Tag: Learning Jewishly

“A little Torah is all anyone knows.”

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.

Talk Shop

DUE TO THE Hebrew calendar’s complexities, we sometimes double up on the weekly Torah readings. The first of this week’s two portions, Matot (Numbers 30:2-36:13), concerns the laws of vows. Words are supremely powerful in Judaism – after all, our Torah holds that G?d created the universe by speaking it into existence – and how we use them matters. Our words can hurt or heal, create or destroy, bring people closer or push them apart. As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” May our words be truthful, kind, and uplifting, each and all when necessary – and don’t forget to add a little humor!

Reluctant Shepherds

OUR TORAH PORTION this week (Pinchas; Numbers 25:10-30:1) contains a powerful lesson in leadership dynamics. G?d reiterates to Moses that the mistake the prophet made a few chapters ago – smacking a rock instead of commanding it to produce water for the thirsty Israelites – will keep him out of the Land of Promise. But Moses doesn’t rationalize his mistake, complain about G?d’s unfairness, or otherwise try to change the divine verdict. Instead, Moses pleads for a successor (Numbers 27:16-17): “Let Adonai, Source of the breath of all flesh, appoint someone over the community who shall go out before them and come in before them … so that Adonai’s community may not be like sheep who have no shepherd.”

Leadership is a difficult thing for one who wields it. It can too easily become an ego-trip, and it can be challenging to put ego on hold and act for the greater good. Such ego-less leadership is a gift that few possess, and those who do possess it tend to use their precious gift as did Moses and his successor, Joshua. An unattributed saying can be applied here: “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” So let it be with leadership; so let it be with life.

Thirsty Work

What did Moses do wrong?

IN THIS WEEK’S TORAH PORTION, Chukat (Numbers 19:1-22:1), Moses disobeys G?d’s command to speak to a rock and thereby produce water for the thirsty Jews and their animals. Instead, Moses – perhaps in grief over his sister Miriam’s very recent death, or just fed up with the ever-complaining Israelites – twice wallops the rock with his staff. Abundant water does indeed flow forth but G?d, annoyed with Moses’ failure to sanctify his Boss in the eyes of the multitude, forbids him from ever entering the Promised Land.

Some say Moses’ mistake would have been a small thing in an ordinary person but huge for one of Moses’ stature; imagine the reaction had Moses spoken up rather than struck out! On the other hand, perhaps Moses had already had his time by getting us out of Egypt so we could receive the Torah, and G?d would have found some other way to keep him out of our then-undiscovered country. The Talmudic sage Ben Azzai tells us: “There is no one that has not their hour, and there is no thing that has not its place.” On this Independence Day of 2025, may we each find our own hour and place to help others quench their thirst for kindness and justice.

Breaking Class

(Sermon delivered this past Saturday morning. Feel free to scroll past if you’re not into that sort of thing.)

KI TISA IS ONE OF those Torah portions that helps give G?d a bad name.

It seems that every time we turn around, in Torah and in the rest of the Bible, G?d is getting mad about something. Jealous. Wrathful, even. What could be behind this extreme behavior?

According to Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, there is one thing and one thing only which sets G?d off: idolatry. Turning our backs on G?d is something that G?d just can’t abide.

Which makes sense. Not only were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob promised that their descendants – that’s us! – would become a vast population, but that with G?d’s help, we would thrive.

In addition, there’s G?d’s delivering us from Egyptian slavery with plagues and miracles. “You owe me,” G?d seems to be saying. “After all I’ve done for you, and you go lusting after idols? Take THAT!”

But as we’ve also heard this morning, Moses calls G?d’s bluff (if it is a bluff) to annihilate the Jews with a “what-would-the-neighbors-think” argument. And G?d relents.

Of course, Moses – no stranger to anger himself – then proceeds to smash the Tablets of the Ten Precepts, as R’ Adin Steinsaltz calls them. Moses destroys the only record of the Sinai Contract, then carves out a new and slightly different one that has lasted more than 3,000 years.

The aliyot my friend Stephen Steiner just chanted are from chapter 32 of Exodus. Stephen points out that in Gematria, Jewish numerology, 32 is also the numerical equivalent for the word “lev,” lamed-bet, meaning “heart.”

