyone could afford a sacrifice. And while not everyone had the privilege of inheriting a sacred status, anyone could be as holy as someone who did. Being a nazirite took a dedication to principles, vigilance over one’s behavior, and a certain amount of self-sacrifice.
Though there’s no longer a Tabernacle or Temple, we call someone who holds and exemplifies those qualities a “mensch.”
Sounds a lot like holiness to me.
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?
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!
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.
Rear Window
“Your spirituality is none of my business.” –Anon
How do we understand the Divine in our lives?
That’s the question answered by this week’s Torah portion, Vayigash (Genesis.44.18-47.27). Joseph is reunited with his brothers, and informs them that indirectly selling him into slavery was actually part of G?d’s plan. Without that act, he would not have risen to second-in-command of Egypt and been able to save his family from the seven years’ famine predicted by Pharaoh’s dream.
Torah is teaching us an important point: that spiritual hindsight is 20/20 vision. Only by seeing how events have unfolded can we discern the G?d of our understanding; as G?d is later to tell Moses, “You may see My back … [but] you cannot see My face, for no one may see Me and live.” It was up to Joseph to see G?d’s hand in matters, but as the Torah later tells us, his brothers never accepted that explanation.
When someone in our lives is struggling in any way, it may seem like a kindness to tell them that what they’re going through is “all part of G?d’s plan.” But we know that’s not appropriate. Pirkei Avot tells us not to comfort someone when their dead lies before them; comfort is in the heart of the beholder. Whatever we experience is not for others to interpret as to cause and effect.
After all, all we really know is the G?d of our understanding. And who’s to say we got It right?
Reading Assignment
WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING RIGHT NOW, stop – and order from your favorite bookseller Liel Leibovitz’ How the Talmud Can Change Your Life (Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book). It’s a breakneck-speed, 272-page survey of Jewish history, bringing to life the key sages and lively times of the Talmud like never before, with illustrations drawn from Aldrich Ames and Billie Holiday and Weight Watchers and the Dewey Decimal System. I read it in three days, only grudgingly taking time for sleep and meals; it’s mildly profane and very learned and joyful and engaging and funny and sweeping and heartbreaking and really, really, real. You owe it to yourself, and to your understanding of Judaism, to read this book.
Seriously. Do it now.