Learning Jewishly – The Metaphorager.

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.

Never Enough

AS A TEACHER of Jewish children and adults, it’s my job (and joy!) to soak up as much Torah as I can – in the broad sense of “Torah” as “the entire corpus of the Jewish textual tradition.”

Fortunately, there’s no end to it, which makes for some pretty challenging (and rewarding!) job security.

What dwells among those who study Torah together?

But Torah isn’t meant to be studied alone. As it happens, I am blessed (or, if you prefer, lucky) to be involved with a tightknit community of very learned and dedicated individuals, some of whom I’ve known for years, who continually teach me more than I can ever impart to them. Please allow me to introduce you.

The first group of Torah scholars hails from 2001, when my copilot had the great idea to study the weekly portion with our co-congregants on the Shabbat mornings that we weren’t studying with our rabbi once a month. We all met in our living room, and though many no longer walk this planet, others have taken their place, and the dozen-or-so of us now converse online (thank you, COVID) for ninety engrossing minutes every Saturday.

Around 2014, a handful of would-be learners commenced living-room meetings on Thursday mornings at the behest of RM, who wanted to study Mussar (Jewish ethical spirituality). Once again thanks to the pandemic, we shifted Zoomward for an hour on Wednesday mornings and collected a small number of fellow students. Though we’ve now worked our way back to Mussar, we’ve also tackled the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Ezekiel, as well as the pithy rabbinical wisdom of Pirkei Avot.

Then there’s the hourly dive into various texts with two veterans of the preceding collectives: Thursday mornings with RT (a wise and humble night-owl with whom I’m now learning one of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks‘ Torah commentaries), and TR (a brilliant and outspoken mathematician-philosopher with a taste for Maimonides) on Monday afternoons. For nearly two years, it has also been my great pleasure to study by phone for fifteen minutes on Wednesday mornings with BE, a hyper-articulate professional writer, as part of the ongoing program Partners in Protection. And just this past Wednesday, my longtime convalescent friend RR and I took up the weekly Torah portion – partly to learn, and mostly to take her mind off her poor health.

Our rabbis tell us that whenever people speak words of Torah together, the Shekhinah (Divine Presence) dwells among them. Whether or not that’s true, I do know what dwells among those who study together: joy. And isn’t that the same thing?

5 Thoughts: Extended Identity

0. IT TAKES A PROTRACTED MOVE to realize how much of one’s sense of self is tied up in one’s Stuff.

1. After 26 years within the same walls, circumstances – specifics are unimportant – have forced us to find other lodgings. But the same circumstances have dictated that our upcoming relocation actually necessitated packing our Stuff some months ago. Thus, we have spent a long time in box-cramped quarters with all but a sparse assembly of representative possessions.

We have spent a long time in box-cramped quarters with all but a sparse assembly of representative possessions.

2. This decidedly isn’t a complaint: at least I still have all my Stuff. Some of my friends lost all theirs to different iterations of NorCal’s sporadic and frightening wildfires, including one friend who was iterated twice. (He likes to say that all his Stuff “overheated.”) And there are refugees around the world whose circumstances have included war, flood, famine, earthquake… I won’t belabor that point, because it’s not the one I’m addressing. What I want to say is something quite else: it’s very disorienting to live without what reminds me of who I am – and which embodies my memory and identity.

3. Chiefly: books.

4. As a student and teacher in our local Jewish community, books are essential not only to my work, but also to my sense of self. Although we all live in a digital Golden Age of Jewish study, thanks in part to Sefaria and My Jewish Learning and the Academic Torah Institute, all my sixty-three years of curiosity-reflexes are geared toward finding answers (as well as more interesting questions) by laying hands on and flipping through books.

5. It’s funny how temporary deprivation can heighten one’s experience of reality, much as the Yom Kippur fast can reveal one’s relationship with food. Before we packed my library, I used to think of books as my friends. Now I think of them as part of my soul. What of your Stuff reminds you of who you are? And: why?

G?d’s Hamsters

(With welcome help from special guest star Ann Autumn.)

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.” – Samuel Beckett, Endgame

You can’t know who you are without knowing where you’ve been.

Mr. Beckett, most famously the author of Waiting for Godot, was not Jewish. By all accounts, though raised in a religious home, he identified as atheist. Yet the above quote could have been describing this week’s Torah portion, Devarim (Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22), the first parasha of the Torah’s final book.

Moses begins “his” book – a 14,294-word Mosaic monologue – by recalling in some detail the Israelites 40-year desert trek; i.e., the events of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

In doing so, our greatest prophet reveals an important truth: You can’t know who you are without knowing where you’ve been. What do you see when you reflect back on your journey? As with Torah’s cast of characters from Genesis forward, along the way there have been others shaping your path – your malachim (“angels,” or “messengers”), your pharaohs, even the occasional stranger pointing the way. As someone once said, “I promise you that along your path you have been helped by people whose names you will never know.”

May we each and all continue forward, looking back when necessary, recognizing that – just as Deuteronomy takes us directly to Genesis – endings are also beginnings, and yet: we go on.

Bargain Abasement

Sermon delivered last night (2507.25). I won’t be offended if you sit this one out.

HERE’S A LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Not every Israelite settled in the Land of Promise – but then again, that was by choice.

The Torah this week, in Parshat Matot/Masei (the final portions of the Book of Numbers, 30:2-36:13), lays out the scene. The adult children of the redeemed Israelite slaves are poised at the border of Canaan, on the Jordan River’s eastern bank, about to enter the land G?d had gifted to Abraham and his descendants. They are fresh from a 38-year wilderness-wander, and are aching to become Divinely sanctioned farmers, herders, and tradesfolk.

However, there’s a small hitch…

However, there’s a small hitch: the tribes of Reuven and Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh, want to stay put. They are cattlemen – cowboys, if you will – and the east bank of the Jordan is prime cattle country. They’d rather remain there than take their tribal portion with everyone else in what’s soon to become the Land of Israel.

As he often does in such circumstances, Moses gets a bit … peeved. “Are your brothers to go to war while you stay here?” he cries. “This is what your fathers did, when they spied out the land and brought back tales of giants and unconquerable cities. They took the heart out of the people, and caused them to wander for decades in this desert wasteland. You’ll do the same!”

Unfazed, the tribes counter Moses’ rebuke by agreeing to give in order to get. They promise they’ll enter Canaan first as shock troops, and only return to their beloved ranches once the land is duly subdued. On hearing this, Moses is mollified. He even says that if they do what they say, they will thus win G?d’s approval.

These two-and-a-half tribes are fine exemplars of the principle of negotiation – giving up something to get something greater in return.

Torah is rife with negotiation, especially negotiating with G?d: Jacob vowed that if G?d saw to Jacob’s basic needs, the runaway patriarch would build G?d a holy shrine and tithe all Jacob’s belongings to his Boss. Abraham famously argued with G?d over the fate of the cruel Sodomites. And Moses talked G?d out of destroying the Jewish people in the wake of the Golden Calf incident by saying, in essence, “What would the Egyptians think?”

So my question tonight is: Have you ever been willing to give up something in order to get something else you wanted? Perhaps even for a greater cause?

[pass the mic: many comments, including one woman’s tale of giving up a well-paying job she hated in order to pursue right livelihood, and another woman’s account of choosing her heartthrob over the scholastic life]

Thank you, everyone. May all our deals, especially for our ideals, turn out at least half as well as they did for our ancestors. Shabbat shalom.