52 Parshas

houses full of all good things that you did not fill... ( some thoughts on Va -ethannan)

2011-08-13T22:27:00.000-04:00

Today I meditated and then read the 7th aliyah of Va-ethannan. I read

When the Lord Your God brings you into the land that He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to assign to you -- great and flourishing cities that you did not build, houses full of all good things that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant -- and you eat your fill, take heed that you do not forget the Lord who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. Revere only the Lord your God and worship Him alone, and swear only by His name. Do not follow other gods, any gods of the people around you -- for the Lord your God in your midst is an impassioned God -- lest the anger of the Lord your God blaze forth against you and He wipe you off the face of the earth. ( Deut. 6:10 - 6:15)

I imagine coming into a world already full of good and beautiful things. And then I remember that this was, in fact, the world I came into, the world that we all come into -- even the poorest of us. As for me, a white woman, a professional, the daughter of professionals, living in a first-world country in a great and flourishing city that I did not build -- well, I came into a land full of good and beautiful things that I did not make.

That's reality. Anyone claiming otherwise, peddling their self-made tales, is following other gods. Most people, maybe, are following other gods. Me, most of the time, I follow other gods. I forget I didn't make this world, that our world is a mystery inside of an enigma inside of a puzzle, or however that goes. I forget that our world is a mysterious and possibly absurd turducken of givenness and gifts and blessings and sheer unalloyed "you didn't make this".

There's something in the laws of this world, though. Call it natural law, call it karma, call it God and God's judgment and God's anger blazing forth, call it nothing at all, but there it is. It doesn't let us forget. Not forever. When we forget that we are in debt to nearly everyone and everyThing in our lives, when we forget that debt is so great and so deep that it can never, never be paid... eventually it will catch up with us. The anger of the Lord will blaze against us, one way or another.

To live in spiritual denial of the gifts we have been given is to court disaster.

I grew up in Reform Judaism. One of the two central prayers of Judaism is the k'riat shema, which is actually just three passages from the Torah. The first passage is actually from va-ethannan, earlier in the parsha than the verses I'm talking about here. The second passage runs like this:

And it will be, if you will diligently obey My commandments which I enjoin upon you this day, to love the L-rd your G-d and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, I will give rain for your land at the proper time, the early rain and the late rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine and your oil. And I will give grass in your fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be sated. Take care lest your heart be lured away, and you turn astray and worship alien gods and bow down to them. For then the L-rd's wrath will flare up against you, and He will close the heavens so that there will be no rain and the earth will not yield its produce, and you will swiftly perish from the good land which the L-rd gives you. Therefore, place these words of Mine upon your heart and upon your soul, and bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, to speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. And you shall inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates - so that your days and the days of your children may be prolonged on the land which the L-rd swore to your fathers to give to them for as long as the heavens are above the earth. (from chabad's translation)

The Reform prayerbooks of my childhood only read the first paragraph of the shema, and they skipped all the God's wrath bit in the second paragraph. ( The second paragraph also, admittedly, repeats a lot of the first paragraph's ideas, if not the exact words.) I think that was a terrible mistake. I think the stakes are high here, and so actually the warning is now my favorite part of the prayer. I like to be reminded to remember all that I've been given. I like to be reminded that if I turn toward idols ( money, power, self, security, career, stuff...) I will most likely experience the consequences of that turning. I like to be reminded that I can turn again, too, back toward Reality, back toward God, back toward a recognition of the blessings of my life.

It's like Praise. We don't always praise God because we truly feel grateful. Sometimes we praise because it's in the prayerbook to praise, and because in praising we remember that it was not us who built this great and flourishing world....

A new experiment: contemplative Torah study

2011-08-13T21:57:00.001-04:00

I've been reading Alan Lew. He recommends a torah study practice that I've decided to start trying, and I'm hoping that it will make it easier for me to write blog posts each week. Lew practiced contemplative torah study. First you meditate, then you read the aliyah for the day. ( Each week's parsha is divided into 7 aliyot.) :

In Torah study both the passages that catch our attention and the passages that set us off on a long rumination are significant. They are God speaking to us through the text of the Torah. The practice of Torah study is the practice of hearing that voice.

Or we may simply notice that certain words or phrases or sentences in the text are charged as though lit from within. And we may notice moments in our life like that as well. When we put the charged words or phrases or sentences together with the charged moments, we may find a significant rhyme, we find that one instructs us about the other, and that both taken together are extremely significant for us, telling us something we really needed to know. -- Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

So that's what I will try to do. Perhaps dealing with smaller chunks of text in a more contemplative way will make it easier for me to grab hold of ideas for blog posts. We shall see.

Perhaps nothing will make it easier.

What I Learned From Dandruff

2011-04-04T21:38:00.000-04:00

Wow. I’ve been waiting to write this blog post for years, yet it’s just now occurred to me. Sometimes things fall not apart but together. Sometimes there is dark matter in the universe and you catch a glimpse of it.

I’m running late on parshas. No matter. This is my life. If all I’m running late on are parshas, I’m doing pretty fine. So we’re at parsha Tazria, now. Birth, circumcision, and leprosy. Lots of leprosy.

My shul had its annual retreat this weekend, by a pond in the woods an hour west of Boston. I took a walk with the four-year-olds and assorted parents, down to the pond and back by way of a septic field. There was a power plant in the distance. The camp itself had a great white windmill, and it filled the air with a gentle, alien whooshing sound, until you got up close and heard also the sound of metal scraping metal which signaled something not quite right up there, in the mechanism. Walking back up toward the windmill someone said they couldn’t get excited about the parsha this week. “Next year they should pick the parsha and then pick the date.”

For me, the parsha doesn’t matter so much, because I have to say something about it whatever it is. I like that spiritual discipline, but it’s also a kind of freedom. I have the freedom not to care that the parsha be good or juicy or easy to get a grip on. The parsha is what the parsha is.

I hardly ever get to torah study on weekends in Boston, but I went to torah study at the retreat. The Rabbi who was teaching had a copy of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger on the table, so of course I heartily approved. He told us that doctors haven’t identified any skin diseases that resemble the disease/s translated as leprosy in Leviticus, but they are certain that whatever it was, it was not leprosy, because by the time leprosy came to Israel, the laws in Leviticus were old, old news.

Our Torah is very old. I know that, but sometimes it is shocking all over again.

Here is what I want to say about skin:

There is always something wrong with your skin. Somewhere on your body, your skin is not intact. You have a cut from the kitchen knife because your mother called exactly as you were cutting that tomato and you were startled by the phone and your hand slipped. Or you were nervous before that big meeting and you bit a hangnail and now there’s a ragged edge on your left thumb. Or the cat was sick and you had to give her a pill and she didn’t like it and she bit your arm, not hard, but it broke the skin. Or you smashed your face into the doorknob while struggling with a three-year-old who did not want to put her rain boots on, and you split your lip. Sometimes when you’re stressed out you get eczema on your arms. Or you have psoriasis and sometimes it’s nothing and sometimes your elbows bleed. Or you didn’t always wear flipflops at the gym and you got athlete’s foot and it is stubborn. Or you have a wart, or a funny-looking mole you should see the dermatologist about. You have three chicken pox scars on your face. And dandruff. Sometimes the skin behind your ears weeps and crusts over, who knows why. You have razor burn. Or you cut yourself shaving with a brand new razor. There’s a patch of dry skin on your foot that just won’t go away. One of your toenails is half-fallen off from when you stubbed your toe that time. You got sunburnt on vacation and the skin is peeling off. You stepped in poison ivy, or nettles, or blundered into a hornet’s nest out near the compost bin or sat down in a red ant hill or stepped barefoot on a bumblebee or you got bedbugs or mosquitoes or lice or crabs or cold sores or chiggers or those horrible biting flies they have at Crane’s beach in July. Or you take a drug to stabilize your mood and it causes your skin to slough off.

There is always something wrong with your skin.

The sages of yore liked to explain all those skin-rules in Leviticus by saying they were really about how the state of your skin was supposed to reflect, somehow, the state of your soul. The disease called leprosy that was not leprosy befell those who did evil, especially those who spoke loshan hara. So the priest was called to witness the disease, the outward sign of internal impurity, and to call the sufferer to repent. Upon repentance the skin disease would heal and the sufferer could re-enter the realm of the holy.

It’s an attractive reading because it’s a hook to let us hang more meaning on skin diseases than they would otherwise seem to warrant in a holy book. We say “well, they couldn’t just have been talking about skin, right?”

As though we don’t obsess about skin ourselves.

What I learned from dandruff (and oh, my dandruff!) is that every day there are a million little things wrong with our bodies. Everything we see on the outside, all the bits that are weird or wrong or funny-colored -- that’s just the tip of the iceberg of all the stuff that is ever-so-slightly wrong with us. The prayer we say in the bathroom says that if just one of the bits of living machinery in our bodies were closed up when it should be open, or open when it should be closed, we would die, but the amazing thing about our existence is that in fact exactly the opposite is true, on the micro level. Many, many pieces can stop working before “we” stop working. There’s change and flux and stoppages and drippages all over the place; there are cells gone wild with proliferation when they should kill themselves and cells that commit suicide when they should reproduce instead. Our bodies are constantly going wrong in all kinds of tiny, imperceptible ways.

We can see our skin, and other people can see it too, so the state of our skin is a kind of palimpset for how much has gone wrong with our bodies in general. That is why we obsess about our skin, and that is probably why the Israelites obsessed about skin too.

Of course I rebel against the whole idea of making someone suffering from a skin disease walk around on the outskirts of camp, on the margins of society, calling out “impure” as they go. But at least the Israelites seem to have had some mechanism for deciding that a skin disease was not of the type that conferred impurity, or was but had healed, and for letting people back in to the community, under the protection of the priest. Ask someone suffering from full-body psoriasis if they’d like a priest to be able to pronounce them pure and make people let them in to holy places and public swimming pools. We’re superstitious and superficial jerks, we humans, and we read things into the skin that are not there, and we trick each other with plastic surgery and makeup and airbrushing , and we cover up and scrape off and lighten and tan and buy prescription medications to make our eyelashes grow. We are superficial jerks now and I’m sure we were superficial jerks then. So then we get to the perennial question: is it better to be a straightforward jerk or a sublimated jerk?

Actually, that’s not the question. I’m riffing about skin, and how it’s always broken. ( We are always broken, like this world, shattered vessels all). I think this quality of our skin is miraculous -- its marvelous and ever-renewing ability to be both broken in places and yet, as a whole, fundamentally intact in its ability to perform its jobs. I’m fascinated by all the ways it can fail us and all the ways that look like failure but are actually success. ( I burnt the skin of my arm, but I did not burn the muscle. My skin protected my muscle from the burn. The skin is broken, but it was broken in the line of duty...)

Still. Most things about the skin part of the parsha are alien to me. The laws, the disease/s described, the rituals, the rules. They don’t add up. And why should I expect them to? Old laws from before the army of Alexander the Great brought leprosy back from India. I can’t quite imagine living in that world. It is long gone. Why should I expect all its records to make sense? These laws don’t have enough texture to them. They tell no story. You had to be there, as they say, to understand the sense they made.

That the Torah is sometimes utterly alien, even, sometimes, repulsive -- I like that, even though I used to hate it. It’s broadening. It takes effort and it induces vertigo.

I like God because God is the cure for existential vertigo but at the same time God induces existential vertigo. This is the tricky stereoscopic vision of Ahavat Hashem, the Love of God, and Yirat Hashem, the fear of God. Relationship with God is both/and.

Relationship with Torah is like that too. Perfectly familiar ( I think of Us Weekly: “Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us”, I think of Head And Shoulders ads, and Creme de la Mer) and at the same time alien ( Purity and impurity, animal sacrifice, polygamy, miracles and wonders and smiting and slavery and deserts).

A rambling blog post, after all. Full of breakages and imperfections, like skin. I shall send it to the edge of the settlement until it has healed and is whole.

Ah. But it will never be whole, will it? We don’t get wholeness in this world. We just get to move in that direction. Wholeness belongs to the World-To-Come, Olam Ha-Ba, and who here knows what that even means? We say that God keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust (that’s the center holding), but we should not expect to understand how that works or what it looks like (and that’s the vertigo). This sounds very mystical, and it is. So I’ll wind up with G.K. Chesterton on mysticism:

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

Strangeness and familiarity. Our skin, and our souls. Botox and lepers. Can you see both at once? It gives you a bit of a headache, I’ll admit. I find that Reality always gives me a headache, but it is a balm for the aching in my soul.

Purity, Danger, Holiness, Order: A Tzav - Sh'mini Double Header

2011-03-16T20:18:00.000-04:00

There are way too many big ideas floating around in my head right now. I was mulling over Tzav for a long time, and when I decided what I wanted to say about that I got food poisoning or stomach flu and I didn’t write any of it down, and then I read Sh’mini and so even though strictly speaking I should have one post for each parsha, I’m combining them. And I don’t even think this is a d’var so much as it is the beginnings of my own personal Zohar. ( Flight of ideas? Check. Grandiosity? Check. )

Tzav is Leviticus Chapters 6 - 8. There are more instructions for sacrifice. I don’t really care about those. This is what interests me:

1) About the grain offering, Leviticus 6:11 “Anything that touches these shall become holy.”
2) Again, about the purification offering, Leviticus 6:20: “Anything that touches its flesh shall become holy...”
3) 7:19-20: “Flesh that touches anything impure shall not be eaten; it shall be consumed in fire. As for other flesh, only he who is pure shall eat such flesh. But the person who, in a state of impurity, eats flesh from the LORD’s sacrifices of well-being, that person shall be cut off from his kin.”

Then we get Sh’mini, Leviticus Chapters 9-11. In Sh’mini the Tabernacle is consecrated for what seems like, seriously, the 18th time. We also get the curious incident of the sons with the alien fire pans, Chapter 10:

Now Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before the LORD alien fire, which He had not enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from the LORD and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of the LORD. Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD meant when He said:

‘Through those near to me I show Myself holy, and gain glory before all the people.’”

And Aaron was silent.

And then for much of the rest of the parsha we get kashrut.

So what do I want to say about all this?

First, something strange. My chumash, Etz Hayim, has a note attached to Leviticus 6:11: “The condition of holiness, unlike that of impurity, was not regarded as contagious. Thus it would be better to translate: ‘Anyone who is to touch these must be in a holy state.’ Only consecrated persons may have contact with sacrificial materials.”

Well, okay, but that’s not what it says. It says ‘anything that touches these shall become holy.’ And then, point 2 above, at 6:20: “Anything that touches its flesh shall become holy...” Now, I am aware of the ridiculousness of my arguing with the editors of my chumash about what words that are written in Hebrew I can’t read might mean. But I presume if they could have translated faithfully those words as ‘Anyone who is to touch these must be in a holy state’ that they would have, and since they did not I can only assume that the words in Hebrew are closer to what I read in English than to their explanation of what those words really mean.

So there is impurity (tumah), and there is holiness (kadosh). Sometimes it seems as though holiness and purity are contagious, and sometimes it seems like it is impurity that is contagious. And then there’s the strangeness (to 21st-century me) of holiness and purity somehow being, in all of this, two ends of the same axis. Why should they have anything to do with each other at all? And where is goodness and righteousness in all of this? It seems like in this scheme we can be at the same time righteous and impure, i.e. un-holy. And vice-versa. Like there’s an entire other dimension of goodness and badness that is orthogonal to the holiness-impurity dimension. And again, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

In college I read Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo:

As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment.

[ ...]

In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea. There is nothing fearful or unreasoning in our dirt-avoidance: it is a creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience. If this is so with our separating, tidying, and purifying, we should interpret primitive purification and prophylaxis in the same light. (p2)

We can re-concieve the axis of impurity-holiness as disorder-order, and doing so helps it make sense to those of us who have this specialized idea of sanctity in which, frankly, impurity seems beside the point. But this does not mean that holiness then shrinks to being about getting organized or imposing our human ideas of order on the world. (Well, I think a lot of people do worship ‘order’ -- worship an idea that somehow we can get everything under control if we just use the right system or keep our email inboxes empty or have the right kind of calendar or mind hack or whatever.

When we, as humans, turn disorder into order, it’s a small, lower-case kind of order. That’s important, that order. But in itself it is neither truly achievable, nor is it holy. Without a higher-level Order toward which we orient our efforts to make little-0 order, we are just sweeping the outdoors.

So the Torah gives us many rules about little-o order, but it gives them to us as a means to bring big-O order into the world --- in the service of perfecting the material world, in order to bring about Olam Ha-Ba, the world-to-come. The creative movement is toward God, the Source of Order in the universe.

( The prophets were constantly railing against the Israelites for forgetting that the little-o rules set out in the Torah were little-o rules, and behaving abominably but performing perfectly ordered sacrifices in the Temple. God spits on your perfectly-ordered sacrifices, said the prophets, because you are not truly directing your hearts toward the Source of Order in the world. You are worshipping a system for bringing Holiness, that is, God’s Order, to the material world. But to worship the system is misdirected. It is just a system. It does not tell you where it’s meant to lead.
)

Now we are in a position to understand what happened to Nadab and Abihu. They thought that they could make their own little-o order and elevate it to Big-O Order. Like the builders of the Tower of Babel, they forgot Who the Real Source of Order was. The Real Source of Order did not take kindly to that.

But actually, we’re not in a position to understand this at all, just as Job was not in a position to understand why God afflicted him, and we are none of us able to understand death, or love, or music, or even one person’s brain. Big-O Order does not stay in its little categories, in little boxes or little words or our little minds. Big-O Order bursts out all over in a profusion, in a burning fire, in absolute mind-boggling absurdity and grandeur and mystery. Before Big-O Order, we, like Aaron, must be silent.

God wants our little human orders too, don’t get me wrong. We must serve God with what we are, and we are little and we are human, and God loves our little human orders. I would say we should try not to forget that our human orders are just human, but I think in our heart of hearts we hardly need reminding. We are just as likely to flee in terror and confusion from God’s Order as we are to rush toward it as a beloved Home. It is too big for us, and it is everywhere apparent that it is so. We are just as likely to see a forest as a dark and confusing place, full of lions and tigers and bears, as we are to see it as a beautiful and intricately rendered example of a Higher Order. Sometimes we are able to catch a glimpse of that Higher Order, and even to enter into it, to become part of it. And sometimes even seeing it from the corners of our eyes will burn us right up. That is why ahavat hasham and yirat hashem always go together, they are two sides of the same coin: the love of God and the fear/awe of God.

( Incidentally, this helps explain for Christians why Jesus could claim both to be affirming the Law and yet regularly ‘break’ it. Jesus saw himself as being part of the Higher Order, and thus like his father, could not be subject to little o-order as others were. Rather, little-o order was subject to him. That is the meaning of miracles, after all -- they are an explosion of Divine Order into the Natural Order, which is an order greater than our human order. And really, when you think about it, what sense could it make to complain to Jesus that he broke the Sabbath by healing someone? Wouldn’t you rather complain that Jesus healed someone? To complain that little-o order (even that in the service of the Holy, such as the Mitzvot are) is being broken when the Natural Order is also being broken seems remarkably small-minded. Which was after all the point, right? Small-minded Pharisees, small-minded Sadducees, and then Jesus, bursting out all over the place. No, husband, I am not converting to Christianity. I do have Christian readers, though, and I do read Christians, and understanding what Christians think is so important about Jesus is not the same as believing that Jesus was who he said (or is said to have said) he was. It’s just explaining why, in all the stories, he is so spectacularly unconcerned with keeping the Mitzvot while at the same time insisting that they are still to be kept. Also bringing up Jesus reminded me that actually the axis of order should look like this:

disorder - little-o-order (human order) - Natural Order (often looks like disorder, but see chaos theory or something) - Divine Order/Holiness.

But then there is tragedy. Is tragedy just disorder? Or is it just part of the Natural Order (earthquakes) ? Or is it sometimes, like the tragedy of Aaron’s sons, a Divine Order that we cannot understand? Or does it come about when we worship our human order instead of the Divine Order? ( c.f. Nietzche, who figured any order you wanted and could make happen was just the best sort of order there could be, and Godwin’s Law says there’s your Nazi Superman right there.) Or when we attempt to impose our little human order on the Natural Order in ways that will make the Natural Order uncongenial to humans (global warming, nuclear power)?

But there I go again, hoping that my little brain can tidy all this up with some well-chosen words. Derrida would tell me how deluded that is. This life is a terrifying proposition, especially since it is not a proposition but a fact. God speaks out of the whirlwind and what can I say in response? But the odd thing is that God does not want me to remain silent, at least not all of the time. God wants me to respond. God wants my little brain’s attempts at order. If God did not want what order we humans could make, then why would God have bothered with us humans at all? God has given us each a divine spark and we can use it to bootstrap our little order into Holiness, to elevate our offerings. Neither I nor God need Derrida to point out all the cracks and imperfections in the work. Never mind. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

C.S. Lewis: “Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?” (from Mere Christianity).

And Lewis again: “[T]he real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.” (ibid)

I do not know why Lewis thinks this is only a problem for Christians, although perhaps it is because Christians, unlike Jews, do not have a set prayer meant to be said each morning, just upon waking, to remind them of exactly the thing he says they need to be reminded of. (snark.) It’s a human thing, that prayer, a little-o human technology, just some words in an ancient language. It’s called Modeh Ah’nee, and in English it reads: “I thank You, living and eternal King, for giving me back my soul in mercy. Great is your faithfulness.” I would like to say it every morning when I wake, because I’d like to come in out of the wind. I would like to say it, but I don’t. New habits are hard.

But here’s good news about habits: In 2010 our household gave about 3 times more money that the IRS considers to be charitable donations than we did in 2009. Some of that is because we joined a synagogue and synagogues, like churches, are nonprofits. But most of it is because I decided I wanted to become more generous and I worked at it, and because I worked at it my husband worked at it too, just with tiny little human systems, like every thirteen weeks is my generosity week and when organizations I care about ask me for money that week I generally give it to them, and when people ask me for money on the street I give some to them, and at the end of each day I note down how I’ve been generous (or failed to be) and what I could do better, and all these little human things add up, finally, into transformation: I can feel (and the IRS can see at least some evidence), that I have actually become a more generous person. ( Which is not to say that I am particularly generous. I am not. But at least the direction of movement is good.)

That is not the most amazing thing, though. The most amazing thing is that I see that the direction of movement is good. I have a sense that Generosity is Good. It is Good, it is Important, and when I use little human technologies to become a more generous person, I am doing exactly what God wants me to do.

Note: I am not stupid. I do not quite understand what I mean when I talk about God this way, but I certainly don’t mean that God is some guy up there rooting for me to give more money to Tsunami relief because that is God’s Plan For My Life. And about generosity being a Good Thing, (there’s a dissertation for you: Purity, Danger, and Martha Stewart: Good Things as Secular Religion.) -- I know just as well as you do that the evolutionary psychologists and the game theorists have done altruism every-which-way. It’s just that, like my favorite physicist-cum-anglican-priest, John Polkinghorne, I don’t think they’ve been very convincing about it: “Although atheism might seem simpler conceptually, it treats beauty and morals and worship as some form of cultural or social brute facts, which accords ill with the seriousness with which these experiences touch us as persons.” (Faith of a Physicist, page 70). So with generosity. You can tell me about kin-group-reciprocity. Actually, it’d probably be the other way around -- I’d tell you about kin-group-reciprocity. But in the end it seems a more satisfying answer that I feel glad about becoming more generous because becoming more generous is actually Important, because it is moving me closer to Holiness.

Which brings me back to perhaps the original great mystery, which is how impurity and disorder can possibly be related to holiness when holiness should be all about goodness, right? And the answer for Jews is that all our little human orderings, our rituals and mitzvot, add up to More, as long as we keep feeding the divine spark within ourselves, as long as we keep the connection to God. Order and goodness and holiness are all related, in a Divine feedback loop.

Hypergraphia? Check.

Parsha Vayikira, in which instructions are issued for all manner of sacrifices

2011-03-11T18:59:00.000-05:00

( Text of the parsha )

Look, sacrifice is hard to swallow. It’s bloody and gruesome and earthy and when you burn up all that animal flesh everything gets covered in sticky, smelly grease.

When I was pregnant with my daughter there was a whole neighborhood that smelled so strongly of rancid fat to me that even driving through it caused me to retch.

Sacrifice is hard to swallow, like God. God is really hard to swallow. The Christians have figured out a really terrific way to swallow God. They just, you know, swallow. That’s awesome for them.

For Jews it’s harder. You can try to slice God up and shrink God down and extract God’s essence or stone-grind or expeller-press or molecularly distill God, but God is still too damn big to swallow.

Well, God could be smaller if God wanted, too. God could dance on the head of a pin.

One way or another, God has to be smaller for humans to have any chance of even dealing with God without going blind and burning up and generally being annihilated by God’s full-on glory. God has to have little thumbnail-sized avatars of God that we can grab onto, see, swallow, taste, feel, love.

Actually, God has a bunch of thumbnail-sized avatars. They’re called people. And sure, there’s been a lot of data loss in the thumbnailing process. Everyone’s just a tiny piece of a big picture, and lossy to boot. Corrupted data and all of that. Anyway, so here we are, thumbnails of God. We have a path back to the original. It’s up to us to follow it.

Maimonides said that God specified animal and other sacrifices to the Israelites because God knew that everyone at that time sacrificed to their gods in those ways. God wanted to give the people something they’d be familiar with. A beaten path. So we cannot blame either God or the ancient Israelites for all that grease. God gave the Israelites what they needed to find their way back to God. God did not expect them to leap into darkness, into a whole new way of understanding the unseen.

Nachmanides, on the other hand, was of the mind that the destruction of the second temple was indeed a disaster, that literal sacrifice in a literal temple was the original, and still preferred, method of relating to God, and that our inability to do that anymore was a great sadness and a great disability for us.

Even today, most Orthodox siddurim still ask for the restoration of the beit ha mikdash and look forward to resuming the sacrifices as outlined in the torah. And most other siddurim do not. I personally have never looked forward to the resumption of animal sacrifice or to the rebuilding of the Temple. I think most of us today could not imagine such a thing. Animal sacrifice seems so obviously deficient as a way to connect with God, so obviously barbaric and obviously primitive and obviously lesser than prayer and service and acts of lovingkindness.