Active debate with G?d might be understood as one aspect of the Jewish heart. We don’t always take what G?d says at face value, whether it’s Abraham arguing on behalf of the S’domites, Jacob’s chutzpadik deal-making en route to Laban’s house, or the rabbis of the Talmud rejecting divine miracles as legal proofs.

But iconoclasm might be seen as another Jewish heart-aspect. If Moses hadn’t broken the Tablets, our ancestors wouldn’t have awoken from their idolatrous slumber. Moses is in good company: with Abraham breaking the idols in his father’s shop, Elijah breaking the reputation of Baal’s priests in this week’s haftarah, and Jews in general throughout history making radical breakthroughs in social justice, medicine, science, entertainment, agriculture, and many other fields of human endeavor.

We’re the little kid who points a finger at the unclad emperor and dares to say so; and sometimes, we’ve taken our lumps for it. But our holy chutzpah has always been in service of creating a better world – not just for Jews, but for everyone.

May it always be so. Shabbat shalom.

One Letter (Alright, Two)

(If you’re not hot for stretchy, out-on-a-limb Jewish linguistic mysticism, best sit this one out. Otherwise, please enjoy.)

IT’S NO SECRET THAT JEWS love words. (After all, Torah begins with “God” speaking the world into being; if you need further convincing, check out almost any Jewish comedian.) Our tradition teaches that Torah contains no unintentional words nor letters – and that meaning can be extracted from it anywhere and everywhere you look. It’s all to play for, and we play hard.

Take, for example, the words “eved,” or “slave,” and “Ivri,” “Hebrew” – not the language, but a member of the tribe. Reading Fig. 1 and 2 from right to left, as one does in Hebrew, you’ll notice the third letter in each word looks very much alike: in eved, that letter is a dalet (D) and in Ivri it’s a reish (R). Another point is that the root word for Ivri is “eveir,” which means “to cross over.”

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Now, stay with me here. It’s about to get weird.

Dalet is a 90-degree right angle, while reish is more of a sweeping curve. One way of understanding this difference may be that a slave is boxed in and constrained. A Hebrew, on the other hand, is a constraint-crosser: one who goes where the flow takes them in order to become more.

Mind you, this quality is not specific only to Jews, but to anyone who walks a way of self-transcendence. Jewish tradition teaches that anyone and everyone can practice growth – in skill sets, wisdom, spirituality, and character. But that osmotic, gut-level tradition is also one reason why there are so many Jewish doctors, scientists, philanthropists, Nobel Prize winners, and others devoted to improving the human condition.

And how exactly does one do that? See the last letter in Ivri? It’s a yod (Y), which symbolizes intuition and literally means “hand” – the appendage with which we effect change. Only good, hard, inspired and diligent work enables us to make a difference in this, the most interesting and problematic of all possible worlds.

Class dismissed.

Minute Mitzvah: ALL ONE ALL ONE OK OK!!!

Today’s Task: Know that “God” is One.

My dead psychic twin Sputnik, who rediscovered his natal Christian faith around the same time I came back to Judaism, was fond of saying, “Monotheism is not for wimps.” By that he meant that if you subscribe to the nondual one-Source-for-everything paradigm, you have to take the bad with the good: earthquakes and aurorae, wars and wonderment, convicted felons and patriots. In other words, if you believe that “God” is only responsible for the stuff you like, and is not to be found in the stuff you don’t, you might be spiritually hobbling yourself. Since the potential for every particle of existence emerged from the Big Bang, we are ALL connected; even to the people and things we despise. That can be a hard concept to swallow — but it can also be worth the chew.

Exercise: Flex those soul-jaws by trying to digest the idea that someone or something you find objectionable, or even loathsome, also partakes of the Divine. That doesn’t mean you have to condone or agree with them or it – an important distinction! – only that you acknowledge the connection. (Or, as Robert Anton Wilson writes, “Everyone has the Buddha-nature, but some poor bastards just don’t realize it yet.”)

Shock Absorber

THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 6, 2024 gave me the biggest and most horrific shock of my sixty-two years.

I won’t go into why, because half the country already knows why, and those processing the same emotions could use fewer words rather than more.

And yet, I do have something to say.
Continue reading “Shock Absorber”

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