Rabbi Diamond's Torah Talks

The Community Free Synagogue

8210 Cypress Lake Drive   P.O. Box 07144    Fort Myers, Florida  33919

(239) 274-SHUL (7485)    synfree@comcast.net

Torah Study preceded by a light breakfast is each Shabbat morning starting at 10:00AM

(scroll down for previous commentaries)

 

May 16, 2009

Bhar-BeHuqotai

Leviticus 25-27 

  This week’s reading means “at the mountain (Sinai)”. Whenever legislation is introduced as coming from Mt. Sinai, the significance is that it is understood to be ancient and supremely authoritative.

  Our Torah portion conveys the fundamentals of the just social order that is the preconditions for have the divine presence in our midst. Much of the Book of Leviticus concerns itself with the ritual requirements for such a presence. Now the authors express the firm convictions that it takes more than rituals to make a environment tahor- suitable for the sacred. It takes justice, fairness the a concern for the cause of equity- concerns that are sorely lacking in our present American economic order when the unbridled banking and credit system are picking people clean!

  The writers imagined the temple as Qiryat Melekh Rav – the abode of the Great King, with the surrounding Land of Israel the feudal possession of a Monarch who was essentially leasing the land to His subjects, the Israelite inhabitants. This week we get to read the terms of the lease and the conditions by which that lease will be extended or terminated.

  This underlying organizing principle of Israelite civic society is explicitly stated chapter 25, verse 23: “For you are sojourners and tenants with Me.” God holds the deed to the Land of Israel, and the all the inhabitants can do is sublet it to each other for very limited periods of time not to exceed the 50^th Jubilee year. As the landlord, God was entitled to annual rents and a share of the produce- the Biblical tithes. And as the only true “freeholder” in the Land of Israel, God could dictate how and when the land was to be used, e.g., the Sabbatical years, how long it could be mortgaged for collateral, and the rights of the mortgagee to redeem the land after a foreclosure.

  Like any properly written lease, our Torah portion spells out the penalty for noncompliance and breach. It is, obviously, eviction, or as the Torah calls it, exile. Those invaders who come and carry the people off into exile are depicted as agents of God, implacable “deputies” sent to disposes us for violating the terms of the lease spelled out in this week’s Torah portion.

  The penalty clauses are not easy reading, but they are intended as a powerful inducement for the Israelite to maintain as sense of God’s absolute sovereignty over His domain. We are meant to understand that ultimately we own nothing, and if we are commanded to adopt humane and charitable economic policies, not to “gouge” or even to charge interest, and not to endlessly and limitlessly amass and horde, we have no justification for resenting these limits on our natural rapacity. After all, none of this really belongs to us to begin with! Thus Torah theoretically does not support “Free Enterprise” in its carefully regulated “top down” view of social economics.

  Of course, even the Torah itself in this week’s reading admits that would it take consistent miracles to make its economic program work! Farming and most other forms of commerce are completely dependant on an interest-based credit system. It is supremely unrealistic to expect that the land must be left fallow, sometimes for 2 years in a row (when a sabbatical year is followed by a Jubilee year). The Torah has to factor in divine intervention in order to avoid routinely self-induced famines (Chapter 25:20).

  It is hard to imagine that this program was ever implemented and not because of impiety or disobedience to God. It simply won’t work, and the Torah knows it. In fact we are reading not a program but a socio-economic manifesto, a kind of fantasy of what it would be like in a perfect society. It is as “fantastical” as Locke’s or Marx’s utopian visions: morally uplifting goals and signposts pointing us towards a happier and less predatory world.

  We have learned from the brutal “top down” economic experiments of the last century that is simply no way to impose any real order on an economy, no matter how supposedly lofty the goals of the controls. The only true order that can be brought to the marketplace must come from the inside out, from a spiritual awareness of the sovereignty of God that engenders humility and limits to our greed and ruthlessness. That awareness is the point of this week’s Torah portions.

 

May 1, 2009

Aharay Mot- Qedoshim

Leviticus 16-20

If we were to unroll the entire Torah scroll in order to locate its exact middle, we would find ourselves in this week's Torah portion. And sure enough, in the physical heart of the Torah we also find its spiritual heart, the axiom from which everything else is derived: “Be holy, as I Ya your God am holy.” As is often the case with most oracular lemmae, this terse pronouncement can be read in more than one way. Here are some possible renditions:

Be sacred because I Yah your God am sacred.

You will become sacred since I Yah your God am sacred

Be as sacred as I Ya your God am sacred.

While each interpretation contains a nuanced difference, the underlying gist is the same. The God you worship is Qadosh (literally “set apart); likewise, you must become a people set apart. What follows in this Torah portion is a long list of commanded behaviors, most of them ethical and social. Yet these commandments are presented as more than intrinsically worthwhile actions. The upshot is that a people that observes them and does them will find themselves a people set apart from the ways of the world.

At the head of the list of commandments in this week's sedra is the general admonition: “Revere your mother and father and keep my holidays”. By tightly juxtaposing family and festival, our writer envisions a seamlessly integrated life, where kinship, cult and community all are directed towards the same goal: the creation of a completely unique society worthy of having a completely unique God in its midst. By the constant repetition throughout this reading of the expression anee Ya ' (Adonai), “I am the Lord”, after so many of the commandments, the writer reminds us that these mitzvot bear the “royal seal”. They are divinely proclaimed edicts rather than “good deeds”. The purpose of obeying these commandments is not to “rack up points” that can be redeemed for future rewards. It is to set us apart, to make us a “shrine people” whose moral and social structures constitute a living temple for our living God.

For better or worse, for so many centuries we have been known as a “people apart.” The world perceived and still perceives us a something different. Miraculous or menacing, divine or diabolical, the Jewish people stands out in stark contrast to the ordinary. Our existence is couched in superlatives. When we are good we are the best, when we are bad we are the worst. Ultimately this flows from our belief, and the world's, that in one way or another the Jewish people is specially identified with God, an identification that is expressed by our possession of God's revelation. Accordingly, the standards to which we are held and by which we are judged are so very much higher than those by which the world judges itself. And this is precisely how this week's Torah portion would have it. We are to measure ourselves against the perfection of God, not by the common denominators of humanity. An impossible standard, but anything else would be an a priori resignation to compromise and defeat.

April 18, 2009

Shmeenee

Leviticus 9-11 

Shmeenee means “8th ”- in this case, the 8 th day of the wilderness shrine's consecration ceremonies. In our tradition the number 8 often signifies beginnings.

The 8 th day after the start of creation was the actual beginning of the world's normal “space/time”, since its first 7 days were in the realm of the supernatural. The day after the 7th day is also yom rishon – the first day.

A Jewish child is not considered viable for its first 7 days. Only on the 8 th day is it a bar qayama – a truly existing person. That is why the bris is performed on the 8 th day, which is also the child's real 1 st day, the time of its actual beginning as a person.

This also explains why the beginning of each year's cycle of Torah readings is on Shmeenee Atseret/Simhat Torah , the 8th day after the beginning of Sukkot in the fall, the penultimate festival at the end of the long series of fall holidays marking the actual beginning of the “normal” year.

Thus this week's Torah reading takes up bayom hashmeenee , the 8th day after the Mishqan was erected and ritually prepared, the very day it is to be formally “opened for business.” At first glance, this highly important beginning was assumed by most to be a time of unalloyed joy. Yet Moses himself must have been filled with trepidation, having recently received an ominously dark oracle from God. Like most true oracles, it is famously difficult to interpret, but perhaps it means something like this: “through those closest to me I will be sanctified and thus be honored among all the people.” (Leviticus 10-3)

As such Moses had a premonition that something awful/awesome was going to happen at the time of the Mishqan's beginning. Some important person or persons would be used by God to underscore its circumscribed and inviolate holiness and separateness, a lesson that needed to be learned and reinforced now that God's “presence” would be taking up residence among them in the sacred tent. From now on the Mishqan was off limits to anyone but the kohanim (priests) who themselves needed meticulous preparation and stringent obedience to its rules if they would draw near.

That terrible “something” was the incineration of Aaron two oldest sons', Moses' nephews Nadav and Avihoo, as they entered the shrine on their own to make a well-intended by unauthorized incense offerings (Leviticus 10:1-2).

Buckets of ink have been poured out writing and speculating about this incident. The Torah writer gently and circumspectly hints that they might have been “drunk on duty.” Some commentaries allude to the possibility that they must have sinned by bringing in fire from some false god's altar in order to justify such a horrible consequence. But all this theorizing belies the utter starkness of the Torah's point: All world-changing beginnings and redirections can only come at a terrible price. In order to disrupt the relentless machinery of the ordinary and the banal, an extraordinary “wrench must be tossed into its works”. Something so utterly unexpected and unbalanced seems to be needed to pull the commonplace out of its mind/spirit-numbing orbit and move things to a higher level.

Perhaps this insight came from the easily observed fact that was the norm up until recently around the world. Very often women died bringing new life into this world, a dramatic expression of the unavoidable fact that the price of new life is old life. Grace is free, but it's not cheap. Evolution is not a smooth and gentle process. It is driven forward time and time again by the “Nadav and Avihoo Effect” – sudden catastrophes and immolations that abruptly redirect towards higher possibilities.

 

 

April 3, 2009 

Shabbat Hagadol

The Sabbath of “The Great”

     The Sabbath immediately preceding Passover is called Shabbat Ha’gadol, often mistranslated as “The Great Sabbath,” which, course, would have to be Shabbat Hagdolah!

  The hagadol in this special Sabbath’s name comes from an expression in this week’s haftarah, a lesson from the Prophets also heard each week.  In Malakhi 3:30 we read:

   Behold I am sending to you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrifying day of the Lord...

 Hagadol is “the great” in this verse.

  Until Germany in the mid-18^th century, the only two times a community’s rabbi would offer an address in the synagogue were on Shabbat Hagadol and then 6 months later on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of Repent” between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The idea of a rabbi delivering a weekly sermon was borrowed by German Reform Jews directly from the Lutherans. Up until then the Torah and Prophets were allowed to speak for themselves!

  Many would suggest that it is an idea whose time has passed, since virtually everyone now has easy access to vast troves of information and opinion.

  Nearly 2,000 years ago, when the Sages selected this Sabbath’s reading from Malakhi, they did so in the belief that God would send the Messiah- a second Moses- on Passover, the same time He sent the first. And like the first Moses, the Messiah would come with horrible plagues and upheavals, ushering in a time of tribulation known in Scriptures as Yom Yaweh, “the day of the Lord.” According to Malakhi 3:19, it will be a “day burning like an oven.”

   I suspect they were not talking about gradual global warming. It was to be a time of sudden upheavals and dislocations which only the righteous would survive. Although it was to be a supremely catastrophic time never to be wished for, it would usher in ahrit hayamim, “the latter days”, a never-ending time of peace and well-being tantamount to a restoration of Eden.

   Although the “day of Yah” brought on by the Messiah would come suddenly, it would not come unannounced. In keeping with the biblical pattern of God sending a prophet of warning before each national disaster, Malakhi tells us the God will dispatch the immortal Elijah the Prophet to herald the final catastrophes. Tradition teaches the Elijah will come on the eve of Passover, 3 days before the arrival of the Messiah, to declare his coming.

   Although there is an earlier reason for the ritual opening the door at the Seder supper, it has come to be associated with the anticipation of Elijah’s arrival. We send a child to open the door, and it’s one of the cute “Kokak Moments” of the evening.

But trust me on this one. If Elijah actually ever was there when the door is opened, better grab the kids and run for cover!

   No doubt there are many starving, suffering people in the world who would rejoice at the coming of Elijah and the Messiah. After all, they have nothing at all to lose by what comes next. But we whose biggest problems include bring “upside down” on a mortgage had better hope that is The Day of the Lord is just a mere metaphor!

 

 

March 27, 2009

Vayiqra’

Leviticus 1- 5

   This week we begin the third book of the Torah, known in English as Leviticus. As the name suggests, it primarily deals with Levitical-priestly concerns such as sacrifice, laws of purity, and other ritual matters surrounding the operation of the Mishqan – the tent shrine in the wilderness of Sinai.

  The Hebrew title of this volume, Vayiqra’ ( [God] called out”), is derived from its opening words: “Then He called out to Moses (Vayiqra ‘el Mosheh) -and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting…”.

  No longer do we find God’s oracles coming impromptu from burning bushes, or set on dramatic backdrops of flaming mountains. Now revelation becomes “routinized” in a cultic setting that is characterized by sacrificial rituals, strictly enforced taboos, and an elite, “pedigreed” priesthood. In other words, God’s revelations are now encapsulated within a highly organized religion.

  I suppose all of this was fairly inevitable. Spontaneity and “charismatic anarchy” are hard for most people to endure, and seem to work best only in small, close-knit circles of likeminded enthusiastic people. As a group becomes larger and more diverse, the natural cohesion becomes more tenuous and diluted, and the mortar of ritual and routine takes the place of shared ethos. The spontaneous gives way to the predictable, and the “specialness” of the group, that which made it unique and vibrant morphs into “business as usual”.

  The people had left Egypt, whose society had perfected the business as usual of religion. Temples, priests, static rituals and formal beliefs where the lifeblood of Egyptian culture. In stark contrast to this, our people found their freedom by following an invisible nameless God Whose spirit “blew where it will,” and Whose reluctant prophets received God’s word without ritual or credentials. Nothing about their deliverance was planned or predictable.

  Soon it became clear that this wonderful turmoil was more than they could bear. The people first expressed their desire for a predicable, “we’ve always done it this way” method of worshipping God by building a Golden Calf. After that debacle, an authorized tent shrine was built and rituals established to satisfy the needs and demands of a very ordinary people!

  Even so, at the heart of the Jewish sacrificial rituals we read all about in this 3^rd book of the Torah is the concept of atonement, in Hebrew kapparah. The root KPR is etymologically concept to the words “cover” and “cap.” Kapparah does not mean that our sins vanish as if they never existed. They are merely “covered” by the blood of our sacrifices offered at the altar. The sacrificial animal substitutes and “covers” for us. The debt incurred by our sins is still owed, but payment will not be exacted, at least for now.

  However if our debit list on our ledger of life continues to grow, there will come a tipping point when kapparah will not suffice, and then the full sum of our obligations will come due.

  As the prophets of Israel repeated warned, our people,  relying too much on the long-term efficacy of atonement, blithely continued to sin, counting on a system they were stretching beyond its limits. Kapparah was intended for essentially good and decent people who thoughtlessly or foolishly strayed from the path. Chronic, willful evil doers were not to be “covered”.

   Good people can do wrong, even terribly wrong things. The Book of Leviticus with its promise of atonement is for them. It gives us a way not to discard these people  by offering them a way to remain in God’s “good graces” and ours. David was made to pay a hefty penalty for his affair with Bathseba, but God did not remove him from the throne.

   Perhaps we need to build a kind of civic altar in our society, where our essentially good and effective public servants to stray can find a way back!  “Bailouts” are only temporary measures!

  

March 21, 2009

Vayaqhel

Exodus 35- 38:20

 

The overarching theme of the Torah is God yearning and striving to connect with a Humanity that is insistent on hiding from its Creator out of fear, guilt and ignorance. This dramatic and ultimately tragic motif is elegantly introduced at the very beginning, in Genesis 3:9:

The Lord God called out to the Human: ‘Ayekah – ‘Where are you?”.

This is a supremely creative and insightful way of presenting the real and actual issue- a frustrated and despairing Humanity searching for a God who is too obvious and ubiquitous to be found. The Torah writers are using a technique often employed by counselors called “role reversal”. When two parties feel frustrated in their attempts at connecting and communicating, the counselor might ask they to exchange roles, to make believe they are the other person try to communicate with them. It is often very helpful in clarifying the issues, or, at the very least, of creating a measure of empathy.

Reading between the lines, this is the Torah writers' message: If we feel frustrated at trying to connect with God, just imagine how much worse it must be for God trying to bond with us?

Just when we think we've found God, which is to say, we imagine we understand why things are the way they are and how events interconnect, something happens to assure us that we still don't get it. That's the Bible in a nutshell – the ancient written record of our people trying to find God and then figure out what that God expected of them and what they might hope for in return. And just when they think they've got it, along comes an enemy or an exile or some other catastrophe compelling them to rethink God and their relationship to God.

This week's Torah portion, quite likely written after the Temple was destroyed, is just such a theological rethinking expressed in a wonderfully subtle way. The Royal temple in Jerusalem was the old certainty that now lay in ruins. For centuries it was axiomatic that if the Temple was properly designed and constructed, and if all the rituals and cultic conditions were met in its operation, nothing really bad could really happen to Israel as a people. After all, God seemed to require the Temple and the sacrifices, and would never do anything to seriously jeopardize “the system.” Then along came Nebuchadnezzar...

But here we are, in this week's sedra , with the people in the Wilderness enthusiastically building the Tabernacle, the Temple 's prototype, an enterprise that the writer knows will ultimately be an exercise in folly, since it was eventually learned that God is not about edifices and institutions. But how is that Torah writer to express this insight without anachronistically step out of voice and character?

The writer let's us know his own insight and true perspective on all the frenetic fashioning and building of a “House for God” by repeatedly using several forms of the word bl ( lev ) –“heart” – throughout his description of the assembling of the Mishqan – the Wilderness Shrine. I count at least 15 instances of the appearance of lev and its derivatives in this week's Torah portion, along with a number of instances of the term ru'ah  – “spirit”, amid all the engineering and architecture.

Could it be that the Torah writer is telling us that it is all ultimately an affair of the heart, and in the matter of true religion, what's inside of you is infinitely more important than the edifices you erect. A temple without a heart is a mausoleum.

 

February 20, 2009

 Mishpatim

Exodus 21-24 

   This week’s Torah portion begins with Moses still atop the mountain receiving the stipulations of the covenant God intends to make with Israel. These are more detailed explications of the very general Decalogue, the essential “constitutional articles” we read last week. By way of analogy, last week’s Decalogue (the so-called “Ten Commandments”) if the Constitution, this week’s reading presents the civil and criminal codes which flow from it.  In fact, the largest amount of Talmudic tort law is derived directly from the verses in this week’s reading. And although these mishpatim (judicial guidelines) are couched in terms of oxen, sheep, cisterns, etc., the underlying legal principles are applicable to nearly the entire range of today’s civil legal causes for damages.

   And just as constitution and the laws flowing from it represent a covenant between the people and its government, so do all these mishpatim embody the brit, the covenant between Israel and its Sovereign. If we are to expect a special kind of divine behavior directed towards us, here is the quid pro quo that God expects from us.

   Underlying all of this is a biblically-preferred form of government we would call a constitutional monarchy. The absolutely powerful sovereign has agreed to circumscribe and limit its actions in predicable and principled ways without caprice or whimsy. In returns, the ruler’s subjects promise continued loyalty and support to the monarch who is no longer maintaining power by terror and intimidation.

  Leaving aside the question as to whether God will be controlled by human behaviors and covenants, a question that is at the heart of the Book of Job, this ancient Israelite idea of the possibility of a covenant with God marks a radical break in ancient religious thought.

   Up until this point, religion was based on Man’s fear of the gods, who were cruel, capricious and totally unprincipled. As the pagan Socrates supposedly remarked, “To live is to contend daily with the gods!”  Thus, at the heart of all pagan religious rituals was the goal of warding off the gods by feeding them, intoxicating them, or otherwise satisfying their craven appetites. The idea of loving Zeus “ with all your all your heart, soul and might” would have been laughable in the extreme to the ancient pagan, since Zeus was exceptionally unlovable!

   And to expect that Zeus would even remotely conform to a pattern of behavior that we mortals call justice and would agree to be bound by a covenant with mortals was an exercise in folly, merely “whistling past the graveyard.”

  The last part of this week’s Torah reading depicts the actual ratification ceremony of this covenant between God and the people. The Assembly of the 70 Elders accompany Moses, Aaron the priest, and his two eldest sons Nadav and Avihu towards that sacred spot atop Mt. Sinai. Moses then informs them all these mishpatim, and the Elders affirm their willingness to abide by them. He then offers sacrifice, reads the formal text of the Covenant, and after their formal affirmation, casts some of the sacrificial blood in them. After “making it official”, the Assembly is allowed to ascend to God’s sacred place, where God actually permits them to see Him!

  This underscores the biblical understanding, not that God is invisible, but that “No man shall see me and live.” The Torah writer remarks with astonishment that for this one time, God allowed mere mortals to view Him and then graciously spared them!

   I suppose you’re wonderful what God actually looked like. Of course, the Torah doesn’t say! But that’s why we have a weekly Torah study…

 

 

February 13, 2009

Yitro

Exodus 18-20

This week's “peak experience” Torah reading, describing Israel receiving the Sinai commandments, bears the name of Moses' father-in-law Jethro (Yitro). The division of Torah portions is not intrinsic to the Torah itself, which is written as a continuous text with only small gaps to separate the 5 books. The Sages in the early centuries of the Common Era set up the weekly Torah portions whose names are derived from a key word in each week's verse. In this week's Torah portion, by beginning our sedra where they did, evidently the Sages wished to offer Jethro the ultimate honor of forever having his name associated with the revelation at Sinai.

Who was this Yitro, also known as Hovev and Yeter, that he should be afforded such an honor? The Torah portrays this “priest of Midian” not only as Moses' in-law, but also, most significantly, as the first none-Israelite “convert” to the worship of our God (see Exodus 18:9-13). He is also described as the architect of Israel 's governmental system in the wilderness (Exodus 18:19 -27). All of this is quite ironic, since the Midianites are subsequently portrayed as one of Israel 's greatest foes during their desert years!

The mysterious Druze religion reveres Jethro as their founder and great prophet. Freud and others speculated that it was Jethro who introduced the fugitive Moses to the one true God, a theme DeMille picked up in his movie. The one thing scholars can determine with some degree of certainty is that Yitro is an early Arabic name, since the “O” ending is very typical in ancient Arabic male names.

Now why would the early Sages want to afford an Arab convert such high esteem? Perhaps they were motivated by the fact that their Jewish Herodian kings were Arab descendants of Arab converts! While the Sages had a mixed view of Herod the Great, they regarded his grandson, King Agrippa I, as a righteous and beloved sovereign. His father, Herod's son and heir-apparent Aristobulus, being also the son of Mariamne, the last Hashmonean princess, was extremely popular. As a result of vicious palace intrigue and his world-class paranoia, Herod ordered not on Aristobolus, but also his brother Alexander and subsequently their mother to their deaths but spared the then 7 year-old Agrippa. The Sages rejoiced when Agrippa eventually ascended to the throne since, of all the Herodian princes, his bloodline, although part Arab, also included authentic indigenous Jewish royalty.

There is an especially poignant scene in the Talmud which depicts King Agrippa breaking into tears during the public reading of the Book of Deuteronomy on Sukkot. He wept when he heard the Torah passage commanding that no foreigner could ever be a legitimate king over Israel . It is reported that the Sages comforted and reassured him by crying out: “You are our brother!” And so it would not surprise me that in honoring Yitro, the ancient rabbis were actually paying tribute to a beloved king. Of course, this is the purest of speculation.

What is not speculation was the great premium our early rabbis placed on male converts. The Jewish catacombs of Rome (found right under Mussolini's home!), contain a number of female but no male converts. Clearly circumcision was a major impediment, which is why Paul repeated attacked the need for his converts to undergo a brit milah .

Another expression of the honor the Sages bestowed on a male convert is the way the tradition prominently features the Aramaic Torah commentary of Onkelos the Ger (convert) closest to the Torah text itself in the Miqra'ot Gidolot , the arrangement of major commentators around each page of Bible text. Although this classical printed exposition of the Jewish Scriptures was created by Daniel Bomberg in early 16 th century Venice , the proximity of each commentator to the sacred words themselves seems to reflect their respective statures in the tradition.

   

February 6, 2009

Bshalah (Shabbat Shirah)

Exodus 13:17-17

        This Shabbat is Shabbat Shirah – “The Sabbath of Song”, referring to the shirat hayam, the “song of the sea” led by the Prophetess Miriam and the women of Israel after Israel came through the sea on dry land.

 Clearly the mere English word “song” falls short as a translation for use of the Hebrew term shirah.  While it is true that the word shir or its feminine, shirah can mean “song” or “singing”, in its biblical sense it refers to all expressions that are not mere prose or narrative, any poetic, metered use of language – language employing parallelism.  Parallelism is when the second part of the verse is a restatement of the first part using synonyms and repetitive imagery.  A classic example of this would be: “Give ear, O Heavens, that I might speak, and let the earth hear the words of my mouth.” (Deut 32)

 In the case of the shirah we read and hear this Shabbat, the proper translation of shirat hayam would most likely be “The Epic Poem of the Sea”, or, more elegantly, “The Saga of the Sea.”  In fact, this is the way the lyric philosopher Martin Buber translated it.  Calling what we are hearing this Shabbat a saga is much more than a mere etymological exercise.  A saga, the poetic exposition of a supremely important historic event, is much more than a mere esthetic and entertaining use of poetry.  Within the saga is embedded a people's emotional and spiritual response to an historic event.

 An archeologist digs up a piece of pottery, an ornament, or even a clay papyrus or leather document.  But those physical artifacts are lifeless objects, and can rarely if ever convey the meaning, significance and the contemporary impact of ancient events.  That is properly the domain of saga – grand emotion set to grand speech.

 That is why the shirat hayam is so incredibly important.  It is an enduring record of our ancestors overflowing emotional response to an overwhelming event.  And so for me, while I am satisfied that there is significant circumstantial evidence that there indeed was an Exodus, the shirat hayam is, for me, supremely convincing first hand and direct evidence not only that we came out of Egypt, but also that this coming out was attended by remarkable and astounding events.  Just as a geologist can find evidence of an eruption or meteoric impact in a geological stratum, so the careful reader can discover in our saga compelling evidence that something important happened to our ancient ancestors involving Egyptian chariot and water and deliverance.

 Exactly what happened is really impossible to ascertain for sure.  Certainly the events were inevitably embellished over the centuries, But something happened..

 

January 31, 2009

 Bo’

Exodus 10- 13:16

 There is a great divide which appears right in the heart of this week’s sedra. Right after God announces the 10^th and ultimate plague, the killing of the firstborn of Egypt, and before it actually transpires, the Torah stops telling the story and for the first time starts issuing mitzvot (commandments). God commands that the spring month of the Exodus is now to be the first month of the year, and then elaborates the laws of the Passover, of the Pascal lamb and the eating of matzah in place of bread, for the seven days of the festival. From hereon in, commandments are intermixed with sacred saga, with the ratio of mitzvah to story increasing chapter by chapter until  it becomes virtually purely legal and procedural throughout. 

While the modern non-traditional reader tends to bemoan this transition from lore to law, our classical stages welcomed it, since for them the commandments were the “meat and potatoes” of Torah. Moreover, the Torah stories were embarrassing distractions for our ancient legalists, since these tales were replete with disturbing behaviors by personages they were obliged by tradition to revere. Their commentaries on the stories of Genesis and early Exodus very often attempt to mitigate, rationalize and justify,  by employing sophistic gymnastics and contortions that would be the envy of Harry Houdini. Bound as they were by the norms of traditional piety, they did not allow themselves the candor to acknowledge the bedlam that was the lives of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs who lived before the mitzvot were given and who were groping in the dark in their search for the godly way. 

In the very beginning of the Torah, in his remarks of the first verse of Genesis, the great 11^th Century Frankish expositor Rabbi Shlomo bar Izhaqi (Rashi), openly asks why the Torah doesn’t simply start with Exodus chapter 12 and take us right to the mitzvot? After all our religion is not based on the belief in stories (there is no commandment to believe among the 613 Torah mitzvoth!), but, rather, on the dutiful observance of the “thou shalts” and thou shalt nots.” In other words, Rashi is asking what possible religious significance, if any, these stories have for us Jews. Of course, Rashi’s question is purely rhetorical, since he has an answer in mind when he asks it, and a very shocking answer at that! 

Here is its paraphrase. The Torah up until Exodus chapter 12 was not intended for us Jews. It was written with a Gentile audience in mind! For God knew that some day the “nations of the world” would condemn the Jewish people as thieves who stole their land from its original inhabitants. And so God begins the Torah by asserting His creation and mastery over the world which in its entirety belongs to God and God alone. Genesis revels that God is  “ruler of the world” (melekh ha’olam), and has absolute sovereignty and eminent domain by which He can dispossess one nation from a land and bequeath it to another. 

Leaving aside the hauntingly prescient element in this Rashi commentary, it does underscore a very essential Jewish religious assertions. First and foremost, although there were some ancient sages who held that the Torah belongs only to the Jews, the older and broader position is that the Torah was intended for the entire world. As Rashi suggests, there are parts intended for the entire human family, and others meant solely for the People Israel.

 

 

January 24, 2009

Va’era  arav

Exodus Chapter 6:2- Chapter 9

 

   This week’s sedra begins with yet another major step in our Biblical “progressive revelation” of God to Humanity. “Progressive Revelation”, a theological concept popularized by classical Reformer Dr. Kaufman Kohler, states that there is a spiritual progress that parallels human anthropological evolution. Simply stated, “Progressive Revelation” suggests that as Humanity moves forward in time, its understanding of God get clearer.

  Of course, this is the obverse of Orthodox Jewish thought that teaches the farther back you lived, the more religiously enlightened and authoritative you would be. For them, Moses on Mt. Sinai was “ground zero”, receiving the highest dose of inspiration. As we advanced in time from Sinai, the inspiration has become diluted and dissipated. This is why in Orthodox doctrine it theoretically takes 100 rabbis to overturn a religious ruling by one religious authority of the previous generation!

  Obviously, this enshrined atavism boilerplates Orthodoxy’s resistance to change. Its recalcitrance was given its clearest voice over a century ago by the Eastern European rabbi known as the Hatam Sofer (Rav Moshe Sofer). He declared: mashehadash asur me’d’orayta – “what is new is forbidden by the Torah!”

  Although it is not necessarily true that human evolution makes people wiser or better, we do seem to know a lot more than we did two or three thousand years ago, at least about biology, physics and cosmology. It is true that as long as we are dimensional creatures who can never step outside this Universe, we can know nothing for sure about God. Even so, we can use all the scientific and theoretical tools at our disposal to do a “C.S.I.”- style forensic search for the ultimate reason all this exists- i.e., God. At the very least, “Progressive Revelation” means that the more we know, the more mistaken ideas we can rule out. We may not end up being right about God, but at least we will be “less wrong” than the generations that came before us. If creation bears the “fingerprints of God” – closer examination of those prints would seem to make sense!

  The Torah asserts this idea of theological progress when it has God telling Moses: “I am “Adonai” (YHWH). I manifested myself to Abraham, to Issac and to Jacob as El Shaddai (A Great Spirit God), but my name YHWH I did not make known to them” (Ex. 6:2-3). In other words, even the revered Patriarchs did not have a true understanding of the identity of the God they followed. In some measure this underscores the depth of their faith while it mitigates their moral confusion. Yet it also suggests that you and I, hardly spiritual giants, have a better religious vantage point than our Biblical personalities.

  It is vitally important that we overcome our undeserved sense of spiritual inadequacy. Not meticulously following the traditional rules and folkways that bound our parents and great-grandparents does not make us religious Lilliputians or them theological giants. Much of what they knew about the world was wrong and so, inevitably, much of what they believed about God was unreflective superstition and undigested dogma.

  Of course it is equally true that 500 years from now what you and I believe and think we know for sure will seem primitive in the extreme. And so we must temper our “Progressive Revelation” with a deeper religious humility. If Moses knew more about God than Abraham, and we can make better guesses about God than they did in the Middle Ages, we can only hope that those who come after us will understand more than we do about “Whys and Wherefors” of existence.  

And, since all so-called “religious truths” are ultimately tentative, and await future information, we must, at all costs, avoid Holy Wars or any sense of theological superiority or having a monopoly on religious truth.

 

January 9, 2009

Vayehee 

Genesis 47: 28 – 50 

  This week we read of the death of Jacob and then of Joseph, with the people now “shanghaied” in Egypt.

   Joseph is clearly portrayed in the line of Patriarchs, and is even revered in Jewish legend not only as a paradigm of virtue and purity, but even as a model for the Messiah! In fact there is an ancient tradition that there will be two Messiahs- the hidden suffering one from the line of Joseph, and the manifest triumphal redeemer from the line of David.

   Yet in the normative rabbinic tradition, Joseph is dropped from the line of Patriarchs. For example, in the opening of the Amidah, we recite “the God of Abraham, the God of Issac, and the God of Jacob” without including Joseph.

   The likely reason for this stems from a deep and painful division in the people of Israel. The Judeans (a.k.a. the Jews) held themselves apart and aloof from the Samaritans who revered Joseph and regarded him as their great ancestor. This rift between the “House of Judah” and the House of Joseph” was a deep one reflected in the contentious relationship between the earlier southern Kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel, also known as Ephraim, named for the son of Joseph.

   During the formation of the rabbinic tradition, there were competing temples of the God in Israel both in Jerusalem for the Jews, and on Mount Grerizim in Shechem (Samaria) for the Samaritan descendants of Joseph. Both groups claimed that theirs was the place that God had chosen for his earthly abode. Each considered the other’s temple to be fraudulent.

  (in the Gospel of John in the Christian Scriptures, reflecting 1st century C.E. attitudes and issues, Chapter 4:19-20 reads:  The  (Samaritan) woman said to him, "Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." )

   Given this very unfortunate earlier division among our people, it is not surprising that the Jewish sages “demoted” Joseph from his patriarchal status in their ongoing feud with their northern cousins.

   It should go without saying that Joseph was not the last casualty of our famous internecine contentiousness. Some of the greatest tragedies that have befallen our people have their origins in our sin’at ahim – the enmity among our brethren. It is said that when the Roman general Titus finally broke through the walls of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., he discovered that most of the rebels had already killed themselves off in factional strife within the besieged city!
   Although this week we end the book of Genesis, we are actually only at the half-way marker of the larger saga that includes both the present books of Genesis and Exodus which are one literally unit. While there is clear evidence that Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were once free-standings works that were eventually anthologized into the Torah, the books of Genesis and Exodus depend on each other and use each other as point of reference.

  What does come to end this week is the prehistory of Israel before the Exodus and the covenant at Sinai. Genesis is a prologue making the case for the necessity of a dispensation of divine law. Even humanity at its best embodied in our Patriarchs seems completely unable to intuit the right way to live. Although often well-intentioned, our pre-Sinai ancestors were groping in the dark trying to discern the nature of the Deity who guided them and interacted with them. Trying to guess at His obscurely expressed desires for them, they often missed the mark.  It is not until Sinai that God drops a bit of His veil by revealing something of His ethical nature and expectations.

  Yet I fear that we are still groping…

 

December 26, 2009

 Miqes

Genesis 41-44  

   It is vital that we understand that the Torah writers are presenting their stories to an ancient audience that, unlike most modern readers, already was quite familiar with the characters and the essentials of the plot. For certain they already knew the outcomes, so, for them, the fascination must have been how these famous stories were retold, the nuances and ironies that were added, and the creative, colorful details that were inserted.

   In very many ways, the ancient readers must have come to these Torah stories the way we go to see movies like Titanic, Troy, or the  remake of King Kong. From the outset, our mood is held captive by our foreknowledge of the outcomes, a prescience that sharpens the irony and deepens the pathos. What is more, since we already know what will happen in the end, the audience, so to speak, is watching in the “God mode” – observing the events unfold from God’s vantage point, and understanding their implications in a holistic way. Thus, in the Torah, the reader alone understands what God is “up to”.

   That is why the seasoned reader of the Joseph saga in the Book of Genesis reads it with a sense of foreboding and even dread. What on the surface seems to be the tale of a Wunderkind who providentially ends up on top of every situation, no matter how overwhelming, the real story is something else entirely. It is the explanation of how the small and vulnerable clan is lured down to Egypt, and, of course, into brutalizing slavery and captivity. The readers know this is what is happening, since we are privy to the mystical oracle that Abraham had received over a century before Joseph: “You must know that your seed will be strangers in a land not their own and be slaves to it, and they will torment them for 400 years!” (Genesis 15:13). Either Abraham kept this to himself and did not pass it on to Issac and from Issac to Jacob, or Jacob knew the prophecy, and, out of desperation, elected to ignore it.

   In any event, the Israelites’ descent into Egypt is hardly the triumphal one that it appears to be on the surface. It is a prelude to catastrophe. The whole chain of events is Deus ex Machina, the inexorable machinery of Providence and relentless Fate using the strengths foibles of Humanity to implement the Divine Will.

   At the very end of his life, in the final lines of Genesis that, God willing, we will read in two weeks, Joseph tries to grasp the big picture and then frame it for his anxious brothers who still fear his retribution. He says: “Should I be in God’s stead?! You intended evil concerning me, but God intended for the good so that the present outcome would be achieved, to provide sustenance for a many people!” (Genesis 50: 19-20). Like all of us, even the wisest and most discerning, Joseph, even though trying to take the overview, came up short-sighted. Seven verses later in the Book of Exodus we read: “A new ruler arose in Egypt who disavowed Joseph”.

   What do we learn from this? Certainly a sense of humility – and, above all, a reluctance to claim that we know what God is “up to!” None of us can accurately “connect the dots”. We are too close to thing - too ready to make facile conclusions and historical rationalizations while the “wheel is still in spin.” We selectively string together events in a way that suites our world-view and justifies our actions. But as the wise Catholic sage Thomas Kemper observed so long ago: “Man proposes but God disposes.” In Yiddish we say Mann tracht und Gott lacht! – Man schemes and God laughs!

   We must leave the future and the machinations that will get us there to God. As the writer of Ecclesiastes concludes: “In the final analysis; revere God and obey His commandments for that is Man’s purpose. Leave it to God’s actions, for better or worse, to justly sort things out, no matter how obscure! (Eccl 11:13-14). And, unlike the grandiose Joseph, we humbly do our best and enjoy the ride!

 

December 19, 2008

Vayeshev

Genesis 37-40  

In this week’s sedra (“order” of Torah reading), the downward spiral that is our Patriarchal saga hits its nadir, its lowest ebb. We read of Joseph’s betrayal by his half brothers, who first consider murdering him, but then, to avoid the bloodguilt, sell him to passing Arabs for 20 silver pieces,  below even the going price for young male slaves. Our reading ends with Joseph languishing in an Egyptian prison, this time the object of false and malicious accusations of sexual improprieties by and with his master Potiphar’s determined wife.  

The Genesis tales of our putative early ancestors are littered with crimes and misdemeanors. Aside from their evolving loyalty and obedience to their new-found God known to them as ‘El Shaddai (The Great Spirit God), our ancient mothers and fathers and their extended clans are consistently “troubled” actors. They are still groping in the dark towards a morality that has not yet congealed. Time and again the reader apparently is meant to be appalled by the behaviors within the line of Abraham. To list just a few: pawning your wife off as your sister and collecting a large bride-price for her; attempting to sacrifice/murder your own son; driving out and disinheriting your first-born heir simply to advantage your next-born; permanently distancing yourself from your wife; cheating your brother and swindling your father; marrying sisters; tolerating idols within your household; overtly favoring one child over the others; attempted fratricide and kidnapping, staging a brother’s death, etc.. And this hardly exhausts the list!  

The writer is certainly laying it on. There is little that is glorious and much that is shameful in what he chooses to tell us about our prehistory, to the extent that we must join the commentators and ask: kol kakh lamah zeh – why so much of this?  

The simplest answer to the relentless pathos of our Patriarchal stories is to regard it as a prehistory to Sinai. The book of Genesis is an argument in favor of the need for revealed divine laws. Perhaps the Patriarchs and Matriarchs meant well; perhaps they were moral giants compared to the peoples around them. But even the best of men and women, left to their own devices and lacking divine guidance, will, in short shrift, find themselves moving from one debacle to the next! As the writer points out very early on in his treatise, a Humanity’s ruminations are only towards the wicked all the time (Genesis 6:5). So as regimenting and restricting as the revealed Sinai law might be- the alternative, at best, is personal and familial catastrophe.  

The other reason the stories of Genesis are so morally and emotionally disturbing has to do with the meta-theme of the Torah and the Prophets: the only true hero of the Bible is God- and a tragic hero at that! Humanity, even the best and brightest among us, are but supporting actors and even foils in the central story of Scriptures. God is the unrequited lover of “His” human creations and their betrayed benefactor. Even the ones closest to him consistently come up short and prove themselves unworthy of God’s care and devotion to them.  

God can exist without us, but without an interactive Humanity God will devolve merely into Plato’s “thought thinking itself.” This is what the Sages meant when they put these words into God’s mouth: “When you enthrone Me in this world I am God- when you don’t - I am not God!” So God is stuck with us if He intends to be God- but it’s in awful dilemma that is portrayed as provoking a love/hate, delight/fury within the Creator.  

It is the supreme irony that we teach the patriarchs and matriarchs as coloring book Bible heroes in our Jewish Sunday schools! It misses the entire point on the Book of Genesis. These are complex, often tragic figures hardly worthy of emulation! What part of the lives of these ancient ancestors would you want to wish on your own children?! This is precisely why the classical Jewish curriculum advocated by the Sages hand the children begin their Torah studies with the Book of Leviticus, which contains no stories. Clearly they didn’t want to expose these tender minds to the rampant immorality and mayhem in Genesis. They also wanted a Jewish religion based upon proper living rather than upon rank hero-worship!  

Perhaps the principle reason these misguided Jewish Sunday School curricula stress Bible “Heroes” and seem to soft pedal on the actual laws and precepts is likely because Jewish Sunday schools, a relatively modern American invention, were inspired by the Protestant Sunday School model. As you may know, up until the American experience, all but the poorest Jewish children in a town had a melamed, a tutor, come to the home to instruct them. The former were sent to a heder, a one-room school that was supported by the community chest, where they learned Hebrew and basic Jewish laws and customs. In the New World, which early on lacked sufficient learned melamdim in most towns, and even lacked properly prepared rabbis for their local synagogues, the Protestant-style Sunday School model was implemented. Moreover, the lay-people who ran these Jewish communities, mostly shopkeepers and merchants with no real aptitude for proper curriculum development, drew heavily from the way the Protestants were teaching their young- namely, Bible stories.  

Of course, the Protestant faith is largely based on belief in these Bible stories in general, in the story of their main “Bible hero” in particular. This is diametrically opposed to the ancient Jewish princple: lo hamidrash ha’iqar elah hama’aseh – it is not the story but rather the deed that matters! To the very greatest extent, our Jewish Bible stories are not articles of faith, but, more often than not, cautionary tales about all the things that can and will go wrong if we are not scrupulous in our actions. This is precisely how this week’s Torah portion must be understood!

 

December 12, 2008

Vayishlkakh

(Genesis 32:4 –Genesis 36)

    This week’s sedra begins with Jacob sending emissaries with many valuable gifts to “soften up” his older twin Essau who is advancing with 400 men-at-arms to intercept him as Jacob returns to Canaan with his clan. Then, on the eve of what promised to be a lethal reunion, Jacob wrestles with a “man” until dawn, pinning his attacker until he blesses Jacob and changes his name to Israel.

   There is much speculation as to the identity of Jacob’s nocturnal adversary. The writer of the book of Hosea regards him as an angel (Hosea 12:5), and believes that place of that ominous struggle to be Beth El. This was precisely the same place where, 20 years ago, the fleeing Jacob saw the angelic ladder and received an oracle of good fortune.  Yet now, on his return to actually receive the promised reward,  “his angel” delivers a crippling kick to Jacobs’ groin before conferring the name change, as if to say “To become what you want to become you have to pay the price.” No cheap grace; no pain- no gain”.

   Another read on Jacob’s opponent that night believes him to be the commander of Essau’s army, possibly sent by his lord to reconnoiter. Or perhaps, to deliver a good solid and well-deserved trashing in the dark to his younger twin whom he was intending to forgive the next morning. After all, didn’t the young Jacob take advantage of his blind father Issac’s darkness to deprive Essau of his patrimony? Tit for tat!

   My own understanding of this episode would have Essau himself be the mysterious combatant. This would neatly close the circle on the foreshadowing before their birth, when Essau and Jacob first wrestled in mother Rebecca’s womb. Adding weight to this interpretation is Jacob’s wry comment to Essau the next morning when they meet again in the early light: “For looking at your face is like looking at a divine being (elohim)” (Genesis 33:10). “You’re no angel, my brother, but it was portentous that we came to grips with each other last night!”

   What adds literary and psychological texture to having Essau be Jacob’s nighttime adversary was the fact that they were twins. Hardly identical twins, they are the “ying” to each other’s “yang”. Between the two of them is one whole man. Each has what the other lacks and needs to be complete. Jacob (“the heel”) needs to reconnect with Essau to become the patriarch Israel (“God shall rule”, or “God is Just”).  Essau (“hairy” [beast?]) needs to be reunited with Jacob to realize his destiny as Se’ir (Satyr), Lord of the Mountains of Edom.

   This interpretation naturally dovetails with the modern understanding of the tale, that Jacob was having a dream in which he was wrestling with himself – with his guilt and fear and anxiety. This suggests that Jacob had something akin to a nervous breakdown the night before meeting his brother out of which emerged a reconstituted and more integrated identity. In a sense, wrestling with a long-estranged twin and struggling with your own deepest flaws are, more or less, very similar motifs.

    I suppose, in the end, my own personal preference for regarding Essau as the one who grappled with Jacob rests on my view that it often takes a swift kick to where it hurts the most in order to get straightened out. If we are going to have to take that much-needed shot in order to get back on track, we should be lucky enough to get it from people who know us best and, ultimately, care for us the most. Clearly the magnanimous, forgiving brother Essau was precisely the right person to administer the beating of a lifetime to his treacherous younger brother. Generous as he was the next morning in their public reunion, he was even more generous the night before in letting his less robust brother pin him. The mighty Essau left Jacob with a dislocated hip and a new self-image, when he could have justly as easily broken his neck and left him a lifeless corpse. Our enemies struggle with us to destroy us, our friends wrestle with us to build us up!

   Of course, if all this were merely a fairy tale, Jacob-called-Israel would, after this denouement, now go on to “live happily ever after.” But this is the Torah, and in the Torah there very few “happily ever afters.” The first half of Jacob’s life was miserable, but the second half goes downhill from there. The little respite he gets from a life of woes comes from the supernatural entity identifying Himself as El Shaddai. (An ‘el is a divine being, a shed means a “spirit”, and the ai ending denotes a superlative. “El Shaddai”= The Great Spirit”.) Whenever things are about to take a turn for the worse, this El Shaddai, whom Moses later on discovers to be the Lord God (see Exodus, chapter 5), manifests to Jacob to reassure him that no matter how dismal things may seem, the divine promise holds firm and is inexorable.  What makes our “man of woes” Jacob a true patriarch is hardly his father and grandfather’s unbridled successes. Jacob’s greatness lies in his ability to persevere and to hang on to the Divine promise no matter what. 

   A useful quality indeed!

   December 5, 2008

Vayaytsay

(see Genesis 28:10-22)

The order (sedra) of Torah reading this week finds the young man Jacob heading towards exile in Aramea, what is today northern Syria. His cover story is that he was being sent by his parents Issac and Rebecca to fetch a bride from their ancestral village of Haran. Yet both we and he know the truth- he is escaping the fury of his older twin Essau, whose birthright legacy of clan leadership he had attempted to swindle through a ruse perpetrated again their blind father.

Being sent away from the land God promised to his grandfather Abraham and reaffirmed to his father Issac was more than a simple change of geography. The land, the divine covenant and its transcendent blessings were one. Jacob had every reason to fear that his leaving the land meant both leaving God’s protection, and, more importantly, surrendering his place in the line of Abraham’s kin and their privileged role in sacred history.

As was often the case when a person was about to embark on a perilous journey that could readily involve a change of fortune, Jacob went to a local shrine to seek an oracle. The casual reader might assume that he simply bedded down at a random campsite on the night he dreamed of an angelic ladder to heaven. Yet the careful reader understands that the Hebrew expression vayifga bamaqom – " he encountered the place " - conveys the clear sense that he deliberately spent the night at a particular, well-known place. The Sages understood the word vayifga (he encountered), to mean "he prayed", also suggesting a shrine setting for Jacob’s ladder dream.

Finally, the suggestion that Jacob went as a pilgrim to sleep in a shrine in order to gestate an oracular dream is reinforced by his startled reaction when he awakes from that prophetic vision. In his astonishment he declares, "Indeed there is divinity in this place and I never realized it!" This is a very complex statement, but it’s not too hard to tease out the nuance.

Like most practitioners of conventional religion, Jacob’s pilgrimage to that yet-unnamed shrine was merely a pro forma act. He was simply following the normal formalities. He needed an oracle, he went to a shrine, paid his fee, and expected some hack priest to offer him a standard "fortune cookie" platitude to send him on his way. It was the expected thing, a benign act, nothing really earth-shaking.

But the cynical Jacob’s world was in fact shaken by his vivid dream in which the ancestral God appears to him to assure him that Abraham’s blessed legacy, embodied in the promised land, would remain his no matter no matter how far or how long his exile. He receives the dream oracle that precisely addresses his greatest concerns: yes- God would still be with him to protect him wherever he wandered, and yes- God would bring him back home and make it his patrimony!

He expected so little from this perfunctory trip to a temple, but ended up getting so very much more! He wakes up with fear and trembling and, proclaiming how awe filled the place, names it Beth El, meaning "a divine location" – a generic term for shrine.

The ancient writer of this tale tells it laden with irony, since his all his readers back then understood that Beth El was the place of greatest sinfulness in all the land. As we read in Kings 12:29, Jeroboam, the paradigm of that all that can go wrong in a leader, tore the unity of the people to shreds, and fractured the great kingdom of David and Solomon into two warring camps: the sovereignty of Judah and the sovereignty of Israel. To cement control over his new subjects, he usurps and undermines the true religion of Israel by erecting a Golden Calf at Beth El. For the writer, this dark-souled megalomaniac exponentially compounds his sinfulness by causing others to sin at Beth El. That is why the prophet Amos can declare: "Come to Beth El and sin!" (Amos 4:4) and "Seek not God at Beth El… for Beth El has become an iniquity" and then goes on to prophesy its firey destruction! (Amos 5:5-6).

And so the story of Jacob’s ladder and the founding of Beth El that seems so wonderful on the surface must have conveyed a feeling of portentous dread. It would be analogous to a modern reader watching the biography of Einstein and realizing that the wondrous moment we he discovered E=MC² foreshadowed Hiroshima and all that follows

 

November 28, 2009

Toldot

 Genesis 26:14-25

We hear in this week’s Torah lesson that, after dwelling among the Philistines and then being driven out, our father Issac set about redigging his father Abraham’s wells that the Philistines filled with dirt. You might ask: Why in an area of the world where water is at such a premium would anyone deliberately ruin life-giving wells? The simple and obvious answer is that this is what Philistines do. In fact, it’s what makes them Philistines, since everything they cannot control or exploit they try to destroy.  Haven’t you noticed how things that used to be free now have a price tag on them? Philistines know the cost of everything and the value of nothing since they value nothing that does not gratify them personally! Philistines are famous for taking all the good and wonderful achievements of others, all the truly valuable that has come before them, and running it into the ground.

 But now look at our father Issac, who busies himself undoing the damage that those Philistines had done. His father Abraham, a blessing to those around him, had dug many wells throughout the region for all to use regardless of folk or tribe or clan. Perhaps it was the very fact that Abraham’s well water was free for taking that provoked the Philistines and their rulers, who may have thought they had cornered the water market by having a monopoly on the wells. In fact, each and every time Issac reopens one of his father’s wells, along come the Philistines and try to make trouble for him.

 Of course, being the son of Abraham, Issac was not to be deterred. In the middle of all this conflict with the Philistines Adonai appears to him in a dream and says to him:

     I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not be afraid for I am with you, and I will bless you and multiply your seed for the sake of my servant Abraham!

Above all, Issac trusting in God, had the inside track. It was precisely this kind of trust that emboldened him to climb onto the altar and bare his throat to his father’s knife. And when the land suffered from famine and all those around and about him were fleeing to Egypt, Issac stayed were he was and would not abandon the land promised to his illustrious father. He held his ground because God came to him in an earlier vision and said:

Do not go down to Egypt. Dwell in the land that I am telling you. Reside in this land and I will be with you and bless you. For to you and your seed will I give these lands, and I will keep the oath that I made to your father Abraham. I will make your seed as numerous as the stars in the sky, giving them all these lands, and through your seed will all peoples of this land be continuously blessed. For Abraham was obedient to me, keeping vigilant for me, observing my commandments, my laws and my oracles.

Provisioned with these divine oracles and promises, Issac persists in reopening his father’s wells since he knows with absolute certainty how things will work out, possessed as he was of the word of God. Now the word of God is not like our words. When we speak our words are what the Bible calls hevel –  insubstantial as the air  through which they travel. But the word of God is a davar – it is real and substantial,  and above all, it creates and transforms reality to conform to the divine will. A so the davar that Issac gets from God not only informs him that all will work out as promised – it also makes the promise come to pass- it is self-fulfilling.

   This is how it worked. God’s word gave Issac the confidence to keep at it, and not to give in to the Philistines by stopping his well digging.  Being bullies that were used to easily getting their way through intimidation, they were ill-equipped to deal with a man who was resolute, unafraid and persistent in his ways. Being Philistines, they lacked the stamina that men and women confident of their values have, a moral and spiritual stamina that is relentless and never quits. Being Philistines, they are merely scavengers, and have neither skill nor the strength nor even the desire of the Issacs of this world. And so they eventually backed down and finally even sued for terms and made a peace treaty with our patriarch.  Thus the trusted Word of God created its own promised outcome!

But let me end this Dvar Torah with another insight into Issac from our tradition. Our sages tended to regard Issac as the most mystical and ethereal of the Patriarchs. His miraculous birth was announced by the angels, and his life until the age of 40 is left as a mystery to the reader. Dying at the age of 180, he enjoyed the greatest longevity of the patriarchs, a sign of special blessing. While Abraham came from a foreign land, and Jacob was allowed to flee to a foreign land, Issac was the only patriarch to live his entire life without setting foot out of the Promised Land, another mark of special holiness and spirituality.

In other words, Issac lived and died “in the Zone” and was, perhaps, the most transcendent of all biblical personalities. As far as I can tell, I don’t think Issac paid much attention to the Philistines, and always kept his focus on the higher things. While the Philistines seemed completely obsessed with his every move, Issac remained oblivious to them and to their negativity. He was just too focused on digging free wells!

 

November 21, 2008 

Hayé Sarah 

Genesis 23-24 

   Although the name of his Torah portion translates as “the life of Sarah”, in fact it starts off by dealing with her death and burial.

  Since the death of Sarah is juxtaposed with the story of Abraham’s attempt at offering their son Issac as a human sacrifice, an ancient Midrash/legend in Pirke D’Rabi Eliezer, chapter 32, connects the two sad events.

   According to this tale, for obvious reasons Abraham had kept any advance knowledge of the proposed killing from Sarah. Yet before he could return home and tell that all had ended well, Satan rushed in to tell her himself, conveniently leaving the fact of Issac’s survival to the very end. But before Satan got around to telling her that Issac was still alive, she collapsed and died.

   I also recall hearing a variation on this story in which Sarah through herself into a well and committed suicide, but I have not been able to presently track down the source.

   Yet this legend once again underscored the tragic consequences of secrets being withheld from a spouse. No matter how difficult it would have surely been for Abraham to share with Sarah his intentions to ritually slay Issac, and no matter how much resistance he certainly would have encountered, the effect of not telling his wife immeasurably compounded the tragedy. If “forewarned is forearmed,” then the absence of forewarning leaves the person in dark vulnerable to much additional misery. As we learn time and time again, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up that gets you.

  Since he is a resident alien, Abraham must negotiate with the town council of Hebron for the right to purchase a cave to be used as a tomb from one of the locals. After paying 400 sheqels of silver, a king’s ransom, the Makhpaylah cave is deeded to him with the consent of the local authorities, along with the coveted right to own land.

  As an aside, the radical nationalist Jewish settlers (many of them Americans!) who have set up an provocative enclave in the West Bank Arab city of Hebron, use this Torah portion as a sort of bill of sale that justifies their “in your face” presence. Of course, they conveniently overlook the fact that Abraham had 2 heirs, his firstborn being Ishmael, the legendary father of the Arab peoples. And so we read that when it came time to bury Abraham himself in that cave in Hebron, the rites were conducted by both Issac and Ishmael (Genesis 24:9).   

  Ironically, the beginning of the realization of the Divine promise to Abraham that his progeny would possess all of Canaan was through the death of wife. It is also quite evident in this weeks’ Torah portion that Abraham seems to get a new lease on life after Sarah’s passing. He sets about arranging the marriage of Issac, and then takes a new wife named Qeturah, presumably an Arab, judging from the names of her many sons by Abraham.

 

Novermber 7, 2008

Lekh Lkha

Genesis 12-17

This weeks Torah portion formally begins the saga of the patriarch Abram, also known as Abraham.  How much of this story is historical is nearly impossible to verify, but, without a doubt, the Abrahamic Odyssey represents the mother load for the three Western monotheistic religions:  Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Whether mythical, legendary or historical, Abraham is unquestionably the most revered figure coming to us from antiquity.  Abraham’s spiritual legacy is claimed by 1.3 billion Moslems, by 2 billion Christians, and by we 13.5 million Jews, making us a very minority shareholder in the Abraham Corporation of Faith. 

It is precisely because the Torah, the Epistles of Paul, and the Quran all claim their believers to be legitimate heirs of Abraham that our Western religions have been unceasingly at each others throats, each one regarding the other 2 as hostile takeovers of the legacy and embezzlers of the asset of blessing, of the unique covenant between God and Abraham.  The Jews regard Abraham as the first Jew, the Muslims esteem him as the greatest of the pre-Mohammad Moslems, while the Christians see Abraham as the first Christian, the Father of Faith, the first to be saved by his faith in the divine promise of a Christ to come.

Of course, the obvious fact that Abraham could not have been a Jew, a Moslem or a Christian is not the point.  He is adopted as one by each tradition respectively.  And, for this adoption to have its fullest power, it tragically is made to disinherit the two others heirs from Abraham’s testament and inheritance.  As some of you may know from sad experience, there are few more ruthless, gruesome conflicts as the conflicts between the family heirs.  And that is precisely the conflict that exists between Moslems, Christians and Jews, a conflict that has once again plunged the world into war.  Sadly, this conflict seems to be congenitally and chronically hardwired into the very essence of the 3 biblical religions, and it will continue as long as the Bible, The Christian Scriptures and the Quran are revered and accepted as divine truth by their religious readers.

This pathetic tragedy will continue to infect the world as long as we misperceive true religion to be a matter of history, pedigree and kinship – as an exercise in ethnocentric chauvinism and a chest-thumping zero-sum triumphalistic contest.  For me, what really matters is not who had it first, but who will have it last – who will discover the way to draw from history the elixir that will bring on peace, health and enlightenment.  History is merely a launching pad towards the future, and the future matters to me more than the past, because that is where I plan to spend the rest of my life. 

One of the goals of psychotherapy is often to free the patient from a morbid preoccupation with the past. There preoccupations generally cause to patient to neurotically repeat the perceived traumas of their past, again and again placing themselves in analogous situations where they will get to experience the same juvenile pains over and over again. These insecure unhealthy individuals prefer the pain of the familiar past to the challenges of an uncharted future.

This also seems to be a good description of what ails the 3 Western biblical religions. Those who are obsessed with history are condemned to repeat it. Surely there must be a way to celebrate our ancient patriarchs, prophets and saviors without being drawn back again and again into ancient hurts and grievances. Kain Yehi Ratson. May this be the will of Heaven.

 

October  24, 2008

 Berayshit

Genesis 1- 6:8 

   The Book of Genesis serves as an extended preamble to the giving of the divine laws at Sinai and thereon in. It is the account of people groping their way towards a  knowledge of God and God’s expectations of them. Its subtle yet pervasive message is this: Before Sinai even the best men and women, trying to do what they thought right, found themselves hopelessly enmeshed in conflict, tragedy and debacle. From the Man and the Woman in the Garden, through Cain and Abel, Noah and the Patriarchs, we find essentially well-intentioned people living chaotic existences, time and again behaving in ways that are shocking to later generations having the benefit of divine instruction. In short, Genesis makes the case for the need of Torah in our lives.

  While the Torah does not teach a doctrine of “Original Sin” as such, it does explain the rapid decline of Humanity as the result of a “Primal Infection” that spread from us to all living things. According to the creation tale in Chapter 1, all living things were meant to be herbivorous, sustaining themselves on fruits and grains.

   29: And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.
 30: And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food."

   Eventually, in Chapter 6, we read how certain bnai Elohim (literally ‘sons of God’) - divine beings mated with human women, causing humankind to develop a taste for flesh. The Torah considers this human craving to be hamas – mindless, senseless violence. It suggests that humans killing animals for food taught the animals to become predatory. The ensuing mayhem, according to the Torah, is what brought on the Flood which lead to the strict regulation of meat-eating and the express prohibition of consuming blood, the spirit- containing life essence.

    The “book end” to this story is Isaiah’s vision of a future world restored to its original divine order:

6: The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
7: The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8: The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.
9: They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

   Who were these bnai Elohim and from where did they come? Some regard them as the “fallen angels” we hear so much about in apocalyptic literature. Scholars suggest they were the Hebraic version of the Hellenic myths, where the gods seduce human women to produce legendary heroes like Hercules and Achilles.

   As I see it, these “divine beings” were the descendants of Adam and Eve themselves who left the Garden and began to mingle with normal human beings. I regard the story of the Garden and creation of Adam and Eve as its supernatural garden keepers is meant to be read as a parallel event to the creation of the rest of the world and its inhabitants. “What happened in the Garden was to stay in the Garden” while the rest of the world continued on its own way. The thrusting of this specially created strain of hominids, built for immortality and a life within the sphere of the purely divine, into the evolutionary history of normal humans, created a new hybrid. The Torah regards us as that hybrid, a creature that yearns for both worlds and in completely comfortable in neither.

   Of course, it probably didn’t happen that way, but it sure does explain quite a bit about our complex natures!

 

September 26, 2008 

Nitsavim

Deuteronomy  29:9 -30 

   This week’s sedra repeatedly emphasizes that our religious lives must flow from within us, and must not be dependant on supernatural events, omens, sign and oracles. Chapter 30:11-14 puts it this way:

This commandment that I am bequeathing you today is not beyond you, nor is it distant from you. It’s not in the heavens that you must say ‘who will ascend to the heavens to fetch it for us and teach it to us in order for us to do it?’ Nor is across the sea that you must say” “who will cross the sea to fetch it for us and teach it to us that we might do it?” Indeed, this is something that is very intimate to you- it’s in your heart and mouth to do it!

   Even though our Scriptures are filled with miraculous events and dramatic revelations, we are informed here that this is not essence of true religion. What we really must know and do to live up to God’s expectation is to be true to the way we are fashioned- our “design specifications,” so to speak. We were created to be life affirming, rational creatures with a penchant for balance and symmetry. In the following verse the Torah equates evil with that which causes death, and goodness with the life-enhancing. Thus, according to the Torah there really is no need for additional supernatural information in order for us to live according to the will of our Creator.

    Although some of the reasons for our commandments seem a bit obscure nowadays, it is not because they were intended to be irrational or mysterious when they were recorded. Apparently they made sense to their intended audience, since very few of them are accompanied by explanations. This suggests that the writers assumed that everyone understood the “whys and wherefores.” Unfortunately for us, over the ages the practical historical contexts for many of the commandments were lost, making them seem irrational or supernatural to us. But clearly that is not how the Torah sees it in this week’s portion.

   We all know individuals who are constantly looking for signs and omens in order to make what they believe to be the right choices. They see religion and the divine as something hidden from them requiring special skills or rituals to ferret out. What they should be doing is introspecting –looking deep within themselves while using their God-given intelligence and intuitive good sense in order to discern God’s will for them and for creation.

  As radical as this may sound, there were even sages in the Talmud who believed that if, Heaven forbid, the Torah would ever be lost or forgotten, they would be able to restore it themselves through reason and discernment. After all, as this week’s sedra suggests, it has been engraved on the very tablets of our hearts.

 

September 19, 2008

Kee Tavo   

Deuteronomy 26-29:8 

   This week’s sedra stresses the historic compact between God and Israel, and calls for our good will in upholding our end of this covenant.

   This covenant is generally understood to be a form of contract between God and us, but that would be a very superficial and dangerously misleading view. Generally contracts reflect a potentially adversarial relationship into which safeguards are inserted. These safeguards are reinforced by rewards and penalties. As a rule, the stipulations of these contracts define the relationship. As such, contracts are defensive instruments.

  In positive, motivated and trusting relationships contracts are seldom a necessity. Simple agreement and a handshake will do since both parties are “on the same page.” While there may be legal contracts underlying the relationship, as in the case of marriage, these contracts do not define their true nature and day-to-day realities. It is only when things seriously break down that the contract is invoked. Otherwise, it is essentially irrelevant to the relationship.

  That is the way this week’s Torah portion would regard our covenant with God. Time and time again it calls for simhah – happiness - to be the defining element of that relationship (for example, verse 26:11). The Torah wants God and Israel to rejoice in each other. Our relationship with God is to be celebration- not servitude, a love-fest rather than a slug-fest.

   Of course, as is the case of with all true intimate relationships, that intimacy irrevocably binds the two parties together “for better or worse.” Even when the joy and good will evaporates, that relationship often continues and can become very destructive. It is then that the contract provisions come to the forefront. Just think of divorces and other family battles!

    The Torah understands that God and Israel have become completely identified one with the other and thus cannot simply “walk away” from each other should things break down. That is why this week’s portion so honestly and vividly describes what can happen should the simhah abate. It is very difficult reading that chillingly calls to mind the darker episodes of our history.

   We can either love and rejoice in God, or be left with fear and misery (see verse 28:47). There is no neutral position.

September 15, 2008 

Kee Taytsay   

Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19 

   This week’s Torah portion primarily deals with the laws of social justice and humaneness, coupled with an ironclad rectitude and sense of civic responsibility. Many of the underlying assumptions are perfectly recognizable to us even today, such as the avoidance of excessive cruelty to animals, the need for safety in construction, public health and hygiene, a concern for the poor and the day laborer, and the avoidance of what back then might be considered to be “cruel and unusual punishment.”

   Yet there are other underlying axioms in this week’s Torah portion that might seem strange and even objectionable to us, not the least of which is the assumption that polygamy is allowed. However, generations of European sages did their best to forbid it. The best they could do was issue a series of taqanot, temporary remedies that could suspend the practice of polygamy for a defined period of time not to exceed 1,000 years.

   The most famous taqanah prohibiting polygamy was issued a little over 1,000 years ago by Rabbenu Gershom ben Yehudah from Rhineland (known as Rabbenu Gershom Me’or HaGolah- Light of the Exile). Since his authority was broadly recognized by Jewish communities in Ashkenaz- what is now Germany, France and northern Europe - the practice of polygamy was formally suspended among Jews in these regions (although concubinage was permitted and practiced for a number of subsequent centuries!)

   Apparently Gershom’s rationale for suspending the polygamy in areas under his jurisdictions stemmed from practical concerns. Many Jews were merchants who did business in several towns, and it seems that they kept different wives and households in some of these towns to accommodate their traveling and other business needs, which was allowed until Gershom’s edict. But then at the time of a man’s death, working out the equitable distribution of his estate among these several households became a very complicated matter. And so Gershom cut the Gordian knot with his prohibition of polygamy in order to simplify probate issues.

   Those readers with advanced mathematical skills have by now already computed that Gershom’s taqanah has recently lapsed. Nevertheless, since the prohibition of polygamy among Ashkenazim has been long-standing, it continues under the Jewish legal principle “long-standing practice of Israelites has the status of law” (minhag Yisrael dinah hoo).

  Since Gershom’s authority did not extend to the Sephardic Jewish Communities (southern Spain, North Africa, the Middle and Far East), polygamy continued to be practiced among the Sepharadim.  While the State of Israel prohibits contracting Jewish polygamous marriages within its borders, it does recognize existing polygamous Jewish  marriages among immigrants coming from Sephardic lands.

   Above all of this is the Talmudic maxim: “Sovereign law is recognized law” (Dinah dmalkhuta Dinah haveh’). If a secular government passes a law, it has the force of Jewish law as long as it doesn’t result in violating a Torah prohibition. Although we are now technically not prohibited from having only one wife at a time a, American laws against polygamy are binding on all Jewish living in the States.

                                                                                   

September 6, 2006

Shoftim 

Deuteronomy 16:18 - 21:8 

   Much of this week’s sedra deals in one form or another with the matter of tsedeq, generally but imprecisely taken to mean “justice”.  In verse 16:20 we find the emphatic admonition: “It is indeed tsedeq that you must aggressively pursue in order that you endure and take possession of the land that the Lord your God gives you.”

   The word tsedeq seems to originate with the balance scales, even today the universal symbol for justice. Before each use of the balance scales you must “true” it, being certain that the two sides are in perfect balance before you weigh things out. Equity is the goal, so that the outcomes are fair to all concerned.

   In Western jurisprudence the concepts of “equity” and “justice” have slightly different nuances. Justice is the impartial application of the law, while equity is the concern that the outcomes are also fair and reasonable. Often justice can be a heartless, mechanical thing, so the good judge also attempts to see to it that the yardstick of justice also leads to appropriate, reasonable ends. Justice is famously blind unless it is tempered by tsedeq.

  Our most famous example of the tsedeq is Tsedaqa, often mistakenly translated as “charity”, when in fact it literally means “equity.” Justice may have it that you have a legal right to your wealth, and that technically you do not owe anything to the poor. After all, what you have you may have come by legally through industry, inheritance, or market conditions, and it is not against the law to be prosperous. Even so, Tsedaqa has you moving beyond that to what is fair and reasonable. It is not illegal to allow the other person to go hungry when you are well fed, but it is wrong. It is not the law which leads to balanced outcomes- it is the application of tsedeq.

  In fact, I have often said that tsedeq is our religion’s “key word,” since it is to animate all of our relationships. First and foremost it must characterize our relationship with God, which comes not from a sense of subservience but rather from the need to be fair with God, which is not really a theoretical matter of theology. God gives and we take, so would it be supremely unfair of us to then go and worship false gods. That is the meaning of verse 18:13- “You shall be whole-hearted (blameless) with the Lord your God.”

  Of course, the Torah fully expects tsedeq to go on to permeate all of our interpersonal relationships, and especially those relationships with those whom we are predisposed to dislike, such as the accused or the former wife, or to ignore, like the poor and landless. Unlike the word “charity” that derives from the root “caritas (heart/feelings)”, Tsedaqa pointed urges us to act fairly even with persons for whom we have little or no “heart.”

August 30, 3008

 Re’e 

Deuteronomy 11:26- 16:17 

  This week’s Torah portion, part of an extended discourse Moses is giving the people just before his death, contains many of the essentials of our religious faith and practice. The fundamentals of dietary laws are spelled out, as are our festivals and rules of philanthropy and basic economics.

  In commanding the generous support of the poor, we read that must give the poor person “enough to make up what he is missing” (15:8). This casual statement eventually evolved into a rather extreme commandment. It is incumbent upon us to help maintain the accustomed lifestyle of an individual that existed before he was impoverished.

   If the beggar has always lived in a shanty and subsisted on gruel, we are obliged to see that he doesn’t lose his shack and always has enough of his staple food to sustain himself. Yet if the man is about to lose his mansion, and had always dined on delicacies, we are obligated to keep him on that level, since that is making up what he would be missing! No kidding! In this case, “to each according to his need” is defined in a way so relative as to strain many of our most basic philanthropic impulses!

  Clearly this radical Torah perspective speaks to our present economic challenges.  It tells us that we must not wait until people are living on the street to put them in public housing, nor are we to let them go hungry before we deem them eligible for food stamps.

   Lurking beneath this is a very powerful commitment to human dignity. Tsedaqah, a term commonly mistranslated as “charity”, really means “fairness” or “equity.” What is fair is rarely mechanical and arithmetic. It must begin with deep empathy and a profound understanding of what each individual needs to be “made whole.”

 

August 23, 2008

‘Eqev

Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25 

   This week’s Torah portion, the 3^rd sedra in Devarim  (Deuteronomy) is a continuation of Moses’ extended discourse to a new generation of the people about to invade Canaan.

   At first, Moses addresses their pre-war jitters, assuring them that the God who delivered them from Egypt and made a mockery of their great army at the Red Sea will likewise do battle for the Bnai Yisrael coming to take possession of their Promised Land. In a nod to historical reality (or perhaps an editorial insert), Moses explains why the conquest will take time and been in gradual stages. Verse 8:22 states: God will weaken those nations before you bit by bit; you will not be able to eradicate them quickly, lest the wild animals multiply! In other words, you will conquer the land at a rate that you can actually populate it without leaving ruins and wilderness. But Moses quickly goes on to assure them that their ultimate victory will be complete, so total that even the name of the Canaanites will no longer be associated with the land.

  But a bit later in the portion, Moses dramatically reverses his rhetorical tack. In 8:17-18 Moses cautions the people not to become arrogant and self-congratulatory when they are victorious, wrongly believing that it was their might and their virtue that caused them to prevail:  

Lest you say to yourself ‘My strength and the power of my hand worked this valor.’ You are to remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the power to act valiantly, so that, clear as day, He might fulfill His covenant that he swore to your ancestors! 

In Chapter 9 Moses hammers this point home by reminding them that what little virtue, if any, they might possess is a relative thing, since they are famously difficult and recalcitrant people. 

It is not through your righteousness and rectitude that you are coming to possess their land, but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord your God is dispossessing them before you, in order to keep His word to your ancestors Abraham, Issac and Jacob. 

This is a critically import lesson for us to keep in mind as our people in Israel does battle with  the Amaleq of our times. We are not invincible Übermenchen – inherently superior human beings. God is not battling for us, but rather against the great evil that they represent. We must be brave and resolute but never arrogant. We must temper our self-confidence with a humility that informs us that we are but instruments of a God determined to work His will in this world. Our ultimate victory is merely a by-product of a Hand that will ensure their defeat.

 

August 8, 2008

Devarim 

Deuteronomy 1-3:27 

  This Shabbat begins the reading of the 5^th book of the Torah, Devarim, meaning “the words.” This last of the Five Books of Moses is written in the “confessional voice” – with Moses portrayed as speaking in the first person. While much of the Torah is about Moses interspersed with quotes from him, Devarim  is presented as Moses’ own final extended discourse to a new generation of Israelites about to enter the Promised Land without him.

  The Greek/Latin name Deuteronomy means “the second giving of the Law.”  It is derived from the Jewish tradition’s characterization of this book as Mishneh Torah, which can be rendered as  “repetition of the Torah”. In fact, much of the content of Deuteronomy also appears in the previous books of the Torah, although many scholars believe that the Book of Deuteronomy is older than the 4 preceding books of the Torah. In other words, just because the tradition places this book at the end of the Torah, since it describes events at the end of Moses’ life, does not mean that it was the last to be written. Sounds a bit topsy-turvy, but it’s worth keeping in mind when we compare what is written in Deuteronomy with what we find in the other books of the Torah! In fact, what is in the other books may actually be derived from Deuteronomy!

  There is much in this very early book that is bellicose and blood curdling, since Israel is apparently being commanded to carry out a genocidal jihad – a holy war – to conquer the Land of Canaan. There is really no modern ethical defense that can be offered for this “commanded” “ethnic cleansing.” But it is vitally important to keep in mind that this is apocalyptic fantasy and does not describe the historical reality of how Israelite culture took hold of that little sliver of the eastern Mediterranean coast.

   Although modern scholarship had not yet arrived at a consensus as to how this took place, there is broad agreement that is was not through an epochal military invasion and massive dispossessing of the indigenous population as commanded in Deuteronomy and “carried out” in its sister work, the Book of Joshua.  Even other books of Bible, most notably the Book of Judges, presuppose that Israel’s roots in Canaan spread very gradually and tentatively over the centuries through cultural and political assimilation with the local population.

   Never-the-less, there can be no denying that our last book in the Torah conveys the wish that there had been a war of extermination, or, even worse, the desire to have one when the opportunity arose. Some like Spinoza would contend that this is the understandable fantasy of a chronically weak and oppressed people that yearned to “get even.”

  It seems that many religions in their infancy have this infantile desires for conquest, just as many immature adolescents dream of someday “teaching their parents a lesson” when they gain power over them. James Carroll, his book Constantine’s Sword, correctly describes Christianity in its early days as a triumphalist war religion. Of course, the same can be said about Islam in its first centuries. It is  also not surprising that even the early Buddhist rulers in Southeast Asia spread their religion at the point of the sword!

   And so it is not astonishing to find the literature of war and conquest in early stages of new religions. What matters, of course, is that like normal healthy adults, as these religions matured and became more self-assured and secure, their dark energies gave way to more elevated spiritual and ethical impulses. This was certainly the case in the Jewish Scriptures that moved well beyond the terrors of Deuteronomy to visions of a peaceful global community held together by the word of God that “will cover the Earth as waters fill the seas.”

  Of course, there will always be those atavistic “fundamentalist” elements in all literature-based religions that will read their early “commands to conquer” and take them as contemporary marching orders. This horrible tendency will be fiercely compounded when these fundamentalists are feeling oppressed and powerless, since they will draw comfort and inspiration from their God’s reported promises of ultimate victory in their early literature. Of course, even though the promise is pure infantile fantasy, the real-world consequences, as we know, are devastating.

 

July 25, 2008 

Matot

Number 30:2-36 

This week's Torah portion brings us close to the conclusion of the turbulent Book of Numbers and offers closure to some of the “unfinished business” in the 4^th book of the Five Books of Moses. Among other matters, it presents detailed boundaries of the Promised Land that the people about to conquer it, the method for dividing the land and its spoils, and also designates those leaders who are to be entrusted with this all-important task.

   While describing the method of apportionment, the second half of chapter 35 commands the designation of 6 “Cities of Refuge” – 3 on each side of the Jordan. Those who commit accidental homicide will be afforded enforced “protective custody” in these Levitical cities, keeping them safe from the blood-feuding avengers from the families of the deceased.

  The process is rather simple and direct. When one person kills another, that individual is to flee to the nearest City of Refuge. A trial is held at the gates of the city to determine whether or not the killing was intentional and premeditated. If it is adjudged to be unintentional negligent homicide or manslaughter, the judges admit the killer into the city, there to remain until the death of the current high priest. If the killing is ruled a murder, the convicted murderer is turned away from the gates, where the avenger can execute retribution.

   Of course, the society envisioned by the Torah is more compact and homogeneous, made up of strong kinship and village relationships with very few “degrees of separation.” The role of the judges was not to impose law from the top down in an anonymous lawless society, but, rather, to serve as referees ensuring that the deeply ingrained tribal laws and customs were applied fairly in accordance with the provable facts.

   But what does emerge from this passage is the fact that the “state” itself was not to carry out the death penalty. That was left to accusers who accusations had been verified by the judges should the aggrieved parties elect to shed further blood.  The “state” was not in the business of retribution and was unwilling to itself have “blood on its hands.”

  I wonder how it would be if this Torah principle were applied in today’s society, with its obvious taste for the death penalty. Would there be more or less executions if the victim’s next of kin were the only one authorized to pull the switch?

  The application of the death penalty has always presented me with this dilemma. Without a doubt the objective causes of justice and parity indicate that there are those cold-blooded murderers who richly deserve to have their own lives terminated. Yet each and every time my representative government itself kills in cold blood, I feel strangely sullied.

 

July 19, 2006 

Pinhas

Numbers 25:10-30:1  

   This week’s parsha bears the name of a grandson of Aaron by his son Eliezar, now the high priest after his illustrious father’s death. At the very end of last week’s portion we read how this Pinhas took a spear and ran through both an Israelite chieftain and the Midianite woman with whom he was in the act of consummating a marriage.

   Now we read how God rewards this zealot’s radical action with the covenant of perpetual priesthood. Instead of being an ad hoc matter, the divinely sanctioned line of high priests will in perpetuity be of the descendants of this Pinhas. All other high priestly appointees will be reckoned illegitimate usurpers.

   There was a time early on in my life as a liberal rabbi that I found this arrangement to be troubling in the extreme. After all, Pinhas’ bloody actions smacked of vigilantism, and the purpose of his double homicide was the violent disruption of an interfaith marriage- hardly a suitable model for a young Reform rabbi determined to welcome interfaith households into his community! And here, it seemed, there was a parade example of the worst form of religious intolerance being abundantly rewarded by God! Troubling stuff indeed…

   What is more, this fanatical rejection of intermarriage seemed to fly in the face of the very obvious fact that Moses was chosen to be the greatest of our prophets after he married the Midianite Tsipporah. And, after, wasn’t our “Once and Future King” David, and by extension his descendant the Messiah of the House of David, the product of the interfaith marriage of Ruth the Moabite and Boaz the Judean?  And so there seems to be times when our Bible elevates interfaith marriages and other instances (for example, see Nehemiah 13:23-30) when it condemns them.

    Although Pinhas’ bloody deed still unnerves me, I have come to understand the underlying reason for the Biblical tradition’s differing responses to intermarriage. It seems to depend on whether or not the intention of the Jewish party is to draw their spouse closer to the God of Israel, or whether that intermarriage is part of the Jew’s broader strategy of “out-processing” and assimilation.

   Certainly over the ages there have been periods when some Jews’ personal survival strategy involved conscious proactive assimilation or even conversion – not at the point of the sword, but, rather, for social, political and economic advancement. This amounted to elevating one’s own well being above that of the people as a whole by “jumping ship” in search of smoother sailing. Deliberate intermarriage was surely part of that strategy since it was part of the apostasy and for this reason it was condemned.

   This is exactly the case in this week’s Torah reading, since the Israelite men were not simply engaging in romantic dalliances with Midianite women. It is explicitly stated that it was through these women that our men were attaching themselves to the pagan cult of Ba’al Pe’or.

   Yet it is precisely the opposite case with Tsipporah and Ruth in Scriptures, and for the very many “non-native” Jews who through marriage to Jewish people draw nearer to our people and its faith. Of course, we all know many wonderful people who have done precisely the same thing in our community and throughout the United States. One of the great contributions of Liberal Judaism is that it allows us to make these distinctions rather than treating all intermarriages as instances of betrayal.

   Now setting aside the immediate causes and circumstances of Pinhas’ radical actions, I must admit to a certain measure of admiration for his willingness to act when those around him were simply moaning, wringing their hands in despair and enduring the unacceptable. His courage to step forward and do something about it, no doubt at some personal risk to himself, marked him as a man truly worthy of the mantle of leadership.

July 4, 2008

Huqat 

Numbers 19 -  22:1 

   This week’s sedra  is packed with a broad range of events set in the wilderness during Israel’s journey to the promised land. We hear of the death of Moses’ sister, the prophetess Miriam and then the death of his brother the High Priest Aaron.

   Separating these two incidents are two significant events - Moses bringing water out of the rock and Israel’s embassy to Edomites, a people closely related to the Israelites.

  When the people complain of a water shortage, God commands Moses to take his “wonder staff”, go to a boulder and command it to bring forth water. Provoked by the peoples’ incessant whining, in a fit of pique Moses strikes the boulder instead of speaking to it. Although the water gushes forth, God informs Moses that his violent expression of anger will condemn him to perish in the wilderness with his generation, and not enter the land.

  After this, Moses sends ambassadors to the descendants of Essau, Jacob’s fraternal twin, asking to the right of innocent passage through their land on the way to Canaan. When they are rebuffed, God cautions Moses not to attack them, since they also hold their land as a divine grant as well.

   Then, following the death of Aaron and the accession of his son Elieazar to the high priesthood, the people are attacked by the Canaanite residents of the Negev fortress city of Arad and some Israelites are taken captives. By divine command Israel sacks Arad and then heads south towards the Gulf of Eilat.

   Along the way, Israel experiences an onslaught of poisonous snakes. God orders Moses to fashion a brass serpent and hang in on a pole to form a caduceus of sorts. Those who are snake bitten are to find healing by gazing upon this nehushtan.

  After this episode the writer presents to us a detailed itinerary of Israel’s wandering set in saga form ending in an ancient ode to the well “dug by the 12 nobles” with their staves of authority.

  Finally, after journeying north, east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River, the people approach the Golan in attempt to enter the upper Galilee. Once again they send messengers to the locals, this time the Amori, requesting permission to pass through their land. Once again they are refused, and Amori kings Sihon and Og lead their people out to war against them.  This time God gives Israel permission to fight and assures them victory. This week’s action-packed portion ends with Israel taking possession of the Golan and the valley below it in the upper Galilee.

   However, before all this death and mayhem, the Sages elected to begin the sedra with the passage commanding the use of the ashes of a red heifer in an ablution intended to purify those who had come in contact with the dead. The ancient rabbis did this order to underscore the graciousness of the Merciful One, who always “sends the medicine before the disease."

 

June 27, 2008

Qorah

Numbers 16-18

 

In this week’s Torah portion, the ascension of the Levites described in the Book of Numbers finally boils over into a full-blown insurrection against Moses and Aaron, led by their cousin, the Levite chieftain Korah, whose very name in Hebrew suggests willfulness and coercion. 

It has long been my theory that while the Torah certainly contains some very ancient elements, some of the events described took place and were added in the Torah at a much later date and “painted in” to make them seem as if they had happened around the Exodus, the “mother load” and core icon of classical Jewish history. It is very much like those late Medieval paintings describing biblical events, where the artist paints in the faces of patrons who lived in his own time in order to honor them. 

In this case the Levites of the clan of Qorah who held positions of high authority right before the temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. were painted into this story, not to honor them, but to condemn them and blame them for bringing on a catastrophe.

We know from the Psalms that the Bnai Qorah Levites were the temple singers. Apparently they also formed a powerful political guild. In his Antiquities (Book 20:Chapter 9:6), Josephus writes: 

Now as many of the Levites, which is a tribe of ours, as were singers of hymns, persuaded the king to assemble a Sanhedrin, and to give them leave to wear linen garments, as well as the priests for they said that this would be a work worthy the times of his government, that he might have a memorial of such a novelty, as being his doing. Nor did they fail of obtaining their desire; for the king, with the suffrages of those that came into the Sanhedrin, granted the singers of hymns this privilege, that they might lay aside their former garments, and wear such a linen one as they desired; and as a part of this tribe ministered in the temple, he also permitted them to learn those hymns as they had besought him for. Now all this was contrary to the laws of our country, which, whenever they have been transgressed, we have never been able to avoid the punishment of such transgressions.

 

This closely parallels the story we read in the Torah this week, where Qorah and his follows are attempting to usurp the sacred privileges entrusted to the High Priest Aaron and his descendants, a move that was supported by the ‘Edah, the equivalent of the Sanhedrin in the wilderness. Eventually, when they themselves brazenly attempt to offer priestly sacred incense to God, the ground beneath them opens up beneath the Qorahites and swallows then up, and then a virulent plague begins to spread throughout the people. Certainly the destruction of the Temple qualified as the ground opening up and swallowing the Levites and the Sandhedrin, since without the Temple and a Jewish polity their roles abruptly came to and end and their authority vanished!

 

It is particularly telling how Qorah and his ilk go about trying to undermine the inspired authority of Moses and Aaron. Like many would-be tyrants, Qorah attempts to seize power by cloaking himself in democratic garb and then trying to corrupt the political process. This is the claim he makes against Moses and Aaron:

 

You take too authority for yourselves, seeing that all the congregation is holy, and Adonai is among them all. So why do you lift yourselves above Adonai’s ‘Edah  (assembly of leaders)?

                                                          (Numbers 16:4) 

Although many in the ‘Edah were seduced by Qorah’s rhetoric, they failed to grasp that Qorah’s ultimate goal was hardly a popular democracy. If he had been allowed to succeed, the upshot would be that he would have become a tyrant, and the people would be left without authentic religious leaders. 

It has been often observed that a democracy can only really work when its people are guided by genuine values and informed by their careful discernment and judgment. Lacking that, democracy simply allows the largest number of people to make the same mistakes at the same time – generally mistakes that cost them first their wealth, then democracy, and ultimately their civil society itself. And so, as in this week’s Torah portion, an ignorant, rudderless electorate will find the very ground beneath them opening to swallow them up into oblivion. 

The Qorahs among them cost our people their beloved temple. But of course, temples can be rebuilt. You know how it goes!                                                                                       

June 20, 2008

 Shlah-Lekha 

Numbers  13-16 

    This week’s sedra begins with yet another debacle in the Book of Number’s chronicle of Israel’s self-induced catastrophes in the wilderness. It is two years after the exodus, and Israel is the Negev about to march north and invade the mountainous central religion of Canaan, the heartland of the Promised Land. Yet the majority of the chieftains sent to reconnoiter Canaan come back with their bad news. They are of the opinion that this rich and fecund land is heavily fortified and unconquerable. Although the two dissenting tribal leaders Joshua and Caleb insist that with God’s help victory will be inevitable, the people prefer to listen to the worst and not the best of their leaders. They condemn Moses and even God for bringing them out of Egypt and leading them to their certain death in the impending battles. “It would be better for us to die in the wilderness then to fall by the sword,” they declare. Some of them even advocate turning around and heading back to Egypt!

    And so God obliges them, assuring them that, since they prefer to die in the wilderness rather than fight a war of conquest, this is exactly what will happen. Yet as soon as they hear this gloomy oracle they decide to go against it and precipitously launch an invasion without God’s sanction or support.  It seems that this  perverse people is determined to do precisely the opposite of God’s expressed will at each and every turn. Although Moses pleads with them not to attack, they march up to battle and are soundly defeated and pushed back into the Sinai desert south of the Negev, there to encamp and lick their wounds for the next 38 years!

    The Torah regards this and the Golden Calf incident to be the lowest points in the saga of the Exodus. In both cases God voices an intention to destroy the people and create a new covenanted nation through Moses. Yet in both instances Moses steps into the breach and persuades God to relent.

   I suspect the reason for the draconian punishment in this week’s Torah portion stems for the dynamic of the present problem. In the Golden Calf incident, it was the masses that pressured Aaron to make a Golden Calf. Aaron stalled as long as he could, trying to delay the issue in the hope that Moses would return in time to put a stop to it. In this week’s sedra it was the leadership that initiated the crisis that then spread among the people at large. This was a “top down” debacle that had no real and practical remedy, since the tribal chieftains were hereditary leaders who could not be easily replaced without totally revamping the long-standing organizational structure.

  When you have a deeply entrenched corrupt leadership that is unwillingly to surrender power, you are presented with 3 options:

   The first and most radical approach is suggested by God in this week’s reading. In chapter 14:12 God says to Moses:  “I will destroy them and start afresh, building a new and better people starting with you!”. You can start a revolution that tears apart and then rebuilds.

  The compassionate Moses, God’s faithful steward, is also the faithful leader of his people, and rejects the offer in favor of the second option, and that is to hunker down, try to minimize the damage and wait for better leaders to eventually emerge. Of course everything changes over time, and given enough time things are bound to get better. It is a sensible, more moderate approach that ultimately works. The fly in the ointment for Moses and Aaron, however, is that they themselves fall victim to this waiting game and find themselves worn down and finally destroyed trying to cope with the chronic corruption.

   Unfortunately, the third and most logical option was not available to Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. Mature and sane people will only put up with a limited amount of heartache within an organization before they decide to leave it and try something else. Sadly, these inspired and very decent men had nowhere to go.

       

June 13, 2008

Bha'alotkha

Numbers 8-12

 

This week's Torah reading, whose name means “As you lift up”, starts off with the irenic and orderly description of how the High Priest is to array the sacred lamps in the Shrine. Yet it ends in total pandemonium and disarray, with fire and food riots sweeping the camp and Moses' two older siblings turning on him.

The turning point can be found in chapter 11, verses 29-32, when Moses' father-in-law Hovev (a.k.a. Jethro/ Re'uel) begs leave to return to his sheikdom in Midian. Although the passage is inconclusive, it can be surmised that he actually did return home, leaving the organizationally inept and inarticulate Moses to fend for himself without his father-in-law's mature wisdom and advice. Besides having deal with the logistical challenges of leadership on his own, Moses now seemingly has no boiler plating to insulate him from the Levites, that restive leadership caste that but recently had itself “consecrated” as Israel's archons.

As things begin to really unravel for our “Veiled Prophet”, this week we find him offering this complaint to God:

Why are You harming Your servant – have I not pleased you enough, that you inflict this burdensome people on me?! What- am I its parent? Was it me that sired it so that now You are telling me that I have to carry it on my bosom like a wet nurse carrying a suckling all the way to that land you vouchsafed to its ancestors?... I just can't bear this people by myself any longer – it's just too burdensome for me. But if this is what You are doing to me, if I have ever pleased you why not just kill me outright so I won't have to be a witness to my own undoing! (11:11-5)

As the student of Torah already knows, God does not immediately grant Moses' plea. In fact, God seemingly allows Moses to twist in the wind as things only get worse, and they will get a lot worse in the weeks to come. Only after Moses is a completely broken and burnt out man does God decree his death sentence, barring him from the completion of his mission of leading the people to the “Promised Land”. But even that death sentence is staid for another 37 years, until Moses is in the very sight of that all-important destination! Only then does God take him, literally a handful of paces away the sole object of his entire leadership career!

What a nightmare this must have been for him, being given advance notice of his ultimate failure as a leader and still being left in charge of an impossible situation for years to come! He never wanted the job. He was never any good at it, and only encountered resistance, rejection and personal insult throughout his career as God's chosen servant. Zero recognition in a thankless job...

And so one very obvious question emerges in very high relief: Why did Moses stick with it? I suspect he could have resigned his office at any time, and like he did once before back in Egypt, simply flee. It may very well have been that if he had done so, like Jonah much later on in the Bible, God would have drawn him back by closing off all other avenues to Moses. Yet how strange that he never even tested the lock on his cell door? At first glace, it sounds like something only Kafka could fathom!

I will not undertake to explain Moses' perseverance, and what motivated him to stay on a job that he hated working for people he did not like and who liked him even less. This I will leave to you to figure out. Suffice it to say, the highest accolade both God and the tradition afford to Moses is the title: ‘eved ne'eman) – the “faithful/trusted servant.”

 

June 6, 2008

Naso

Numbers 4:21-7

   This week’s Torah portion, in which the well-known “Three-Fold Priestly Blessing” (“May the Lord Bless You and Keep You..”) appears, also contains a less-known but highly instructive passage whose underlying logic speaks volumes about the values at the very heart of our Torah.

   Starting at chapter 5, verse 11, we are instructed on how to deal with a married couple when the jealous husband suspects his wife of adultery without any evidence at all to support his suspicion. The Torah specifically adds that in this situation it does not matter whether or not there is any basis to the husband’s suspicion. There follows then a detailed description of a peculiar oracular ordeal which the husband causes his wife to undergo at the hands of a priest at God’s shrine.

   The ritual sounds like the purest of Voodoo. After they present a gift of barley flour to the shrine priest, the priest then dishevels her hair, pours “holy water” mixed with dust from shrine in an earthen vessel, and then speaks to her this formula of an ‘alah, a conditional curse. 

If you have not slept with another man and have not strayed towards impurity, then you will be immune from there oracular waters. But if you have strayed from your husband while under his authority and are defiled by another man who had lain with you aside fro, your husband, then may the Lord make you a curse and a byword among the people, and when these oracular waters enter you may the Lord cause your womb to drop and your stomach to distend”

 

The priest them writes these words on a tablet, rinses the ink into the earthen vessel, and causes her to “drink the words.” If she is guilty, the curse will come to pass. If nothing happens, she is judged to be innocent and God will reward her with a child. 

Sounds barbaric, superstitious and demeaning, eh?  But let’s think it through.  In those days it was easy to divorce a woman, often with very little negative consequence to the man. So if he is overwrought with suspicion and jealousy, why not simply divorce her without having to resort to this ritual? Obviously in this case the man in very attached to his wife and does not want to send her away! What he really wants is the peace of mind that will come when she is exonerated by this “Wizard of Oz” ritual. It’s a craziness that he really wants to “get over”, and he needs a “divine oracle” to achieve this. It’s a “guy thing.” 

As for the woman, if she is innocent, she will drink the water without hesitation if it helps her get past this marital crisis. If she is guilty, she will also chose the water, since to confess to adultery was to incur the death penalty! Besides, back then any woman brazen enough to commit adultery would sure “tough it out” and drink the water. 

Now unless the woman had some very serious psychosomatic disorder (generally not the type to risk adultery), you can be certain that nothing untoward would happen to her. The exoneration rate for this ritual must have been nearly 100%, so that Shalom Bayit, domestic tranquility, would be restored no matter the real facts of the case. 

Compare and contrast this to the genuinely barbaric societies that exist even today on our planet. How many women in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or in Moslem Africa would have been grateful for an opportunity to drink the water?! 

A consider one famous American woman who recently endured a protracted, very frustrating, and ultimately fruitless ordeal to prove herself!

 By carefully thinking through this Torah passage, we can discern the sublime wisdom and humanity that lurks just below the surface.

 

May 30, 2008

B’midbar 

 Numbers 1-4:20

     This week we enter “The Wilderness” – the meaning of the Hebrew name of this 4^th book of the Torah commonly known in English as the Book of Numbers because of the several censuses that appear in it.

   These numberings of the people in the wilderness of Sinai were cast in a negative light by our Sages, who understood that counting people is always an ominous thing. For them, knowing the exact number of a population generally surrounds some sort of catastrophe. It can be a precursor to a government’s starting a war as the ruler assesses his military strength. Of course, a census can signal tax increases or political changes and upheavals. Then there is always a counting after destruction, be it a defeat, a plague or another natural calamity. All in all, the Sages concluded that numbering people in one way or another invites the ‘Ayin Hara’ – The Evil Eye.

   Indeed, this Book of the Wilderness is a chronicle of woe leading to the loss of an entire generation before it was able to enter the Promised Land. A careful analysis of the causes for these points to the rampant social strife that plagued our people – the result of tribal and Levitical leaders overreaching politically as they strived to usurp the divine authority conferred upon Moses and Aaron.

   This week’s Torah portion sets the stage for this. We read how the informal religious folkways of the Israelites were replaced with a formal hierarchical structure in which the Levites were given a permanent and hereditary bureaucratic role. The Torah envisions the Levites serving under the authority of Moses and of his older brother, the High Priest Aaron. Yet no sooner than this arrangement was set in the place, the Levites grew restive and militated for ever-increasing authority and power.

   Of course, even before the Levites were assigned their administrative roles, the Israelites had proven themselves to be unruly and difficult to lead. But now the Levites were able to artfully harness this recalcitrance into institutional oppositionalism and eventual insurrection.

   It has been often noted that revolt and coup d’estat generally emanates not from the people at large but rather from that level of leadership just below the top. Often employing the rhetoric of reform and egalitarianism, these “Levites” are simply out to grab power from those entrusted with authority over them. And so those nominally entrusted with the task of carrying out the policies of lawful government are, in fact, often committed to eroding and undermining the orderly process of governing. Elegantly stated, over-ordering creates disorder.

 

May 23. 2008

L”ag Ba’Omer

 Bhooqotai

 Leviticus 26:3-27

 

   This week’s Torah portion brings us to the end of the Leviticus, the 3^rd book of Torah.

  It falls on L’ag Ba’omer, the 33^rd day of the sacred counting of the 7 weeks between Passover and Shavu’ot (Pentecost). An omer is a measure of grain. By Torah command, during this 7 week grain harvest period, each day an omer of grain was ritually delivered to the Temple. Although we can no longer literally fulfill this command, we figuratively do so through anamnesis- the act of recalling and reliving a significant past event through ritual words and directed memories.

   The 7 weeks of counting the omer are intensely serious ones in our tradition. No wedding or other frivolous celebrations are allowed. Originally, the only focus was the community-wide effort to bring in the all-important grain before the onset of the early summer rains. The somberness of this time was later associated with the 2^nd century C.E. Bar Kokhva Revolt debacle, after which the Romans effectively ended the Jewish polity, renaming Judea Palestine to “honor” our traditional biblical enemy, the Philistines.

 The Sages allowed a break on this 33^rd day of the omer counting by permitting weddings and recreational outings of this day.

 Bhooqotai means “in my statutes.” It is based on the verb hqq, conveying the meaning of engraving. A hoq literally means that which is carved in stone. The Sages understood that whenever the Torah called a law a hoq, it meant it in the absolute, authoritative sense – something like a legal dogma for which no rational end needed to be discerned. You simply do it because it says so!

  In this case, the huqqim in question seem to be the laws of the Sabbatical years and Jubilees which, if and when implemented, would likely cause serious if not catastrophic economic results. Moreover, there seems to be no obvious rational economic or agricultural reason for implementing these laws. It is a parade expression of the absolute sovereignty of God.

  As so, in this week’s portion we find the “boiler plating” that comes with these huqqim – the promise of reward for obedience, and then an extensive diatribe spelling out the blood-curdling consequences of disobedience.

May 16, 2008

Bhar

Leviticus 25-26:2

 

This week’s reading means “at the mountain (Sinai)”. Whenever legislation is introduced as coming from Mt. Sinai, the significance is that it is understood to be ancient and supremely authoritative.

Our Torah portion conveys the fundamentals of the just social order that is the preconditions for have the divine presence in our midst. Much of the Book of Leviticus concerns itself with the ritual requirements for such a presence. Now the authors express the firm convictions that it takes more than rituals to make a environment tahor- suitable for the sacred. It takes justice, fairness the a concern for the cause of equity- concerns that are sorely lacking in our present American economic order when the unbridled banking and credit system are picking people clean!

The writers imagined the temple as Qiryat Melekh Rav – the abode of the Great King, with the surrounding Land of Israel the feudal possession of a Monarch who was essentially leasing the land to His subjects, the Israelite inhabitants. This week we get to read the terms of the lease and the conditions by which that lease will be extended or terminated.

This underlying organizing principle of Israelite civic society is explicitly stated chapter 25, verse 23: “For you are sojourners and tenants with Me.” God holds the deed to the Land of Israel, and the all the inhabitants can do is sublet it to each other for very limited periods of time not to exceed the 50^th Jubilee year. As the landlord, God was entitled to annual rents and a share of the produce- the Biblical tithes. And as the only true “freeholder” in the Land of Israel, God could dictate how and when the land was to be used, e.g., the Sabbatical years, how long it could be mortgaged for collateral, and the rights of the mortgagee to redeem the land after a foreclosure.

Like any properly written lease, our Torah portion spells out the penalty for noncompliance and breach. It is, obviously, eviction, or as the Torah calls it, exile. Those invaders who come and carry the people off into exile are depicted as agents of God, implacable “deputies” sent to disposes us for violating the terms of the lease spelled out in this week’s Torah portion.

The penalty clauses are not easy reading, but they are intended as a powerful inducement for the Israelite to maintain as sense of God’s absolute sovereignty over His domain. We are meant to understand that ultimately we own nothing, and if we are commanded to adopt humane and charitable economic policies, not to “gouge” or even to charge interest, and not to endlessly and limitlessly amass and horde, we have no justification for resenting these limits on our natural rapacity. After all, none of this really belongs to us to begin with! Thus Torah theoretically does not support “Free Enterprise” in its carefully regulated “top down” view of social economics.

Of course, even the Torah itself in this week’s reading admits that would it take consistent miracles to make its economic program work! Farming and most other forms of commerce are completely dependant on an interest-based credit system. It is supremely unrealistic to expect that the land must be left fallow, sometimes for 2 years in a row (when a sabbatical year is followed by a Jubilee year). The Torah has to factor in divine intervention in order to avoid routinely self-induced famines (Chapter 25:20).

It is hard to imagine that this program was ever implemented and not because of impiety or disobedience to God. It simply won’t work, and the Torah knows it. In fact we are reading not a program but a socio-economic manifesto, a kind of fantasy of what it would be like in a perfect society. It is as “fantastical” as Locke’s or Marx’s utopian visions: morally uplifting goals and signposts pointing us towards a happier and less predatory world.

We have learned from the brutal “top down” economic experiments of the last century that is simply no way to impose any real order on an economy, no matter how supposedly lofty the goals of the controls. The only true order that can be brought to the marketplace must come from the inside out, from a spiritual awareness of the sovereignty of God that engenders humility and limits to our greed and ruthlessness. That awareness is the point of this week’s Torah portions.

 

May 9, 2008

 ’Emor

Leviticus 21-24

  This week’s portion, one of the longest in the Torah, covers a broad range of topics, including the special restrictions applying to our priests, some generals rules concerning the bringing sacrifices, a concise guide to the Torah festivals, the ritual of the oil lamps and bread in the shrine, the Lex Talinois (Law of Retribution, i.e., “an eye for an eye…”) and the equal application of law to all residents regardless of status.

  Since it had been nearly 2,000 years since we have had a sacrificial cult and a functioning priesthood, at first blush many of this week’s Torah regulations seem outdated. Even so, our Sages were able to derive from them laws that are in force even today.

   For example, the Torah states that the ancient priests were not allowed to participate in funerary rites for anyone except their fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and unmarried sisters (implying that husbands mourn for their wives). This Torah definition of consanguity (“blood relations”) was applied by the Sages in the rule of the people for whom we are required to mourn. We only “sit Shiva’, observe the Shloshim (30 days) and the year’s restrictions, the requirement to recite the “Mourners’ Qaddish and Yizkor 4 times a year for people on this week’s Torah list.

   Of great relevance to us today is that stated principle that “one canon of justice must apply to the native-born and to the sojourner…” (Leviticus 24-21). Of course, back then there were no nation-states, no passports or clearly defined immigration laws, nor was there even the idea of individual citizenship rights. Even up until the time of the Napoleonic Code the sovereign’s laws was applied depending on the status of the group to which you belonged, e.g. the nobility, the squire class, the priesthood, the peasantry or the “infidels and foreigners.”

  By asserting that the law comes from God who is equally sovereign over all everywhere, the Torah laid the foundation for our American constitutional principle of “equal protection under the law” as enumerated in the 14^th Amendment. Of course, we still struggle with this firmly stated Torah axiom, since we persist in emphasizing the ephemeral, perceived superficial differences among ourselves, rather than trying to see each other as we imagine God does!

 

May 02, 2008

Qedoshim

Leviticus 19-20

If we were to unroll the entire Torah scroll in order to locate its exact middle, we would find ourselves in this week's Torah portion. And sure enough, in the physical heart of the Torah we also find its spiritual heart, the axiom from which everything else is derived: Qdoshim tehyoo kee qadosh anee ‘Ya’ elohaykhem.

 As is often the case with most oracular lemmae, this terse pronouncement can be read in more than one way. Here are two possible renditions:

Be sacred because I Yah your God am sacred.

You will become sacred since I Yah your God am sacred

While each interpretation contains a nuanced difference, the underlying gist is the same. The God you worship is Qadosh (literally “set apart); likewise, you must become a people set apart. What follows in this Torah portion is a long list of commanded behaviors, most of them ethical and social. Yet these commandments are presented as more than intrinsically worthwhile actions. The upshot is that a people that observes them and does them will find themselves a people set apart from the ways of the world.

This is meaning of the expression “A nation set apart … a kingdom of priests and a holy people”. (Exodus 19:5-6). The purpose for a circumscribed people is to create and protect a “habitat” for God in this world.

At the head of the list of commandments in this week's sedra is the general admonition: “Revere your mother and father and keep my holidays”. By tightly juxtaposing family and festival, our writer envisions a seamlessly integrated life, where kinship, cult and community all are directed towards the same goal: the creation of a completely unique society worthy of having a completely unique God in its midst. By the constant repetition throughout this reading of the expression anee Ya ' (“adonai), “I am the Lord”, after so many of the commandments, the writer reminds us that these mitzvot bear the “royal seal”. They are divinely proclaimed edicts rather than “good deeds”. The purpose of obeying these commandments is not to “rack up points” that can be redeemed for future rewards. It is to set us apart, to make us a “shrine people” whose moral and social structures constitute a living temple for our living God.

For better or worse, for so many centuries we have been known as a “people apart.” The world perceived and still perceives us a something different. Miraculous or menacing, divine or diabolical, the Jewish people stands out in stark contrast to the ordinary. Our existence is couched in superlatives. When we are good we are the best, when we are bad we are the worst. Ultimately this flows from our belief, and the world's, that in one way or another the Jewish people is specially identified with God, an identification that is expressed by our possession of God's revelation. Accordingly, the standards to which we are held and by which we are judged are so very much higher than those by which the world judges itself. And this is precisely how this week's Torah portion would have it. We are to measure ourselves against the perfection of God, not by the common denominators of humanity. An impossible standard, but anything else would be an a priori resignation to compromise and defeat.