Tag: Torah: Input

Things learned.

Temple of the Holy Reruns

HAVE YOU EVER SAT IN a theater after the movie ended so you can see it again? Then you’ll understand Simchat Torah.

Simchat Torah, or “Rejoicing of (the) Teaching,” will be celebrated by the worldwide Jewish community beginning tonight through tomorrow. It marks the end of the yearly Torah-reading cycle and the beginning of a new one. We’ve been doing this for at least (best guess here) 2,569 years; when we reach the last words of Deuteronomy (“Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses … [with] all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel”) we immediately rewind to “In the beginning of G?d’s creating heaven and earth…” To paraphrase a line from Guys and Dolls, among other things Judaism can be called the oldest established permanent floating book club on Earth. Continue reading “Temple of the Holy Reruns”

Literal Myths

DOES IT MATTER WHETHER OR not our sacred writings are historically accurate?

This question comes up every year at our synagogue Torah study, as people go to great lengths to try and explain the fantastical events of the text, especially the Book of Exodus, by relating them to natural events. Somebody is bound to mention that the Nile’s fish were killed by a blood-red tide, that locust swarms were a common (and in the Torah’s case, well-timed) occurrence, that Mount Sinai was a volcano, etc., etc., etc.

I feel that these good-natured and well-intentioned attempts at explanations may be unnecessarily missing the point. My own point of view is that what matters is the story. Continue reading “Literal Myths”

Why I Love: Torah Study

IT’S THE ENDLESS INTELLECTUAL PUZZLE. It’s that Hebrew writing closely resembles Klingonese (well, it does; come to think of it, so does some of the sentiment). It’s belonging to the 3,000-year-old Permanent Floating Book Club. It’s the spectra, vagaries and levels of meaning. It’s the idea of “seventy faces of Torah,” meaning that each word (even letter!) can be looked at in multiple ways. It’s engaging with the minds of long-dead people who live on in your study. It’s the level playing field (“Only a little is all anyone knows of Torah,” quoth the greybeard rabbi). It’s seeing how far the Sages can stretch a metaphor. Continue reading “Why I Love: Torah Study”

Sailing the Sea of Talmud (And Related Waters)

IF YOU STUDY ANYTHING, AS the salesman sang in the opening scene of “The Music Man,” “You’ve got to know the territory.”

Case in point: Every Wednesday morning for the past few years, I have conducted an hour-long living-room learning session we’ve come to call “Text Study,” which has included in-depth forays through the Bible’s early prophetic books, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and currently, the Book of Psalms. Continue reading “Sailing the Sea of Talmud (And Related Waters)”

Midrash Noach

DESPITE THE ALLURING INTRICACIES OF Mosaic law of the past few months, it’s nice to be once again studying the Torah’s classic origin tales. This week we see a sea change (literally) in the way humans relate to their world and each other, with two stories of human intransigence and Divine response: the Flood and the Tower of Babel.

The Flood came about, so our rabbis tell us, because people didn’t respect the boundaries which had been set up at Creation. Murder and violence were the order of the day. God decided to start over again by washing the earth clean and re-beginning humanity with Noach and his family.

The Tower united humanity in one great work, but at the cost of challenging God. Continue reading “Midrash Noach”

First Graf: The Jewish Catalog

Fig. 1
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE COUNTER-CULTURAL agents of the 1960s (re)discovered their Yiddishkeit (Jewishness)? A trio of them (and many others) produced the now-classic The Jewish Catalog: a do-it-yourself kit.

As the subtitle implies, the book is chock-full of homemade ways to “do Jewish,” from making your own challah, tying and laying tefillin, navigating a siddur (prayerbook) or the Torah, burying someone with dignity, mystically understanding Shabbat, navigating the “Jewish Establishment” and much much more. Published in 1973 (and serially reprinted since then), it spoke to the nascent anti-authoritarian paradigm of “ethnic pride” and “finding your roots” that was then sweeping the United States. It features articles from such luminaries as Rabbi Zalman Schachter (founder of the Jewish Renewal movement) to Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, and sparked a communal yearning for authenticity and connectedness that still resonates today. The lavishly illustrated book spawned two sequels and is still relevant to anyone seeking to jump into the sea of Judaism: Continue reading “First Graf: The Jewish Catalog”

Chosenness as Motivator

ONE OF THE MORE CONTROVERSIAL aspects of traditional Judaism is the idea that “Jews are the Chosen People.” Some (both Jew and non-Jew) take this to mean “superior” in some way (I’m looking at you, Grandma), and use it as an(other) excuse to resent and revile us; some Jews are so uncomfortable with the notion that they go so far as to pretend it doesn’t exist.

I can certainly sympathize with their discomfort, but as a Religious Agnostic, I’m not sure that that isn’t throwing out the baby with the mayim chaim (holy bathwater).

Full disclosure: I don’t believe in a G?d Who plays favorites or makes distinctions between one branch of Homo sapiens and another, or even between Homo sapiens and the other animals. But I think there may be some value in thinking there is — at least, a little bit. Continue reading “Chosenness as Motivator”

The Loudest Silence

THE TRICK IS: HOW TO scream at the top of your lungs without making a sound.

That’s one of the lessons taught by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a Chasidic teacher who lived in Ukraine at the turn of the 19th century CE. R’ Nachman, who suffered deeply from depression throughout his life (and who once said, “It is a great mitzvah [religious obligation] always to be happy”), taught that one can release one’s emotions by focusing them into a “silent scream:” Continue reading “The Loudest Silence”

Two Letters, One Torah

THE FIRST THING YOU NEED to know is that, in Hebrew, the letter D (dalet) looks a lot like the letter R (reish). It’s so easy to confuse the two, in fact, that Source Critics (those who see the Torah as knit together from several other texts) like to explain some of Torah’s eccentricities as scribal errors — handmade typos, if you will.

Now, I mainly hold to the Source Critics’ view of the Torah, in that I believe the text we have now is a redacted compendium of several older documents (a theory better known as the Documentary Hypothesis, or DH). Unlike the critics, however, I don’t believe the Redactor was slipshod; rather, that what we call “mistakes” were actually deliberate features, put there in order to keep us talking about the Torah for lo these many millennia. Case in point, the debate over Deuel vs. Reuel: Continue reading “Two Letters, One Torah”

Sacred Polyphony

The Torah can be taken, among other things, as a ‘polyphonic’ text, or a loose anthology of competing claims regarding the legal stipulations of the covenant. The edited Torah, following this approach, was not meant to be read as a practical and coherent handbook on how to carry out the law, but as a collage of competing understandings of the requirements of the covenant.”

— Rabbi David Frankel

Raiders of the Lost Prayer

THE SCENE IS TENSE. RENE Belloq, a French archaeologist hired by the Nazi government (ptoo ptoo ptoo) to steal the Ark of the Covenant in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, is about to open the sacred artifact wherein lay the original tablets of the Ten Commandments. Dressed in the garb of the High Priest as detailed in the biblical book of Exodus (and standing before the Ark as described in the same book), he whispers a prayer before raising the lid — and thereby provoking the fiery Wrath of G?d to incinerate the infidels. Continue reading “Raiders of the Lost Prayer”

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