Four Bright Lights

MOSES IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:11:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Shmot 5773.

I did my favorite New Year’s Eve thing by watching multiple episodes of the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s 1960’s classic about the paranormal. As campy and antiquated as the show and its special effects are to our jaded 21st century eyes, it always manages to suck me in with its themes of uncanny mystery: the bizarre and unexplained phenomena we encounter, the possibility of extraterrestrials, and the folks like you and me caught, well, in the twilight zone, what Bruce Springsteen refers to as the death waltz between flesh and fantasy, between reality and the mind’s dream state. I am particularly drawn to ironic episodes like the one about the bookworm who is the lone survivor of a hydrogen bomb attack, who can now read undisturbed for the rest of his life, yet who then smashes his reading glasses accidentally; to chilling, moralistic episodes like the one about the woman in a brave-new-world autocratic society who is sentenced to total quarantine with others like who her who are hideously ugly. The only problem is that, in fact, she and her fellow lepers are actually beautiful, while the rest of that society looks like ducks who have survived gamma radiation; or my all-time favorite episode about beings from another planet who convince the earth that they wish only to serve Man. In the last scene, as the hero of the episode is getting on a space ship to their world, his assistant desperately tries to stop him, shouting, “Professor, don’t go with them! That book they gave us about serving Man? I finally translated it. It’s a cook book!”

I laugh at what Serling considered to be serious drama but I get chills from Serling’s razor sharp insightfulness about the twilight zones of the human mind and life’s mysteries. I also appreciate one other important feature of this great American TV show: most of Serling’s characters are completely alone. They may intermittently interact with other minor characters, but they are mostly caught in a vast wasteland of human loneliness and alienation in which they are the last people alive, or the only people to see what no one else sees, or even people who have died who think they are still alive. Madness, loneliness, alienation and death are the main staples of the Twilight Zone, and I feel almost like I’m watching a Franz Kafka novel remade as sci-fi when I watch the show. This perhaps is what continues to make it so popular. Serling tapped into some of our deepest terror about loneliness with fantastic tales and morality plays that take the sting out of our fear by entertaining us.

Of late, I have been thinking about Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, as a Twilight Zone character, one who at every turn is never quite sure who, where or how he is. Look at the details of his early life. After his birth, his mother has to hide him for three months from the Egyptian authorities who want him, and all the Israelite males, dead. She casts him off in a basket, where he floats down the Nile only to be saved by none other than Pharaoh’s daughter, who then adopts him, ironically enough with the help of his own mother who serves as his nurse maid. Moses is raised as Egyptian royalty, but is chased out of Egypt after he kills an Egyptian slave driver in defense of an Israelite and is threatened with exposure by another Israelite. He saves his future wife and her sisters from rough necks at a well in Midian, then they promptly forget to show him hospitality, something almost unthinkable in Middle Eastern culture. He meets a God he has presumably never known, Who self identifies as his ancestors’ God, and Who draws him in with an unconsumed burning bush, a special effect that Rod Serling would have loved. Best of all, as Moses sets out to save the Israelites, God seeks to kill him out of anger that either he or his son has not been circumcised. This is a bizarre scene that dabbles in the demonic and fuzzy worlds of magic and blood rituals. Moses himself tells us the readers that he is living in his own Twilight Zone: he names his first son Gershom, “For I have been a stranger in a foreign land.”

What are we to make of our ancient Twilight Zone character? What do we learn from him? Bible scholars tell us that Moses’ life follows a literary theme commonly known as the abandoned hero motif. Generally, the hero is abandoned by his royal father or mother for some less than savory reason, with one or both parents ordering a simple peasant to destroy him. The peasant refuses to do so, or in another version, the abandoned hero is found in infancy by a kind peasant who raises him as his or her own. Often, the abandoned hero find his way back and reveals himself to the parent in a showdown between good and evil. Yet, Professor Nahum Sarna reminds us in his commentary on Exodus that we should not take the parallels too far. Moses’ mother, Yocheved, is no powerful queen seeking to get rid of her son, she is an oppressed Israelite who seeks to save him from genocide by sending him off. Even her abandonment of Moses is done in a way to insure that someone will find him and save him: she hides him in the reeds on the shore of the Nile River. In a keen reversal of the conventional abandoned hero motif, the one who saves Moses is herself royalty, Pharaoh’s daughter who uses her position yet also risks her life to courageously defy her father’s decree.

However, what I find most enlightening about Moses as the abandoned hero is that however absurd and liminal his experiences may be, he is never truly alone. His mother sends him off on the Nile, but then sends his sister to watch out and intervene for him. Pharoah’s daughter saves his life in defiance of her father, then brings him to the royal household right under her father’s nose. The Torah tells us that when he grows up, Moses goes out to consider the plight of his enslaved people, a hint that even as adopted royalty he already knows that he belongs with them and to them. Jethro, Moses’ father in law, makes him part of his household, God calls him to lead his people out of slavery, and even his brother Aaron makes an appearance in the story to become Moses’ partner in the work of liberation. Moses lives through strange and frightening encounters that likely make him feel alone, but a whole cast of actors, human and divine, are either behind the scenes or out front, helping him to make his way in his complex life.

It is callous and simplistic to assert that no one is ever truly alone, for we know that this is not the case for some people. Their lives are painfully solitary due to homelessness, the deaths of loved ones, a horrible family situation, mental illness or other circumstances. Perhaps Moses the abandoned hero is not a tale about what is but what ought to be, from the perspective of the Torah. Individualism is not a Jewish ideal, and I can think of no one in Jewish legend who fares well living outside the matrix of community and mutual obligation. For Judaism there is nothing heroic about going it alone, so that even after we die, the community remains fully involved in bringing us respectfully to our final resting places and in helping our grieving loved ones. The Torah and Jewish tradition challenge us to receive community from others by recognizing that we do not have to be alone at the margins of life, and to create community for others by recognizing that we are not alone at the center of life. Yes, a person may feel utterly abandoned by life and by God when dealing with loss, illness, death, grief and loneliness: how could anyone not in such times? Moses’ story hands us our mandate to walk compassionately with that person and all who feel alone and keep them connected so that they do not fall into the twilight zone.

THE GOOD THAT MEN DO

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:07:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat VaYehi, 5773.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of visiting the Museum of Modern Art, something I have not had the chance to do for quite some time. My visit felt to me almost like a pilgrimage to these paintings that have had a tremendous impact on me and the world, such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Munch’s The Scream, and Wyeth’s Christina’s World. The huge vacation week crowd at the museum came from all over the world to view these iconic pieces, and given the manner in which everyone crowded around them with their ipads and iphones clicking away, one would have thought that we were paparazzi in Hollywood. I got caught up in the excitement as I clicked away on my iphone and furiously texted to my wife tongue-in-cheek messages like, “OMG, I’m like standing three feet away from Christina’s World!!!!!!!!,” complete with numerous exclamation points, as if I were a teenage girl meeting a celebrity.

As I always do when I look at it in photos, I was overwhelmed by the emotional power of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Its unnaturally oversized, swirling stars stand in direct contrast to the peaceful village sleeping below, conveying a deep sense of turbulence and energy. I had to pause to consider what that turbulence and energy are all about. Are they a reflection of Van Gogh’s inner emotional turbulence that was a well known feature of his tormented life? Are they Van Gogh’s way of expressing nature’s energetic movement underlying what appears to be a calm and ordered world? Are they both? Are they neither? The beauty of great art such as Van Gogh’s is that it lends itself to robust debate about and multiple interpretations of what that art is doing or saying.

In like fashion, great writing, particularly the spare prose of biblical stories, lends itself to many readings that encourage energetic debate and disagreement about what the stories are saying and what they are teaching us. When we Jews talk about midrash, creative rabbinic interpretation of the Torah, we refer not only to the multiplicity of possible meanings in a sacred text, but to the engaged, passionate debate of faithful Jews that teases out those meanings. The opening of Jacob’s death bed speech to his sons in chapter 48 of Genesis provides us with an excellent example of this process.

And Jacob called his sons and said, “Come together that I may tell you what is to befall you in days to come.”

This appears to be a straightforward verse introducing Jacob’s address to his children. However, looking at the verse closely in context raises some important questions. Throughout Genesis, we have never known Jacob to possess any kind of prophetic power that would lead him to offer his children or anyone visions concerning the future. Further, as should be evident from reading his addresses to his sons, many of Jacob’s supposed prophesies are either descriptions or harsh criticisms of past behaviors. Is Jacob perhaps explaining to his sons what he expects them to become based upon what he knows about them now? Finally, we would expect Jacob to preface his addresses with far more intimate and familiar language than he does. Why bid his sons farewell by forcing them to listen to impersonal speeches that can only leave some of them scratching their heads in confusion or deeply resentful of him?

The view of modern Bible scholarship is that Jacob’s entire speech is actually a retrojection, a reading back into earlier history of what the Bible’s authors already knew about the Israelite tribes in their own day. However historically accurate that reading may be, it fails to capture the poetry and imaginative potential inherent in this poignant scene. For that, we turn to the sages of the midrashic tradition who offer us three intriguing, imaginative views about what is happening here.
The first view is that, indeed, Jacob began to tell his sons not only about their futures but about the future of the Jewish people and the future of the world as well. He promised them that the holy Temple would be built in Jerusalem and that the great apocalyptic battle foretold in the book of Ezekiel would in fact take place, thus ushering in an era of lasting world peace. The second view is very different. Jacob promised his sons a prophecy of what would befall them in days to come, but at that moment just before death, his powers of prophecy utterly failed him, and he was unable to tell them anything. Thus, he switched to critical analyses of each son, both good and bad. The third view is that from the very beginning of the end Jacob had lost all power of prophetic vision, so much so that he openly expressed fear that his children would not carry on the spiritual legacy that he had built. At that moment that he expressed his fear, his sons, referring to him by his new name, Israel, reassured him with the words that we call the Shma: “Hear, O Israel our father, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” Reassured, Jacob spoke to each son and then passed from this world.

Think of that poignant, fragile moment when Jacob is about to speak to his sons for the last time in his life as if it were a brilliant, suggestive painting eliciting from our sages these three different readings of its meaning: each one is reflective of a unique perspective on life and death. None of these readings need to be taken as literally true, though each one presents one piece of a greater truth about the human journey that is expressed with artistic and emotional sensitivity. Jacob is first seen idealistically as possessing great prophetic powers extending well beyond intimacy with his family: we could imagine that as an old man who has experienced life he could impart wisdom and insight that no younger man could. However, the wisdom and insight of old age soon enough give way to the terrible reality of the shutting down of one’s mental and emotional capacities. Jacob wants to tell his sons the future, but impending death shuts out his ability to do so. Left with unresolved emotional wounds and resentments for which he and his children are responsible, Jacob is reduced to this almost pathetic admission: “I am about to leave this life, and I cannot even feel secure that the good things I have imparted to you will be carried on by you. Even this much of our future I cannot predict.” At that moment, his sons reassure him that the future of his hopes, his dreams, his legacy, his mission, his God, are in their good hands. He needs no power of prophecy, for they are his power.

The desire to see into the future – to know how things will turn out for us, our descendants, our community, the world - is a human impulse that lingers just below the surface of daily human awareness. I suspect it emerges most poignantly when we realize that our lives are nearing an end and we will no longer have a say in the destinies of those who remain after we are gone. These teachings of our sages remind us that we are limited in our power to control the future when we are alive, and even more limited as we prepare for death. Yet we have one power that, while not perfect, can last well into the future beyond our time on earth. It is the power to raise children, build relationships with students, and influence neighbors, colleagues, and loved ones with our own exemplary, if howbeit imperfect lives and actions. In a twist on Shakespeare’s famous line from Julius Caesar, I refer to that power as the good that we do that lives on after us. It is this good which is our finest work of art, to which those whom we leave behind can respond: “You have helped us understand how to live in the present. Rest assured that we will be your future.”

GOD WRITES TO JAMES DOBSON

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Dear Dr. Dobson:

I briefly interrupted my grieving over the deaths of the children and teachers murdered in Newtown, Connecticut to consider your recent comments concerning the massacre. This is part of what you said on your international radio program:

“Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I'm not talking politically, I'm not talking about the result of the November sixth election. I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God. I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn't exist, or he's irrelevant to me and we have killed 54 million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too. And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God almighty, and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on. We’re seeing things happen that didn’t happen just a few years ago, and there’s a reason for it. Something has gone wrong in this country.”

I created those innocents who were murdered by Adam Lanza. I created Adam Lanza. I mourn deeply that My defenseless creations could be mercilessly destroyed by another of My creations whose brain went utterly out of control, as his soul plunged into pure evil. I also created you, and like every other human being, I gave you moral and behavioral freedom. You claim that in Newtown I wreaked judgment upon America. Please stop speaking in My name and engaging in dangerous perversions of faith.

We are not going to argue about abortion and gay marriage right now, but you dare not forget that the people whose lives you condemn are made in My image no less than you are. Enough said. Let me instead argue against your dark insinuation that I would use a mass murderer as an instrument of judgment, punishment and warning to Americans. This assertion ultimately robs humans of moral freedom and responsibility by asserting that our most horrible behaviors are really just a part of My great plan for sinful humanity. Further, it’s true that Western religion developed early on the belief that I punish communities and individuals for their sins through nature and human violence. However, early in the Bible, Abraham took Me to task for even contemplating destroying the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah without first sparing the innocent people living there. He challenged Me, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?” The ideas and values of communities of faith developed along with their sacred texts. The prophet Ezekiel repudiated an earlier belief that children will die for the sins of their parents. The book of Job utterly rejected the earlier biblical idea that if good people suffer evil, they are being punished by Me for their hidden sins. People’s perspectives about Me have developed and grown. Why haven’t yours?

I’ll assume that your beliefs about Me are sincere and that you are genuinely concerned for the health of America’s children, as you explained on your show. However, have you not forgotten other teachings of Mine that should be of equal or greater concern to you? What about your obligation as a person of faith to help those who suffer, or at least not to make them suffer more because of your words? What about the book of Psalms’ warning that you guard your tongue from speaking evil? What about your sacred obligation to support those who mourn? Some people take perverse comfort from your words because, as obscene as they are, they offer simple explanations and solutions for the most baffling tragedies: evil would no longer plague humanity if everyone just returned to basic biblical principles and averted My wrath. Trust Me, as a God of mystery, I assure you that with respect to human evil, even I am often mystified.

There are those who dismiss you as a bigoted crackpot who should be ignored. However, you are much more than that: you are a high profile psychologist and powerful evangelical leader whose daily Family Talk radio show is estimated to reach two hundred million listeners worldwide. Use your unprecedented influence to foster inclusive national dialogue about what ails America and to teach the best values of religion without distorting My image. Otherwise, My name and the memories of those who died will have been desecrated.

FOR THE MIRACLES

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:57:00 +0000

Dvar Tefillah For Shabbat Mikketz/Hanukkah 5773.

The American philosopher, George Santayana, is famous for his dire warning that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. However, Santayana who was a confirmed atheist, also had much to say about religion and the true nature of the world. One of his statements that is most interesting to me, if not particularly deep, is this one about miracles: “Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.” What I find so strange about this statement is Santayana’s extraordinarily narrow definition of a miracle as something that is assumed to be outside of the natural order, thus setting up a philosophical strawman which can be easily knocked down. Since science has proven to us the ironclad laws of nature, it is a scientific fact that the laws of nature cannot be altered. Anything amazing that you and I call a miracle in the religious sense is nothing more than a lucky, blessed accident that is based in nature as well, even if you and I don’t understand it. To argue anything else is to brand oneself an ignoramus who replaces science with silly superstition.

Can the miraculous be defined in only one way? What about all of those phenomena within the natural world that imbue us with a sense of wonder and awe precisely because they are too complicated and mysterious to be understood? What about the things that human beings do as a natural part of being human that nevertheless are so extraordinary they overwhelm us with a sense of their miraculous power? A holiday like Hanukkah pushes the envelope of our definitions of miracles precisely by refusing to make them either/or propositions about reality and faith.

An excellent example of this is the prayer, Al Hanissim, which thanks God for the miracle of saving us from King Antiochus and his Syrian-Greek army many thousands of years ago. My translation, which is taken from the new Siddur Sim Shalom, is somewhat more literal than that of the Siddur’s editors:

We thank You for the miracles, for the deliverance, for the heroism, and for the triumphs that You performed for our ancestors from ancient days at this time of the year.

In the days of Mattathias, son of Yohanan, the heroic Hasmonean Kohen, and in the days of his sons, a cruel power rose against Your people Israel, demanding that they abandon Your Torah and violate Your mitzvot. You, in Your great mercy, stood by Your people in time of trouble. You defended them, vindicated them, and avenged their wrongs. You delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the corrupt into the hands of pure in heart, the guilty into the hands of the innocent. You delivered the arrogant into the hands of those who were faithful to Your Torah. You have revealed Your glory and Your holiness to all the world, achieving great victories and miraculous deliverance for Your people Israel to this day. Then Your children came into Your shrine, cleansed Your Temple, purified Your sanctuary, and kindled lights in Your sacred courts. They set aside these eight days as a season for giving thanks and chanting praises to You.

Since every text has a context, we should note that Al HaNissim is placed in the Amidah prayer immediately following Modim, the prayer that expresses gratitude to God for the daily miracles of being alive. Two early rabbinic sources are clear that this is where Al HaNissim must be placed; in fact, the Hebrew phrase Al HaNissim, which means literally, “For the miracles,” is a direct echo of the phrase in Modim that praises God for daily miracles, “Al nisekha she-b’khol yom imanu.” This placement and repetition of phrases hints at a connection between our ancestors’ victory over Greek oppression and the common nature of the miraculous: their ability to vanquish the evil king Antiochus was a miracle, but it was not something that happened outside of the normal course of nature and the world.

This idea is played out in two other ways in the prayer. It makes clear that it was God who stood up for the Jewish people and defeated our enemies who sought to destroy us. However, as we know from ancient history, the way that God did this was through the determination of the Maccabees and the people, who steadfastly refused to allow the Greek armies and government to trample our rights to live freely and securely as Jews. The miraculous salvation may have been entirely God’s doing, but none of it would have happened without the thoroughly human resistance to oppression. Finally, what about the story of Hanukkah did you notice is missing from this synoptic account of the Hasmonean revolt? The Talmud’s account of the miraculous way in which the little jug of oil burned for eight days, a miracle quite outside of nature and frankly pretty unbelievable, is nowhere to be found in this prayer. This is the case despite the fact that Al HaNissim was likely composed around the same time that the early Tannaim, the sages of the Mishnaic period, were teaching that story about the jug of oil burning brightly for eight days.

Al HaNissim is a more subtle and sophisticated response to Santayana’s rather dismissive critique of the religious perspective on miracles. It does not ask the believer to park his or her intellectual and spiritual honesty at the door. It is a prayerful expression of what the Hasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev refers to as nissim she-b’tokh ha-teva: God’s great miracles that happen precisely within the context of nature and normal, profane human affairs. They are not miraculous because God mysteriously undoes the regular order of the universe to right wrongs and change tragedy to triumph. They are miraculous because you and I find the mysterious power of divine love and justice within that order and use it in our struggle to bring light to a darkened world.

ALL’S “WELL” THAT ENDS “WELL.”

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 04:29:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Toledot 5773.

When is retreating from conflict weakness and when is it wisdom? When should one fight and when should one flee? The three stories of Isaac’s retreat from the wells that he had dug in the face of opposition from his Philistine neighbors hold more than one answer to these questions. Let’s review what we read in the Torah portion this morning. Isaac echoes his father, Abraham by claiming that Rebecca is his sister in order to avoid harassment or being killed by the locals when he journeys into the territory of Avimelekh, the Philistine king of the city of Gerar. This morally problematic tale of our ancestor forfeiting his wife’s physical and emotional integrity is nonetheless an accurate description of how nomadic heads of household may well have survived the salacious advances of the populations in which they were guests during ancient times. Likely the story is meant to describe Isaac’s actions, not praise them, as we can see from Avimelekh’s far more ethical outrage at Isaac’s deceptiveness.

The Torah then tells us that, having settled in or near Gerar, Isaac reaps one hundred times the amount of produce that he had planted, and during a famine no less. He grows so great in livestock and agriculture that he incurs the jealous wrath of the Philistines, who stop up the wells that had belonged to his father and that had become Isaac’s possession. Avimelekh warns him to leave the area because he has grown too much, thus compromising the king’s ability to protect him, according to some commentators. Twice, Isaac’s servants dig new wells, only to have their ownership belligerently contested by the local shepherds. These wells are named by him Esek and Sitnah, “Conflict” and “Hatred.” Only on the third try, after moving out of Gerar altogether, is Isaac able to dig wells without incurring hostility, so he names those wells Rehovot, “Wide Spaces.” Avimelekh and his dignitaries then visit Isaac in his new home and conclude a pact of peace with him, for they realize that God has blessed him. He is a man of power. At the very day this happens, Isaac’s servants inform him that Abraham’s wells which Isaac had attempted to re-open are full of water.

On the surface, we can read this story of Isaac’s retreat from his rightful property in two ways: either as an example of strategic retreat by a smart man who knows that he lacks the power to overcome his opponents who are stealing from him; or as an example of a cowardly man who easily relinquishes whatever is valuable to him –his wife, his property- to save his own neck. Let me suggest a more subtle, contextual reading. The Torah makes very clear that Isaac is a good guest of, and later, a treaty partner with Avimelekh. He is also blessed BY God, so that he becomes insanely wealthy and well fed in the midst of a famine. Isaac at times may be strategic and at other times he may be a coward, but this time he is a man who loves peace and courageously pursues it. He knows full well that, though it is no fault of his own, Avimelekh’s people are hungry, restive and hostile. He has nothing to prove to himself about his power, and he certainly has no reason to hurt his friend and patron the king. So, Isaac engages in a real act of courage: he backs off for the sake of not rubbing his good fortune in the faces of those who are suffering, with whom he is a neighbor. Note however that his willingness to compromise is only so elastic. God has already told him that he may not leave the land in order to sojourn in Egypt. Isaac may be ready to give his neighbors physical and emotional breathing room by contracting his own presence among them. However, he is not prepared to let them drive him out altogether. He recognizes that good fences may make good neighbors, but only when one person’s fence doesn’t become his neighbor’s graveyard.

It is not easy to be Isaac. One needs to know how to retreat for the sake of peace with others, but to do so in a way that leaves one’s integrity and security intact. This requires a careful balance of ego and self-respect with humility and greater vision: a vision of peace and community that transcends one’s immediate needs, hurt pride, or fear. It is not easy to be Isaac, whether we are talking about a family member, an employee working with others, a neighbor, a citizen, a leader in a badly divided congress, or a sovereign state of Israel that is trying to defend herself from the attacks of people whose territory she left years ago. Nonetheless, Isaac is the role model we need to emulate at every level of relationship. Thus we will truly be able to insure that all’s well that ends well.

THE END.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:03:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Kohelet/Shabbat Hol Hamoed 5773.

“And in the end, the love you take
Is equal to the love that you make.”

Paul McCartney and the Beatles ended their iconic White Album with this seemingly irrelevant couplet of poetry that was part of a song called, appropriately, The End. What fascinates me is how memorable these two lines have become in the history of music and musical lyrics, as if their words were somehow the most important wisdom ever taught to humankind. Apart from their catchy tune, the Fab-4’s cute little harmony, and the one-finger piano work that backs them up, the words of this little poem actually pack a whole cosmos of ideas into very little verbal space.
Think about it. In sixteen words, we are taught that in the final analysis, the wisdom to end all wisdom is this: the quantity of love you, or I, or the world receives is directly related to the quantity that we give. Underlying such a grand idea is the even grander idea that all love and hate, peace and war exist in an almost karmic balance of cause and effect that is the result of free human initiative. You and I are at liberty to put out however much love we choose, and it is a firm universal law that we will get back what we gave in equal measure. The Beatles are perhaps unconsciously echoing here the classic Talmudic concept of middah k’neged middah, measure for measure.

These are great and powerful ideas, but their truth value is limited. The truth is that there are people who take plenty of love and a whole lot more from plenty of other people, yet who give very little love back; and there are lots of people in the world who give lovingly and unstintingly of themselves, yet who still get abused, neglected, or exploited by others. Love does not work its way magically into everyone’s heart, and relationships are often the settings for terrible heartbreak when the person who loves is repaid with selfishness and dismissiveness. Love is a fickle fellow, whether in the realm of romance, friendship, or life in community. It often needs to be balanced by other human endeavors and qualities to insure that in its absence people don’t get hurt. The end of the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, that we are about to chant offers us its own final-analysis wisdom about how to achieve this balance. Look with me briefly at the very last verse of chapter 12, on page 78 of your Megillah books. There we read:
The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: revere God and keep His commandments. For this applies to all mankind.

This verse, which you can see repeats verse 13, ends this biblical book that for a full twelve chapters counsels the reader that all human endeavor is vanity and worthless striving, and that there is ultimately no difference between humans and beasts. In the end we all will go to the same place: our deaths. Some Bible scholars assert that this verse was placed at the end of the book as a kind of pious conceit. The author or editor of the book knew that his ideas were threatening to his audience, so he pitched the book as a story about a man named Kohelet whose ideas were depressing and cynical. At the end of the book, the narrator comes back to tell us: “Whatever Kohelet said about life, in the end what really matters is for you to be a good person who does what God wants.” In this way, the author is able to distance himself from the same ideas he is trying to teach by placing them in Kohelet’s mouth and allowing the narrator to end the book on a note of simple, traditional faith.

Let me suggest that this ending of Kohelet can be understood in another way, as more than an appeal to simple piety. Having considered all of Kohelet’s tortured ruminations about the purposelessness and injustice of life, the narrator sits back and tells us the following: in the end, all of Kohelet’s ruminating might be very enlightening, but taken to excess it is paralyzing. Yes, life often is meaningless and cruel, yes, we humans are no different in some respects from all other animals with whom we share mortality. However, dwelling on these truths for too long doesn’t bring us any resolution, it just causes us to waste time that we could be using to make the best we can of the lives that we have. Moreover, while it sure would be nice for everyone to just love one another in the manner suggested by the Beatles, this is not going to happen because love is a fickle emotion that does not always translate into good behavior. In those moments when love is absent, fear God by doing what God wants and needs us to do to be menschen, decent human beings. In those moments when you don’t feel loving or loved, you still have to treat yourself and others properly because that is what it means to be created in God’s image.

This truth applies to all mankind.

BREATHING BALLOONS, BECOMING AND BEING.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 23:58:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Breishit, 5773.

Balloons are one of the most fun and instructive of educational tools that I like to use. To elucidate one important teaching from the Torah this morning, permit me to blow up this balloon…. Obviously, were I to tie the end of this balloon, you and I could bounce it around and marvel at its lightness and liveliness until it ran out of air. With Helium inside, our lowly balloon could soar into the air effortlessly. Now, watch as I let go of the opening…. Obviously, balloons deflate when their air or Helium is let out, and they return to being mere pieces of cheap synthetic rubber or plastic.

Now, let’s take our balloon analogy one step further. I invite you, if you would like, to close your eyes for just one moment…For the briefest moment, pay attention to your breathing, the simplest, most miraculous thing that healthy human beings do reflexively every few seconds…Inhale and feel your lungs inflating, filling with air….Exhale and feel your lungs deflating, being emptied of air…At their simplest physiological levels, we and our lungs appear to be no different from balloons… But that is where the comparison ends…The air that we breathe is energy that feeds every last atom of our intricate, miraculous bodies and minds…The carbon dioxide that we exhale is the end result of processes too complex and too numerous to even try to describe…Best of all, we don’t deflate into lifeless, cheap balloons…For the duration of our lives, we continue to breathe, to live…Our breath is energy, divine in origin, human in execution…Our breath is the breath of God.

This idea that our breath is a miraculous wonder whose source is God’s breath is found in the second version of the story of the creation of human beings, which we read in our Torah portion. According to the Torah, (Genesis 2:7), “The Lord, God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living thing.” In crass, popular consciousness, this verse may evoke scenes of rabbis creating Golems or scientists creating Frankenstein beings, but in classic religious writings it is a touchstone for talking about the miracle of life and the uniqueness of human consciousness. The Targumim, the two ancient Aramaic translations of the Torah, interpret the words, “living thing” to refer to humankind’s unique ability to speak; Rashi explains this verse to mean that God created human beings with physical characteristics from the earth and with divine characteristics, particularly the ability to think; Nachmanides waxes eloquent and at length about the utter uniqueness of humankind in having been brought to life directly through the efforts of God, who directly breathed divine breath or life force into that first human. Later commentators on specific early morning prayers that emphasize the miracle of the body and the soul, allude to this verse when they write at length about the amazing nature of our bodies that manage to hold our spiritual essence –represented by God’s breath – inside of us through the duration of our lives; several commentators explore the complex, dual nature of humankind in that we share overt characteristics with all other animals here below on earth, while we are also heleq Eloah mi-maal: an enduring part of God above.

It is not clear if the traditional commentators on this verse of the Torah believed that God literally breathed enlivening energy into us at the beginning of time, and that each of our breaths is literally God’s breath flowing in and out of us. What is clear to me is that one need not take this verse’s claim literally at all in order to take it very seriously. This one verse and its interpreters represent the Bible’s and Judaism’s worldview and values at their best. They teach us that to be human is to be a daily miracle: we live and breath, actions that are so reflexive we do not need to think about them at all; yet not to think about them at all also puts us in the dangerous position of forgetting how miraculous being alive really is, and how critical preserving and respecting life truly is. This verse and its commentators also reflect brilliantly upon how complicated it is to be human. We are animals, not angels: we have animal needs, animal impulses, we live and die like all other animals. Yet, we are so much more than animals: we use speech, a trait that according to many anthropologists is the most important thing distinguishing us from all other species, and that has allowed to evolve in the way that we did; we possess consciousness and the capacity for moral choice that present us with challenges and glories no other animal could contemplate; we come as close to being divine as we can without actually being God;. Finally, this verse and its commentators constantly warn us that, no matter how special the human species is, we are not the center of the world, for we are not the Creators of ourselves, God is. In his comment on how God formed the first person from the earth, Rashi quotes an ancient teaching that God took earth from every part of Planet Earth because it is the medium in which we are buried after we die; but earth was also the material used to build the holy altar of the Jerusalem Temple, upon which offerings would be made to ask God’s forgiveness for human sin. Rashi is saying here that we human beings come from and return to the greatest symbol of our mortality and our humility. We will not live forever, and hopefully we learn over time that we are not the center of the universe, only the God of eternal life is.

This mortal life of ours at times looks, feels and maybe even is as fragile as the filling up and deflation of a balloon. That is worth our humble consideration when we lose perspective and allow the all-too-human capacity for arrogance to dominate us. However, this wonderful life of ours is also a precious creation of God whose own spirit resides in us, animates us, and propels us forward to do the incredible things that humans do best. Yes, we share much with all other species, but we are also profoundly different, in the most miraculous ways, from our most complex thoughts and actions, to our simplest breaths. This is why Jewish tradition teaches us to awaken each morning with simcha atzuma, literally “gigantic joy”, and express our deepest gratitude for simply being alive at that very moment. It is why we celebrate the birth and naming of baby or the wedding of two people who love one another: they are opportunities for us to stop rushing through this miraculous life relentlessly, so that we can look at and add to the rich tapestry of experience love that all began with that first breath of God which awakened our ancestors and began this great narrative we call being human.

HEAVENLY AND EARTHLY JERUSALEM

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 02:11:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Ki Tavo/Shabbat of Selichot 5772.

There is something about dreaming that helps me to see the truth in ways I can’t see when I’m awake. Take the dream I had the other night. I woke up at about 4 AM after trying several hours before to write this sermon. I sat in somewhat of a stupor, not having slept sufficiently, and looked over some of the commentaries to this week’s Torah portion. At about 4:50 my body told me, “Dan, this is ridiculous, go back to sleep, even if only for an hour before you get up again to go to morning services.”

I did just that, and I had one of those dreams you have just before sunrise, that possess deep clarity and allow you to awaken feeling a bit wiser and more refreshed, even as they convey a world of conflated fantasy and real-life images. In the dream, I am riding down two main streets in Jerusalem on a rainy day just before the holiday of Purim, when everyone is out selling masks and costumes and the whole world feels like a masquerade ball. I feel like I have felt when encountering this scene in real life: a sense of bursting emotion and pride that the Jewish state is a place where we Jews can just live as naturally and openly as we wish. Suddenly the dream scene changes, and I am on a hill overlooking the old city with the Dome of The Rock prominently showing in the foreground, along with the Western Wall. The scene is clearly part of a dream sequence because next to the Temple Mount where these sites are, stands an elaborate palace that does not exists in the real Jerusalem. It shimmers with a deep maroon color, even on that cloudy, rainy day. Next to me stands an older man and a teenage boy. I am overcome with emotion…then the dream ends.

Psychology teaches that dreams allow us to confront fantasies and unresolved issues pushed down into our subconscious minds. They generally weave together emotional responses to real life experiences using images that are not real in the objective sense, but whose symbolism touches upon very real things with which we struggle. Thinking back over the last two weeks, I realize that my dream may well have been my mind’s way of dealing with a few things, obviously having to do with Jerusalem and Israel, that I have been too busy, or too afraid, to deal with. First, about two weeks ago, a woman by the name of Penina Ha-Levy died at the age of 92. She and her husband, Avraham (whom everyone referred to simply as Halevy) were my kibbutz parents when I spent the summer on their kibbutz, Hatzor-Ashdod, in the summer of 1979. They both have had a tremendous impact on me well into these, my middle years. I realize that I have been grieving their deaths, and I’ve also been feeling some guilt at not having kept in touch with them over the years. Around the same time as Penina passed away, I read the news reports about the group of young Israeli teens who attacked and severely beat four Palestinians in downtown Jerusalem while a crowd of people looked on and did nothing. Some Jewish leaders explained that this vicious, racist act was an anomaly in a generally democratic, peaceful Israeli society; others warned that it was a sign of the growing tolerance for racism and extremism in Israel. Finally, the night of my dream, earlier in the evening, I was privileged to attend a Sheva Brakhot for a young couple in the community who had just been married. Sheva Brakhot, which means in Hebrew, “seven blessings” is a week-long party after a Jewish wedding, in which the couple is hosted for a daily or nightly meal, at which the traditional seven blessings of the wedding ceremony are chanted after Birkat Ha Mazon, grace after meals. At the meal for the young couple, I was honored to publicly chant the fourth blessing, whose words are the following:

Bring great happiness and joy to mother Zion who was barren, as her children return to her in joy. Blessed are You Lord, Who gladdens Zion through her children.

The blessing places the joy we feel at the creation of a new Jewish family in the context of the rebuilding of Zion, one of the symbolic names for Jerusalem, Israel and the Jewish people. Youngest to oldest, we are Zion’s children.

Reflecting upon these experiences I had and the images in my vivid dream, I have concluded that deep down I am struggling with what traditional sources call the conflict between the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem. The heavenly Jerusalem is the one of our fantasies, in which everything is beautiful and emotionally sustaining, and the city is a place that shines with the light of the messianic age, full of peace and joy. The earthly Jerusalem is beautiful too, but like all cities in all real societies in the world, even democratic ones, it is less-than-perfect, it is at times the site of human ugliness and violence, and its light is often mixed with darkness. Penina and Avraham Halevy understood this better than anyone. Their families immigrated to America, where they both became passionate left wing, secular Zionists, then made aliyah before the founding of the State of Israel, even as their extended family was being murdered by the Nazis. The Halevys raised at least three generations of their family on their kibbutz. As they and their descendants fought physically and politically for the survival of the State of Israel, they also taught their family and others about the supreme importance of keeping Israel democratic, and actively pursuing peace with the Palestinians well before it was fashionable for anyone to even mention such things. They taught me to love Israel, yet more important to love the Jewish people in all of its complexity. Most of all, they taught me that a State of Israel that mistreats its weakest members may feel strong in the short run, but will become weak in the future, because it is not being true to its best Jewish and democratic values. Remember that these were people who lived and died as Israeli citizens and soldiers, who built the Jewish state with their own hands. They were part of an almost deceased generations of halutzim, pioneers, who pursued the dream of heavenly Jerusalem, who slogged through the dark waters of earthly Jerusalem, who spilled their own blood so that you and I could have a Jerusalem to visit, and who would have been appalled by the bloodshed perpetrated upon innocent people by their fellow Jews in the city of Jerusalem. In their own very secular way, the Halevys understood better than any of us what that blessing of Sheva Brakhot means when it talks about Zion’s children returning to her in joy. They just weren’t willing to accept the either/or notion that our Jewish people’s joy at returning to Zion has to preclude the joy of others who are living there alongside us, and vice versa, something that plenty of Palestinians still don’t get as well.

This summer, responding to people in our community on the left and the right who have asked me to speak out more on Israeli politics, I started writing a long essay about my views. After two weeks, I realized I was writing a boring, cagey, defensive manifesto that no one would read, even though it would still make everyone angry. I stopped writing it, thankfully, and I now see that this sermon is what I was intended to write instead. I am not the Jerusalem Post or Haaretz, and I do not have a PhD. in Israeli and Middle East Affairs. I would never, never presume that even my best insights about how Israel ought to deal with Iran, the Palestinians, or its own democracy and religious life are definitive truth. I do not pay Israeli taxes, I do not serve in the Israeli army, and my family is safely ensconced in Albany, NY. What some might assume is my cowardice or political cageyness in not expressing my political views is actually more a matter of humility on my part, at least I would like to believe that. I am not an AIPAC rabbi or a JSTREET rabbi, I am just one rabbi, one Jew living in America, but deeply connected emotionally and morally to the state of Israel and the Jewish people. I am tired of the political correctness police telling me that Israel is an apartheid state. That is like telling me that because America still struggles with its racist past, ipso facto, America must be an apartheid state as well. I do not see any of those same people who are so smug about demonizing Israel leaving America because it still deals inadequately with racism. I do not see them divesting themselves of their iphones or laptops, even though China, the world’s biggest producer of these items, is also the world’s biggest human rights violator. At the same time, precisely because I am a student of the Torah and of people like the Halevys, I get worried when I witness the earthly Jerusalem and the heavenly Jerusalem diverging. But forget about my worries, for in the end they lack a certain credibility since I am not an Israeli. Think about what Penina and Avraham – two people who not only dreamed but lived and loved the real Jewish state – would have worried about. Think about what they would have told us we need to do to support Israel physically, while also helping Israel democratically, Jewishly and spiritually. Would their emphasis on security and using military might to protect the Jewish people have made them right wingers? No. Would their emphasis on peace and justice for all of Israel’s citizens have made them left wingers? No. It would have made them, it did make them, Jews and Zionists in the best senses of those words.

I grieve the loss of my friends and mentors, the Halevys. I continue to dream and try to make reality the things they taught me. I rejoice at the rebuilding of Zion each time a Jewish couple marries, each time anyone goes to Israel and comes back transformed. I pray that Israel continue on its path of being a strong, Jewish and democratic state. I am hopeful that these dreams of mine will continue to become reality. I make a commitment in this coming new year to doing my part to make those dreams come true.

YOU, GOD, WHO LIVE NEXT DOOR...

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 12:57:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Va-Etchanan, 5772.

Listen to this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, the 19th century Austrian-Czech writer whose Book Of Hours is a classic of contemporary spiritual poetry.

You, God, Who live next door—
If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking—
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.

As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why wouldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,

it would barely make a sound.

Who is this God that Rilke addresses? Certainly not the God that popular religious culture has trained many of us to believe in. That God, meaning that description of God, figures the Holy One as so distant, frightening, mysterious, impenetrably Other, that we could never imagine Him as anything other than Melekh Ha-Olam, the imperious Ruler of the universe. Certainly, our experience of life’s awesome mysteries, as well as our mortal smallness before Nature and Time can humble us sufficiently to understand and relate to God in this way, even when our exercise of human prowess makes us arrogant. Who is the God that Rilke is speaking to? Imagine yourself awake in the lonely night listening so intently for your parent, your child, your good friend sleeping right next door to you, just beyond the paper-thin walls separating the two of you. You can barely hear him or her breathing, you have no way of knowing how he or she is doing, or even if your loved one is alive! You are so paper-thin-walls close to each other, but even that distance is achingly far. So too, Rilke tells us, is his relationship with God. Rilke’s God is potentially vulnerable, even needy, and Rilke wants so badly to knock down those walls separating them because God needs him. Sometimes, God’s need for him – for any person – is deeply reflected in even the most mundane tasks of helping other people, symbolized by getting someone a glass of water in the middle of the night. Rilke listens for any sound God would make in the world, the sound of God calling for help.

In case you think that this way of talking to and about God is scandalously un-Jewish, think again. Though images of God as the all-powerful and all-knowing King abound in Jewish tradition, the idea of God as being in need or in search of Man, as Abraham Heschel put it, finds expression particularly in rabbinic and later mystical literature. Think of God as the divine father who suffers when His children suffer, of Shekhinah, the up-close-and-personal face of God who goes into exile when the children of Israel are exiled, and of the God of the Kabbalah Who cannot heal Herself or the world without human intervention. All of these striking images are a part of Jewish tradition, and all of them point to a critical role for us human beings in God’s life and in life itself.

Though the following is admittedly a highly creative interpretation, I want to suggest that our reading of the majestic first line of the Shma is pointing us to the same kind of relationship with our vulnerable God to which Rilke alludes. We just read the first paragraph of the Shma in its original setting, our Torah portion. In context, the Shma is Moses’ stunning charge to the Israelites to affirm God’s oneness and to love God with absolute finality and exclusivity.

Shma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ekhad.
Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

Little wonder that this line is recited twice a day by Jews, why it is the subject of so much roiling theological debate, why it is one of the first prayers that a Jew learns in infancy, and why it is the last thing we say before our deaths. Essentially, its assertion that God is our God and the God of the universe, that God is the absolute Oneness underlying all of existence, is what Judaism is all about: the ultimate protest against all idolatry, the ultimate faith statement that all existence is one. That is tremendous.

However, look at a number of things that are so strange about this first line of the Shma. Why does Moses tell us to listen to a statement of faith? Normally, when the Bible asks us to listen or to hear, it is asking us to pay attention to instructions or commands. Why does God’s name Adonai, spelled YHVH, get repeated? Grammatically, it would have been more logical to say simply, Adonai Eloheinu Ekhad: the Lord our God is one. Why this superfluous phrase, the Lord (is) our God? What is the deeper meaning of Yisrael, the name Israel, and does Ekhad only mean that God is One?

Using Rilke’s imagery and that of Jewish tradition before him, I suggest that Moses’ charge could be read quite differently. To this point, God has staked so much on the viability of the covenant with the Jewish people, a covenant upon which God relies to bring testimony of God’s presence and power into the world. We, the people of Israel need God as we are about to enter the promised land, but God needs us just as much. A well known Talmudic comment (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Brakhot 6b) elucidates this mutuality in a rather shocking way. After playfully “proving” that, like us, God also wears Tefillin, the black prayer boxes containing the Shma that are worn on weekdays in prayer, the Talmud then teaches that a passage praising the Jewish people’s uniqueness to God is written in God’s Tefillin as well! Our Tefillin remind us that God is the only One for us: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” God’s Tefillin remind God that we are the only ones for Him: “Who is like Your people, Israel, a unique nation on earth!” The Talmud then imagines God telling us Jews: “Look, you singled Me out for love and attention among everything in the world; what is written in your Tefillin is evidence of this. So too, I single you out for love and attention among everything in the world with what is written in My Tefillin.” Implicit in this highly imaginative story is mutual love and need between us and God, a two way street of interdependence.
With this Talmudic story and Rilke in mind, how might we read this first line of the Shma differently? Let me offer my own translation:

Yisrael, you who are always struggling with God and men: listen closely for Adonai our God Who is right next door to us in love and intimacy. That same Adonai is alone and lonely.

Let me quickly break down each part of my translation.

Shma, the command form of the Hebrew verb SHAMAH, to hear, is often employed to mean heed instruction or orders. I understand it in its most literal sense: to listen intently to or for something, as when Rilke tells God, “I wait listening, always.”

Yisrael, the biblical name for the Jewish people, is taken from our patriarch, Jacob’s new name that was given to him by God’s messenger after their tumultuous struggle prior to Jacob being reunited with his estranged brother, Esau. Like our ancestor, we are a people constantly struggling with the divine and the human, and like him we prevail.

Adonai is Eloheinu. We are asked from time to time to desist from our Yisrael struggles long enough to listen closely, carefully, compassionately for God with Whom we have such intimacy, yet Who feels at times so detached and isolated from us.

Adonai is Ekhad: not One in some abstract philosophical sense of pure unity of being, but One in the sense of being alone, lonely, and isolated.

In other words, with this first line of the Shma, Moses might really be calling us to reach out to God, Who is often very alone in the struggle to be a presence in the world, Who feels close enough to be our next door neighbor, yet from Whom we feel at times alienated. So much evil and despair in the world push us and God apart, as if our distance were the difference between heaven and earth. This is terrible for God and even worse for us. The Shma inspires us, commands us, to knock on God’s door with the greatest urgency and to let God know that God may be One in a way that is beyond us, but with us as God’s partners, God is never alone.

YOUR CHILDREN ARE YOUR CHILDREN.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Wed, 30 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Shabbat B’Midbar/Erev Shavuot 5772.

One of the books that has carried many of us through the histrionics and narcissism of adolescence is Kahlil Gibran’s, The Prophet. Gibran, a renowned Lebanese poet and artist, wrote about a prophet who dishes out wisdom on a variety of life topics to the people of his adopted country before he leaves them to return to his home. The book’s overly florid diction, likely an attempt by Gibran to make it sound biblical, did not stop the book from becoming an international bestseller that continues to be read today in many languages. One of the prophet’s teachings – the one about children – is quoted quite often:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s
longing for itself.
They come through you but not from
you.
And though they are with you yet they
belong not to you.

With all of my children currently home for a brief time, and with two of them preparing to graduate their respective school programs, I certainly understand what the prophet was saying. We parents learn, not always quickly enough, that almost from the moment they leave the womb, our kids are becoming their own people, shaping their own souls and charting their own destinies. Clearly, we the parents have a lot to do with this; but as they get older, if we give them the room to do so, our children grow into the people they wish or need to become, hopefully for the better and not for the worse. Our job is to guide them in this process of self discovery, and to do so with the humble recognition that, in a very healthy sense our children are not our children.

However, that is not the entire story, as the Torah and later Jewish tradition teach us. In the Torah portion, B’Midbar, we learn about God’s command to Moses to match each of the firstborn males with each of the Levites for the purposes of redeeming the firstborn from sacred service to God after that task was given to the Levites. We read earlier in Exodus, chapter 13 that God sanctified the firstborn males as dedicated servants of God after the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn. When the Levites replaced them for this work, the firstborn were still sacred to God, and as such needed to be redeemed from that sacred status before they could return to normal life with their families. Our Torah portion tells us that there were 273 more firstborn males than Levites. They were redeemed by giving five shekel coins to the sanctuary coffers as a kind of redemption price in lieu of turning over their status to other Levites who awaited this conferral of status. Later on in chapter 18 of Numbers, God commands us to redeem all firstborn males in the future by giving this redemption money to a Kohen, a priest, who then absolves each firstborn from dedicated service to God. This ritual of redemption developed over many years into Pidyon Ha-Ben, redemption of the firstborn which is performed by a Kohen in behalf of a family and its firstborn son after the newborn has been alive for thirty days.

It is unfortunate that Pidyon Ha-Ben is not performed more often in our non-Orthodox Jewish circles. We could certainly expand it to include firstborn daughters, specifically because of the meaningful symbolism of the liturgy that has been written for it. In America, the custom is to offer the presiding Kohen five silver dollars in memory of the five ancient shekel coins used during the time of the Torah. That money is generally not pocketed by the Kohen, but is given to the poor. What is so interesting is the script that the Kohen and the parents recite to each other before the Kohen recites the blessing thanking God for the mitzvah of redeeming firstborn children:

The Kohen asks the parents:

What is your preference: to give me your firstborn son, the firstborn of his mother, or to redeem him for five shekel coins as you are obligated according to the Torah?

The parents then respond:

We wish to redeem our son. We present you with cost of his redemption as required by the Torah.

This is a very strange script. Why would the Kohen give the parents a choice to redeem or not to redeem their child, while in the same breath reminding them that the Torah obligates them to redeem the child for five shekel coins? One siddur commentator suggests that the Kohen is merely reminding the parents that they might think they can get away with not paying the five shekels for their child’s redemption, but their attempts will not succeed. I suggest a different reason for this script. We parents begin an amazing and terrifying life journey with our children from the moment they are born, one in which we and they struggle simultaneously with their being and not being ours. Life with children is all about holding on and letting go. One of the great insights of developmental psychology is that the terrible twos and the teen years mirror one another: at those ages, our kids will do almost anything to push us away while also seeking to keep us near them, as they figure out how to be in the world. There are times when, in our deepest frustration with our kids, we even contemplate wishing them to leave the house and be out of our hair, so we can get back the lives we had before parenthood. Yet how many of us have felt the pushback of guilt and remorse after feeling these things, which is only natural. The redemption of the firstborn and its liturgy seem to be telling us that, no matter how grown up and far away from us they get, our children never stop being our children. We are always “redeeming” them by recognizing our bonds of family responsibility and love with one another, even if at times we do not like each other very much. What is more, as much as this parent-child relationship is an obligation, the challenge for both parents and children is to reaffirm regularly that we choose this relationship, by allowing it to grow and change and deepen from birth, to adolescence, to adulthood, and perhaps even into that time when our children become parents, and the great mystery of family and parenting begins again.

So, my postscript to Kahlil Gibran’s sage insight is this: our children are our children.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:03:00 +0000

CARL STROCK, THE SCHENECTADY GAZETTE AND ANTISEMITISM.

Over the past few weeks, our friends in the Schenectady Jewish community have been subjected to one of the most insidious forms of anti-Semitism: the use of freedom of the press as cover for espousing uninformed, virulently antisemitic views that demonize Israel, and that denigrate Judaism (along with Christianity and Islam). Columnist Carl Strock who has written for the Schenectady Gazette since 1981, retired from full-time work about four years ago. He continues to write a column known as The View From Here. After a trip to Israel last month that included only Jerusalem and Ramallah, he returned to our area and wrote a series of articles that can only be denounced as pure bigotry, Mr. Strock's protests of honest reporting and claims of victimization notwithstanding.

Ohav is firmly committed to Zionism and to supporting the State of Israel. Though we as a congregation do not publicly take sides in debates about Israeli politics and foreign policy, constructive debate about what is happening in Israel should be no different from constructive debate about what goes on in any nation. Certainly, we Jews must be vigilant to ensure that such debate not be exploited vindictively by those who hate the State of Israel; nonetheless, debate is often necessary and just, when it is based upon fact, careful analysis, and a desire to help Israel be its best self.

What Carl Strock has done, with the permission and support of the Gazette, is not legitimate, constructive debate or criticism: it is antisemitic screed, and it needs to be condemned as such by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Let me briefly analyze just one segment of one of Mr Strock's articles, since my point is to demonstrate how easily words can distort the truth, especially in the hands of a well known opinion writer and a readership that may not know any better. Below is an excerpt from his essay from April 3, 2012. After the italicized paragraph which is his writing, I will offer some commentary.

One thing that struck me about Judaism on my brief visit to Jerusalem is that it’s a tribal religion. The god that it posits — the ineffable YHWH — is the god of a particular people, his Chosen People, in opposition to other gods of other peoples. That’s the way it originated in biblical times, when YHWH had to compete with Ba’al and other disreputable types, and that’s the way it still seems today. Christianity, for all its warts, is at least intended for everyone. Islam claims to be for everyone, but its god speaks only Arabic and you have to be able to pray in Arabic if you want to have any show with him. Judaism makes no pretensions to universality. This matters because Judaism is the heart of the state of Israel. The state is not for everyone either. It’s for members of the tribe, as made clear in its declaration of independence and its national anthem. Its central conceit is that modern-day Jews, whether from Poland or Ethiopia, and regardless of physical type, are all lineal descendants of the Israelites of the Bible. After 2,000 years they have come home. You hear this all the time in Israel. I heard it most memorably from an aggressive guy in downtown Jerusalem who buttonholed me and tried to get me to sign a petition against the division of Jerusalem, not that any such division is in the works. “We waited 2,000 years!” he shouted at me, though I was not offering any resistance. It turned out he was from New York, though he could as well have been from Kiev or Marrakech.

Judaism began as a religion intended to bring the idea and presence of one universal God to the entire world, through the life and family of Abraham. Though this idea of the one God of the universe Who has universal standards of behavior for all people developed over millenia, it is hardly "tribal." Consider that it is our Bible that teaches from the beginning that all human beings are created in God's image. Consider also that the rabbis who developed Judaism in the Talmudic period taught explicitly that seven laws of personal and societal decency govern all human beings and that all righteous people - not just Jews - have a place in the world to come. Finally, were Judaism merely tribal, no one could ever gain admission to the tribe. However, conversion to Judaism occupies a prominent place in Jewish life and practice, precisely because being "part of the tribe" is as much about accepting the historic mission of Judaism and the Jews to be a light unto the nations, as it is about being born into a Jewish family. The Jewish concept of chosenness is often the "bad boy" that is used by people like our writer to "prove" that we Jews see ourselves as inherently superior and solely self-concerned. Certainly, we care about the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people, just as other ethnic and religious groups quite naturally care about their own survival. Nonetheless, the concept of being the chosen people is more often expressed by Jewish sources in terms of being responsible for our historic mission of being God's partners in healing the world. Further, this historic partnership with God does not preclude other peoples and faiths from having their own partnerships, from being "chosen" for their own missions in the world.

Mr. Strock would also do well to note that the "universalism" of classical Christianity he highlights was historically a universalism of coercion that insisted every person accept Jesus as his or her savior or forfeit salvation in the next world, and often one's life in this world. This does not mean that any or all Christian communities accept this idea today; it does mean, however, that Mr. Strock is dangerously ignorant about religion and history. (Further, I am amazed that Mr. Strock would be so quick to assert that Islam only allows people to speak to God in Arabic. What is his basis for such a comment?) We Jews have struggled for millenia to be a part of the world while also being apart from the world, that is, to live in the larger society as a people with a distinctive identity. Why is that tribalist bigotry when it applies to Jews, but healthy self-assertion when it applies to other nations and peoples who seek to thrive and express themselves?

The worst aspect of Mr. Strock's assertions is his wholesale condemnation of Israel as a bigoted, tribalist Jewish state. Citizenship in the Jewish state is for everyone and it is particularly supportive of the repatriation of the Jewish people. Why is that? Why did the Israeli Knesset create the Law of Return that grants immediate citizenship to any Jew seeking to live in Israel? Precisely because for two thousand years, when we had no home, we were persecuted repeatedly and treated like pariahs simply because we were Jews. The most extreme expression of this, of course, was the Holocaust, which ironically was perpetrated by Germany, one of the leaders of "refined, universalistic" Western civilization and culture at the time. One can hardly call it bigoted and tribalist to establish a homeland for our people in order to express ourselves culturally, politically and spiritually, as well as to protect ourselves. Certainly, wanting to establish that homeland in the place with which we have been connected for 3,000 years can hardly be called bigoted either; unless, of course, one wishes to condemn all national and cultural aspirations of every people in the world as bigoted, which itself is the worst form of bigotry dressed in the garb of universalism.

Whether through the Law of Return or other means, Israeli citizenship is open to Jews and non-Jews. There are Israeli Arab citizens who fully integrate into Israeli society, who vote, and who do quite well academically, socially and economically. There are Arab Knesset members and physicians, university professors, and an Arab supreme court justice. The relationship between the State of Israel and her Arab citizens is not perfect by any means. Discrimination, inequality and racism exist, as they do in every Western democratic society. Right now in Israel, a great deal of public controversy exists between forces within Israeli society that would like to deny rights to women and minorities and the vast majority of Israeli society that wants Israel to remain a strong democracy. That controversy is as public and civil as it is precisely because Israel is a democracy, howbeit an imperfect one. We must look carefully at what Mr. Strock is doing here: he is using "hot-button" words that bother Americans, such as "tribe" and "tribalism," to convey the distorted message that Israel is a racist backwater founded upon stone-age ideas and loyalties.

Finally, Mr. Strock's comments about the Israel Declaration of Independence and Ha-Tikvah deserve some firm response. The declaration is exactly what a declaration of independence is supposed to be: a profound and succinct statement that tells the world about a people's national aspirations and its determination to achieve self-determination. It is not necessarily supposed to be a statement of universal principles about the brotherhood of Man. However, this is what we read about two thirds of the way into that document, after its writers summarize the tragic history of Jewish homelessness and persecution in the diaspora :

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

Israel has not been able to live up to every one of these high ideals. To be fair, what nation can? Yet a look at Israel's record over 64 years of existence reveals that she has done a remarkable job in building her democracy, especially given her onerous burden of being constantly vigilant about defense and security. Could Israel do a better job? Yes. Is it clear that Israel and the Palestinian people need to forge a lasting and just peace that will benefit everyone in the region? Yes. Does Israel deserve to be relentlessly singled out for one-sided criticism from people like Mr. Strock and others who are even more vocal? Most certainly not.

Later in his essay, Mr. