“Teaching young people about their heritage is a front-row seat to Jewish continuity.”
— Me, after witnessing one of my students (flawlessly!) chant from our synagogue’s Torah scroll
Tag: Torah: Output
Things said.
Sinchronization (sic), Expanded
A teaching based on an earlier post, which I delivered at our synagogue this past Yom Kippur. If it’s not your bag, may I suggest a little podcast [literally] to chase your blues away?
OF THE MANY metaphors for Yom Kippur, my favorite is a road trip. There are: interesting sights to see, good people to see them with, a killer soundtrack – but no snacks.
Teshuvah is Hebrew for “return.” It’s how Jews make up for our sins – how we wipe them from the whiteboard of our lives, leaving only the lessons they teach us.
But what is a sin, anyway?
Some religions equate the word “sin” with something inherently evil. But the Jewish understanding is rather more nuanced.
Judaism teaches that there are three categories of sinful acts. They’re collectively described as “aveirot” (loosely translated as “line-crossings”):
1. Khet: An archery term for missing the mark, it’s an inattentive or truly ignorant error.
2. Ahvon: A “just this once” or “what’s the harm?” action.
3. Pesha: Knowing what the laws/customs/social contracts require, but deliberately breaking them.
If those distinctions aren’t clear enough, try this driving analogy:
1. Khet: Not paying attention to, or not seeing, a stop sign.
2. Ahvon: Seeing the stop sign, but – not seeing any other drivers – proceeding to drive past it.
3. Pesha: Blowing through the stop sign with a smirking, “they can’t tell ME what to do.”
To extend the metaphor, Yom Kippur may be seen as a reevaluation of our driving habits: brushing up on the California Drivers’ Handbook, say, and plotting our routes to make sure we know how to avoid the known hazards and comply with posted signage.
Why is this important? Because we’re not the only ones on the road! We share the highways and surface streets with other drivers, some of whom have differing behind-the-wheel skills. So to ensure that we all reach our destinations safely, we agree to conduct ourselves accordingly.
Torah, in its broad sense of the entire Jewish textual tradition, is just one example of a drivers’ handbook. It sets out to create a blueprint for a perfect society. Toward that end, Torah defines for us certain positive and negative behaviors: the many “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” of the mitzvot. In addition to acting by the Torah, we are instructed to continually study it and teach it to our children.
Imagine how safe the roads would be if we all reviewed the driving laws on a regular basis, and then, actually complied with them. And how Jewishly meaningful our lives might be if we study Torah and apply it.
That said, this is not a pitch for joining Shir Shalom’s two weekly Zoom Torah study sessions (though if you are interested, you can talk to me afterward or check the links in the congregational newsletter). What I’d like to talk about instead is this: where our idealistic tires meet the experiential roadway. So let’s examine why, despite every good intention, we sometimes “drive off the road.” So to speak.
There is an ancient rabbinic teaching, based on the early chapters of Genesis, that every person has two internal urges clamoring for attention: the yetzer hatov, or urge for good, and the yetzer hara, classically understood as the urge for evil. What’s fascinating is that our sages say the yetzer hara is of extreme importance to us – as a primal drive. Without it, the rabbis say, we wouldn’t go to work, build anything, or have children.
But two relatively modern rabbis cast the yetzer hara in a different light. American Rabbi Harold Kushner views it as “the urge to selfishness.” And 19th-Century European Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch describes it as “the urge toward comfort.”
Let’s explore Rabbi Hirsch’s definition more closely.
Unlike some religious or spiritual traditions, Judaism doesn’t pit our souls and our bodies against each other – we balance them. Our sages teach that without the body, the soul would have no way to experience the world. Without the soul, the body would be inert and lifeless. After all, what good is a car without a driver?
While the Jewish soul and body don’t exactly engage in a battle for supremacy, they do have different priorities. The soul aspires toward things that uplift it, like art, music, prayer or meditation, nature hikes, even Torah study. The body, on the other hand, likes to stay put. It seeks gratification in lazing about, and by satisfying its many appetites – egotistical and otherwise. And this behavior, if unchecked, can lead to the aforementioned aveirahs, or line-crossings.
Without teshuvah, it’s easy to get bogged down by the soulless indulgences of the yetzer hara. But Judaism offers a potential remedy: what our sages call “mesirat nefesh.” Literally translated as “soul-sacrifice,” it can also be understood as “self-sacrifice” or “devotion.” Mesirat nefesh keeps soul and body, the yetzer hatov and yetzer hara, in proper equilibrium through a sort of creative affliction.
Those fasting today are already engaging in one form of creative affliction. Other forms might include giving more tzedakah than usual – making sure it hurts a bit. Going out of our way to help our fellow creatures. Studying a page or two of Torah, or listening to an inspiring podcast, when we’d rather veg out in front of a screen.
The point is not to conquer or do away with the yetzer hara, but to keep it balanced with the yetzer hatov – by getting out of our comfort zones often enough to grow. Otherwise, we stagnate – which is the very opposite of teshuvah. To revisit the car-and-driver model, we can be tempted toward, as Pink Floyd sang, “running over the same old ground, year after year.” Never knowing or even guessing what wonderful vistas we’re missing along the highway leading over yonder.
Wherever it goes, let’s all get there safely together. Gut Yontiff – and happy motoring.
Sinchronization (sic)
AS THE HIGH HOLY DAYS approach – a time for an accounting and confession of personal and communal sins – we may rightly ask: “Just what is a sin, anyway?”
Many of us, living as we do in a differently oriented culture, might equate sins with something inherently evil. But the Jewish understanding is rather more nuanced.
Judaism teaches that there are three categories of sinful acts, each described as “aveirahs” (loosely translated as “line-crossings”):
1. Khet: An archery term for missing the mark. Think of it as an inattentive (or ignorant) error.
2. Ahvon: A “just this once” or “what’s the harm?” behavior.
3. Pesha: Knowing what the law/custom/social contract requires, but deliberately breaking it.
If those distinctions aren’t clear enough, try this driving analogy:
1. Khet: Not paying attention to, or not seeing, the stop sign.
2. Ahvon: Seeing the stop sign, but also not seeing any other drivers – and proceeding to drive past it.
3. Pesha: Blowing through the stop sign with a smirking, “they can’t tell ME what to do.”
I hope this illustration helps make clearer our annual pilgrimage to the Day of Atonement. May this season of holy rededication bring increased awareness of What connects us all together – and the strength of responsibility to act accordingly.
Hearing Aid
A message in today’s congregational newsletter. It’s a Jewish thing, but also universal.
Listening.
It’s one of the most important things people can do for each other. It’s so important, in fact, that our Torah teaches us to speak of it – in the Shema – twice daily.
The Hebrew root of “shema” is shin-mem-ayin. In this week’s Torah portion, Eikev, that root surfaces in its doubled/emphatic form (Deuteronomy 11:13) as part of the Shema’s second paragraph.
The word “shema” is usually translated as “hear” or “listen,” and when it’s doubled it means “really listen.” However, there is no single English word that perfectly captures its multiple shades of meaning – which can also include “understand,” “take seriously,” and “hear in order to act.”
“When you encounter a word in any language that is untranslatable into your own,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says, “you are close to the beating pulse of that culture. To understand an untranslatable word, you have to move out of your comfort zone and enter a mindset that is significantly different from yours.”
He goes on to define listening as a deeply spiritual act. It can also be painful, since what we hear may sometimes challenge our own worldview. But it’s through meeting that challenge – listening to others who may not agree with us, who may think and feel differently than we’re used to thinking and feeling – that we can open ourselves to growing and developing in ways that might never have occurred to us.
“Listening is the greatest gift we can give to another human being,” Rabbi Sacks concludes. “To be listened to, to be heard, is to know that someone else takes me seriously […] it changes not only the one who is heard, but the listener as well.”
May we all be strong and brave enough to really listen to each other – and to willingly go wherever that listening takes us.
This is Dedicated to the One
HOW CAN WE distill something as complex as Judaism into one simple, straightforward sentence?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l makes an interesting observation this week, reminding us of a discussion in the Talmud where three rabbis tried to do just that.
One rabbi sees it as a matter of faith, and offers Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema – “Hear O Israel, Adonai is our G?d, Adonai is One.” Another frames it in terms of community, citing Leviticus 19:18: “Love your fellow as yourself.” But the rabbi who gets the last word says Judaism’s essence can be found in Numbers 28:4: “Offer one lamb [as a sacrifice] in the morning and the second in the afternoon.”
Rabbi Sacks intimates that living a life of consistent action is our religion’s most important teaching. “Judaism … is not just the fire of romantic love but the daily kindnesses of a successful marriage, not just an exalted faith in the transcendent G?d but the way it takes faith and translates it into everyday life.” May we all strive to carry this essence forward.
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.
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!