But really, on what do I base my opinion of sacrifice? Have i ever done it myself? Have I even ever killed a mammal myself, or seen one killed in person? I held a man I loved when he died, and one thing I can say about that is that death is primitive and intense and gruesome and strange and it is absolutely barbaric that we all must die, and that my uncle, a man I loved who had not lived out his allotted days, as far as I was concerned, died. And also that I have never felt more in the presence of the holy and the sacred as when I sat there with my uncle as he died, except perhaps when giving birth, which is also gruesome and bloody and brutal and intense and absolutely strange.

Why then do I dismiss ritual slaughter as something less likely to connect me with the divine than some nice clean praying in a nice clean synagogue with absolutely no rancid fat smell? Is it because I like to imagine that I am more civilized than that, or because I know that I am not more civilized than that and I would prefer not to understand that about myself, because if I did -- chaos? Is my knee-jerk dismissal of literal sacrifice just another way to hide from the terrifying realities of life as we know it, just as our funeral homes and our nursing homes and our intensive care units and all the beeping machines are a way to pretend that we no longer die? In rejecting sacrifice, am I rejecting the reality of death?

Then there’s the other reality of eating meat. It is messy and greasy and smelly and smoky and bloody and all meat came from something that was killed, on my behalf, by someone somewhere on a real farm, factory or otherwise. Sacrifice sanctifies the eating of meat, and probably that kind of sanctification is something we need more of in our lives. Attending a sacrifice would, at the very least, make it harder to pretend that we are not doing the things we are doing.

Too, when we give the first fruits or the firstborn of a flock to God, we acknowledge in a very concrete way that everything we have is borrowed or given to us. I mean, there's "thanks god for all the awesome you've given us" and there's "thanks god for the awesome and here's our very best sheep." Those are pretty different acts. In my family, we even have trouble at Havdalah pouring out wine to extinguish the candle in. We think "but that's good, drinkable wine! Why waste it?" It's not like we're saying "why waste it, we could give it to starving children in India who don't have anything but Manischevitz to drink." We would just rather drink the wine ourselves. If we have such a reaction to spilling a little bit of wine, I imagine it'd be pretty powerful to give up a whole actual living animal. To see all that good meat go up in smoke, for the sake of something or someone invisible, unknowable, unthinkable...

I don't want to sacrifice animals. I don't think I can hope and pray that the Mosque on the temple mount is torn down and a new Temple is built there and that I will someday go there on Sukkot and buy or bring a sheep or goat and stand there singing psalms while some guy named Cohen kills and butchers and burns up the animal I've brought.

But I can see the appeal. I can see that it might actually be the most intense experience of God I could have in this world. Just ordinary me, not great at meditating, not super at prayer, only able to feel God in fits and starts and only inklings. I can very well imagine that it would be like attending a birth or a death, only there for the taking (or giving) whenever I felt distant from God, whenever I needed to connect.

I don't pray for the restoration of the temple and the sacrifical system. But I'm not sure that I shouldn't.

Some thoughts on costumes, for Pekudei

2011-03-01T08:03:00.000-05:00

Today in shul we read Pekudei. Most years we read Pekudei along with the previous parshah, Vayakhel. This year is a leap year, and that means there are several extra weeks to fill up with parshot, and therefore we read Pekudei all by itself.

Pekudei tells a lot about the priestly wardrobe. As usual, I find it tedious on first reading. Also on my second and third readings. Who cares what the priests wore? Jews don’t have priests anymore. I had nothing to say about the priestly clothes, and then last week at work we interviewed a job candidate and at the debrief I noted that the candidate had not dressed as one would expect someone to dress for an interview. He wore jeans and sneakers. He did not bring a notepad or a pen to take notes with. He wrote nothing down. This was not the only thing that bothered me about him; if I had been impressed with him otherwise I might not have cared. But I was otherwise not bowled over, and the clothes bothered me.

My colleagues thought I was petty and weird to bring up the clothes. “We’re engineers,” they said. “We don’t care what people wear.” And yet each of them, when asked, would admit that when they had come to interview they had not worn jeans. Maybe they did not wear a suit, but they did not wear jeans. We’d interviewed someone a couple months ago who was covered in tattoos and pierced in a million places. Still, he wore a suit for the interview. That’s what people do.

I said I thought that someone who wanted the job would have worn something besides jeans. No one wanted to make a hiring decision on the basis of jeans, of course. It annoyed them that I kept mentioning it. But it kept bothering me. I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I knew all the things it might mean. It might mean that the candidate didn’t really want the job, and was interviewing with us for the hell of it. It might mean that the candidate didn’t think that he had to make any effort to impress us -- that would signal arrogance. It might be that the candidate wore jeans and sneakers because he had a rebellious streak and was damned if he would conform to anyone’s expectations of what appropriate interview attire was -- that would suggest someone who might not play well with others, and who is still struggling to find himself and assert himself as his own person, i.e. it suggests immaturity. And it might have been that he was one of the few people who are simply sartorial deaf-mutes. Some people do not know how to speak with clothes and they do not know how to read other people’s clothes. But his haircut and his tattoo made me think that was probably not true for him. Even if it had been true, it would have been a red flag for me, because sartorial deaf-mutes are often deaf to other forms of non-verbal communication, and that tends to lead to difficulties for them working with teams.

So those are the options as I saw them: a candidate who didn’t want the job, or didn’t think he needed to follow the rules because he was so good at what he did, or who was still locked in a rebellious immaturity, or who did not understand that humans speak through many channels, including through what they wear. Any way I looked at it, it was not a person I wanted to hire.

But I might be wrong.

I don’t know the guy personally. I don’t know his history. We share a country and a profession but there are bound to be many things we do not share, and any one of those things might lead to my reading the wrong things into what he wore that day. I asked a friend in San Francisco what engineers wear when they come to interview with him. Jeans, sure, he said. Maybe a t-shirt, maybe a collared shirt. Engineers are in high demand right now. Not enough of us to go around. So maybe the dress code slipped downward when I wasn’t looking. ( When the dress code for engineers at job interviews slips down to cutoffs and flipflops, sell your tech stocks, stat. That thar’s a bubble.)

What’s this have to do with the priestly costume? Well, it’s about costumes.

( Purim is coming up. Purim is also about costumes. I’d like to dress as Vashti, too proud to be paraded about for the delectation of her husband’s drunken guests. Vashti, who dressed for herself and the women of her community, who dressed for the harem, and danced when she pleased and not when she was told to. Vashti, who had to be put in her place, because what would the men of Persia do if like Vashti their women decided they had right of refusal? King Ahasuerus wanted a more docile wife, and picked Esther. Esther seemed docile enough and turned out to be quite a ball-busting Jewess who wasn’t going to sit there looking pretty while her people were slaughtered. Some men, it seems, are just attracted to strong women. )

Here’s the thing. We say that what someone looks like doesn’t matter, that it’s what is inside that counts. We know that isn’t true. What we mean is “it seems wrong that what someone looks like should matter, so we would like to pretend that it does not.”

We want clothes to be irrelevant, and yet we cannot help but tell stories by what we wear. We can pretend we aren’t telling stories, or if we are telling them they do not matter. We can say one thing with our eyes and another with our mouths and yet another with the shoes we wear. Today I went to shul in jeans, rolled up to show my black leather boots with the buckles on the side. When we got there I put on my uncle’s bar mitzvah tallit, 50 year old silk with thin blue stripes. I did not wear a kippah. I don’t know why. I always wear a tallit at shul, and I hardly ever wear a kippah. So there I sat and stood and sang and prayed in my edgy boots and my rolled up jeans and my prayer shawl. What was I trying to say, exactly? I’m not sure myself. Sometimes our clothes are like prayers that way, or poems or dreams: they have a sort of incoherence to them. I’m feeling incoherent, the last few days, and insecure, and dreamy. I got a haircut a few days ago: it’s short again, like I kept it when I was younger, before I had children. I keep meaning to buy my own tallit, a nice wool one -- I’ve already got the yarn I’ll need to tie my own tzitzit. But I can never decide what tallit I want, so I never get around to buying one. I don’t even like the silk one so much. It slips off me. It doesn’t have enough heft to it. Of course it reminds me of my uncle, but I didn’t know him when he was thirteen, wearing that tallit. I knew him later, in his grown up tallit, the one he was buried in. We bury our dead in white shrouds, and we wrap the men in their tallitot. Plain wood boxes. In death we are all equal, is the idea. We cannot carry our wealth or poverty with us there. We all go the same, plain shroud, plain box, and yet, like ancient pharoahs, with our own prayer shawls.

I’m ranging rather widely, I apologize. It was important that the priests know precisely what to wear. It was important that all that be prescribed, in detail. That it be beautiful, and that it not be individual. A priest was a representative. A priest did not act on his own behalf. He did not speak on his own behalf. He could not be telling his own stories, more or less coherent, more or less conflicted, with the clothes he wore. All the channels we humans speak on -- he had to speak the same things on them all. A priest should not be a candidate for inclusion in The Sartorialist. He did not serve his own desires, he was not meant to project his own anxieties and his own hopes and dreams. So of course what he wore must be completely prescribed, in all its detail. That is how you ensure coherence.

A priest could not be incoherent. A prophet, a holy man, a faith healer, a rabbi -- they can afford to be incoherent. A priest must speak with assurance and knowledge, in all the ways that humans talk. We want priests we can understand. The enormity of what’s behind the priests, what gives them their power -- surely that is mystery enough for us.

---

This morning I went for a walk and thought again about the developer we interviewed, about how we judge people. It bothered me that I judged the developer the way I did, on the strength of his jeans. As I said above, I could be wrong about what the jeans meant. I reminded myself that as a Jew I have a duty to judge fairly.

Then I remembered what the first verses of Pekudei were about. They were an exact accounting of the silver and gold that were provided by the people Israel to be used in the making of the tabernacle and the priestly garments and all their accoutrements. My Chumash comments that this detailed accounting was necessary because some of the Israelites, knowing that they themselves would be tempted to embezzle from such funds, were bound to assume that Moses, like them, would do so. Therefore the funds were dispersed and accounted for with absolute transparency. Although it was incumbent upon the people to judge fairly and not to make assumptions, it was equally incumbent upon Moses to ensure that he gave the people the information they needed to judge fairly. Leaders must avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Carefully prescribing the priests’ ritual clothing also provided clarity and made it easier for people to judge their priests fairly. There could be no argument about whether a priest was inappropriately self-aggrandizing by wearing garments that were more precious or jeweled than were called for. Because the uniform was the uniform, and that was that, no one had to question the intentions of the person who wore the uniform.

There used to be such a uniform for job interviews. There isn’t one anymore. I have to use my powers of judgment whether I like it or not. I wish that our interviewee had made it easy for me, by doing what I expected. He did not.

So I turn to Joseph Telushkin, who is writing a three-volume Code of Jewish Ethics. In Volume I he offers guidance for judging others fairly. Here is a summary of some of the most important points he makes that are relevant to my own dilemma -- how to judge a candidate for a job who has seemed to do something inappropriate.

He says we must judge others on their intentions, rather than on their actions, if their actions are annoying to us. But if they act well, we should judge them on their actions, and not impute ulterior motives that ‘explain’ their good actions. If someone does something we think is wrong or inappropriate, we should, if we can, politely ask them to clarify why they did that thing. If you cannot ask someone to clarify why they did something, you should try to imagine a reasonable explanation. Choose the most charitable explanation for someone’s behavior of the several options available. Do not condemn others on the basis of hearsay, and of course, do not pass hearsay on to others. See each person as a whole, judge them in light of their background and the context of their actions, do not hold others to higher standards than you hold yourself. Pay more attention to another’s character than to their appearance or accomplishments. Judge strangers as compassionately as we would judge those we love.

Help me, God, to learn to judge others with fairness and compassion. Help me to remember also to make it easy for others to judge me fairly, to make it easy for others to understand what I am telling them in all the ways I speak. Help me orient my life toward You, to strengthen the spark of the divine inside me, so that rather than being scattered and confused and difficult to read -- even for myself -- , I can be clear and obvious and straightforward. I suppose it’s a kind of holy simplicity I am seeking, an Ehyey Asher Ehyey, I am what I am, I shall be what I shall be.

This holy simplicity I am speaking of, it is not a foolish consistency. Rather, it is an order that surpasses human order. I want a constant sense of what is truly important in life, I want to remember to order my life around that, I want to clear away all inner conflict that is driven by my own selfishness and fears and anxieties and confusions. Of course I won’t succeed, entirely. And certainly this does not mean that I should not question myself, or change my mind, because I’m afraid to appear inconsistent. In fact I must always be questioning myself, always questioning whether in my actions and my thoughts I am creating more holiness in the world, or less.

My center may not always hold. But being unable to hold the center is different from having no center to hold. There is a center to this life. As I’ve said before -- grab hold any way you can.

Va Yak Hel : On Vocation

2011-02-27T13:44:00.000-05:00

A friend who does me the great honor of reading my d’var torah each week recently did me the greater honor of asking me why I was ‘not a writer’. I told her I had an answer to that, and my answer dovetails with one of the themes of VaYakHel, which is now (heh) last week’s parsha.

A few weeks ago we got an entire parsha with tedious instructions about just how to go about constructing the tabernacle in the desert. This parsha is almost entirely a recapitulation of that one, except that where that one was God giving instructions, this one is the Israelites carrying out the instructions God gave.

This is the part I am interested in: “And let all among you who are skilled come and make all that the Lord has commanded.” (Exodus 35:10) “And everyone who excelled in ability and everyone whose spirit moved him came, bringing to the Lord his offering for the work of the tent of meeting and for all its service and for the sacral vestments.” (35:21). “Moses then called Bezalel and Oholiab, and every skilled person whom the Lord had endowed with skill, everyone who excelled in ability, to undertake the task and carry it out.” (Ex 36:2).

My Chumash notes: “The Hebrew translated as ‘skilled’ (hakham lev) literally means ‘wise-hearted.’ A Hasidic master comments, ‘Wisdom of the mind alone, without wisdom of the heart, is worthless’ (Aaron of Karlin).”

Against this background, I’d like to talk about the idea of vocation, about what I see as my vocation, and about why the fact that I haven’t yet come fully into my vocation does not mean that I don’t intend to someday.

I have always been a terrific writer. When I was a kid I knew I would grow up to be a writer (probably a novelist). When I was in college I knew I would grow up to be a writer (probably an academic, writing also popular books for the New York Review of Books audience, probably Malcolm Gladwell). After college, I knew I would grow up to be a writer, mostly of activist screeds. But somehow, I never did grow up to be a writer. First of all, I never did reach a point where I thought “I’m all grown up now, time to be a writer.” Second, I looked around at people who were writers, at the work they did to be writers, and it looked too damn hard to me. There was a lot of toiling for very little reward. Writers didn’t make very much money. Writers had to spend a lot of time selling themselves and selling their writing, and that wasn’t very attractive to me. If a writer got successful a writer had to go on book tours and there would be gross coffee at gross hotels in gross places. And even most successful writers do not find it a lucrative business. I doubted very much both my discipline and my ability to write best-selling anythings.

My husband thought I’d enjoy programming, so I ended up as a programmer instead.

( Programming is a terrific career. When programmers are in short supply, which is often, we are paid a lot of money and treated very well, because the companies that hire us know that we can leave them at any time. Last September I decided I wanted a different job so I sent out a couple of resumes. My job hunt lasted a week and a half. Now, it won’t always be the case that programmers will be in such short supply -- tech goes through cycles, like everything else. But overall, as skilled labor, I am paid well and I have a lot of flexibility and respect in my work. The combination of the good pay and the flexibility is one reason I became a programmer, because I knew if I wanted to work when I had kids I needed to make enough money and have a flexible enough job to support that. I recommend programming to anyone who is thinking of a career change and has not yet considered it, because you really don’t know if you’ll be good at it and like it unless you try it. If you read this and you are wondering about whether you should try programming please let me know and I would be happy to talk to you about it. )

Despite my career choice, I have never been able to escape from the calling to write. Fortunately the rise of the internet made it possible to indulge my need to write (and to write publicly) in a completely unencumbered and undisciplined way. For several years I had a political blog, mostly focused on changing what had apparently become U.S. policy to engage in torture. Then for a while I kept up a professional blog discussing topics of interest to programmers and the people who work with them. About a year ago I began occasionally guest-blogging on a Christian blog I had fallen in with. Several months ago I started this blog, hoping to write each week about the torah portion. Then last week I started The Mussarista, primarily to capture quotations and my responses for the work I do each week on strengthening particular character traits.

Actually, a couple of years ago I had an actual signed contract to write a book, about computer science. I wrote a proposal for the book one night I had insomnia, sent it off, and three weeks later got a contract in the mail. ( I should note that this is not as insane as it seems, because the publisher, although ‘real’ and highly respected in my field, did not issue advances on its books. So getting a contract turned out to be easy, but if you could not actually deliver on the book, the publisher did not lose anything, and in fact got to keep the idea. ) Ideas are cheap, though -- I’m good at ideas. Follow-through is something else altogether. I started trying to write the book, but I had a one-year-old, and then out of the blue I got a job, and after four absolutely miserable months of making very little progress but feeling a lot of despair, I gave up the book. I spun it well: it’s not the right project for me, and it’s not the right time, I said. Both were true. I was happy to let the idea go -- as I said, they come cheap to me. But I was sorry to let the book go, because after all, writing books is what I was born to do. How could I have a chance to get published like that and let it slip through my fingers? Could I finish nothing? Was I not, after all, meant to be a Writer ? For me, the best part about getting a book contract was getting the book contract. The rest of it was awful.

Still, having gotten one contract, I blithely assume I can get another when the time and topic are right. But I am also unwilling to “Become a Writer” until the time and topic are right, because I’ve seen that I can’t deliver when they are not.

What does this all have to do with this week’s parsha?

This week’s parsha is all about men and women who have been called to do the work of building the tabernacle. They are talented in different ways, and they use their talents in the service of God. “And everyone who excelled in ability and everyone whose spirit moved him came,” we read. Jews don’t talk much about vocation, these days, but Christians do.

Here is Frederick Buechner, a Christian writer I love to read, on Vocation:

Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, “to call,” and means the work a person is called to by God.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.

By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work god usually calls you to do is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads , the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Does anyone believe these days that they have callings? Or, if they feel they have callings, do they believe that they have actually been called? Am I trying to say that I believe I have been called, by God, to write my little blog entries about my little thoughts? Am I that much of a narcissist, am I that delusional, and do I need to adjust my meds?

Here’s what I do know.

I have always been compelled to write. But I have never felt that what I wrote mattered, in particular. The words that came out of me were of little consequence. They were just words, they came out of me because I seemed to have an excess of them. Sometimes I vomit words or shit them out. I’m good at words. I’ve used them to be cruel, and I’ve used them to get what I wanted, and I’ve used them to get back at people who hurt me. At work I’ve used them to write documentation, and pitch ideas, and get things done. But all those words have been so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. And somewhere in me I knew that was true, I knew that all those words, clever as they were, touched nothing real. I had nothing of consequence to write about, and hence, little interest in ‘being a writer’, either as a profession or as a hobby.

I had nothing to say.

I don’t know how to describe what’s changed. I can say “God has entered my life, and in my relationship with God I have been changed, and changed for the better. And that -- that! -- is something to write about.” But some of the people I most want to understand this will not understand it if I say that. So I’ll try a different way to explain what it’s like, why I feel as though I understand, finally, what this talent of words I have is for.

So think of “the world’s deep hunger.” No, think of your own hunger. Maybe you have none. Maybe you have no longing. Maybe you are not looking for anything. You’re only reading my blog because you know me and you’d read anything I wrote, even a phone book. There is nothing you want so deeply and so profoundly and that sometimes seems just within reach, you see it just from the corner of your eye, but then it’s gone. You are not plagued by fear and uncertainty. You feel centered and strong and you know how to behave and you find yourself able to behave how you know you should behave. So maybe you’re not hungry. That’s cool.

But maybe you are. Maybe you don’t even want to admit it, but you are.

I’m hungry. I’ve always been hungry. It’s in our nature to be hungry in the way I’m talking about. To hunger and thirst for something that we can’t even describe.

I’m hungry, and I have found food. I have found food in the Torah, and I have found food in the spiritual writing of Jews, and Christians, and Buddhists, and others. Most of all, I have found food in a living relationship with God. If you are hungry and you don’t really want to admit it, you read “God” and off you go again, you’re outta here. That woo-woo shit is not for you. You are sensible and grounded in the reality-based community. Just think of it as food, then. Something that keeps the gnawing feeling at bay. Jews like to look at Christians like they are crazy because they eat and drink their god, but really, the feeling of spiritual yearning is precisely a hunger and a thirst, and there’s something very satisfying about the concreteness of the Christian ritual to meet that need with bread and wine. (Still not a Christian, don’t worry, friends and family! Just giving credit where due.)

This food I’ve found, it’s not a chili dog from the 7-11. It was not invented in a laboratory last year, either. Humans have been cultivating the stuff for a long time, this food. The tree of Judaism, in particular, has been cultivated continuously for thousands of years. It’s been burnt to the ground many times, and green shoots come from the stump, again and again. It doesn’t make my life easier, it doesn’t soothe all my doubts or make me unafraid of death or give me a certainty that I am right or a feeling of safety and protection or a nice easy simple story where I always know what to do next and I don’t have to make tough decisions and everything is going to go my way. People who haven’t tasted it think it must do one or the other of those things, that it must have a nice easy point to it. They think it’s not complicated, the food. They think I must be eating cheese-wiz.

The food doesn’t do any of those things -- or at least it doesn’t do any of those things all the time, reliably. It’s not simple like that. It’s not cheese-wiz, it’s camembert. You have to taste it.

I can’t explain it very well, of course. Who could?

But --- and here’s the thing -- I know I have been blessed with a talent for words, and therefore I know that while I can’t explain it very well I can explain it better than most. And when I am explaining it, I find myself full of a “deep gladness”.

So, why am I not a writer? Well, I am. Why have I not made it my profession? Because it never seemed worthwhile for me to devote my life to it. Sure, there was some deep gladness in it, sometimes. But there was no deep hunger in the world for what I wrote. Perhaps there isn’t any deep hunger for what I write now, either. I haven’t given up my day job, and I don’t intend to anytime soon. I have in any case only begun to acquire wisdom of the heart, hakham lev. There has only now seemed to be a point behind my cleverness, something useful I could say.

I do not think it means that my purpose and goal in life is to write a bunch of powerful-sounding stuff that ‘converts’ people to Judaism in particular or to God in general. I just want to talk about the camembert. And to the extent that some people may find that they would like to taste the camembert themselves, I want to point a way. I’m gesturing at something outside the frame, smiling, with my mouth full.

I’m working on joining Bezalel and Oholiab, trying to get wise-hearted enough to help build a dwelling place for God, a tabernacle of words, the words themselves just the tents, the ark, the cherubim, surrounding a cloud and a pillar of fire so powerful and mysterious and strange that words can never tell.

P.S. I’ve been writing this blog for a few months now and have not made any effort to publicize it. I’m not interested in becoming a ‘blogger’ (which is sort of like becoming a writer only generally involves AdWords rather than book tours). But the discipline of writing is hard, and I need encouragement to maintain it. If you like what you read here, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to my feed, either via a feed-reader, if you have one of those, or via email. ( See the links at the top right.) And if you know someone else who might like it, tell them about it. When I know I have readers I am encouraged to keep writing, even those weeks when I can’t think of anything good to say, like in May, where I believe we’ll get a lot of rules about lepers. Thanks!

Must we talk about The Golden Calf?

2011-02-18T08:30:00.000-05:00

There’s some sort of awful stomach plague going around the city; all the preschools are emptied out, and the doctors’ offices are swamped. My daughter has been laid low for five days now. I called the doctor this morning, finally, and asked for intel on how long this thing is going to last, and if I ought to bring her in. “One to two weeks,” said the nurse, “and no, as you suspected, there’s nothing we can do for her here. Just keep her hydrated.”

In our family, I’m the grownup who deals with the pukes, because, much as I hate to puke, I’ve always been a puker myself, and my husband thinks that vomiting is akin to dying. So for five days I’ve been holed up in my apartment, sharing my bed with a pitifully ill child, cleaning up explosive diarrhea and mucous-y vomit and offering up a rotating menu of apple juice, ginger ale, seltzer, ice cream, and childrens’ chewable ibuprofen. Oh, and working. I’m a software developer, and I can work from home, and we have a big deadline, so I sit here in bed with my sick daughter and fix bugs, and I am exhausted.

Illness is strange; it takes you out of time. Like death and birth, only not quite so baldly. My daughter and I have been lost in our own world this week, trapped in a still point, as in a glass bubble. Outside, the world goes on. It is 60 degrees out. Here in the bedroom, it is no time. We’re just waiting for time to start up again, for our routines to resume. It’s tiring and miserable but it’s also very intimate. And I’m proud of how well I’m managing to care for my poor sick little girl. I’m glad of how I’m able to be in this bubble of waiting with her -- sorry I cannot make her well, but grateful for the strength to sit with her in her illness.

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My daughter is finally better. She is once again imperious and impish, laughing and telling stories to herself. I’ve had a migraine for a day and a half, my reward for struggling through her illness with her. This morning I drugged it to death and then went to shul with my son. At shul we did not read the golden calf portion of Ki Tissa -- we’re on a triennial cycle and this year we read all about, I think, the census. Under my breath I read the part about the golden calf to my son. We left not long after. I was glad to have gone to shul; it had been a long time since I’d been to shul on a Saturday morning, I don’t know why exactly. I have just fallen out of the habit.

So I was thinking about the golden calf. The story is, Moses goes up onto Mt. Sinai, looking for all the world like he’s climbing up into the crater of an active volcano, and he stays up there for forty days and forty nights. That’s a pretty long time to be up on a mountain, alone. It’s a pretty long time for a recently enslaved rag-tag band of refugees to cool their heels in a tent city down below. People get bored and anxious. They want something to happen. Nothing is happening. They are at a show, and the opening act has been on, and left, and the main act never comes. Occasionally a roadie rushes across the stage, murmuring into their headset. The beer is getting warm, and the people who used to stand around smoking in this kind of venue are thinking longingly of the alley outside. It’s too loud to talk, even, because the club managers have turned up the really awful music to encourage some kind of desultory dancing activity to make up for the failure of the main act to arrive. You start envisioning them, the band, out in their tour bus or ensconced in some gritty yet decadently comfortable green room in the bowels of the club. You bet they’re allowed to smoke in the green room, and on the bus. They are sprawled in their leather pants, snorting coke and making out with groupies. They’re in no hurry. Why should they rush? The fans will wait. Where the hell else are the fans going to go? Back home? And miss the main act? You’re angry out there in the noisy dark, waiting. Who do those people think they are, anyway? What’s so special about them, that they can make us wait like this, for no visible reason?

Well, dammit, someone says finally, let’s make our own fucking music! We don’t need no stinking ‘main act’. The idea spreads, and the general disgruntlement turns to something else -- to revolt. We’ve got people down here in the audience who know how to play that fancy drum set, and look, here’s an electric guitarist, and this fine lady used to sing a cappella. There’s resentment and nastiness, to be sure, in the swelling demands of the audience, but also excitement, and solidarity, and a heady anticipation. The mob of fans could turn violent, but they are not violent, yet. They are unified around this single idea: that out of the ordinary audience members they will form their own band, that they will stop waiting for the main act, which, like Godot, has failed to arrive. They will take matters into their own hands.

The club manager comes out onto the stage, hands raised, conciliatory. He is so very sorry for the delay, he say, but we must trust that the main act will come out soon. He admits he does not understand the hold-up himself. But he’s booked this act dozens of times and they have always come through. He trusts them. If everyone can just calm down --

No one is going to calm down. Some men down at the front, stinking of bud light, make as if to storm the stage. There’s a lot of fancy equipment there, and the club manager does not want it destroyed. Nor, for that matter, does he want his own face smashed in. What can he do but give in, what can he do but attempt to contain the rising energy, to dissipate it safely? Let’s have some love songs, he says. Let all those who can sing come up on the stage, and a drummer, and a guitarist, and a bass player. Can anyone play a fiddle? he asks. What about saxaphone? Let’s hear some music, while we wait, some gentle songs, something light.

It’s not a terrible idea, really. Some light songs, to calm down the crowd, to pass the time, to channel all that energy. Light songs, like a newborn calf, all wet tongue and velvet nose, struggling to its feet for the first time, staggering a bit, drunk on having been born. Some adorable gamboling, under the spring sun, in the grasses. Harmless, innocent, powerless, and benign. What harm could possibly come of such song, of such imagery? What band will be offended at hearing its audience pass the time with such frivolous music? What God could imagine a newborn calf, leggy and still damp, to be any kind of threat? It’s this or a descent into absolute chaos, thinks the manager of the club. A nice innocent calf, thinks Aaron -- surely God won’t get too exercised about that. Not when the alternative is mayhem.

And so the music starts, smooth and calming, like the stuff they play in the dentist’s office. And so the calf, innocent and powerless, is cast. Everything is under control.

But all that energy hasn’t been dissipated. People are still pissed off, underneath the major key and in the face of the sweetest little velvet nosed calf you ever did see. They are still waiting, dammit. It’s not like any decisions have been made, it’s not like the beer has gotten cold again or the people who want to smoke have had their cigarettes yet and the bathrooms are pretty nasty and they’re all sick of standing, and they still can’t decide if they should stick around waiting (50 bucks, complains someone! To wait in the dark, on this sticky floor! ) or just leave. All those people in the desert, they’re still there in the desert, who knows where, this godforsaken place, who knows why we’re even here or whether we’re just going to die out here or where this Moses guy is taking us or if he’s even coming back, the maniac, he’s probably just dead up there, and the vultures picking his bones.

What the hell are we going to do next?

That kind of fear and anxiety is not dissipated with any old Kumbaya my Lord or any cavorting little baby animals. That kind of fear can turn to chaos, or to the Tea Party, or Hezbollah, or to Fascism. A good leader could turn it to good, maybe, to a strong kind of good leading with a rare kind of love. If you can turn that energy inside out, into a high and loving and miraculous sort of courage -- well, that’s something to be seen. That’s “I have a dream” material, is what that is. But if what you are is a middle manager and a functionary then what you do is paper over it with sentimentality, hoping to buy some time, and when that wears off the sentimentality gets ripped away, like old wall paper, and what’s underneath is pretty dark. That calf is going to the slaughter, after all. Those love songs end in despair, as likely as not. Lovers murder one another, the throat of the calf is slit. All that black energy just gets blacker, and someone’s shirt gets ripped off, and someone gets a bloody nose, and the drums get louder and the singers start howling. It’s a wind whipping through the people, whipping up their fear and their anger and their anxiety, ripping all that innocence and love to shreds.

And by the time the main act comes on stage, their instruments have been smashed to bits. There are puddles of beer, and the air is thick with smoke, and a red-headed girl is passed out on an amp.

By the time Moses comes down from the mountain, that golden calf is all bloodied. The severed head of a real calf is hooked on one of its horns. Several dogs are eating up entrails that are stuck in its tail. The Israelites are all naked, streaked in blood, drunk, hollow-eyed. A baby is whimpering for its mother, who is pinned under some men. Mounds of steaming excrement are piled close to the tents.

Whose fault is this, exactly? Who should we blame? The people, who were left without guidance, after years of hard slavery? Left in the desert, to die -- for all they knew. Abandoned by their leader, the man who had the ear of God, or so he said. It had seemed like he did, it was plausible enough, when Moses was there with them, when he did great things, when all those signs and wonders had happened, when they were led out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. But human memory is short. The Israelites were an anxious lot, and the place they were in -- well, it was an anxious place. The energy of mobs is a fearsome thing.

Should we blame Aaron? Aaron the functionary? Aaron knew about the correct ways to sacrifice things, about the forms and rituals of worship. He did not know how to inspire a people. It was not Aaron who had led them out of Egypt. It was just Aaron, left down below, facing an angry mob, without any guidance from either God or his brother. Left to babysit, no phone number to call in case of emergency. For all Aaron knew, his brother had died up there, and he was stuck with somehow leading these people to somewhere they could settle and call home. The waiting was awful. Perhaps he could stall people, maintain some semblance of order in the camp, while waiting a little bit longer. Give them an innocent project to focus their energies on, something he could leverage later, if he needed to, to assert his own authority to lead. If in the end Moses never came back after all. It was a decent enough plan, for an average-ish managerial type.

Should we blame Moses? Moses went up on the mountain and didn’t come back down for 40 days and 40 nights. Didn’t he worry, any of that time, about what was going on down below? He’d been the only source of stability for those people -- their rock. He was the one who spoke of God to them. He was a wise enough leader -- humble, judicious, and clever. And for over a month, he gave no thought to those down below? Didn’t ask for a furlough to visit his people? Didn’t worry they’d think he was dead? Well, maybe he did think of it, but so what? He was going to ask God, who was dictating to him, and fast, too -- ask God to slow down, to give him a break to go down to his people? Ask God to let him check on his flock, God!? Who surely would know if there were anything wrong down there, at the base of the mountain. Surely God would let him know if he was needed. If God kept him up there, taking dictation, then that must be the right thing to do.

So we’re left with just one party to blame. One character in this story who was in a position to know what was happening, and had the power to stop it. Someone, Someone, who shall remain Nameless.

Are we willing to step forward and blame Hashem for what happened? Are we willing to accuse God? Are we willing, when God gets angry and God’s anger blazes forth, and God says to Moses “I will destroy this stiffnecked people, I will wipe them off the face of the earth and I will give you a new people, a new people who shall be my people, with whom I will make my covenant” -- are we willing to argue with God? Who would be willing to do that?

Moses was, and he did:

Moses pleaded before the Lord, his God, and said: "Why, O Lord, should Your anger be kindled against Your people whom You have brought up from the land of Egypt with great power and with a strong hand? Why should the Egyptians say: 'He brought them out with evil intent to kill them in the mountains and to annihilate them from upon the face of the earth'? Retreat from the heat of Your anger and reconsider the evil intended for Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your very Self, and to whom You said: 'I will multiply your seed like the stars of the heavens, and all this land which I said that I would give to your seed, they shall keep it as their possession forever.' " The Lord then reconsidered the evil He had said He would do to His people. -- Exodus Chapter 32:11 - 14.

The people of the Torah are always arguing with God, and sometimes they win, as Moses did here. “Look,” they say, “you made a promise, you swore an oath, you said you’d guide us, and we screwed up but you’re an honorable God, you should stand by your word.” They remind God of the importance of a good reputation. They ask for more chances and for mercy. Again and again they call God to account. Again and again they turn away God’s wrath, or change God’s mind, or kindle God’s mercy. What sort of God is this, who deigns to argue with humans? Who is swayed not only by sacrifice, but by intellect? Is it any wonder we Jews like to argue, when you look at the models we’re given? Any one of us might be called upon to argue with God!

God did not make the golden calf. But in the end, God had to take responsibility for the world that God made, for the people God saved, for the 40 days and nights they waited down there in the desert, for the calf that they made. There was nothing special about those people, they were no better than anyone else. But God had an idea. God wanted to try an experiment. Could God make an entire people holy? Make a holy society? Not just individuals gifted in holiness, but everyone? Could God make a people to be a light unto the nations, to be a nation of priests? God didn’t know. God figured on giving it a try. God keeps getting mad at the people God’s chosen; they’re not holy at all, they’re just people. Then one or another of the just people will call God to account: You made us, they’ll say, and you bound yourself to us. This is your experiment we’re in, and tell the truth -- it’s not much fun being your lab rats. So give us a break and don’t let us be annihilated. You can’t publish a paper if your data are swallowed up by the earth.

I don’t know, the Golden Calf is supposed to be this big old betrayal. From here it looks sort of inevitable, the way things went down. There’s a Dr. Who episode in which The Doctor, very serious, tells a ragtag bunch of humans that they must be, right now, the very best of the human race. They must be better than they are. Of course they try, and they fail, and The Doctor forgives them. You must do better next time, says The Doctor, for the sake of your children. So throughout our generations forever, we try to do better. And we fail, and God forgives us, and we try, try again.

The Breastplate of Decision: some thoughts on Tetzaveh: Exodus 27:20-30:10

2011-02-14T19:56:00.000-05:00

I’ve been working a lot the last couple of weeks, and my daughter is sick. Also, I wrote a lot of stuff about pageantry and priests for what is now last week’s parsha, and then I decided that it wasn’t any good and it didn’t hang together very well even with the joke about John Ashcroft and his Crisco anointing. So I kind of ditched it and then I had nothing.

Then I thought I would talk about how I used to read Tarot cards, and about the Breastpiece of Decision.

Tetzaveh, in case you are too lazy to read the wikipedia entry on it, covers the priestly dress code. ( And some other stuff, including that priests are anointed with high-quality olive oil, and why John Ashcroft chose Crisco instead of olive oil when there’s no shortage of olive oil in this country is quite a mystery to me -- did he want to be tacky and gross? There, see, I fit the John Ashcroft joke in after all.) Included in the uniform of the high priest is an item called the “Breastpiece of Decision”. There’s a note about this in my Chumash. ( I use Etz Hayim, the Chumash put out by the Conservative movement. It was bequeathed to me by my uncle, of blessed memory, as we sat together in the hospital on the day it arrived, sent from home by a friend. “You can have this,” he said. “Thank you,” I said. “I don’t think anyone will be fighting me for it.”). Anyway, page 508, note 30, regarding Exodus 28:30 “Inside the breastpiece of decision you shall place the Urim and Thummim, so that they are over Aaron’s heart when he comes before the Lord. Thus Aaron shall carry the instrument of decision for the Israelites over his heart before the Lord at all times.”

The editorial note about this enigmatic statement says “It is clear from the association with the ‘breastpiece of decision’ and ‘the instrument of decision’ that these two items [ the Urim and Thummim ] constituted a device for determining the will of God in specific matters that were beyond human ability to decide. Although the function of this device is clear, nowhere in the Torah is there a description of it or of the technique employed in its use... It remained in the exclusive possession of the priest and was used only on behalf of the leader of the people in matters of vital national importance.”

This reminds me of something I read in the autobiography of the 14th Dalai Lama. There was in his court a man whose occupation was to channel a spirit to provide guidance to the Dalai Lama in matters of national importance. The spirit would possess the man in a special ceremony, offer guidance, and then depart. It was in fact at the urging of this spirit that the Dalai Lama went into exile when he did, and the route that he and his entourage took over the mountains to India has also been specified, apparently, by this spirit.

Of course the Torah is against divination. My tarot cards are not sanctioned by Halacha. The sacrifices prescribed in the torah were always careful about entrails, because entrails were associated with divination and sorcery, and sorcery was no good. Sorcery was practiced by people who had not been properly anointed. They were not sanctioned by God, those people, with their predictions. The instruments of decision were all on the up-and-up: tools for use in matters of state, by the specially trained and the specially clothed.

It intrigues me, this difference. Of course like all cultures Jewish culture is chockfull of magic and superstition. Well, not your nice post-everything Jewish culture, very focused on the tikkun olam and the social justice and the yiddishkeit and oh, on radical theologies that basically boil down to different approaches to getting us modern Jews to stomach God. We’re not superstitious, us non-dualist god-in-your-body-ist mindfulness ground-of-being-ist Jews. We’re practical, deep-breathing, focusing-on-the-moment kinds of Jews. We accept our inability to predict the future, it doesn’t occur to us to ask either God or Tarot cards to help us decide anything. We don’t hike over mountains because a spirit said the Chinese were coming. We ask our LinkedIn networks, or perhaps we ask twitter. The lazyweb is our breastpiece of decision, or perhaps the coin flipping app on our phones.

Divination was proscribed because it was dangerous to presume we knew what came next, dangerous to usurp one of God’s powers as our own. Who needs to proscribe such things these days, when clearly the future is an indeterminate mess?

Anyway, I used to read my tarot cards all the time, whenever I had a decision to make, or felt at a loss of some sort, or simply when I wanted to know what would come next. I never thought there was either a spiritual power or a force behind the reading. You draw some cards, they give you themes, and then you have to make a story from the themes. You make the story up as you go. It helps you decide things, or perhaps it just helps you make things happen. The story you make up sinks into you. It becomes a part of you. Your subconscious mind fixes on it, devotes processing cycles to it, grows dendrites for it. You give it reality in your brain, and your brain works to make it reality in life. That’s all very neuropsychiatric: that stuff really does happen. When we make things real in our minds, then our minds devote more effort to making things real. So the cards are powerful for entirely materialist reasons.

A spirit who sends you over mountains, though, that’s something else.

How do we make decisions when we do not have enough information to make decisions? Donald Rumsfeld did have a point, we do live in a world of unknown unknowns. Nevertheless, we must leap. And most of the time, we must not leap with weak knees and doubt on our faces. We must leap strongly, like surefooted goats in the mountains. And yet, how?

It is not easy to leap strongly based on the recommendations of the lazyweb. It is not easy to trust in decisions arrived at via twitter. We can read all the medical literature, and still shoot the moon for that heart/bone marrow transplant. We can look at the data and question ourselves every night when we swallow our meds. Sometimes it wouldn’t be so bad to have a breastpiece of decision, would it? “We shall do this, say the Thummim and Urim. This is God’s will.” We would leap into the unknown, go into exile, swallow our meds, take the new job -- surefooted and confident that whatever came next, we had God at our sides.

Here is G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy:

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

There is something in that quote that feels real and true to me, and then I think of George W. Bush, deciding with his gut, going full speed ahead straight for the iceberg. But it was worse than that, really, for Bush invented the iceberg and then slammed full speed ahead into 30 million people. Given that, it’s not fair to blame Bush on Mr. Chesterton.

What Mr. Chesterton says, what he means, is that what God provides is a direction to go in, a relationship that guides you there, a confidence that there really is something right and true and good in the world, that we humans can, albeit poorly, access it, that at the very bottom of reality there is sense and goodness and order, and that we, mere mortals, have been offered a chance to participate in that. That whatever we do, wherever we go wrong, the offer stands firm. The center holds. We leap strong, breathe deep, suck the marrow out of life. It’s a beautiful vision. Can you feel it? Can you imagine what that is like, that center actually holding? The confidence and peace in it. That’s God, that center. Grab hold any way you can.

Terumah : Exodus 25:1–27:19

2011-01-30T21:21:00.000-05:00

I’m thinking about workmanship.

We hired some painters this fall to finish painting our apartment, 8 years after we moved in. There were still rooms that were painted a yellowish-white flat paint, what I called “developer white”. Our kitchen was one of them, and after 8 years of cooking the walls there were all sticky with grease.

The painters were a team led by a friendly Brazilian guy, and they had painted our second-floor neighbor’s apartment. She is an exacting woman, bless her heart, and we figured if it was good enough for her, it was probably way too good for us. But we had no other painters in mind, and we were feeling more flush with money -- and less flush with time -- than usual. Also, some people we knew were just winding up a gazillion dollar renovation on their house, and we had just seen a perfect house ourselves, around the corner from us, that was far too expensive to actually buy. So compared to a giant renovation or a new house, getting a few rooms painted seemed very sane and modest. Well, because it is.

Most of the other rooms we’d painted ourselves. (“We?” asks the husband in my head. ) They were perfectly acceptably painted rooms. Maybe not all the trim got done, or the ceiling, and maybe the walls were not perfectly smooth, and maybe the edges were wonky in a few places. No biggie. We didn’t care. It was not like in my husband’s parents’ dining room where, once upon a time, when painting, he’d painted the word ‘party’ in giant letters, before immediately painting over it, except that in certain light, 25 years later, you could still see it there.

Anyway, so the Brazilian guy and his team were in our apartment for a week and a half. They sanded and painted. They cleaned up at the end of each day, they left everything spotless, and they did extra work just to meet their own standards. It’s a beautiful, beautiful paint job.

There’s a book I keep meaning to read and not getting around to, written by someone who might have been a banker or a professor (I really can’t remember) and became a motorcycle repairman instead, Shop Class as Soul Craft.Only of course now he’s a writer, not a banker or a professor or a motorcycle repairman. It’s about craftsmanship, and about what we lose when the work we do is not a craft, when it is all in our heads, when it’s pushing papers and sitting at computers and clackety clacking on our clackety keyboards.

Me, I love my clackety keyboard. Clackety clack, it goes, and keeps the silence at bay. I am reminded of A Wrinkle in Time, of the shriek of anguish as evil destroyed a little piece of creation. And I am reminded of The NeverEnding Story, of the Nothing that came to devour the universe of the imagination. There’s the power of mind, and the power of body. We’re all up in the clouds with our heads, or we have our feet solid on the ground. Oh, the manichean divide between the material world and that other one, the one in our heads. But it’s not a real divide, because in truth our heads are full of squishy brain stuff and the material world is built with abstractions, like money. There are our neurons, and at the same time, money, art, music. God.

I haven’t even talked about the parsha, have I? Typical. The parsha is all about how to build the tent of meeting, the mishkan, within which God, or the Shekhinah, the emanation of God, the Spirit of God, will dwell. It’s a long and tedious parsha, especially coming as it does without illustrative pictures. I’ve read the fundamentalists are fond of their recreations of the tent of meeting, recreations of the ark of the convenant, with the cloud above it by day and the glowing pillar of fire by night. A mobile home for God -- who ever heard of such a thing? The gods lived in high places; they did not traipse around with ragged bands of worshippers. Gods were for going on pilgrimage to, they were not a traveling hit Broadway musical, advertised on taxicabs. What sort of God consents to be schlepped all over the desert, in what, however nicely made, was a box inside a tent?

Anyhow the instructions for the tent take a very long time to get through. God is quite exacting. And strictly speaking it’s not just one tent, but four, with lots of fancy curtains and gold clasps and threads dyed with rare shellfish and all kinds of special things. It’s a whole tent city, magnificent and gaudy, a traveling gypsy circus. Come one, come all, come see the God within. Well, pay for a sacrifice at least; don’t get too close, the unholy may be incinerated.

So that’s the parsha.

Back to human craftsmanship. Why all the fuss about the stuff, exactly? We’re all about stuff, aren’t we, these days, and at the same time, we want desperately not to be about the stuff. We are drowning in stuff. Cheap stuff, nice stuff, pretty stuff, ugly stuff. Sometimes you look around and the human race just seems a blight upon the world, spreading our shitty stuff everywhere you look. Building ugly buildings, and leaving ugly vacant lots. Paving over everything in sight and shopping all the time and buying our new mobile phones each year and donating our old ones to women suffering from domestic violence, as if that makes it okay, as though there could possibly these days be not enough mobile phones to go around. Like the clothes donation bins in parking lots, always too full, full of our lightly worn and badly made clothes, as though somewhere someone does not have enough old navy t-shirts.

So there it is: disgust at all our stuff. Disgust at what we humans make, what we have wrought upon the face of the earth and upon the sky and upon the waters and everywhere on this great and gorgeous, magnificent world. It’s miserable, really. If you’re so inclined to believe there’s something more out there, something else beyond this world, it’s awfully tempting to think what happens here, what we do to this place, is quite irrelevant. If our world is just a testing ground, a waystation, an illusion, what’s it matter, what happens here? Given, say, the toxic electronics dumps of Lagos, and, say, the Mall of America, that would be a relief, really.

Well, most of my readers, I bet, are not inclined that way in any case. There’s nothing here but here. It’s awful what we’ve done to it, we’re hardly likely to recover. The global warming and the pollution; the overpopulation, the slums, the strip malls. All those ugly houses in the suburbs. We’re stuck with it, until it kills us, pick your version of materialist apocalypse: the weather goes all wrong, or the soybean blight, or the new and awful plague, the collapse of society driven by the end of cheap oil. What a miserable future we have to look forward to. This, we say, looking at each other, this right here is as ridiculously good and insanely profligate as it is ever going to get. When we are old, if we are lucky enough to grow old, we’ll tell stories about the glowing screens in our pockets, about the heavy metal tubes that somehow flew, very fast, all over the world, about listening to a radio station broadcasting in Paris via a tiny computer the size of my hand, in Boston. That’s the very best we have to hope for. The very worst involves guns, and starvation, and fiefdoms, and death. We’ve fucked this world up, and we’re not likely to fix it, humans being what we are. Our heads are not in the clouds, but there’s not really any ground there either, is there? Just a choice of terrifying materialist apocalypses, none of them less awful than the traditional kind with the hellfires and the horsemen.

So this is us, right? These are our choices: we can take the shiny things and the mountains of junk, or we can leave it all, the beautiful and the damned of it all, the gorgeous paint job and the faux leaded-glass. Either the stuff is important, or else it is irrelevant or worse, a hindrance (spiritual or psychological, as you wish). Augustine of Hippo vs. the Stoics. What else is there?

Oh, but.

Step right up, come one and all, let’s see what’s behind these curtains here. What’s this shining tent in the desert, glittering in the sandstorm? An extravagant confection, this tent, a Turducken of a tent, tents inside tents inside tents, a beautiful fairyland of a tent. Like Tivoli, this tent. Traveling in the desert with a whole people, the rich and the poor, the craftsmen and the weaverwomen and the moneychangers too. All the people having made this tent, with the very best work they could do, some with their hands and some with the mushy stuff inside their skulls. The people have made the tent and they honor their God who dwells in it, and their God honors them right back, by dwelling in their midst, in the place that they have made. Not a high mountain, not a sacred spring, not a grove of trees or a volcano or a valley or a sea -- not for this God. This God will take up residence in a hand-made tent, with all its hand-made imperfections, an entirely human place.

This God has truck with humans, pitiful as we are. This God consents -- no, commands -- to be dragged all over the desert in a circus tent, like a dancing bear. But why? What can this possibly mean?

It means this world is not a terrible mistake. It is not a hardship to be struggled through, and it is not an illusion, and it is not a sort of school to get through on our way to some other, better, less-cluttered-up Reality. This world is not purgatory, and it is not hell, and it is not nothing, either This world is real, and what we do here matters. The future looks like eight different kinds of disaster to me, most of them all our fault. If not for that ridiculous tent I’d be despairing. That tent means that God trusts our work. The tent means that God doesn’t plan to burn up this world and start all over again, and that even given all the crap we make and the shit we throw out and the awful way we treat this world, sometimes we can make things so beautiful and special that God Godself will dwell in them. Whether there are other worlds after or beyond or interleaved with this one, I don’t know. But I do know that God does not consider this world to be disposable, that God has faith in us, that God hopes and trusts and yearns for us to be up to this task of making this world (and that is what we are doing, for better or for worse -- we are covering the face of the world and we are making it over, a new creation, of a sort, not always to my taste, but still -- you can’t deny the enormity of it all).

God hopes in us as much as we must hope in God. And how could I have hope if God did not have hope in us? Who can believe we humans will muddle it all okay in the end, without something else than us? We cannot get away from things. Can you imagine us not building, making, doing, painting, singing, sculpting? We build our cities and our gardens and our violins and bookstores. We build our world financial markets and our currencies and our philosophies and our websites. Let us hope there is some way to turn all our doing toward the good. It seems impossible to me. I cannot imagine how we can make all this come out all right. What a nasty broken mess we’ve made.

Fix it, says God, from the ridiculous tent in the desert. Follow me and fix this world, brick by brick, nail by nail, day by day. I’m right here with you. Many hands make light work, remember? You don’t have to complete it, but neither can you refuse to do it.

Somewhere in the distance I hear the blast of the shofar, calling us to the tent of meeting. A Terumah is a gift, an offering. But who is offering what to whom? There are so many layers to this tent, rooms within rooms, like a dream, like a mystery inside an enigma inside a secret, like diving into a deep pool, like a funhouse, only very serious and very strange at the same time as it is very glad. A cold high kind of glad mixed up with a warm furry kind of glad, smoke and incense and animal skins and everything utterly strange and yet familiar... I feel as though I’m falling through a mirror, I try to focus on the clickety clacking of my fingers on the keys, a siren outside, the rain in the trees, my own burning skin. Everything is hyperreal. I feel quite strange. (I wonder if I’m losing my mind again?) Sometimes life is like this -- numinous. The world itself is a tent of meeting. Let us sanctify it.

mishpatim - Exodus 21:1–24:18

2011-01-26T16:34:00.000-05:00

Shelby N. is standing next to her car, a luxury behemoth of a car, the kind that is advertised, inexplicably, in the pages of The New Yorker, with the Charles Schwab and the Pratek Philippe and the Mandarin Oriental ads. ( I have read The New Yorker for years and yet I still marvel at how little its advertisers seems to know about me. ) I think it’s a Jaguar. She’s got that chemically straightened hair and she’s wearing those sheepskin boots and a big down coat and the sky is slate gray and spitting at us with contempt. It’s not a day and its certainly not a good time to stand next to your car in the middle of the rotary at Memorial Drive and the BU bridge. She’s getting splashed by other cars, five-thirty in the evening, merging and weaving in an endless circle. It’s nearly dark and she forgot to put her hazards on, and she’s talking on her phone (I see her nails, immaculate orange, clutching her phone, they’re almost the only part of her I can see in the wintry dark) and I can’t see what’s wrong with her car but obviously something, because why else would she be standing there, gesturing madly, in the sleet, next to an enormous puddle.

Who knows how I recognize her at all? I haven’t seen her for thirteen years. I’ve thought of her sometimes, since college. I have thought of her with bile and malice and bitterness and regret. She was awful to me -- who knows why? -- one year in school. The people who assigned roommates had been mistaken. We could not live together, she and I. By the end of the year I shrank from her, I skulked so as to avoid her, I found a boyfriend I could spend the nights with so I did not have to hear her, see her, be tormented by her.

Of course I recognize her. The mind remembers danger, right? She looms out of the darkness at me, and I know her at once, and I knot up in fear and catch my breath and remember I am safe and warm in my own car, and I can drive right on by and leave that bogey in my past.

I can’t, though. I mean, I can, of course, but I may not. I am commanded not to. Stop, says my God and the God of my people. Stop and help your enemy raise her ox, which has fallen under the weight of its burden.

That’s what mishpatim says.

*****

It doesn’t say I have to be gracious about it. It was Jesus who is best known for saying we must love not merely our neighbors -- which is difficult enough, God knows -- not just our neighbors, but our enemies too. Not that Christians have a monopoly on loving their enemies. I remember a story about a Jewish man who befriended, somehow, I forget how, a grand poobah of the KKK after said person tried to pipe-bomb his house or something equally terrible. I think the poobah got reformed and when he became fatally ill was cared for by the Jewish man and his wife, in their home, until he died. It sounds like I read that in one of those Chicken Soup books, but I didn’t -- the book I read it in had a much more tasteful cover, and was much more scholarly in tone. Chicken Soup for the Cultural Snob’s Soul. But there wasn’t any talk of chicken. Chicken is not scholarly and it is not advertised in The New Yorker.

Anyway, God commands me to stop, in the sleet, in the dark, with my dandruffy hair and my Target boots and my cheap dye job ( Natural Instincts, if you must know) and my ragged nails ( did you know you can superglue a nail together so it doesn’t tear entirely off after you have chopped it up while making dinner? ) and my station wagon with a piece of the front bumper missing and the plastic in one of the rear lights broken, to pause my own life and to bring my 18-year-old self, shrinking or no, right along with me stopping up behind the Jag and putting my own hazard lights on and getting out of my own safe cocoon and stepping into reach and asking “Can I help you?” with what I hope is a sympathetic smile.

God doesn’t tell me what has to happen after that. That depends on Shelby, right? Maybe Shelby needs my help, and she has her son in the backseat, and some groceries, including ice cream, and maybe he’s autistic, her son, and perhaps I loan her my car to take him home in and I stand there myself, waiting for the tow truck, so her autistic son can be safe at home eating ice cream.

Maybe Shelby does not need my help, and moreover does not recognize me, and she is bewildered that I have stopped and a little irritated at my odd solicitude, some people are so weird, and she waves me on without a word, with just her eyebrows.

Maybe instead the tow truck comes as I am asking if she needs any help and she could get a ride with the tow truck guy or I could drive her home instead, and she’s alone, no son with special needs, and she does remember me, of course, come in for tea, why don’t you, I’ve always felt I was not quite fair to you that year, that I made your life more difficult than it ought to have been. I’m so glad to see you again and tell you so.

God and Mishpatim are silent on what happens next. Never mind. What would be the fun of living if we knew how it all would turn out, the raising of our enemy’s ox? God breathes it all in motion and builds a web of rules, like the best damn game theorist you ever saw, and waits to see if we can listen, if we can hear and can obey. If I stop my car that day, God wins. I was commanded, and I obeyed. Do I win too? Can that ever turn out bad for me, that question, “Can I help you?” I could spin some horror story endings, something snopes would warn about. If it all goes south from there on out, should I have listened and obeyed?

I think so, yes. That’s Bitachon, or trust in God. The moment I stop, the moment I ask, God and I have won together, whatever happens next. A piece of the world has been repaired.

****
To be honest, I don’t get much else from mishpatim. Such a faraway land, such a strange people, a trembling mountain, Moses dashing blood upon the men of Israel, gathered together at the base of the thundering mount. Such alien laws. I am embarrassed to confront the rules on slaves and how to free them properly. You can take your proper bride price and the penalties for raping a virgin and you can shove them up your neighbor’s ox’s butt. I have no fields to let lie fallow in the seventh year, and I know of no one, Jew or otherwise, who does not believe in making loans with interest. Clearly that’s one the Rabbis have driven several trucks of loopholes through.

Still. Here is an ancient scroll, from an alien people. It purports to tell me of my god and what God wants of me. Maybe it tells me other stuff too, stuff that isn’t really about God at all. That happens. I don’t know for sure.

But I do know what I must do if I see Shelby N. and her broke-down Jag in the sleet on a February afternoon. And perhaps that’s quite a lot indeed, from mishpatim.

Fear and Trembling ( Yitro: Exodus 18-20)

2011-01-20T17:57:00.000-05:00

So one of my new year's resolutions was to make time again for my d'vrei torah. All fall I've been avoiding my poor abandoned torah blog. Things are like that, though, aren't they? The longer you ignore them the harder it is to pay attention to them again, because then when you turn and face the thing you've ignored, at the same time you are facing the fact that you ignored it. Oh, I feel like I should jump right into an ad for Facing History, Facing Ourselves, which was not my point. I am just trying to psych myself up for re-starting something that I meant to make a habit and then abandoned, frustrated and embarrassed by my failure to do so.

Of course I can provide a long list of extenuating circumstances: the meds debacle, the new job, the grapefruit interaction, the confusion and turmoil and busy-ness of the life of a working mother of two children under 8. And it is not that those circumstances are not extenuating, because they are. Nobody but me expected me to be able to maintain any kind of regular writing this fall, but then, who besides ourselves ever expects us to do the things WE want to do. Self-imposed goals are always dispensable, according to everyone else.

Happily there is repentance. Yes, yes, I know that repentance is not really meant to refer to my turning again to the writing of a blog that no one in particular reads. The failure of the blog is not a moral failure. And yet it feels as though it is, because it is a betrayal of something I want and that I think I need in my life, and a betrayal of what had always felt for me like a calling without a caller.

You would think, having found the caller, that the calling would be easier to practice. It is not. It is no easier to write regularly about God than it is to write regularly about politics, or computer programming, or fashion, or history. In fact, it is harder. All those other things are the things of this world and they have secular value, and you can both write about them and not write about them without having to examine yourself.

Anyway, I'm on vacation right now. Along with the piña coladas and french cheese and the pool and the beaches there is still a feeling of unease. That is because I would like to write this blog post, about this week's parsha, and it is much easier and less unsettling to read a trashy novel or have a nap. Why should I have to be uneasy on my vacation? What in the world leads me to make myself sit here, feeling anxious and inadequate and undisciplined and incoherent, thinking of something to say about Yitro? You can lead a horse to life-giving water, but can you make her drink?

I want to drink that water, and unless I must write about it, I will not. In the end I'm hoping this blog can serve as spiritual practice for me. I want to hear God better. I want to listen more. But the things of this world make it hard to hear God. There is hustle and bustle, and I'd rather think of myself as a basically good, perhaps even better than average person. I'd rather not face my failures.

Perhaps in the Torah there's not a lot of facing my failures to be done anyway. Maybe there's nothing much there to be scared of. Just a bunch of strange, cobbled-together stories, the mythology of a long-dead people, made sacred by the fact of its survival down all the long years.

****

That's a very long introduction to the first d'var torah i'm writing in months. The Hebrews have just left Egypt. They travel through the land of the Midianites, and Jethro, who was not a Hebrew, came out to meet Moses, with Moses' wife and his two sons. Jethro is Moses' father-in-law. One of his sons is named Gershom, which means "I have been a stranger in a strange land," and if that's not a phrase pregnant with meaning through all our ages of exile, right down to Robert Heinlein, I don't know what is.

Jethro notices that Moses is wearing himself out serving as the judge for all the people, and advises Moses to delegate, delegate, delegate, which Moses does. If you are looking for "Easy Life Lessons In The Torah", this is one of them. "What you are doing is not right; you will surely wear yourself out, and these people as well. For the task is too heavy for you, you cannot do it alone." (Ex 18.17). Moses takes his father-in-law's advice ("Easy Life Lessons from the Torah, #283: Sometimes your in-laws actually have something useful to say.") and delegates some of his power to judge to some other elders. All is well. Off go the hebrews, with, one presumes, Moses' family in tow. They go to Sinai, and there's a big mountain, and they camp there, and God gives Moses one of two versions of the not-really-ten commandments that are received in the Torah. This particular version gives the fact that God rested on the seventh day the reason for the commandment to observe and to guard the shabbat, whereas other places we are told it is because we were slaves in Egypt and now are free that we must be shomer shabbos.

The whole scene looks an awful lot like a grumbling active volcano, what with the mountain "all in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The blare of the horn grew louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder." (Ex 19.18 -19). Charlton Heston didn't make all that up, there really is all that drama.

"All the people witnessed the thunder and lightening, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance." (ex. 20.15) They were afraid, and they said to Moses that he should speak to God for them, because they did not want to get too close, and they did not want to hear God's voice.

The commandments themselves are sandwiched in there, not clearly ten, and a motley bunch. I'm your God, and don't forget I liberated you from slavery in Egypt. Don't worship anyone else. Don't make a sculptured image of me or anything else and worship it (the 'sculptured' here would turn out to be very important to the Eastern Church as it developed its complex tradition of iconography, because it doesn't say 'painted', does it?). Don't swear falsely by my name. A long paragraph about the importance of Shabbat. "Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy." Honor your father and your mother. Don't murder. Don't commit adultery. Don't steal. Don't bear false witness. Don't covet anything your neighbor has, wife, slave or ass. (Here we can at least be grateful that wife comes before slave and ass.)

I'm struck by this odd thing about purity, and about fear. It says that God tells Moses to tell the Israelites to make themselves pure, and then to stay away from the boundaries of the mountain. Whoever touches the mountain will die, says God, and it won't be safe to go up on the mountain until the ram's horn sounds a long blast. So there we have God telling everyone to stay away from the mountain. (oh, and be pure, don't touch a woman, so we're using everyone rather loosely..)

On the third day the people (or, at least, the men-people) stand at the foot of the mountain, as instructed, and the smoke and thunder and everything come, and the ram's horn blows, but they don't go up the mountain, even though the instructions were "go onto the mountain when the ram's horn sounds a long blast." Only Moses goes up the mountain, and God says "Tell everyone not to come up here, if they look at me up here they'll die." Moses says "you told us to set bounds around the mountain, to sanctify it, so why would anyone come up here when I already said to them don't?" And God says "okay, never mind, go down and get Aaron and you can bring him up here with you, but everyone else must stay below or else I'll kill everyone." So Moses goes down, but actually he never does seem to bring Aaron back up with him, at least not in this version of the story. He tells the people the not-10 commandments, and they say "don't make us all go up there with you, and Moses goes up again to be instructed that God prefers monuments of natural stone, like Andy Goldworthy, rather than of hewn stone, like Rodin. And there's Yitro, as strange and alien as the Torah always seems, excepting those little nuggets of Easy Life Lessons.

I'm torn between writing posts that focus on these Easy Life Lessons, of which you can almost always find at least one per parsha, and writing posts that are much less coherent and much more difficult but that are actually attempting to look at the whole of the parsha. Or, if I were actually someone with any experience in torah study, I'd probably go deep into the meanings of two or three words, relate them to Lurianic Kabbalah and the Baal Shem Tov, and wind up with a seven-heavens theory of spiritual growth with some insight meditation thrown in for good measure.

What I'm doing is messy and confused. It's probably not very easy to read, and you could argue that if I'm going to do it this way I shouldn't do it. But I feel as though I have to get through the torah this way before I can or should get through it any other way. I don't want it pre-masticated for me, even though I know that naively reading the Torah without the benefits of scholarship and tradition is as likely to lead you astray into polygamy and stoning as it is to lead you to fresh insight and profound understanding.

Back to Yitro, where I try to find a less-easy but still manageable life lesson to wind everything up with, to make it worth the while of you and me. Something about sanctity and boundaries. Something about Yirah: the fear and awe of God. Or of the Universe itself, of Reality, if the word God makes you all squeamish, like endometriosis or placentas. So does God tell Moses to keep the people away, or do the people tell Moses to keep God away? We are scared of God, we are scared of reality, and if we're not careful, our faces will melt off like those of the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

You wouldn't think I could relate to the storm und drang of Mt. Sinai, to the feelings of fear and awe the Hebrews had, with that long blast of the ram's horn sounding but all of them too paralyzed to move, and God, seeing that, changing his mind and letting them stay put. Ordering them, in fact, to stay put, so that they are not overcome by their fear, so that their faces don't melt off. We're so broken, down here, in this world, that we can't face God. We can hardly face ourselves, and our own small failures, and our own grand triumphs. To the extent that we are made in God's image, we hide from ourselves as we hide from God, fearful and overwhelmed by our own inexplicable existence. God would like us to come up the mountain when the ram's horn sounds, but when we don't, he grants dignity to our fear. Oh, says God, that's what I meant all along: so that you will be afraid and you will do as I say, because of your fear. I meant stay away, so you will not be destroyed. God says that, God is polite that way, but God still wishes we would seek God's face, still hopes we will all someday climb that mountain, and look upon him, and that our own faces will shine with all that glory, and that everything will turn out all right in the end. God believes in God's own fairy tale, God keeps faith with us, all of us, terrified and tortured down here. God is looking forward to the big party up on the mountain, and hopes we all come, even late, even without the right clothes, even bearing no gifts at all but our own strange and curious selves.

Ki Tavo: Act Wisely, Don't follow other Gods, and you will not be cursed with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (plus some thoughts on contracts and EULAs)

2010-08-30T22:38:00.000-04:00

Ki Tavo describes a participatory drama that Moses instructs the Israelites to engage in after they’ve crossed over into Israel. They are to stand half on one mountain, Mt. Gezerim, and half on another, Mt. Ebal, and commit yet again to a covenant with God. The first half recites all the great blessings that they’ll have if they follow God, and the second half gives the curses.

Only first the Levites say some stuff which looks like curses but are actually more like laws, for example (my favorite): (Deut 27:19) "Cursed be he who subverts the rights of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. — And all the people shall say, Amen."

Then come blessings, for example:

(Deut 28:7 -12): The Lord will put to rout before you the enemies who attack you; they will m arch out against you by a single road, but flee from you by many roads. The Lord will ordain blessings for you upon your barns and upon all your undertakings: He will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. The Lord will establish you as His holy people, as He swore to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways. 10 And all the peoples of the earth shall see that the Lord's name is proclaimed over you, and they shall stand in fear of you. The Lord will give you abounding prosperity in the issue of your womb, the offspring of your cattle, and the produce of your soil in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to assign to you. The Lord will open for you His bounteous store, the heavens, to provide rain for your land in season and to bless all your undertakings. You will be creditor to many nations, but debtor to none.

And then the curses. And whoa, what curses!

(Deut. 28:49-57): The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, which will swoop down like the eagle — a nation whose language you do not understand, a ruthless nation, that will show the old no regard and the young no mercy. It shall devour the offspring of your cattle and the produce of your soil, until you have been wiped out, leaving you nothing of new grain, wine, or oil, of the calving of your herds and the lambing of your flocks, until it has brought you to ruin. It shall shut you up in all your towns throughout your land until every mighty, towering wall in which you trust has come down. And when you are shut up in all your towns throughout your land that the Lord your God has assigned to you, you shall eat your own issue, the flesh of your sons and daughters that the Lord your God has assigned to you, because of the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you. He who is most tender and fastidious among you shall be too mean to his brother and the wife of his bosom and the children he has spared to share with any of them the flesh of the children that he eats, because he has nothing else left as a result of the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you in all your towns. And she who is most tender and dainty among you, so tender and dainty that she would never venture to set a foot on the ground, shall begrudge the husband of her bosom, and her son and her daughter, the afterbirth that issues from between her legs and the babies she bears; she shall eat them secretly, because of utter want, in the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you in your towns.

You should read the whole thing, it’s pretty impressive.

Anyway, about those curses. All the biblical scholars have discovered that this whole thing is basically a standard-format contract from the ancient near east. So it sounds all dramatic and scary but may have been a bit more like a EULA. More of a checkbox with a lot of fine print in a scrolling window no one ever actually reads. And in fact, the tradition is that the Rabbi reads all the curses in an undertone.

It was recently discovered, by the way, that for several months everyone who purchased things from a certain video game vendor had been selling their souls to the vendor via some fine print in the EULA.

Anyway, it is fair to say that as a result of the contractual nature of our relationship with God, Jews love contracts, love the law, love loopholes and legalese and line-drawing. This is sometimes caricatured, bizarrely, as an arid legalism. Is there anything at all that is arid about the Jewish engagement with the Law?

Not that I know anything about anything, so who am I to pronounce on Jews?

Actually, speaking of curses, I’ve lately become enamored of the second paragraph of the shema. As a child I knew only the first paragraph, and it was called the V’eahafta, and it was one of the four prayers I had to learn by heart for my Bat Mitzvah. Reform siddurim (prayer books) did not and still don’t have that paragraph, because much of it is redundant to the first paragraph and also because it, like the curses in Ki Tavo, is pretty clear that there are serious consequences to the failure to do God’s will. Reform Jews are not much into the notion of consequences, or at least the people who made Gates of Prayer and Mishkan T’filah, the Reform siddur then and now, were and are not. Anyway, here are the verses:

Beware, lest your heart be deceived and you turn
and serve other gods and worship them.

And anger of the Lord will blaze against you, and he
will close the heavens and there will not be rain,
and the earth will not give you its fullness,

and you will perish quickly from the good land that
the Lord gives you.

(This is actually from Devarim (Deuteronomy) chapter 11, so just a a few parshas ago.)

I have lately been worshipping a god named Lamictal. Lamictal, I had been convinced, would be my savior. Lamictal would offer me peace, health, comfort and joy, for the low, low insured price of sixty dollars a month. Everyone loves Lamictal. Lamictal is such an easy god, everyone said. Lamictal just gives and gives. I read testimonials all over the internet about the transformative powers of the great god Lamictal.

Yes, once in a very long while, Lamictal will with little warning require the sacrifice of one of his worshippers, who must be flayed alive and left to die, skinless and bleeding from every orifice. But so rarely, said everyone, that it was hardly worth worrying about.

My heart was deceived, I admit it. After four weeks of taking daily communion with the great god Lamictal (who eerily imitates Jesus in asking that we ingest him), I began to have a sense that something was wrong. I began to feel that perhaps I had been chosen to be a sacrifice. My throat hurt, and I had strange sores on my tongue. My mouth began to hurt so badly I could eat nothing but ice cream. With great reluctance, I stopped my daily communion. After a week, I was fine again, and in consultation with my doctors decided to try daily communion again, in very small doses.

At the end of the second day of the second course, I noticed that my throat hurt, there was a strange sore place on the inside of my lip, and I was aching all over. Also I had these two strange rashy places on my leg. So on the third day I did not take my Lamictal communion, and I went instead to shul and asked God what I should do.

And the parsha was Ki Tavo, and I stood there next to the Rabbi while he chanted, quietly, all those paragraphs of curses. I got tired and bored standing up there watching him chanting, and I fidgeted. I had gone up for a misheberach, a prayer for healing, and had asked God to heal me, and to heal my neighbor and a few other people who needed it, and then I was the representative from that aliyah chosen to stand up all through the next aliyah, I don’t quite understand the choreography yet, really, but stand I did. It took a while, it was a hard portion, apparently; difficult to read from the torah itself, with its absence of vowels, so the rabbi was going back and forth between the torah and a chumash with the vowels in it.

After all the curses, quietly chanted, there was one more reading. Someone explained that you never end a public reading of the Torah on a negative word or a negative thought. And obviously all those curses were negative. This explains why some parshas end in very strange places; they have to end on a high note.

In this case the high note was the first 8 verses of chapter 29, and it was sort of a summation by Moses and a reminder of why Israel should follow the rules of Yah. The last verse is often translated as “Therefore observe faithfully all the terms of this covenant, that you may succeed in all that you undertake.” (JPS translation)

But Everett Fox translates it slightly differently. “So you are to be-careful regarding the words of this covenant, and are to observe them, in order that you may act-wisely in all that you do.”

Anyway, I was finally sitting down again, feeling very much on show for having stood there for so long, and also because I’d sat in the front row for some reason, and also because I was writing notes for this d’var in a notebook before I went up and someone came over to tell me very nicely that I wasn’t allowed to write in shul on shabbat, so of course I was hideously embarassed. (But actually I was a little surprised, because in fact the correct rule is not to write on shabbat at all, and not to drive, or use electricity, or whatever. And people at my shul are clearly seen to write, drive, talk on their phones, play music, and in other ways break the sabbath. I know people who bring books to read at their seats during the torah service because they otherwise are bored to death. So I wondered too why this particular breaking of the sabbath was such a faux pas. But no matter; I watched myself from afar, feeling on show and embarrassed, and noted what it felt like, and figured it was a good and important thing to feel sometimes. Every shul has its own minhagim (customs) and I have to learn those of our shul one way or another.)

So I thought about this idea, that following God does not cause you to succeed in all you do, but causes you to act wisely in all you do. Which is all that can be expected, really, and even that is probably too much.

Anyway, I’d been wondering what to do about the Lamictal. I was loath to stop it. But God suggested I act wisely and quit following the god Lamictal. God reminded me that Lamictal was a false god, and there was a non-zero chance that if I kept following after Lamictal, convinced that Lamictal was my savior, Lamictal might flay me alive.

You would think that knowing you were at such risk would be enough to convince you to stop doing a thing. But really it’s not. We are so good at convincing ourselves that what we want to do is actually perfectly sensible, that the risks are not great, that what we know is true is not true, that it is coincidence or imaginary or unimportant or something else entirely.

Lamictal held out a shining vision of the New Jerusalem to me: mental health without side effects. I was seduced. Part of me was willing to follow after that other god, ignoring the warning that I might perish quickly. It turns out I’m not alone; if you look at the message boards about lamictal, people tell stories of how they stayed on it during just a little rash because it worked so well, how they convinced themselves they just had acne, or poison ivy, or a virus, because they simply didn’t want to quit taking the drug. I nearly did it myself; I nearly thought, “well, no need to say anything till I’m sure.” Even though I was sure, and I did need to say.

So after shul I called my doctor and told her I had to quit taking it. I’d been disappointed the first time I had to stop; this time I was not, anymore. Lamictal was not my God.

Of course, even though I’ve stopped the drug, I still have a couple of weeks in which my skin might fall off. Pray for me, readers.

P.S.

Almost immediately after I finished writing this d’var, last night, I realized I had blisters on the inside of my mouth that hadn’t been there even an hour or two before; and that my skin felt like it was burning all over. So my dear brother drove me to the emergency room, where I worried for the first hour that everything was about to escalate horribly into a nightmare plague, waited, bored and wishing I hadn’t come, through the second hour, and finally, in the third hour, saw an attending who said “It doesn’t look like it’s progressing right now, take antihistamines, and NEVER TAKE THAT DRUG AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE.”

Now I am waiting for my skin to stop burning, the soles of my feet to stop hurting when I walk, and to stop feeling this terrible fatigue and pain when I move.

This is not a diatribe against meds. I am a great believer in meds. I am happy that Lamictal is helpful for so many other people. I am taking and will take other meds, and I am and will be happy for the help they give me.

But when we turn to meds for salvation, when we make gods of them, when we seek after other gods, we can so often go wrong. We delude ourselves. We take risks we otherwise might not. We want so much what is offered and do not want to count the cost or see it. We do not see with an open eye, like Balaam did. And that is dangerous. The problem is not with the medication; it’s with our thinking the medication is miraculous. It’s with the hope we place in medication, sometimes far beyond its ability to deliver. The problem is not hope. The problem is where we place our ultimate hope. Meds can make us better, but they cannot make our lives matter.

Many of us hope for radical change in our lives: we hope to be happier, more content, more peaceful, well-loved and loving, good people, successful people. We know ourselves as broken and we want to be fixed. But nothing on this earth can give us that: no person, no community, no organization, no drug, no program, no shoe, no surgery, no doctor, no therapist, no guru. Not money, and not stuff. Not our own efforts.

All those things can help, yes. But -- and to some readers this sounds crazy and to others it sounds perfectly true and to still others it sounds both crazy and possibly -- could it be? -- true, and I don’t even know which one of those is true for me right now and it changes all the time -- the ultimate source for the ultimate fix, the repair we all need, for ourselves and the world -- that’s God. The rest is just world and more world, as broken and confused and in need of repair as we ourselves are.

When we worship idols, things of wood and stone that cannot talk, or gold, or paper, or pills, or people, we do not act-wisely. Whether things are going well or things are going badly, the Torah warns us to remember that it is God who is the ultimate source of all blessings in the universe, God alone:

When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God -- who freed you from teh land of Egypt, the house of bondage; who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers had never known, [ ...] -- and you say to yourselves, ‘My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.’ Remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you the power to get wealth...

(Deut 8:11-18, from parsha Eikev, JPS translation)

And remember that if you don’t act-wisely, then maybe “The Lord will strike you with the Egyptian inflammation, with hemorrhoids, boil-scars, and itch, from which you will never recover. ” (Deut 28:32) Or maybe even with the Lamictal rash, if you were so foolish and eager to follow after that false God that you did not see the danger.

I’m grateful I stopped taking the drug when I did, and grateful that God told me to act-wisely and do so. What happens next will happen. I just keep faith with God, as in a vigil, and I remember to look to God for my salvation, and not to pharmaceuticals.

(Note Aug 30, 2010: Ki Teitzei will be posted after Ki Tavo. I’m behind, as usual, and Ki Tavo came out first. )

Ki Teitzei : On The Diversity of Commandments

2010-08-21T21:18:00.000-04:00

The commandments given in Ki Tetsei ( Devarim/Deut 21:10-25:19) illustrate everything that is most incomprehensible and frustrating to me about Halacha (Jewish Law). Some of the commandments -- and the fences and explanations and illustrations that the Rabbis have built around them over thousands of years -- are masterpieces of ethical lawmaking. A famous example is 22:8: “When you build a new house you shall make a parapet for your roof.” We are required by God to be careful, for ourselves, and for others. Our building, which has a flat, black roof, doesn’t in fact have a parapet all around; you can walk right off the back to fall four floors to your death on the back patio. Maybe if you’re lucky the overgrown forsythia will break your fall. When we need to put on a new roof, I’d like to put a parapet up back there. I dread some child or drunk person going up for a lark and going over the edge. So that’s sensible.

And then there is 22:11, “but don’t weave two types of fabric together”. This sounds like nothing so much as my three-year-old complaining about a tiny, tiny piece of green stuff on her pasta. There’s nothing ethically wrong with mixing fabrics. It’s just irrelevant, and what is it doing there in the same parsha as 24:17 “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless,” which is so beautiful as to make one cry? It’s infuriating. And finally, there are the commandments that are actively obnoxious: 23:2 is an injunction against allowing men with ‘crushed testicles’ to convert to Judaism, and 25:11 says that if two men are fighting and the wife of one of them helps her husband in the fight by running up and grabbing his adversary’s genitals, the wife’s hand should be cut off, I presume because she has possibly prevented the adversary from becoming a convert? (I jest. I know that’s not why, because the law probably only ever applied if the adversary was already Jewish! No Jewish woman is going to get her hand chopped off over hurting gentile testicles! )

So there’s the situation. We traditionally identify 613 different commandments in the Torah, and they exhibit a diversity of subject matter, apparent intention, palatability to modern people, and importance or triviality that is truly boggling. Like each commandment evolved on a different island, in very different microclimates, and then were all gathered together and thrown into a big dusty storage room somewhere in the Victoria and Albert museum.

Actually, that’s probably pretty much exactly what happened.

I am reminded of a piece of paper that I found recently in a kitchen drawer, labeled “Dinnertime Rules.” I’d drawn it up for my son’s edification maybe four years ago. He was amused by them. “That had to be a rule?” If today I drew up a new set, some of the rules would be the same, and some of them would be different. Four years ago I did not need to tell him he was not allowed to read at the dinner table, and I did not have to tell him not to tussle with his sister. Now, I don’t have to tell him that he’s not allowed to say “beurk!” to the food. I still have to tell him to use his napkin, though. And some things don’t have to be rules because we’ve changed the environment: it turns out to be impossible for our kids to drink with straws without blowing bubbles and otherwise making a mess, so we just don’t have straws in the house anymore.

So I really think we have to look at the collection of mitzvot in the torah as having arisen in part through just this kind of ad-hoc rulemaking. A situation comes up, somebody rules on it, and the rule then becomes a precedent, and some of the precedents end up being collected in the Torah, where, unfortunately, they can ossify.

And actually I think that my view might be also the majority rabbinical view, in practice if not in theory. (In theory, all the laws are the Word of God.) As I’ve said before, traditional Judaism is not fundamentalist or literalist or ‘bible-believing’ in the sense that ‘bible-believing’ Protestant sects are, or say they are.

So the Rabbis have expanded or contracted the meaning and domain of the rules based on their best understanding of the principles behind the rules. If we must build a parapet, we should also build a fence around our pools, for example, and require seatbelts in our cars. But I’m hoping that in thousands of years (and I don’t know) they’ve narrowed the meaning of ‘crushed testicles’ quite a bit and loosened up about mixing fabrics.

Still, however the Rabbis have organized the collection, the collection is still basically a source of reverence and devotion and truth for Jews who try to be mindful of all these mitzvot, and do them. However much they’ve narrowed some and expanded others, and reinterpreted all along the way, the basic structure is still in place, with its injunctions against shellfish, its tedious detailing of temple sacrifices, its don’t mix two kinds of cloth, its bride-prices and crushed testicles and slaves with their ear-piercings, right there with justice and mercy and loving our neighbor. It’s frustrating, having to take all the crazy stuff along with all the sensible stuff. It’s equally frustrating to have to choose what we don’t have to take anymore. Which of these laws were for then, for those people living at that time and place, and which of them are for now and for always? The Torah (both written and oral) is a record of how one people were guided by the voice of God to engage with those very same questions. They had olden days back then just as we have them now. They were not more stupid or more credulous than we are.

So to be a Jew is to first be mindful of all these mitzvot, whatever we think of how sensible they are. Of course, there’s ethical monotheism, secular humanism, secular humanist judaism. We try and try to find a way not to throw out the baby of ethical mitzvot along with the bathwater of nonsensical or obnoxious mitzvot. We complain about mindless rituals and archaic practices the original meaning of which has been forgotten. I mean, really, WE NO LONGER REMEMBER THE NAME OF OUR GOD. Why should we remember the burnt offerings we made in that name? Build a parapet for your roof, keep honest measures, be good to the weak, the hungry, the orphaned, the stranger, and the slave. But eat pork, cheeseburgers, and shrimp. Go shopping and run errands on Shabbat. Wear mixed cloth and dress as the opposite sex and love who you love. Why doesn’t that work, exactly?

Maybe for some people, it does. We derive our ethical rules and we drop the unreasonable stuff, drop god even, and god’s unpronounceable name, and off we go, perfectly and unerringly living our values, never a struggle or a conflict in sight.

Not for me, though. I struggle so much to be good, to do good, to be a person of strong character, to be ethical, to care, to treat others with kindness and empathy, to look out for the sick and the old and the homeless and the poor and the orphaned and the immigrant. I am so wrapped up in myself, most of the time, and I do things so often that are what the Buddha called ‘unskillful’. I can see they’re not good to do, for me or for others or for the world.

I keep thinking of the words of Rabbi Chaim Luzzato (The Ramchal) in the introduction to his Mussar masterpiece, called in English The Path of the Just:

I have written this work not to teach people what they do not know, but rather to remind them of what they already know and clearly understand. For within most of my words you will find general rules that most people know with certainty. However, to the degree that these rules are well-known and their truth self-evident, they are routinely overlooked, or people forget about them altogether.

This, to me, is the crux of the problem with stripping ethics from the ritual and tradition that surrounds it. Or, as Paul said, (Romans 7:15): “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Reason and knowledge and ethics alone are not enough. It is difficult to change ourselves, it is terribly hard to direct ourselves away from ourselves. Every day we act in ways big and small that are not what we want to do. Or rather, not what the better part of ourselves wants to do.

For years it’s been a huge question for me, one I circle back to all the time in my journals, in my mind. How do we become other than what we are? What makes us change? And more specifically, what makes us change to become better people than we are? There’s no shortage of systems, gurus, books, tapes, and varieties of yoga all offering us the tools to change ourselves. There’s no shortage of religions. But change seems so painful, and slow, and small.

My friends at Cambridge Vineyard talk a lot about empowering impossibly great lives. For them, Jesus offers that promise, and delivers. Jesus doesn’t really talk to me, but my God, the one with the unpronounceable name, does. And in the year and a half that I’ve been listening to my God, the year that I’ve been talking back, I know that I have become a better person. That I am an impossibly better person than I was before. And though I think that change is driven by God, it has not happened in a vacuum. It happens in context, the context of my Jewishness, the context of Judaism, of my peoples’ ongoing relationship with God.

There’s a field of neuroscience called neurotheology. I read one book about it, How God Changes Your Brain. At the end of the book the author offers perfectly secular ritual techniques to help you get some of the benefits of God without actually needing God. Ritual words, music, and movement help, but they don’t have to be religious. Meditation and mindfulness are useful, and they too don’t have to be religious. But religion has been around a lot longer than neurotheology, so I’m going to guess that whatever stuff a neurotheologist comes up with to hack your brain into getting the goods from God and religion without actual God or religion involved is not going to work as well, or be as rich, or just as fracking beautiful and mysterious and many-layered and multifaceted as actual God and actual religious practice.

Spiritual practices are technologies to connect with God. Or to get the goods. Experimenting is good, but we shouldn’t be too quick to throw out what has come out of thousands of years of tradition, which is really just a way of saying the collective experiments of generations. So I struggle with this mixed bag of commandments we’ve got, and not just the commandments but a mixed bag of practices and rituals spiraling out from the commandments. I struggle with figuring out which are important for me, at this time, to connect me with God. Because I see that it is my connection with God that has enabled me to live, far more than I’ve managed on my own in the past, according to what I would always have said were my values. ( G.K. Chesterton says something similar about Christianity in Orthodoxy: “This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.” )

I think my favorite How to Be Jewish book is Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice. It’s an introduction to the teachings of Reb Zalmon Schacter-Shalomi, the founder and spiritual leader of Jewish Renewal. Reb Zalman was a college outreach rabbi for Chabad when he decided that the insights of Hasidism needed to be brought to a much wider community of Jews. Lots of Jews find Renewal too woo-woo, touchy-feely, and new age for them. I guess my shul is sort of renewal, though we don’t identify with any denomonation at all. What I like about Reb Zalman is that he talks about God, unapologetically, and about having a relationship with God. We modern Jews are mostly pretty uncomfortable with God -- that’s why we are all agnostic or secularist or assimilated or intermarried or whatever. Not Zalman. Well, not the Hasids, either, but Hasidism is a lot to swallow, and it looks so horribly itchy and uncomfortable to be a Hasid in the summer.

Anyway, I read in Jewish with Feeling that traditionally the mitzvot are divided into three types: mishpatim, the ethical mitzvot; edot, the mitzvot of witnessing or remembrance; and chukim, ritual commandments, those which defy logic. Reb Zalman writes that each of the three types of mitzvot are different ways of being in relationship with God, of sanctifying our lives. The mishpatim are logically easy to assent to, but often very difficult to actually perform; it is the work of the other two types of mitzvot to strengthen us through a connection with God such that we are able to be transformed. Keeping Shabbat and keeping Passover, nailing a mezuzah to one’s door -- these are mitzvot of witnessing. They remind us that we were slaves in Egypt, that God rested and commands us too to rest, that we are to remember God when we enter or leave our houses. Reb Zalman talks about circumcision as perhaps the epitome of the chukkim -- a powerful and terrifying ritual that so many Jews submit their infant sons to, appalled, even, at themselves, desperate to find a way out of it, sure it is horrible, and most of the time going on to do it anyway.

It was that way for us, and when our son was born we were by no means believers in God. But I knew my son would be circumcised and I knew I’d want a bris. My mother thought that a bris was barbaric. No, I said, it’s the act that’s barbaric; only the ritual meaning could possibly redeem such a thing. Still, we called up, the day before, the Rabbi who’d married us, terrified to go through with it and terrified not to. Everyone feels like this, assured the Rabbi. Go ahead and do it. It’ll be fine.

And it was. This is a long post, and maybe I’ve strayed a long, long way from Ki Teitzei. It is easy to dismiss certain mitzvot as irrational, barbaric, and unneccesary. It’s easy to nod sagely at the wisdom and goodness of others, “yes, yes, of course, I ought to be like that, I ought to do that. That’s obvious, who needs to be told that anyway?” But my experience, and I think the experience of many who have found transformation in Judaism or in another religious tradition, has been that radical transformation, radical connection, a radical sense of the goodness of God and of our own capacity for goodness -- that those don’t come from smiling and nodding and they don’t come from only doing the things that make sense. I don’t keep all the mitzvot, by any means. God has not told me to keep kosher, for example, though in our household we eat so very little meat to begin with that it wouldn’t be a big stretch, except that I cannot imagine giving up jamon iberico and scallops and the occasional cheeseburger. But I try to be mindful of the mitzvot, even if I do not do them. I consider them, not only with my mind, but with my heart. The water of lustration, for example -- the ritual of the red heifer -- a bogglingly illogical ritual that, when I thought about it, made perfect sense in response to the spiritual contamination that is death. I’ve tried to keep shabbat without lighting candles, and it simply doesn’t work as well -- shabbat needs to be welcomed with candles and wine and the breaking of bread, and it needs to be sent on its way with more candles, and spices, and wine, at Havdalah. I could have decided, instead, that Tuesday would be our day of rest, and that we would welcome it with incense and chocolate bon bons and drums, and see it off by playing scrabble in the dark, with flashlights. Those would be rituals commanded by no one, shared by no one, neither more or less strange than the ones I practice now. But somehow, there’d be a vacuum. No one else, neither God nor person, would be involved. There wouldn’t be as much power there.

And I’m not in this religion thing for the fun of it. I’m in it for the goods. I want to be changed. I’m scared of that, too, scared to grab hold of that live electrical wire. But I do it, because, like Frankenstein’s monster, all that electricity changes me. Makes me more alive than alive. I sound a lot like a Christian here, I know. I could be speaking of new life in Jesus, of being born again. For Jews, I don’t know, it’s a little different maybe. Not turning to something new, but remembering who we were before we were born. Returning, which is the meaning of teshuvah, which is what is usually translated as repentence. We do not become new people, we Jews. We return to who we always were, we wipe the dust and grime off our souls. The soul you have given me is pure, we pray every morning. We do not need to be born again, we just need to return.

So I make my way through the sensible, the strange, the offensive, and the bizarre. I try to be mindful of all these mitzvot even when I do not do them. I do what I do and I listen, and I experiment, and I struggle. This is the journey I am on. I mark my discoveries with pillars of stone. “Surely God was in this place, and I did not know it.” (Someday many years later uptight priests will make my descendents tear the pillars down. “Do not worship in high places, do not build pillars of stone...” they’ll say, and some of what I discover will be lost. But there are still Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, wandering through a sacred landscape in a sacred scroll, turning and seeing their visitors are angels, after all. Mirthful; struck dumb with awe; afraid; triumphant, coming upon God unexpectedly and marking the way. There’s following them, our ancient and mythical forebears, and also the priests and their psalms, and also the rabbis and their fences. And the mystics, the hasidim, and the scholars, and the women, lighting candles on Friday evening, as the sun sets, all over the world, throughout our generations forever.

Shofetim: What is justice, and how do we pursue it?

2010-08-16T12:34:00.000-04:00

Shofetim has two very famous verses. They are both concerned with justice.

Deut 16:20 “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”

And 19:21 “Nor must you show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”

I have two not-particularly-related things to say about these verses, and if I were disciplined and professional and all that, I'd pick just one. But I'm going to say them both. First: Yes, you must show pity, and no, we don't take an eye for an eye. The rabbis made sure of that. Second: To pursue justice is to accept the burden of free will. This is the essence of being commanded. This is what it's all about. So those are my two big ideas, here's how I get to them:

The Rabbis of old read read the eye for eye bit and said, in effect, “Screw that!” They were fundamentally anti-fundamentalist. They built a practical religion out of the ashes of a failed state and years of failed rebellions and an antiquated, strange scripture full of irrelevant details and of judicial practices that seemed barbaric even by the rabbis’ time, not to mention our own.

They were not fundamentalists but they didn’t want to be religious revolutionaries either. If they’d wanted a revolution in their religion, they could have joined the followers of Jesus. But the followers of Jesus overturned the Law, and the Rabbis did not want to overturn. They wanted to be more creative; to work within the form they’d been given. The 613 laws like the shape of a sonnet, and the rabbis like poets, cleverly finding meanings within meanings within meanings, sparking an endless conversation.

The Rabbis said “Oh, but that’s just the written torah. We have the oral torah, and it’s been handed down generation after generation from Moses and Aaron themselves, given to the Jewish people by God along with the scrolls. Of course you can’t understand the written torah without the oral torah too!” And the Rabbis went ahead and made sure that no Jew ever thought that when the Torah said “eye for eye” it actually meant “eye for eye”.

One recent week, one of my own rabbis spoke approvingly of the Rabbis of old. We don’t have any truly great rabbinical leaders who are willing to make bold judgments anymore, she said sadly. And so halacha has stagnated. The world has changed, and the law has changed too, but only to push the world further away. This rabbi’s husband, though, himself a rabbi, gave a dvar on shofetim, and he said that “it is the awareness of contradiction of values that is the driving force of Jewish life.” We pursue justice, but we must also practice mercy. How can this be? How do we decide? These are the questions of halacha, of law. The answers provided are comprehensive and erudite; argumentative but respectful; humane but oriented toward God. The minority report is never suppressed.

I have two books by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, English-language compendia of Jewish ethical law. He devotes chapters to the halacha regarding, for example, lying. The Law is mostly against lying, but there are exceptions. If someone asks your opinion, will be hurt by the truth, and is not in a position to change as a result of the information, then you may tell what is often called a ‘white lie’ to protect the feelings of the person involved. But say if you tell the truth, the person could fix the issue. (“Yes, your breath does stink.”) Then it is a mitzvah to tell the truth when asked. Maybe I’ve got all that wrong; I’m not an expert. But he covers all this stuff, in detail, and it’s not just him. He’s reporting on two thousand years of the opinions of the best minds in Jewish culture. How to give charity to someone. How one should behave as a host. How to be a good guest. Under what circumstances can you withdraw life support from a dying person? What kinds of speech are harmful and should be avoided? How exactly do you honor your mother and your father, anyway?

Well, the best male minds, anyway. The best male, straight minds.

But anyway, so it is with justice. Justice, justice shall we pursue, but we must temper it with mercy, as God does.

Here's my second point about shofetim, and really it is the more important one, because it's not about the rabbis and the bible, it's about us, and it's about God, about us and God right now, this minute.

And forgive me, I didn’t take Michael Sandel’s course in college, and I didn’t even read the book. My philosophy is all bolloxed up, and somehow what I want to say is all tangled up with a lot of ideas I got while reading G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy on my iphone while standing up in a crowded, shuddering green line trolley. Good ole G.K. says “Christianity” and “The Christian” a lot, and makes a lot of special claims for the culture that Christianity made. Maybe he is even right about some of them. But a lot of what he says about Christianity seems more generic than that; seems applicable at least to monotheism in general. But then again, perhaps not. Perhaps I just want somehow to agree with him and love what he says and believe him and yet not be a Christian.

What GK says, and like I said above, no doubt a billion other people have said it too, and I’m sure a billion have poked holes, nothing new under the sun and all that, is that there is no justice without free will.

If we are to pursue justice, then what people do actually matters. Why do we care if the world is just? Because some aspects of that caring, or something similar to that caring, or something that comes along with that kind of caring, helped some of us survive a little bit better in the past. Yes, I’m down with all that. You won’t hear me going up against evolutionary psychology. Hell, I like a little armchair evolutionary psychology just as much as the next person, I reckon.

But why do I not throw that to the winds now? Why do I not take my cue from Nietzsche and from Gordon Gekko and jettison my sense of justice?

Look, Darwin did not invent determinism, did not invent materialism, did not invent a world full of emptiness and despair and meaninglessness . Darwin did not invent the notion that free will is an illusion, that our consciousness, our morality, our desire for the beautiful and the good are illusions, that our selves are illusions, that this world is an illusion, that choice is an illusion. He did not say that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That was someone else, hundreds of years before Darwin. And before that man, the Stoics. And the Epicurians. And the Buddha. It’s an old problem.

But here we are, Shofetim, commanded to pursue justice. By whom? We do not know. The name, if ever there could be a name for such, is lost to us. And how? It’s not always easy, that how. We don’t always get it right. Most of the time we don’t, probably. We’re only human.

Who wants to be commanded so? Why should we tolerate it? Why pay attention to a commandment written down in an old, old scroll, from an old place, a war-torn desert land, from people who stoned adulterers and slaughtered the children of their enemies?

Shh. Listen.

We pay attention because we feel ourselves commanded thus, even without the words, even without the scroll. Against all evidence to the contrary, we feel ourselves to be commanded and if we are commanded to pursue justice it must be something we can do, however imperfectly, and if we are able to pursue justice that is because we have free will, truly, in some way we cannot understand. Along with and beside and intertwined with everything we are through a hundred thousand years of evolution.

Think about what a commandment means! We are not asked politely; we are commanded. Yet somehow, having been commanded, we are made free. We may choose to obey or to disobey.

Chesterton writes:

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say ‘if you please’ to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness.

He did not say much about Judaism; he didn’t think much about it, I imagine. But the Christians did not invent free will. The Jews didn’t either. Free will was given to us, but we have to accept the gift. A strange gift, that comes in the form of an order. “Do this!” It is a beautiful but difficult gift. Chesterton talks about ‘the man at the crossroads’; in Mussar we speak of bechirah points: the times and places we are given a choice. Our lives are not always at crossroads; not every moment is a bechirah point. But those are the most interesting times. Here is Chesterton again (ignore his insistence on the Christian):

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?--that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of DANGER, like a boys book: it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) ‘to be continued in our next.’ Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.

But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like.

We are commanded to pursue justice, like a white whale, like a fox, like a criminal or a lover. We do not have to obey the command, and obeying the command doesn’t tell us how the story will come out, or guarantee that we will catch justice, that justice will be done. But in obeying we paradoxically become free. We declare we are not bound by our genes or our environments or our culture or our history or our parents or our mistakes or our personalities or our astrological signs or our RNA or our diseases or our early childhoods or our ethnicity or our race or our nationality or our economic system or our handicaps. We are free to choose, to struggle, to make mistakes, and to repent. We are free to change ourselves, to become better than we were. We are free to draw closer to God, and we are free to walk away. We can pretend we didn’t hear. We can pretend that our choices don’t ultimately matter. But that way lies death, and bondage, and a world emptied of meaning.

Here’s a quote from an actual Jew, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, same point:

You already know in your heart what your best choice is at this moment. Yet,e even now, you are free to demur, free to indulge your anger, your pettiness, your horniness, your hunger, your exhaustion - whatever it is that makes you deviate from the mitzvah that awaits, and your truest, best self, the tzelem Elohim within. But God loves you with an ahavat olam, an abiding love. God bids you to make the best choice and gives you the capacity to make it. "See," says God, "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your children may live.”

Pursue justice, so that we may live as free beings.

Re'eh -- On gods whom you have not experienced

2010-08-15T09:07:00.000-04:00

Sorry, devoted readers (hi Mom!), I was offline for a whole week in Vermont, and so I missed posting Re’eh on (late) time.

In Re’eh, we get admonitions to follow only Adonai, our God, and not to follow any other Gods, “whom you have not experienced.” We also get some of the classic Deuteronomic admonitions to only worship and sacrifice to God at His Temple in Jerusalem, and not to sacrifice at ‘high places’ all around the land of Israel, as had been done in the past. These admonitions reflect a priestly concern during the time of King Josiah to consolidate worship at the temple, and to root out practices like sacrificing at stone pillars that bring Israelites, so the priests worried, perilously close to idolatry. (No matter that all the earliest ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob among others, are specifically recorded to have erected stone monuments at sacred places all over Canaan, and sacrificed to their God at those places. Such is no longer to be countenanced, in this Temple phase of Israelite religion.)

It’s easy to be flippant about the ulterior motives of the authors and collectors of the Torah, this oddest of collections: Well, this guy was making a power grab. This was an old ‘just so’ story about how a place came to be named what it was named. These are records of wars; these are myths that came from Babylonia; everyone tells this story of a great Flood; lots of nations had legal codes with language just like this one. What’s so special about all this, that I should read it still and think about it still and struggle still with its words, infuriating, evocative, repetitive, inexplicable, dull, ridiculous, contradictory words?

The longer I engage with Torah, though, the more it seems worthwhile to do, and the less I like my flippancy and anger at its words. They take me nowhere but to a lonely corner where I sit, arms folded, watching everyone else, wound up in myself and constricting my heart. So I struggle with the words as Jews have done for thousands of years, and I sit myself down at the table, and I join the conversation.

This is the mystery of religious practice: from the place of not-practicing, its value is completely opaque. To judge the value of a spiritual practice, we must engage in that practice ourselves. We must taste and see: is the fruit good to eat? Will my practice cause me to blossom and give forth fruit, bearing God’s goodness into our shattered world? Does it quench my thirst? Does it give rise to compassion, to mercy, to peace, love, kindness, grace, strength, vision, and generosity? And does its value seem to stretch beyond those values, as though it is touching on their Source?

Of course, and here’s the kicker: you enter into a practice and it changes you, and you learn to value different things, and you become part of an interpretive community and you absorb that community’s modes of thinking and learning and being and whether or not there’s something ‘real’ behind it all, there’s something obviously real in front of it: the psychology and sociology and neurology of it. The mind-hackiness of it. The community of it. The functional MRI pictures of it.

It’s easy to say that that is the reality and the other Reality that draws me in is not a true Reality, but is something we made up, my interpretive community and I. Something we are making up right now, talking and talking and talking. From outside this world of depth and meaning, things look simple: here is a neurological change in response to prayer. Here is a mode of speaking Amy has learned from some Rabbis. Here is an image from her tradition, burnt into her memory from early childhood. Here is the Rabbi sitting next to her next to the corpse that was her uncle. It’s all very clear, the surface.

But wait, before I said it was opaque, and now I say it is perfectly clear!

It’s the meaning behind the meaning that is opaque to mere observers. The extra dimension itself, and the conviction or intuition or suspension of disbelief that the extra dimension is a true one, that it explains something about human experience that is not otherwise explicable -- that is opaque. But how a religious practitioner comes to find meaning in their practice, how they enter the community, what it does to their brains -- that’s perfectly transparent, it’s on this level of reality, it’s the how.

Last night my son said at dinner that “How” was the most important word in the world. My son is a scientist, an inventor, a seeker after technological knowledge. I said in response that “Why” was also an important question, and my father-in-law then said “but it is not a scientific question. It is a theological question.” “Of course,” I said. “And it is important even if we don’t know how to answer it.”

We should not allow our mere inability to answer questions prevent us from raising them. We should not allow our failure even to find a reliable method of studying a question prevent us from using what unreliable methods we have. All our methods for observing Divine Reality are unreliable; spiritual technologies alter us as we practice them, but they are the only means we have. As John Polkinghorne, the physicist-turned-Anglican-priest, likes to say, this is not so different from our relationship to quantum phenomena. Our observation alters that which we observe. It is difficult and mysterious and we get only glimpses and we are stuck with what we can get because that is it the nature of the object. “We know the everyday world in one way, in its Newtonian clarity; we know the quantum world in another way, in its Heisenbergian uncertainty. Our knowledge of entities must be allowed to conform to the way in which they can actually be known. If we are to meet reality at all, we must meet it on its own terms.” (Faith, Science, and Understanding, p. 7) So with our attempts to study the Divine Reality, or to ascertain its existence or its nature.

Only the Divine Reality is not an object for our study, but a Subject. We are limited to studying divine reality by way of entering into relationship with that reality, via the technologies that the world religions have developed for entering into that relationship. One can argue that the reality we thus experience is a put-on, explicable in terms of all the materialist realities we already know. One can argue that the sense of meaning thus experienced is an epiphenomenon of our pattern-finding, agent-assuming brains. Again, as Polkinghorne says, all well and good. But: “If you want to make a materialist reductionist uneasy, ask one what he or she makes of music, and insist on a response that corresponds to the actual way one lives and not to an ideologically glossed version of it. ‘Neurological responses to vibrations in the air’, seems totally inadequate as an account of listening to a performance of the Mass in B Minor.” (ibid., p. 14)

From inside or from outside, the question of Who, if anyone, is on the other side of the relationship remains mysterious. For those of us in the relationship, there seem strong hints that on the other side there is an Other. I see evidence that the Other is not just me in a mask. But it’s not irrefutable evidence. It would not stand up in court. It is simply suggestive. That is all I may ever get. As Polkinghorne suggests, Divine Reality, if indeed there is such, is not likely to conform to our scientific modes of evidence, nor likely to be entirely explicable and understandable and graspable by human beings. It cannot be picked apart and studied and observed and experimented upon, because it is not that kind of thing. It can only be experienced, and because of that, its reality will always be questionable.

But the fruits of this practice are irrefutable. Whatever you think of my so-called relationship with God, it brings forth blessing and not curse, although sometimes its blessings look at first like curses and vice versa. An outsider can see these fruits, as my husband does, as the product of a magnificent mind hack. That’s one theory, and it may even be true. I keep faith with the Person on the other side of this relationship, however much I cannot prove the existence of such a Person, because for me the fruits come from the Person and not from the mind hack.

Yes, this is really coming back around to actual verses from the actual parsha! Here they are:

Deuteronomy 11.26 - 11.28
“See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you upon this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.”

And 13.11 If a relative or someone close to you “entices you in secret, saying ‘Come let us worship other gods’ -- whom neither you nor your fathers have experienced -- [...] do not assent or give heed to him. Show him no pity or compassion, and do not shield him; but take his life.”

And 13.13-15 “If you hear it said ... that some scoundrels from among you have gone and subverted the inhabitants of their town, saying, ‘Come let us worship other gods’ -- whom you have not experienced -- you shall investigate and inquire and interrogate thoroughly.” If the charges are true, the text goes on, kill everyone in the town, “and burn the town and all its spoil as a holocaust to the Lord your God,” says my JPS translation, chillingly.

Three times in this text the Israelites are told not to turn to other gods ‘whom you have not experienced’. The punishment for doing so is death.

This all would be reasonably straightforward, if harsh, except for the clause about experience.

Given this clause, that you are guilty if you turn away to a God you have not experienced, then how can anyone be proven to be guilty? Who can know what face the One True God wears to others? What if the other Gods we turn to are not other gods at all, but the One True God? What if instead the other gods are true also, but we cannot know that without experiencing them? Do we open ourselves up to investigating other Gods, to experiencing them, to know if they are true or not? Risking that we will lose our souls to false gods, to idols, to mirages?

These are urgent questions in a pluralistic world, as they were for the Israelites, surrounded by a plethora of gods, and for the early Christians, living amongst the proliferating gods of the Roman empire, east and west. If we are commanded to burn a town as a holocaust to the Lord your God, we had better understand how to tell if someone follows other gods and not simply the same God wrapped in different packaging. And how can we know this without entering into the investigation, inquiry, and interrogation of that god and the religion and spiritual practices inspired by that god?

So here we are:

Don’t turn to other gods you have not experienced.
Kill Israelites who turn to other gods they have not experienced.
How can we possibly know whether someone has experienced another god or not, and whether their experience is in truth from the ‘One True God’, or from some other source?
What does it mean to experience God, anyway?
Is experience a reliable indicator of the Reality of God, or is it illusory?

It is often stated rather simplistically that Judaism is a religion of acts, not of faith. For Jews , the story goes, there is no such thing as ‘sinning in your heart’. There are only mitzvot and the breaking of mitzvot. Judaism does not care about interiority, is not interested in faith, but is a kind of religious behaviorism.

But here we are, cautioned not to turn to gods we have not experienced. The people of Israel are again and again reminded of the miracles they themselves experienced, of the pillar of fire, the parting of the sea, the manna, the water bursting forth from dry rock, the voice out of the cloud. And if there is no experience of God, then why follow the laws at all? Many of them are inexplicable and absurd. One of the oldest mitzvot is painful, at least for men. Who would circumcise their baby boys to follow a God they had not experienced themselves? (We did, though. We didn’t understand why, and it made us rather sick to our stomachs, but we did it.) How could a person find the energy to fulfill such laws if they had no direct experience of the God who commanded them? On the other hand, how is one to experience God unless one takes up the spiritual practices recommended to enable the experience? It is a chicken-and-egg problem, and the theological solution to it is that God is seeking us, whether or not we are seeking God.

If we seek God, we take up a practice, we taste and see, and then, as we taste and see, and practice, in community, we may more and more find that God is also seeking us. And we may find that the more we practice, the more our lives are transformed, and that it is self-evident that they are transformed for the better. To experience God is to be transformed; to become more humane. Anything that looks like a god that we do not experience in this way, upon investigation, interrogation, inquiry --- that is not God, but an idol. Relationships with God are never static, they are not particularly self-affirming, they are full of doubt and angst and confusion and crying out in the wilderness and wondering if we have been forsaken and fear of new things and trying to discern and attempting and failing to do what is right in our own eyes and the eyes of God, and turning again and again toward God, deepening the relationship, seeking more and more of the life-giving experience that is God.

So practice may begin in doubt and remain always in doubt, or grow to faith, or a mix of faith and doubt together. But an adult does not newly turn to spiritual practice (practices they have not been brought up in, or done consistently, such that to do it is natural and not to do it is not natural) in the certainty that there is no God. We must be open to experiencing God if we are to do so. And that openness is indeed a faculty of the heart. It must be cultivated, and usually with pain. Faith matters, even in Judaism, because it is far easier not to practice than it is to practice without faith. To practice without faith or the possibility of faith or openness to faith is indeed to be under the burden of the law, as the Christians would say, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans. Without an openness to direct experience of God practice is worse than no practice, as it leads to self-righteousness and to spiritual pride and those are not the fruits of drawing close to God. But Christians who believe the Jewish laws are death, that to live under the law is to live under death, have not experienced God as God is experienced in the practice of mitzvot. To do a mitzvah is to open a connection to God, provided you do it with an open heart. It’s not the only connection, but it certainly is one, and anyone who claims otherwise has never kept the Sabbath or worn a prayer shawl or sat around a seder table or blessed and shared the wine and challah at a Sabbath morning service.

So those who have not had experience of God cannot report on it, and those who have find their reports tainted by the fact that their experience is personal, subjective, interior, and can be reduced to various neurological and social phenomena. This is an impasse for materialism, but not for theology, which trusts that God wants to be known and that we are able to know God, but not in the ways we are able to know the laws of physics, because God is not a law but God, and though we can’t understand what God is, we seem to have powerful access to God when we interact with God as a Person with whom we can have a relationship.

So who should we stone, and who should we burn, and should we investigate them with the rack and the waterboard, or with hot pokers or by pulling out their fingernails? How shall we ascertain if someone has experienced a true god or not? What towns will we bomb into oblivion, women and children howling, covered in napalm and burning alive?

However we pull someone to pieces, whatever George Orwell said, we cannot get into a person’s heart and read the experiences written on it like a scroll. We do not know what someone has taken to heart. We can guess, by watching the fruits they bear. But it is only a guess. On the evidence of a guess, there can be no throwing of stones, no burnings or drownings or draw-and-quarterings. If we must inquire about the authenticity of someone’s God, we must do so by taking up their practices. If we do not want to taste and see, we cannot judge their God; we can judge only the fruits of their practice.

What does this mean for interfaith dialogue? Polkinghorne writes:

In contrast to the unanimity of the scientists on such fundamental issues as the existence of quarks and gluons or the molecular basis of genetics, there is no unanimity in the theological world about even so fundamental an issue as the existence of one true God -- Theravada Buddhism seems at best agnostic on the question.

[...]

I can do little more than acknowledge the problem and say that I regard it as one of the most urgent and critical items on the contemporary theological agenda.

[...]

Let me content myself by saying two things. The first is that religious understanding must start within a tradition, taking with great serious the experience and insight that tradition preserves. Once again there is no accessible view from nowhere, only a perspective from somewhere. [...] The second point is the complement to the first, namely, that if theology is to be true to its essential nature as a search for truthful understanding, then tehse issues will not be pursued by means of each tradition stridently reasserting the total correctness and adequacy of its own exclusive point of view, but by a truth-seeking dialogue between the traditions, long and painful and difficult as that will surely be. The quest for motivated belief will take on a further dimension when it is pursued in the setting of this truly ecumenical meetingplace. There is a vital necessity that we should be willing to continue on this shared long search for the deepest truth about reality. (ibid, 50-51)

I talk about Christians a lot on this blog, and about Jesus. I have these Christian blog friends, as I’ve mentioned before. I’m also really into the Dalai Lama. For a while I used to go to sitting meditation at the Shambhala center near where I live. It’s not because I’m a crypto-Christian or a Crypto-Buddhist and, I hope, it’s not because I’m a new-agey navel-gazing grazer collector of religious practices. It’s because I’m seeking Reality, and because I know there are many things my tradition has gotten right and some things it may not have gotten right. And because when I see people who follow what look like other gods whom I have not experienced, I want to know what their experience is like, and I want to see for myself what fruits it brings, and whether we’ve experienced the same Reality or quite different ones.

I do not want to throw stones and I do not want to burn anything to the ground in a holocaust to God. I want to sit at the table, all night long, asking questions, making connections, joining with others to experience God.

Eikev

2010-08-03T20:53:00.000-04:00

So, Eikev.

Today I went to have lunch with some Christians I’d never met in person. I knew them from a blog I’ve been following for a little more than a year, Not the Religious Type, and I heard about the blog from a member of the church the blogger is pastor of, Greater Boston Vineyard. I met the member of the church because I happened to be there for an event that had rented the church, and my daughter, then two, did not want to be in the event. So I’d taken her out of it, and was sitting in a community room where some people were cleaning up from a church event, watching her hang on the stairwell like a little monkey, and she went up to the church member in question and sat down with her and started a conversation.

The great thing about having a charming, gregarious child when you are sort of an introvert yourself is that you meet all kinds of people through your kid.

Oh, well, I could tell the whole story, but I already have.

Anyway, the people who run the blog were having a conference, and I asked if I could come by and meet people, because it is fun to meet people in person you’ve gotten to know so well on the internet. And it’s a very unusual community, that blog, because everyone who comments genuinely wants to listen and explore and connect. I mean, everyone. There is never a flame war on that blog. And we talk about some really difficult things, at least difficult things in the context of the larger Christian community. We really challenge each other.

There is absolutely no good reason I should be hanging out there, really. Not only is it a Christian blog, it’s often discussing intra-Christian issues or issues about leadership in churches. It is not an interfaith blog. I am the lone Jew there, among a crowd of people who are really pretty into Jesus. It was very strange that I ended up there in the first place, and stranger that I stayed, lurking, but reading religiously all the posts and all the comments, and then stranger still that I began to comment myself, and then to write guest posts. I have really never understood any of that, but I have tried to trust that good things will come of it.

Dave, the blogger/pastor/conference leader, said he’d arrange a lunch. So today I went out to this church to meet a bunch of Christians to talk about God. I get there and it’s totally overwhelming, because there are a ton of people, and Dave had just quoted something I’d written in an email in a big talk he’d given the night before, so everyone knew about me. I was a minor celebrity at this conference of Christians. So I end up with this group of about eight people and we go to a greek place for lunch and we talk about God, and religion, and faith, and science, and theology, and prayer, and Shabbat, and GLBT issues, and Judaism and Christianity and someone brings up something he’d just read by Jonathan Sacks, who is the Chief Rabbi of something or other in the UK, and it is completely fun and comfortable and amazing. Nobody is trying to convert anybody, nobody’s arguing loudly about how they are right and the other people are crazy jerks. There are just a bunch of smart people talking about God, only they’re all Christian except me, and basically I’ve never been in a room before with that many really fun, smart, Christian with a capital C Christians before.

This is getting along to parsha Eikev, I promise. Sort of. A little bit, anyway.

So the most amazing thing about this lunch I had with these blog friends was at the end. We prayed together. We prayed together in a format that is very Christian, in that “let us pray” way that evangelical Christians do. Or spirit-filled christians, or something. I mean, it’ s not book of common prayer prayer. And it’s not “Now I lay me down to sleep”. It is communal, extemporaneous, prayer, and it’s not something that exists in Jewish tradition at all, as far as I can see. Lord knows Jews have plenty of prayer; the siddur is an unbelievable treasure trove of prayers, songs, meditations, prayers for being able to pray, blessings, readings, and psalms, traditional Jews say a whole bunch of fixed prayers every day, three times a day, and davvening, praying the Jewish prayers, often standing and rocking back and forth, bowing, motioning with arms, covering eyes, rearranging prayer shawl is a full-body, full-mind, full-spirit experience when it goes right. And there’s a fixed blessing for every occasion: upon seeing a rainbow, eating different types of food, hearing good news, getting up in the morning, going to sleep at night, using the toilet. The idea is that all these blessings that you say on all these different occasions sanctify your entire life, all the tiny otherwise mindless events of your life.

Of course, prayer can be mindless too.

So we have a lot of fixed prayer, and it can be really meaningful and beautiful, and then of course there’s an idea that people will pray personal prayers to, within and between and among and at any time.

Except it can be really hard to figure out how, because that kind of prayer is done in private, and no one ever models how to pray that way. And since no one ever models it, you never learn how to do it.

So this particular kind of Christian have this habit of praying together. And because it’s out loud, you learn how people do it. And because it’s communal, and people pray for each other in a communal way, it’s incredibly, beautifully powerful. Later I found out that they call this kind of prayer “conversational prayer” and that a lot of time and energy is devoted to teaching and practicing this prayer.

So there we are standing in a circle saying goodbye, and they’re all going back to their conference and I have to book it back home to meet the kids when they came back from camp. And I said “I would really love it if we could all pray together the way you all do.” And the two women in the group came and stood next to me lightly touching me, and someone said a few words of prayer for me, and there was silence for a bit, and I could feel their hands on me, their love and their strength and their presence, and then another person prayed, and another. It was a circle but we didn’t go around in a circle, and I think everyone said something, and I did too, and it was one of the most moving experiences of my life, just those few moments with these people I’d just met in the flesh two hours ago. There was an extraordinary sense of presence. Everyone was really there. People thanked God for everything I’d brought to the blog and to their lives. They asked God to help me stay healthy. They asked God to guide me tomorrow for this very difficult work meeting I’d told them all that I had. They blessed me and they asked that God give me every good thing and I thanked God for that moment, I told God and them how grateful I was for that very moment, shehecheyanu v’kiyamanu v’higiyanu lazman hazeh, blessed are you oh lord our god who has enabled us to reach this day. I asked God to give us more good fruits from this strange alliance we’ve made, the crazy jewish girl from the family of atheists, and the praying-out-loud christians. I prayed to God but with them, through them, almost. Like together we were a radio tower, with an antenna and a repeater, and we could hear more and be more heard together like that.

And the very light touch on my shoulder and my back, like reiki, almost, or the sweetest kiss you ever got from your mother, or a beautiful dream that you’ve almost forgotten but not quite.

So I am talking about prayer, and the power of prayer. And how much I am learning about how to pray from these Christians and their way of praying.

It’s incredibly scary to open yourself to God that way in the company of other people. It is a kind of nakedness. Just like it is incredibly scary to open myself as I have on that blog to a group of Christians, to open myself to what I might learn from them about God. There’s an almost instinctive desire to pull away the moment we are really touched by difference, the moment we are really challenged. What if I caught Christianity from them, like cooties? How would I explain that one to my friends and family, already hard pressed to understand how I caught God? To stand in communion and to pray together with Christians, given all the communal history and all my personal history, growing up surrounded by well-meaning or not-so-well-meaning Southern Baptists or others who told me all the time I was going to hell... That’s scary. You can’t fake that kind of open-ness. It’s a risk, and always a risk. Will I have to change, and if so, how? Where will this go?

So in Eikev Moses is re-telling the whole sordid story for what seems like the billionth time: slaves in egypt, mighty hand, signs and wonders, first set of stone tablets, golden calf, 40 days and nights, new stone tablets, rebellion and wandering and manna and the promised land. He tells the people what blessings they’ll receive in the promised land, and he warns them that if they do not honor the covenant that all their blessings will be taken away. So stop being so self-focused, people, he says. Just do only what God requires of you. Chapter 10:12-14: “And now, O Israel, what does the Lord, your God, demand of you? Only to fear the Lord, your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, and to worship the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord and His statutes, which I command you this day, for your good.” Then we get verse 16: “You shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart, therefore, and be no more stiffnecked.”

The idea here is of a carapace of sorts, or a callous, that is built up around our hearts and prevents them from being open. A constricted, hardened heart is not open, and it cannot give and it cannot receive blessings. An uncircumcised heart is also hidden: it hides from God and from others and even from itself. God called out in the garden “Where are you?” and Adam wished to hide his nakedness, but he could not. So he circumcised his heart and cried “Hineni!” (Here I am!).

Like the plain old physical circumcision, circumcising the heart is pretty scary, and not without pain. ( I think of Eustace tearing off his dragon skin to find his real self in Voyage of the Dawn Treader .) I think perhaps Christians maybe think of this as becoming born again and undergoing baptism, which I think is sort of strange, because the thing that is so very different about spiritually cutting away the covering of our hearts from the physical act is that the spiritual act is never done once and for all. There’s so much evil in ourselves and in the world that our hearts just keep getting calloused and encased and we keep needing to cut all that away again. It’s not being born again, it’s being born again and again and again and again. It’s not being, it’s becoming. Every day we must wake up and circumcise our hearts again so that we can greet God and our neighbors, and ourselves, even, with openhearted love and honor.

This would be a miserable prospect if it were not that even though in this world we must always pick up the knife and cut away, it gets easier to do it as we go on. We get better at wielding the knife and we get better at withstanding the pain of it. And also, more strangely, the knife itself seems to get sharper rather than duller as we go on, and the foreskin of the heart thinner and thinner and softer and softer.

These aren’t particularly original thoughts I’m having here, about the foreskin of our hearts. But this verse speaks to me so deeply now because of this relationship I have with these amazing and openhearted Christians, because of how I’ve had to open my heart to them and how they’ve done the same, and because of how that opening has changed me, how it has borne fruit. It has borne fruit not only because of the respectful exchange of ideas, but because of the practice it affords us in circumcising our hearts, and for me also it has borne fruit because it has introduced me to a technology of prayer that I think itself is an amazingly effective practice for opening/circumcising our hearts. In conversational prayer we lay ourselves open to God and to others and to ourselves: in words, in touch, in silence. I imagine such prayer is not always as moving as it was to me today; like all spiritual practice or like sex I’m sure it is sometimes rote, sometimes forced, sometimes fine but not spectacular, sometimes amazing, and sometimes transcendent. For me, it was transcendent. And if I had not opened myself to the risks of associating with them, I would not have had that experience.

This is not to say, at all, that my Jewish prayer experiences have not also run the gamut from bad to spectacular, or that this prayer technology is better than the ones in my own faith, or that the experience means that I should be a Christian.

It’s more about the perils and the rewards of interfaith friendship and dialogue and communion. Ironically much of the rest of Eikev is, as so often, entirely focused on the perils and very clear that there are no rewards:

7:25 “The graven images of their gods you will burn with fire; you shall not covet the silver or gold that is upon them and take it for yourself, lest you be ensnared by it, for it is an abomination to the Lord, your God.”

8:19 “And it will be, if you forget the Lord your God and follow other gods, and worship them, and prostrate yourself before them, I bear witness against you this day, that you will surely perish.”

11:16-17 “Beware, lest your heart be misled, and you turn away and worship strange gods and prostrate yourselves before them. And the wrath of the Lord will be kindled against you, and He will close off the heavens, and there will be no rain, and the ground will not give its produce, and you will perish quickly from upon the good land that the Lord gives you.”

Last week we had Deut. Chapter 6:14-15 “Do not go after other gods, of the gods of the peoples who are around you. For the Lord, your God, is a zealous God among you, lest the wrath of the Lord, your God, be kindled against you, and destroy you off the face of the earth.”

Chapter 7, verses 2-5, was particularly harsh about other peoples’ gods:

And the Lord, your God, will deliver them to you, and you shall smite them. You shall utterly destroy them; neither shall you make a covenant with them, nor be gracious to them. You shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughter to his son, and you shall not take his daughter for your son. For he will turn away your son from following Me, and they will worship the gods of others, and the wrath of the Lord will be kindled against you, and He will quickly destroy you. But so shall you do to them: You shall demolish their altars and smash their monuments, and cut down their asherim trees, and burn their graven images with fire.

And yet how are we to reconcile these admonishments with the simultaneous admonishment to love God, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to circumcise the foreskins of our hearts, to open ourselves? Our hearts cannot be both soft and hard at the same time. If we are to love God we must love God-In-Our-Neighbor, and other peoples’ Gods or other peoples’ Godlessness are part of those other people. There is no love without openness, and openness to change. There is no love without the risk that the love will change you. And yes, too, the risk that our hearts may be misled.

How can we be instructed to love at the same time that we are instructed to show no mercy to The Others who inhabit the land of Canaan, when we are instructed not to marry The Others and not to make any treaties with them and not to be gracious to them?

Can both these instructions be operative? Are both in some sense true? It doesn’t seem to me like they can be, and since I feel I have to choose, I choose love. Maybe there’s a way to think about it all that brings to mind the slogan of some brand of toilet paper: “Soft and Strong”. Somehow we must live our own spiritual lives with strength and conviction and yet open ourselves to the spiritual lives of others.

One way, perhaps to do that, is to share in and learn from the spiritual technologies of others. Skills-exchange, if you will. I think there’s been in recent years a lot of cross-fertilization between, say, Buddhism and Judaism, and between Buddhism and Christianity. I don’t see so much happening between Judaism and Christianity, probably in part because of the contentious and painful history between the two, needing no elaboration here, and maybe in part because the close relationship and intermingling mean that we’ve already exchanged all the good ideas we had to exchange, and maybe I just don’t see much because I haven’t been looking in the right places.

Of course ‘interfaith dialogue’ includes theological discussion too. But I like very much the framework in which The Dalai Lama and Brother Lawrence undertook their Christian-Buddhist seminar, chronicled in the book The Good Heart: it was a mix of theological discussion and sitting meditation practice. The spiritual practice together, all felt, was essential to or foundational for the theological conversation.

This is far too long a blog post, because it has too many different things shoved into it. I haven’t even gotten to the part about the interesting ethnographic research I’ve found about the practice of conversational prayer, research that actually took place at a church that is part of the Vineyard movement. I haven’t gotten to the book I’m reading by John Polkinghorne and the seriousness and humility with which he approaches the important question of the irreconcilable differences between some of the major faith traditions, and what that says about our ability to do theology and gain what he calls ‘verisimilitudinous knowledge’ of the world. That’s, like, another 3000 words, and honestly, no matter how good a writer I am, you really don’t have the time. I should be snappy and punchy like a TV ad. I should be on-point and goal-oriented, like a well-run meeting. I should not ramble and I should not use the week’s parsha (well,let’s be honest, LAST week’s parsha) as merely a jumping-off place to some other thing that’s what I really want to talk about.

But I’ll open my heart to what’s here for me now, to this Really Existing Moment. Maybe you will too, and maybe we will open our hearts together.*

Okay, here’s something my favorite Rabbi blogger, Rami Shapiro, wrote. (Oh, wait, he does interfaith stuff with Christians! So it does happen!):

“My religion is love. My method is Judaism as I define it for myself. Won’t this weaken community if we each define Judaism for ourselves? Maybe, but who cares? My goal is love not branded community. If I am loving, I will find others who are the same. Love will be our bond, and we will welcome any brand that serves it.”

* cue cheesy music and swaying celebrities; photoshop john lennon into the picture, and we’re all set.

Va-ethannan: What do you get the parsha that has everything?

2010-07-21T08:03:00.000-04:00

If you want one parsha that hits practically every theme of Jewish tradition, you can do worse than go for Va-ethannan.

You’ve got Moses, begging The Lord to enter the Promised Land, and reporting back that “The Lord said to me ‘Enough! Never speak to me of this matter again!’” (Deuteronomy 3:26).

You get God promising that observing the laws will be “proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples...” (4:6) and there you have it, the tradition of exceptional Jewish intelligence.

You get plenty of warnings to “Never Forget” ; for example: “But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live.” (4:9)

You get your Ten Commandments (one version of them, anyway...), you get your stone tablets, you get your Lord who “spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of his words but perceived no shape -- nothing but a voice.” (4:12)

You get your advance warning of and explanation for the Diaspora:

When you have begotten children and children’s children and are long established in the land, should you act wickedly ... I call heaven and earth this day to witness against you that you shall soon perish from the land ... The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a scant few of you shall be left ... There you will serve man-made gods of wood and stone, that cannot see or eat or smell. ( 4:25-28)

Well, sort of. It probably wasn’t really advance warning; scholars figure Deuteronomy was written mostly after there’d already been some scattering.

Did I mention the Ten Commandments? Cue the thunderclouds.
“You shall have no other God beside me.” Except when you serve man-made gods, which look a lot like Goldman Sachs, I’ll bet. Or a dry-goods store in rural Alabama. Here we are in the Diaspora, ruled by money and surrounded by the idols of consumer culture. Even here, there’s hope, however: “But if you search for the Lord Your God, you will find him, if only you seek him with all your heart and soul..” ( 4:29).

But wait! There’s more. Also included is the Biblical source for the most famous prayer in Judaism, the Sh’ma. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord alone.” (6:4). Or translate that as “Listen, Israelites, Yah is God, Yah is One.” Or “Listen Jews, The Godness of God is a Moebius Strip.” Okay, the last translation is my own paraphrase.

And then you get the first paragraph of what I always called, growing up, the Veahafta, but which most Jews think of as part of the K’riat Sh’ma, and boy, if you go to shul at all you’ve got that sucker memorized, reverberating in your head like the most ancient earworm ever. “You shall love the lord your god with all your heart, with all your strength, and with all your might. Set these words, which I command you this day, upon your heart. Speak of them when you are at home, and when you are away, when you lie down, and when you rise up, Teach them faithfully to your children. Bind them as a sign upon your hand, let them be a symbol before your eyes, and upon your gates.” That was from memory, so the order of all these instructions is probably not quite right. Tefillin, Mezuzot, and “You shall love...”.

But wait! Still more! Free of charge, here’s the source text for the question asked by the wise son at every Passover seder: “What mean the decrees, laws, and rules?” “We were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt...” (6:20ish)

And as a final bonus gift, some monotheistic fundamentalism: “You shall tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred posts, and consign their images to the fire” (7:5).

So this is Judaism.

Listen. Love. Remember. Seek. Obey. Freedom from slavery, the mighty hand of God, a voice from the flames, stone tablets and commandments and the Promised Land. Exodus. Do not worship other Gods, which are not gods. Smashing idols.

Telling the same stories for thousands of years! Who can grasp the enormity of that? Not just stories, but ideas. Hints. Glimpses. Trying to make everything fit tidily together, when of course it doesn’t. Themes weave in and out, again and again. Second verse, same as the first, sings a voice in my head. Old stories on top of older stories on top of who knows what.

Listen. Love. Remember. Seek. Obey. That’s quite enough for the moment. Maybe enough for always.

Devarim

2010-07-18T12:48:00.000-04:00

Yes, late again. Maybe I should make it a policy to be one week behind. Then I wouldn’t be late all the time.

Devarim is the first parsha in the Book of Deuteronomy. The entire parsha is an extended recap of Exodus and Numbers, like that hour-long special they showed before the Lost series finale. Much of it is told in first person by Moses. It’s an extended monologue: “And then God said this, and we did that, and I said this, and you did that, and ...” “And I said to you at that time, saying, 'I cannot carry you alone.’” (1:9) “ How can I bear your trouble, your burden, and your strife all by myself?” (1:12) And then you pissed God off, and He punished you like so, and I pissed God off, and he punished me, and these are all the people we displaced, and so as to justify our exterminating them I’ll mention how those peoples were in the land because they’d come in and exterminated the people who lived there before them, who had done the same to the people who lived before them. And here we are, back in the bloodbath.

I’m pretty tired right now, and I don’t have the energy to give a recap of a recap. Read the parsha yourself if you don’t know what’s in it: Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22.

Okay, actually, I’m super-duper tired right now. I can barely keep my eyes open. The only two things that strike me in this parsha strike me, I think, because I can relate them back to two middot I practice as part of my Mussar work. But explaining about that requires me to explain about Mussar.

Mussar means Ethics. It’s the Jewish study of and practice of ethics. It offers, in practical terms, answers to the questions: How do I become a better person? How do I purify my soul of all the accumulated schmutz it has stuck to it because of this polluted although beautiful world we inhabit? Mussar is self-help, but not for self-satisfaction, but for the glory of God. Here's a quote from Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, aka The Ramchal, from the turn of the 18th century, in his book The Path Of the Just:

I have written this work not to teach people what they do not know, but rather to remind them of what they already know and clearly understand. For within most of my words you will find general rules that most people know with certainty. However, to the degree that these rules are well-known and their truth self-evident, they are routinely overlooked, or people forget about them altogether.

Therefore the benefit to be obtained from this work cannot be derived from a single reading; for it is possible that after just one reading, the reader will find that he has learned little that he did not know before. Rather, its benefit is a function of continuous review. In this manner, one is reminded of those things which, by nature, people are prone to forget, and he will take to heart the duty that he tends to overlook.

Christians will notice that this sounds a lot like Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, 7:15 “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Paul believed the solution to this problem was to trust in Jesus. The Ramchal, and many great Rabbis and teachers since, had a different solution, since obviously Jesus was out. Their solution was systematic study of the traits of godliness, called Middot, and systematic practice to increase them. Today you can study Mussar through books like Alan Morinis’s Everyday Holiness, the book that introduced me to Mussar, and through online programs and institutes, The Mussar Institute and Mussar Leadership, in online communities like madrega.com, and perhaps at your local synagogue or in your own town. I study Mussar with Rabbi David Jaffe who runs The Kirva Institute For Torah and Spiritual Practice.

One of the core Mussar practices is to choose 13 soul traits, or middot, to work on. Each week you work on a different one, so that in the course of the year you’ve hit each trait 4 times. During the week you study texts about that trait, you examine yourself and your behavior in light of that trait, and you actively practice that trait. The week I do generosity, for example, I try not to turn down requests for help or money, in fact, I actively look for opportunities to give. When I first started the practice it actually took effort for me to do this, but over the last several months it’s become easier and more natural. It is no longer such a struggle. What I want to do, I do, at least some of the time. At least more of the time than I used to.

Wow, I am really too tired to be doing this right now. Not an auspicious start to my practice of this week’s middah, which is zerizut: enthusiasm, alacrity.

Savlannut

Anyway, one of my middot is Savlannut, which can be translated as patience or forbearance or bearing burdens. Traditionally Moses is seen as the examplar of savlanut: he bears the burden of leading the entire Hebrew people for 40 years in the desert while they grumble and argue and rebel and complain and sleep around and disbelieve and worship other gods and get tired and want better food and miss Egypt and don’t like their allotments and are afraid to go to war as God commands or else go to war when God forbids it. That is one hell of a burden. Moses had to keep God from smiting his people and his people from going against God’s will, with nary a thank you in sight. Not only did no one thank him, the one time he screws up, gets angry, lashes out, by beating that dumb rock with a stick instead of just commanding it to give water, he gets horribly punished by God, who says that Moses will not after all be able to enter the promised land. Moses had a bum deal, no doubt about it. As told in Exodus, he tried like hell to get out of taking on the position in the first place. But eventually he had to bear that burden, and bear it he did, year after year after year.

In one of the Kirva Institute courses I attended, we studied Savlanut as exhibited by Moses. In the Torah verses we studied, Moses did not complain directly to the Hebrews about what a pain they were; he complained only to God. This is in Bamidbar - Numbers - Chapter 11: 10-15:

Moses heard the people weeping with their families,each one at the entrance to his tent. The Lord became very angry, and Moses considered it evil. Moses said to the Lord, "Why have You treated Your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in Your eyes that You place the burden of this entire people upon me? Did I conceive this entire people? Did I give birth to them, that You say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom as the nurse carries the suckling,' to the Land You promised their forefathers? [...] Alone I cannot carry this entire people for it is too hard for me. If this is the way You treat me, please kill me if I have found favor in Your eyes, so that I not see my misfortune."

In our study group we discussed the significance of Moses complaining to God only and not to the Hebrews themselves. Complaining to God is an appropriate outlet for Moses; both because God can bear all complaints, all burdens, and because God may also be able to offer help. Complaining to the Hebrews themselves would not be appropriate: Moses’ job as leader is precisely to bear the complaints of his followers. In any case, God does come through with some help: he tells Moses to appoint some middle managers to filter the complaints and disputes, solve the easy ones, and only bring the hard stuff to Moses himself. Delegate, delegate, delegate!

Studying that text, among others, really helped me to grab onto forbearance (says Amy, immediately before speaking rather too sharply to a 7-year-old wanting paper towels to play with in the bathtub), because it offered a concrete way to respond to the burdens of others. You take your impatience, your anger, your frustration, your weariness, your burdens, and you lay them at God’s feet. You give all that ugliness to God instead of sending it back out into the world or back at the people who are driving you crazy. If this sounds wrong because you think that we should only give God our good stuff, not our bad stuff, then you will find yourself able to give very little to God, because most of us have a lot more bad stuff than good stuff in our lives. If we are not able to give that to God, then where exactly are we supposed to put it? Should I give my impatience and my frustration to my kids? Will they bear it any better than I can? Should I give it to my husband? Will he? Who can bear all those burdens, all that strife? Who can carry even one hearts-full of toil and trouble? Is it Santa, the candyman, the Hulk, Batman, Spiderman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist?

If we are not to add to our own or others’ burdens, we must give our burdens to God, who can bear them a million million times over, and still have room for one more complaint about how great the spring onions were in Egypt. When I have something to bear (a cross, for example :-) I offer it to God. Of course I also try to offer God the good stuff. I offer it all, the good the bad and the ugly. I burn my burdens on an altar to God and they are purified. God returns only Love. And then, instead of burdening others with my anger, my complaints, my trouble, my impatience, I can give them love instead.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice I suck at it, of course. Once in a while I’ll breathe in through the blood rushing through my head, wanting to scream at a kid who’s dumped my coffee onto the bed, and I’ll picture myself just draining all that blood out, like a sacrificial animal, like a goat, all that blood onto an altar to God. Here, I say to God, please have this. And God does accept such sacrifice, and the blood is gone, the anger has passed.

Once in a blue moon. Once in a long while. Once in a leap month or a mercury retrograde or a lunar eclipse. Better than never, though. Infinitely better. Who knows what havoc a single instant of untamed anger may wreak in the world? But God is a sort of sink for bad stuff: you can just keep on offering it.

( Ira Stone of Mussar Leadership, develops his entire theology around savlannut and the terrifying responsibility of bearing hte burden of others in his book A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar )

So, that’s savlanut, and Moses is its exemplar, but here we are in Devarim and as Moses is recounting the story of the 40 years, he recalls that he complained directly to the people, not to God: “And I said to you at that time, saying, 'I cannot carry you alone.’” (1:9) “ How can I bear your trouble, your burden, and your strife all by myself?” (1:12)

I’m not sure what to make of this. I suppose the main thing to say about it was that the character of Moses we think we know now, the role that Moses plays in Jewish myth is more consistent than the Moses who appears in 4 of the 5 Torah scrolls. That Moses is not always the same Moses, because those scrolls were not written by one person, but many, over a long time, and because in any case even one person doesn’t always maintain perfect characterization in, say, a long novel, and many people over lots of time even less so, and people themselves don’t behave always consistently anyway, and also have terrible memories. So here Moses remembers himself as less virtuous than he actually was. He remembers complaining to the Hebrews themselves, even though he only complained to G0d. Or perhaps he only says that he remembers it that way, because he does not want to set himself up as such a saint? It’s such a minor discrepancy, you wouldn’t even notice unless you’d been thinking about those other verses, in Numbers, because from them you had learned a little bit about how to behave when you would like to scream and throw something preferably with a nice smashing sound.

Yet the Jewish tradition of Biblical interpretation is built on just such discrepancies. Why say this here, and that there? Why say this twice, and that only once? Why mention both hands and fingers? Why? The answer, in that context, is never “no good reason” or “happened that way” or “transcription error” or “poetic license”. There is always a reason, if you look deep enough, and yes, if you are creative enough.

If I’m working within that tradition, and everything has a reason, I’d go for the “doesn’t want to set himself up as a saint” explanation. It’s many years later, the people listening probably don’t care if Moses bitched to their parents 30 years ago, as their parents bitched to Moses. Even the older ones are probably over it all by now. But it would be humiliating to hear how your parents bitched to Moses, how you yourself bitched to Moses, and Moses just turned the other cheek. How is anyone supposed to live up to that? ( There’s a discussion here about Jesus, turning the other cheek, how to become the perfect image of God on earth, living up to God’s expectations, and perhaps something about spiritual humility.) Moses was so humble and so forbearing he wouldn’t even boast about his humility and forbearance. He goes out of his way to show that he’s not any better than the rest of them, complaining-wise. As well he might, because he’s about to die and appoint a perfectly ordinary man, Joshua, not a prophet or a saint, to lead the Israelites. If Joshua is not to seem a pale reflection, then Moses must bring himself back down to earth.

Hence, he reports that he complained. He says he gave his bad to the people instead of to God. Just a regular Joe, says Moses.

If I had to make sense of it, that’s how I’d do it, anyway. Sometimes I think I have to make sense of it all, and sometimes I think it doesn’t matter much whether sense comes or not. Here is a logic beyond logic. Here is deeper magic from before the dawn of time, says Aslan, rising from a broken stone table. One of the Lost Stations was called The Lamppost, in honor, I’ll bet, of Narnia. Sometimes I think the myths I swim in are too confused. Swimming in a mess of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, all mixed in with psychiatry and neurology and evolutionary psychobiology and headaches and nausea and meds. I graph my meds and moods and energy and side effects on an hourly level right now, these days, trying to work it all out. My mind is drifting through this flotsam and jetsam of human religiosity. I feel a little unmoored today. Do I really want to tell you this? It’s a distraction, my mental state. It has nothing to do with Devarim. So let’s move along, to the other middah I noticed, reading through this parsha, Emunah.

Emunah

Emunah is faith. It’s another one of my thirteen middot. It’s not about belief. It’s about trust, and about trustworthiness, and about keeping faith, about being faithful. Emunah exists in the relationship between God and people. The Amidah praises God “who keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust”. So faith is not a thing we have, it’s something we do, and God does. We can keep faith, even when we do not believe. We can keep faith when we do not even have faith, because keeping and having are two different things.

Ah, so here’s my mental state again. When I’m sick, I don’t believe in anything: not in myself, not in God, not in anyone, not in living. Even the kind of faith I keep during those times is not the kind of faith that looks like faith. It’s not something I feel. So if I’m neither believing in God or in health or in joy, nor feeling God or health or joy, then what is it that I am calling faith?

What I am calling faith is the relationship between me and God. God has blessed me with my husband, and my brother, and my parents, and my friends, and my other family, and a great doctor, and to live in a time where there are at least some medicines that help some ways. God led me to join the synagogue before I got sick, so that I would have that extra help. So God is keeping faith with me in my illness. And so I keep faith with God too. It’s reciprocal, this faith-keeping. Duh, it would be, it’s a covenant.

Oh, right, devarim. Here’s the line that made me think of this, Moses complaining about how utterly faithless the Hebrews are:

“But regarding this matter, you do not believe the Lord, your God, Who goes before you on the way, to search out a place for you, in which to encamp, in fire at night, to enable you to see on the way you should go, and in a cloud by day.” (32-33)

It’s true, they’re faithless. Signs and wonders all over the place, and still they don’t do what God would like them to do. Still they do not hold up their end of the bargain. They whine and complain and rebel. Ooh, I can quote Jesus again. Mark 8:12: He sighed deeply and said, "Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it." (New International Version). You can see why Jesus wouldn’t have bothered with signs; more often than not, we ignore them, disbelieve them, refuse them, or find them inadequate. In the context of the Gospels, Jesus gave plenty of signs, and some people had faith in him, and some did not. ( I make no truth claims about the Gospels, I just mention that the pattern there is the same, unsurprisingly.) God in a pillar of cloud was not enough to convince the Hebrews to keep faith. We have eyes to see, but see not, etcetera. My dad is a big believer in UFOs. Look at the evidence! he says. There’s plenty of it! But our minds see the evidence they want to see. To see differently, to see with an open eye, as Balaam did, that’s tough. How do we judge evidence when evidence shows that we are so very bad at both seeing and weighing evidence? That, kids, is a question Kurt Goedel answered decades ago, and the answer was this: we are fundamentally limited. There are truths we can know but cannot prove. Well, really I’m completely misappropriating his work, as he was talking about math and logic, not God. There is some relationship though. “Imagine a perfect circle,” I say to my husband. He can do it, even though he knows that such does not exist in this world. He cannot prove that he imagines it. He cannot prove it has some reality outside his mind. And yet the sense of reality of that perfect circle cannot be shaken. It matters, that circle. Oh, Plato, we are still in your shadow.

I try to keep faith with God, because I cannot shake Reality. We keep faith together, God and me, outside of the system of evidence and logic. The evidence might be there for UFOs and not for God, but God keeps faith with me, and UFOs do not. It’s like we are outside the perfect circle, in the infinity that is left after we’ve defined a tiny, careful, consistent closed world. Nothing interesting goes on inside the circle. God is not the circle but the space around the circle. I’m pretty sure this is a bunch of cheap half-assed pseudo-theological rambling. Trashy pop theology. Only not very pop.

But why do I keep faith with God now, and not before? Why do some people keep faith with God, and then stop? Why couldn’t the Israelites, with all their signs and wonders, keep faith? To keep faith is mysterious and wonderful.

Now I have some meds and a nap to take.

Matot and Masai

2010-07-11T09:19:00.000-04:00

A day late and a dollar short yet again, folks. Matot and Masai were last week’s double-header parsha game, ending last night, when the rest of my family did Havdalah and I lay in a tranquilized stupor in my tempurpedic bed. Two parshas, I guess, for those pesky calendrical reasons I can’t wrap my head around; in other news, did you know Hanukkah is like, the week of Thanksgiving this year? It’s a-crazy, man. A-CRAZY.

A couple of weeks ago I complained about Balak to a Rabbi teacher of mine and he said something like “maybe you should skip the next couple of parshas for your blog, because they’re pretty tough to swallow...” But no, I am de-VO-ted to my parsha project, swallowing be damned. Anyway, I ought to know what’s in those scrolls I go to shul each week to hear read out loud in a language I don’t speak. I ought to know what I’m revering as Torah when I revere the Torah. Wait, I’m getting perilously close to having an Alanis Morrisette song stuck in my head, though given what’s been stuck in my head the last few weeks, an Alanis Morrisette song is a distinct improvement, which goes to show how very badly my brain has broken.

So: Matot and Masai.

Matot: Tribes.

Numbers 30: Vows and stuff

You have to keep vows you make in God’s name. Unless you’re a girl, in which case you have to keep the vow only if your dad or husband hears about it and doesn’t annul it on the same day he hears about it. This is interesting because it does, as is often the case in these old Torah rules, give women some autonomy; the man to whose household the woman belongs actually has to make some effort to annul her vow when he hears of it, and he has to make such effort without delay. So if your husband or father is lazy and a procrastinator, which he could well be, you are home free, ladies, to make your own idiot vows and then be stuck with them. (c.f. Jephthah, who promises the Lord to sacrifice whatever comes out of his house first to meet him upon his return if the Lord helps him in a successful war against the Ammonites or someone, and expects it to be a goat or something, but no, his only child, his daughter, is quick out the door that day and off she goes to the altar. This was before Jephthah had rabbis to get him out of jams like this. He made the vow and felt like he had to fulfill it, even though in later days any Rabbi could have told him that first of all, you don’t sacrifice your children, second of all, the positive commandment to preserve human life trumps most other commandments like ‘keep vows’, and third of all, you should have run that vow by a legal scholar to begin with who would have put appropriate limitations on it before you checked the I agree box and clicked “submit”. Man, am I off-topic. Oh, that’s in Judges, by the way, chapter 11 by my JPS translation.)

Numbers 31: Kill ‘em all. Except virgin girls.

Numbers 31 we are off to slaughter the Midianites. 31:1-2 “The Lord spoke to Moses , saying ‘Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites; then you shall be gathered to your kin.’”

You have to go back to parsha Balak to figure out what the Midianites did that needed avenging. The Moabites (led by Balak) and the Midianites formed an alliance out of concern about the Israelites; it was Balak plus the Midianites who sent for Balaam who prophesied their ruin, and meanwhile back at the camp the Israelites were apparently “whoring” with the Moabites, except in the next verses it’s a Midianite woman who gets killed along with the Israelite man by the God-fearing priest Pinchas. So is it the Midianites or the Moabites who enticed Israel into sex and idolatry? Not clear. A mix, I guess. An alliance.

Now apparently the proper revenge for having been enticed into a little pagan orgy is to utterly destroy the people you partied with. Or maybe to destroy the people they were allied with, or both, or who can tell the difference anyway, all those people look the same, right? Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out. So a bunch of Israelites go out and slay all the Midianite men, every last one. Also killed Balaam, though what did Balaam ever do to them? We find out when they all get back to camp, with the Midianite women and children and animals and booty and riches and stuff:

Moses, Elaezar the priest, and all the chieftans of the community came out to meet them outside the camp. Moses became angry with the commanders of the army, the officers of thousands and the officers of hundreds, who had come back from the military campaign. Moses said to them “You have spared every female! Yet they are the ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, so that the Lord’s community was struck by the plague. Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and slay also every woman who has known a man carnally; but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man.” -- Numbers 31.13 - 18

So they do, and seriously, what is this, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?

After that there are a bunch of boring and complicated verses dividing up the booty.

Numbers 32: Home on the Range

By now I guess the Israelites are on the wrong side of the Jordan from Israel, about to cross in to the Promised Land. The Reubenites and the Gadites, however, have a lot of cattle, and they like the grazing land right where they are. They want to settle down right there, and build some little houses on the prairie for themselves, and give up their piece of the Promised Land. Moses says to them that they can’t get out of going to war for the Promised Land just because they don’t actually want a piece of the Promised Land. Fine, say they, we’ll build our houses, leave our families and cattle behind, and go to war with you all till all the land has been won. Then we’ll go back across the Jordan, to our little houses on the prairie, carrying great bolts of calico in brown with little pink sprays of flowers and pink satin trim so Ma and the girls can make themselves new Sunday dresses.

Wait, I think I’m getting a little confused. The calico was actually blue, with yellow flowers.

Anyway, Moses agreed to all that, and Pa brought out his fiddle and played long, long into the night, and Laura hadn’t felt so happy since Pa brought back that darling Midianite girl to be her slave.

Masai: (Journeys of...) Previously on ...

Numbers 33:

Previously on Lost ... , “These were the marches of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron.” Blah blah blah de blah blah, for verses and verses. You can look in Biblical Atlases and see, based on this recap, the proposed possible routes the Israelites might have taken, but the archeaological evidence is slim. And everything keeps shifting around, like a certain island some of us know and love. Numbers 33 is nice for the sing-songy repetitive nature of its recap; it probably sounds good in shul, but I didn’t make it to shul yesterday due to Teh Crazy.

Verses 50-56 are worth looking at, however. They are precise instructions about how to handle the Others the Israelites will find on the island (er, land of Israel).

In the steppes of Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho, the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy all their figured objects; you shall destroy all their molten images, and you shall demolish all their cult places. And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess. [ ... ]. But if you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you live; so that I will do to you what I planned to do to them.

Wow. There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin. Three religions born of this people, duking it out over the same piece of land for centuries, building up and tearing down and dispossessing and slaughtering. Thorns in your sides and stings in your eyes. Settlers and suicide bombers.

Numbers 34 sets out boundaries of the land (still arguing over those, of course) and assigns different parts to different tribes. Numbers 35 is not so painful to my modern sensibilities (at last!). It instructs the Israelites to set up six stations to study the land, the Fig, the Pomegranate, the Olive, the Date, the Grape, the Wheat, and the Barley. Oh, wait, that’s the seven species. My bad. No, it says make six cities of asylum, where people can go when they’ve killed someone accidentally, where the families of the dead are not allowed to come and kill the killers for vengeance. And call them The Swan, The Flame, The Hydra, The Pearl, The Orchid, and The Arrow. Oh wait, God never names the cities of refuge. Can't I keep anything straight?

Then we get a few sensible rules about legal testimony, the differences between murder and manslaughter, how many witnesses are required to convict someone, the usual. We Jews like to spin this stuff as totally original, but these legal codes were pretty much all over the place in the ancient Near East, at least after Hammurabi. What was, perhaps, original, was the vesting of the authority of the law in a single, eternal God, the only God, the Ground of Being, and enlarging the lifespan of the legal code to “throughout your generations forever” rather than “till the current government falls”, which back then, there, would not have been a long time coming. So there’s an authority and a permanence to the Covenant which must have provided some measure of stability. Well, and really, like our times are so stable?

Self-evident truths and inalienable rights, authority vested in an eternal God; you can see why people thought of America as the Promised Land. It’s a powerful promise, and a powerful base on which to build. If I were not feeling so despairing right now I’d probably have taken this idea and spun it into an inspirational d’var about the greatness of a such a covenant, about the radical idea that certain laws and certain rights were established by God and can never be revoked, are not subject to the rise and fall of nations, parties, corporations, or what Christians call “principalities and powers” which means all those institutions in the world that have somehow turned evil and try to exert authority over us and get us to forget that really we are not ultimately subject to earthly authority but to a higher authority, so take that, you insurance reimbursement forms! But that we have to uphold our end of the bargain, which is making sure to seek justice, walk humbly, love the lord, love our neighbors, or else George Bush comes and takes away our inalienable rights and then Obama comes and forgets to give them back. So you know, vigilance, service, join the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, cue the Progressive Jewish Social Justice Guitars.

I see that other d’var that I could write, through a looking glass. But I’ve got demons in me, baby, and the demons won’t ignore or explain away or soften the demon bits of the whole damn edifice, built on sacrifice, slaughter, war, conquest. There’s good stuff buried here, and the Rabbis have spent a long time interpreting it in good ways, but my interpretive skills are all off right now. I can only see the blood, so much blood, throughout your generations forever. That was a very different time and place. Are we so very different now, though? What has changed, and what remains the same? What can we leave behind as a legacy of laws for a land in chaos, and what do we only think we can leave behind but really still find right here, in our time. It’s peaceful here, where I live, but my nation fights wars all over the world. I just read that the war in Afghanistan has gone on longer than the Vietnam war now. Fewer of ‘our people’ have died, though. The Afghans haven’t fared so well. I’ve stayed behind in my little house, and someone else’s Pa went off to join the shock-troops in an endless war. Is this what we’ve inherited? Endless war? Everyone’s fighting in Israel, and no one is safe. What is there to give us hope? Shall we cling to our laws that God gave us, for all eternity, so that there is something solid when all else has melted into air?

Well, I know that God is holding me up. Not like those cheesy footprints in the sand. Like ground. I hear the voice of God in Torah, but like I said before, it’s full of static. Some Christians say God came to Earth in Jesus so we could know God without the static: so some people could get a crystal clear image of God in terms they could understand; in human terms. What Jesus says is easier to tolerate than much of what dear old I yam what I yam says in the good old Pentateuch. Still, you look at Christianity and there seems to be, nevertheless, an awful lot of static.

Those prophets, though. They say some good stuff. You know, half the time Jesus was quoting a prophet.

Here’s Isaiah, for example: “No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin. Then shall your light burst through like the dawn and your healing spring up quickly.” ( 58:6-8)

There’s some ground to stand on, people. That’s self-evident truth, whatever Nietzsche or Ayn Rand thought. That’s the God who is holding me up right now, as my mind goes round and round down and down, like a hobbit in the goblin’s caves. At the bottom, under the mountains, under the lake where Gollum lived, or not under, but elsewhere, only here too. Both here and elsewhere. God was in this place and I did not know it, exclaimed Israel. That’s here. God is holding me up here, and God asks me to deal justly and compassionately with my neighbor, and says nothing about dispossessing and nothing about slaying. Shhhh. Listen.

Listen. “These are the commandments and regulations that the Lord enjoined upon the Israelites, through Moses, on the steppes of the Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho.”

Pinchas

2010-06-26T20:23:00.000-04:00

Oh, DOODY! I did not manage to post an entry on Pinchas. I did read Pinchas, and I did make some notes on it, but I was a little slower than usual last week because of a bizarre out-of-nowhere debilitating episode of depression.

Anyway, Pinchas is really not that interesting. God gives Pinchas some kind of special covenant for having killed that guy having sex with that Midianite or Moabite woman (not clear which). There’s a census plus some lottery for distributing land (maybe I recall wrongly though, there seems to be a census and land lottery every other freaking parsha ). The only interesting bit about that is that someone’s daughters show up and complain to Moses that they shouldn’t be permanently disinherited because their dead father left no sons. Moses asks God about that, and God agrees, so the inheritance laws set down in the Torah actually count daughters as inheritors, although only if all the sons are dead. Ladies, get ready for fratricide! Or something. Sorry, I’m a bit weird today, having some funky-ass responses to some meds.

The rest of Pinchas is verse after boring verse about appropriate offerings to be made to God in the form of sheeps, goats, bulls, grain, oil, aromatic spices, and whatever else people have on hand that is precious and can be burnt. Not quite as dull as the endless descriptions of how to build the tabernacle that we got back in Exodus (er, I think) but still. If I’d managed to write an actual d’var last week it would have been something about sacrifice, and the temple, and how Orthodox prayer books still include page after page of descriptions about what sacrifices we ought to be making at particular prayer services which we replace instead with prayer since we don’t have the temple anymore, and even non-Orthodox versions of the Amidah usually say something about rebuilding the temple speedily in our day, and really? We’re looking forward to temple sacrifice again? As a good thing?

Look, the Temple is centralized. I don’t like that. At least the tent of meeting was movable, and for a long time the tabernacle moved from place to place within Israel. Till David (or wait, was it Solomon?) built the Temple, and even then there were all these alternative spiritually important places where one could go to worship and sacrifice, the places mentioned in Genesis where someone or other is always erecting (heh) a monolithic stone to mark a spot where “God was in this place”. So, lots of sacred places, moveable tabernacle, yeah, some idolatry mixed in with all that decentralized worship in high places. Then along comes some priest or other, time of Josiah, who ‘finds’ an ancient scroll in the temple that says “definitely do not worship in high places or anywhere but in the temple or god will hate you” and then Josiah says “OMGZ!!!!!!!!” and goes on this rampage of sacred place desecration all over the country, and if I felt like bothering I’d stick a picture here of the Taliban smashing those gorgeous buddas to pieces wherever that was in Afghanistan that time, because it sounds kinda the same.

So there, centralized Temple worship only, controlled by an inherited priestly caste. Uh, yay?

No, not yay. Fast forward to ‘Second Temple’ period, otherwise known as “the time of Jesus”. You have your Sadducees, super-temple people, enforcing the centralized temple model of where you go to get you some God. You have the Pharisees, who are expanding the commandments so that non-priestly Israelites can experience, serve, sacrifice to God even if they are nowhere near the temple, just in their daily lives. Sure, that expansion was/is crazy legalistic and not always conducive to actual godliness (c.f. criticisms made by Jesus in christian scriptures. ) But the Pharisees were not trying to make things harder for regular Israelites, they were trying to find a way to include regular Israelites in the daily service of god. They substituted the authority of a particular place and an inherited priestly caste with the authority of scholars all over the place, and not just a single party line but a plethora of voices arguing and disagreeing with each other. And they were starting to do this even before they ‘had’ to, after the destruction of the second temple in 130-something c.e.

Jesus/Christianity did something else altogether with that authority/access to god: Jesus took it on himself. So it was decentralized in that it was no longer associated with a particular place, but it was highly centralized in a particular person. If that particular person was/is really God in human form, then it makes sense to centralize faith and authority and practice on that person. I don’t think Christianity has managed to remain centralized on the idea that Jesus is the only authority/way to God. I think religious practice probably leans toward fragmentation and decentralization. Judaism never has had or attempted to have much in the way of central authorities or put much importance on creeds or on infallibility or on there being just one way to get to God. The mitzvot are multitudinous, and since no one actually manages to practice them all, they offer a decentralized, personalized approach to God. Of course this means some people will put a lot of emphasis on the mitzvot that are furthest from the central teachings, as stated by Hillel, and which I’ll restate as “Not only don’t be an asshole, be a mensch!”. But for those of us who are really trying to follow that, there are many ways to be a mensch and hence serve God, and no particular central belief or barrier to entry. (I’m talking about those of us born Jews; for converts, there are pretty high barriers to entry, in fact). And then there’s still this ongoing experience of participating in the conversation of oral torah, with all the arguments, debates, and yes, sometimes legalistic wrangling that this entails.

So really, I have no interest in seeing the Temple re-established and all those sacrifices take place again. According to the Torah Judaism existed before the Temple, and it certainly has managed to exist after the Temple. What, I need the temple so I have to fly a zillion miles and contribute to global warming so I can serve god? Or what, I’d commission animal sacrifices via the internet, along with millions of other jews, so that the temple mount would just be a constant burning mess of dead animals? I realize I’m being deliberately provocative here. Dude, I’m god-wrestling. Okay, maybe with a little bit of the wicked child in me. But underneath the flippancy I really do have a point, and that is my discomfort with the fact that I am supposed to pray for a re-centralizing of Jewish practice around a Temple that really did have a bunch of people selling animals for sacrifice sitting around it, and really was probably corrupt and venal some of the time, institutions and human nature being what they are. I like my decentralized Judaism, and I like offering God my prayers instead of my animals.

Balak, Part Two: The Parable in Balaam's Mouth

2010-06-23T18:30:00.000-04:00

Poor Balak. He’s just trying to save the land he loves, playing his very last card, hoping for some magic to pull him out of the hot seat. Reality is barreling down on him like a stampede of oxen, as he says. His world is changing, and there is nothing he can do to stop it. Like Treebeard said: “The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” The Israelites are coming, and God, it appears, is on their side.

Three times he asks Balaam to curse the Israelites; three times Balaam blesses them instead, with the Word that God places in his mouth.

Balaam ‘takes up his parable’ and tells it to Balak:

“Balak the king of Moab has brought me from Aram, from the mountains of the east [saying], 'Come, curse Jacob for me and come invoke wrath against Israel.' How can I curse whom God has not cursed, and how can I invoke wrath if the Lord has not been angered?” (Numbers 23:7-8).

Meanwhile back at the camp, the Israelites are that very moment worshipping Baal-Peor and fornicating with the Moabite women, and God is just about to get angry with them and send a plague, which kills 24,000 of them. But Balaam says the Lord has not been angered.

Balaam says :

“God is not a man that He should lie, nor is He a mortal that He should relent. Would He say and not do, speak and not fulfill? I have received [an instruction] to bless, and He has blessed, and I cannot retract it. He does not look at evil in Jacob, and has seen no perversity in Israel; the Lord, his God, is with him, and he has the King's friendship.” (Numbers 23:19-21)

Again with the “Nope, no perversity in Israel. God loves them. And also, God doesn’t change his mind or ever have mercy.” Even though the whole bloody story is about how the Israelites keep pissing God off and God keeps getting angry and planning to obliterate them and then Moses or in this case, Eleazar’s son, manages to do something to appease God.

Balaam says:

        The word of Balaam the son of Beor
                and the word of the man with an open eye.         The word of the one who hears God's sayings,
                who sees the vision of the Almighty,
                 fallen yet with open eyes.

        How goodly are your tents, O Jacob,
                your dwelling places, O Israel!
        They extend like streams,
                like gardens by the river,
        like aloes which the Lord planted,
                 like cedars by the water.

        Water will flow from his wells,
                and his seed shall have abundant water;
         his king shall be raised over Agag,
                and his kingship exalted.

         God, Who has brought them out of Egypt
                 with the strength of His loftiness
        He shall consume the nations which are his adversaries,
                 bare their bones and dip His arrows [into their blood].

I wonder why the Rabbis broke the parsha up where they did. If they’d ended it with Balaam blessing Israel and cursing everyone else, then it wouldn’t have been so obvious that what he says is not really the whole truth. But they tack on that extra bit about the Baal-Peor worship, and the murder of the Israelite and the Moabite women in flagrante delicto, and the last line of the parsha is “ Those that died in the plague numbered twenty four thousand.”

I’m sure I’ll find endless discussion on this very question if I look. But I’m enjoying the closed-book nature of this essay test, this time around.

Balaam speaks three times, but the first two times, God ‘chanced’ upon him and gave him the words to say. Only the third time does it say that Balaam had a vision of God. And it’s only the third blessing that Balaam doesn’t say something obviously, patently at odds with exactly what is going on down at the Israelite camp, far away below in the valley. God IS angry with Israel, and God DOES relent.

The rabbis must have thought it was important for us to notice this: that what Balaam says is at odds with the facts on the ground. True enough, for the purpose of blessing rather than cursing Israel. But not really the Truth. Not the whole truth about the relationship between God and Israel, which is more complicated than just “Israel is righteous and therefore God loves them.” That is clearly NOT what is going down there in the valley. The relationship is much more mysterious than that. But like all relationships, it can’t really be understood from outside.

The first two times he speaks, Balaam gives an outsider’s view of what is going on between Israel and God. But the third time he speaks, he speaks with an open eye. He doesn’t say Israel is righteous. He doesn’t say God never changes his mind or that God is not angry with Israel. He just says the Israelites have very nice tents, and a lot of them, and that God will ‘consume the nations which are his adversaries.’

As far as prophecy goes, that’s true. The Edomites, the Midianites, the Moabites: all gone. Assyrians, gone. Roman Empire: gone. Babylonians, Syrian Greeks -- gone. The wandering nation of Israel: still here. No one worships Baal-Peor anymore. An awful lot of people worship, in one way or another, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Balaam spoke with an open eye to a man who wanted to be lied to. Balak wanted hope that his way of life was not passing away like Middle Earth. But something new and terrifying was thundering across the land: monotheism.

Bloody wars backed by a bloodthirsty God and waged by a bloody disobedient lot of people. We remember ourselves as victims, as seekers of justice, as liberated slaves, but we carry our holy scrolls, filled with war stories, glorious war stories, God at our heads in a pillar of cloud, smiting, always smiting. Dipping his arrows in the blood of His enemies.

Balaam spoke with an open eye. Balaam saw Reality.

I don’t want that bloody reality of his. I don’t want that bloody God of his either.

So why am I still here, among these words? Why am I looking for God in these ancient tales of tribal wars?

Balaam was like Al Gore: He spoke an inconvenient truth. Those people and their tents are coming your way, and your life is going to change, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

We have a lot of shit coming our way too, don’t we? Our lives are going to change, like it or not. Do we want to be lied to, or do we want to see with an open eye? And how, seeing with an open eye, do we keep on living? How do we find the strength to walk into that terrifying future we’ve made for ourselves?

I’m here in these words because I don’t have that kind of strength, myself. Israel has walked through the ends of ages, walked to the ends of the earth and back again. There’s nothing so special about us, just God. God who loves us anyway, God who always in the end takes pity on us, has mercy on us, relents, redeems. God who spares us, over and over, even if only just barely.

I spy with my little eye a world so terrifying I’d like to cry.

We’re not going to save ourselves. We are not clever enough, humble enough, kind enough, good enough. If we are going to be saved then God is going to have to do it. And I want to be saved. I want beauty and love and goodness to go on. I want all that is right with the world to endure, or to be resurrected from the ashes of whatever is left after we’re done trashing this good earth of ours. I don’t deserve it but I want it anyway.

Starbuck was right. There’s gotta be some kinda a way outta this place, she sang, and lucky her, God was watching over it all. It’s not all cheery and smiley though, is it? Used to think people wanted God to comfort them, and it was Thomas Kinkade false comfort they got. And then I got God and God is scary and strange and inexplicable, and the comfort God offers is not like any other kind of comfort I’ve ever had.

But that’s the only game in town. That’s Reality, scarier and more beautiful than we can bear. What’s the point? All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again? What’s behind this world? What makes me, holds my molecules together, animates me? Why does physics make so much sense at our level, at the Newtonian level, and just get stranger and stranger the further off you go? What is the there there, and what keeps it all going each moment? A God who loves us is our only hope, and maybe it’s a long shot, but no one’s showed me why it can’t be so. God put a Word in my mouth, and the Word was God.

Here I am in all these words because I believe God speaks. Some of these words are what people thought they heard. But like Balaam we don’t usually get the whole story. We don’t hear right, or we get the simplified version, or the outsider’s view, or we can’t help but interpret even as we hear. So I dig through the words, listening. We’re all listening together. “Can you hear me now?” asks God, but we can’t, there’s too much static, the call keeps dropping out. Maybe we wouldn’t want to hear God so clearly anyway. Balaam saw with an open eye and fell on his face. Are we listening? “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” That bit seems clear enough. I have a terrible headache, as though I’ve been prophesying myself.

I keep circling around something important, I keep missing it, somehow. Something that will make all that blood and war make sense, make it make sense that I hold these stories holy.

This is what it is: Blood, war, plague, despair. Evil. History. Gory, gruesome history. Over and over Israel acting up, God’s judgment, God’s mercy. The stories say “oh, God decreed this.” and “God smited those.” Those are stories, is all, old stories. But God spoke to those people, whatever God did say, and there is still an echo there that we can hear today.

Balak, Part One, the synopsis

2010-06-23T15:28:00.000-04:00

Balak is a king, and the people Israel come in a swarm to camp out near his land. He fears the ravening masses. They are wanderers. As far as Balak is concerned, these people are the barbarian hordes, come to topple Rome, come to destroy all he has built up, lay waste to his peoples’ land, his beloved home, the cities and temples of his world. And rape, and slaughter, and pillage, and destroy.

Balak feels helpless to stop it, so he calls on Balaam, a prophet. Balaam is a prophet of the One God, it appears, even though he is not an Israelite. Balak sends some men to convince Balaam to come and curse the Israelites for Balak, so that he can save his people and his land. Balaam says “I can only do what God tells me to do. Let me dream and ask God and give you my answer in the morning.” And God tells Balaam not to go with the men that Balak sent, and so he does not.

And Balak sends men again, more this time, with more offers of money. And Balaam says “I can only do what God tells me to do, but I will ask God again.” And God says to Balaam that this time, he can go with the men, but he must say only what God tells him to say. And so Balaam gets up in the morning and says “I will come, but I can only say what God tells me, and no matter how much money Balak offers me that will not change.” And he saddles his ass, and starts off down the road.

Even though God told him to go this time, He now sends an Angel of the Lord to bar Balaam’s way. So the Angel of the Lord stands there in front of the donkey, and the donkey turns off the road to avoid smashing into the Angel of the Lord. But Balaam does not see the Angel of the Lord, so he beats his donkey with a stick. Again they are on the road to Balak, and again the Angel of the Lord (let’s call it AOTL for short) blocks the way, and the donkey tries to squeeze past and scrapes Balaam’s leg up against a wall, and Balaam gets mad and beats the donkey again. And on they go, again. ( Maybe the AOTL went to lunch? I don’t know why it let them past...) Third time, AOTL blocks the way, donkey lies down in the road completely, Balaam beats it.

Now God makes the donkey speak. “Why are you beating me?” asks the donkey. “Duh, because you keep not doing what I want you to do, and for no good reason! If I had a sword I’d kill you!” “Haven’t I been your donkey for a long time now, and have I ever behaved like this before?” asks the donkey.

Balaam admits that no, the donkey has not behaved like that before. (One might ask why the donkey had to do anything more than START TALKING for Balaam to recognize that something kinda freaky was going on, but maybe Balaam was so pissed off at this point that he didn’t notice that particular weirdness.) And then God makes Balaam see that actually, there is a big ole shining terrifying AOTL blocking the way. “Oh!” says Balaam, “I didn’t see you there! I’m sorry! If you don’t want me to go to Balak, I won’t. I’ll turn around right now.”

Strangely, even though the AOTL has been repeatedly blocking the way, it now says, “No, no, go on ahead. Just remember: don’t say anything except what God tells you to say.”

So after this pretty weird experience, Balaam finally gets to Balak, who says “You’re late! What took you so long? C’mon, I’m taking you up on a hill where you’ll be able to see the Israelites and curse them.”

“Fine,” says Balaam, “but I can only say what God tells me to say.” But Balak is really desperate. His entire nation is on the brink of disaster, and he knows it, and all he can think to do is ask a reluctant holy man if there’s any hope at all, if he can curse the Israelites and save Balak’s own people from destruction.

Up they go to the top of the hill, and there they build seven altars, and sacrifice 7 bulls and 7 rams, and Balaam goes off to have his vision or whatever, and God comes and puts something in his mouth. Some of the translations call it a ‘Word’. Some of them call it a “parable”. Some of them just say that God told Balaam what to say to Balak. Anyway, when Balaam goes back down and tells Balak the words God put in his mouth, they are definitely not a curse on Israel.

“Dammit, Balaam, that’s no good,” says Balak. “I can only say what God tells me to say,” says Balaam, implacably. “Maybe from a different hill?” says Balak. And they all troop off to a different hill, with a different view of the Israelites camping below, and they make the same 7 altars with the same sacrifices and Balaam goes off again and God gives him a Word in his mouth and he goes back to Balak and blesses Israel again. “Arggh!” says Balak. “If God won’t let you curse them, could you at least not bless them?!” “I can only say what God tells me to say,” says Balaam, again, which really makes you want to kick him in the teeth, honestly.

Third time’s the charm, thinks Balak, and really, what has he got to lose? Another hill, another round of sacrifices, another blessing for Israel from Balaam. And also, for good measure, Balaam prophecies the downfall of not only Balak’s kingdom but of everyone else around them. Blessings for Israel, curses for everyone else, and that’s what God told him to say, says Balaam, and off he goes, home again.

***

Meanwhile the Israelites were, as usual, off getting themselves into trouble. A bunch of them start having ritual sex with some Moabite women and worshipping Baal-Peor, the god in those parts. Kill everyone involved, yells God, and also apparently sends a plague. Some poor schlub hasn’t seemed to notice the wailing and hubbub, and actually brings a Moabite woman back to his tent in the middle of this and starts screwing her. So Eleazar the priest’s son, Phinehas, grabs a spear, follows them into the tent, and spears them both through the groin as they are doing it. God likes the righteous anger he sees there and stops the plague, and only 24,000 Israelites died.

** And there you have this week’s parsha, Balak Paneer. **

Chukkat, part two, the d'var

2010-06-18T18:25:00.000-04:00

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai said, of the ritual of the red cow, two different things. To non-Jews, he said it was an exorcism. To Jews, he said “It makes no sense, it has no point, but God commands it, so we do it.” (from Midrash Tanhuma).

I read in my Chumash, also, that King Solomon himself labored to understand this ritual, and could not.

I don’t get that. The Torah is full of bizarre rituals, rituals that seem like magic. At the same time the Torah itself, and the Rabbis who followed, are careful to note that the rituals are NOT magic. Their effectiveness stems from God, not from any other forces called into service by the specific actions. It is commanded by God that this is what you do, and so you must do it exactly as God commands. But the fact that you do it precisely is not what makes it work. You do it precisely only because God commands you to do so. That is why the rituals are not magic. But why should the ritual of the brown cow be more mysterious than the others?

And why does God command such rituals? Why would God want us to do things that look an awful lot like magic, but are not meant to be understood that way, and at the same time prohibit the practice of actual magic? (Not that that ever stopped anyone. I am wearing, right now, a hamsa my father’s mother gave me, many years ago, that she bought in Israel. A hamsa is an ancient middle eastern token of protection from the evil eye, and it’s sold wherever Jewish jewelry is sold. )

Anyway, back to the red cow ritual. You sacrifice the red cow, you burn it up (teeth, tails, hooves, dung, and all) and you collect the ashes and mix them up with some water. Well, you don’t; Eleazar the Kohen does. That makes the “water of lustration”, which should definitely be the name of a band.

The water of lustration purifies concrete nouns (“A noun is a person, place, or thing.”) after they have been defiled by death. You can get a priest to dash the water of lustration upon the contaminated objects (but only after a certain amount of time has passed), and then they become clean again. There’s an entire chapter, verse after verse, of exactly which people, places and things become defiled through death, and exactly how to purify them. If you don’t purify them, they will always be unclean.

Yes, let us modern people now take a moment to point and laugh at our very, very superstitious, gullible, gods-ridden ancestors, with their seven drops of the water of lustration, and their red heifers, and their priests shaking hyssop at a tent where a dead man lay. Oh, those ancients and their obsession with pointless spiritual purity. It’s like old home video, these stories, of kids doing the darnedest things with the utmost seriousness.

Or instead let’s project the germ theory of disease three thousand years before it was discovered, and decide that enforcing separation for people and places where someone has died was for the purposes of medical quarantine. That’s because our people have always been special and preternaturally clever. ( And the injunction against pork is all about trichinosis, and circumcision was to prevent cervical cancer in ancient Hebrew women...)

The great advantage of both of those stories is that both of them allow us to pretend that contact with death does not, in fact, cause any kind of spiritual contamination. We were either superstitious or health-conscious, but not actually dealing with a genuine spiritual phenomenon that genuinely needed a purely spiritual solution, because if that were so then we would have to admit that today, too, there are spiritual consequences to death.

If death does not contaminate, then why, pray tell, do we hide ourselves from it? Why do we segregate our old and dying? Why do we leave professionals to care for our dying, why do we leave professionals to prepare our dead for burial, why do we run from death like it’s breathing down our own necks, icy cold?

Me, I threw away the clothes I wore at my uncle’s side when he died. After he died, my cell phone turned sinister. The things I touched, the objects in that room, my body, that hospital, that part of town, the park at which I’d received the call that his kidneys had failed, the taxi company I’d used to carry his things home from the hospital, all of them -- UNCLEAN! Everything that his death touched, including me, was foul with it. No one came to me and pointed and pronounced me “unclean”. No one came to me and said “You, you are impure. Separate yourself until you have been purified.” It was Death itself that dropped a barrier, and if I had had some water of lustration, I would have been grateful.

But we have no more priests and no more temple and no more water of lustration. All we have are the words, but perhaps they are enough. At the very least, they are a reminder that we once understood the spiritual significance of death. In the days after you have witnessed death, when you are seeing the world through a veil, when you walk like one half-dead yourself, and wonder where to turn and what to do and how you can feel this way about what is a perfectly natural process, (isn’t it?) it is no good laughing at the ritual of the red heifer, and it is no good nodding at its wise hygenic quarantines. You know better than that.

* Here is a wonderful article on My Jewish Learning which suggests that today, in the absence of the Temple, it is tears and tzedekah that substitute for the water of lustration.

Chukkat, part one, the synopsis

2010-06-18T01:25:00.000-04:00

Chukkat, a synopsis: (Numbers 19 - 21)

God tells the priests burn up a red heifer and mix it with water. This potion will purify people made unclean by contact with death. Many paragraphs explaining how to do this. Involves hyssop.

Miriam dies. The people complain to Moses that they’re thirsty. No water in the desert, why’d you bring us here, will this wandering never end. Moses throws himself down on his face. God, could you help? Also, please, please make the whining stop. God says, “ Take your staff, stand at that boulder, speak to the boulder and water will come.” Moses goes to the boulder, says “Look how much God loves you even though you are all ungrateful wretches.” and hits the rock, twice, with his staff. Water springs forth, and everyone drinks it. God says “Moses, I didn’t tell you to hit the rock. Because of this neither you nor Aaron will reach the promised land.” (Moses does not point out to God that this punishment violates the clear meaning of ‘promise’, and what does Aaron have to do with it anyway?)

Then they travel some more. At several places they send to the king and ask for safe passage through the land, always saying "it's a small thing, we won't cause any trouble". The people who live there never seem to think it’s such a small thing though, so then they have big battles that the Israelites always win. Somewhere in the midst of the wandering and the battling, two interesting things happen:

First, God says Aaron will die, and Moses takes Aaron and his son Eleazar up the mountain, tells Aaron to take off his priestly robes, and puts them on Aaron’s son. Aaron dies. Moses and Eleazar troop down from the mountain, sans Aaron. This looks a little suspicious to the people down below, but no one says anything this time, because whenever they bitch about Moses’s authority someone gets smited.

After more battling over easements and rights of way, the people forget that God smites them every time they complain, and they complain again to Moses. “The people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this desert, for there is no bread and no water, and we are disgusted with this rotten bread."” (Numbers 21:5) God sends venomous snakes among the people and many of them die until they beg Moses to do something about it. So Moses makes a bronze serpent head, sticks it on a staff, and tells everyone who is bitten to look at the serpent head and be cured. And lo, it works.

Then some more traveling, and another well for water, this time without anyone getting in trouble about anything. Slaughtering of Amorites, smiting of the people of Bashan, including their fantastically named king “Og”. “They smote him, his sons and all his people, until there was no survivor, and they took possession of his land.” (Numbers 21:35)

Meta

There is a lot of commentary out there and I read what I can, but I tend to get caught up in the endlessness of available commentary and could easily use up all my available time studying without ever getting to write down anything. I try to remind myself that I don’t have to learn everything all at once, but I do have to let the words of torah speak to me in the context of my own life, in the context of what I do know and have experienced about Judaism and about how life actually is. I want to recognize the sticky bits before Rashi or whoever explains them all away to me, I guess. But I can’t actually explore all the sticky bits each week. So I’m making notes of everything I find interesting/difficult/inspiring/awful or whatever about each parsha so in the future I can come back to those issues. Maybe next time around some of them won’t seem so baffling or urgent to me. Maybe there will be new things. Who knows?

The Sticky Bits

Anyway, here’s this week’s list:

Really? Someone had a king named Og?
That punishment God gave Moses and Aaron seemed pretty harsh given the offense. After all, Moses hit the rock, which is way better than whaling on the nearest whining Israelite.
It sure sounds like kids in biblical times must have been picky eaters, because that Israelite complaint sounds like nothing so much like my dinner table. “This food is gross, you’re starving me, I’m dying of thirst, it’s not fair!”
Why not let Aaron die on his own instead of setting a specific time and place for it to happen? Was it to ensure an orderly succession? The priest is dead, long live the priest! ?
All the battles, smiting, and dispossessing peoples of their land freak me out. I hate that our Torah records God sanctioning , supporting, and even sometimes commanding that behavior toward neighboring nations. That is not what I want God to do.
Serpents and complaining and healing via the symbol of a serpent.

Next post for this parsha (to be posted tomorrow before sundown, I hope): Thoughts on the Ritual of the Red Heifer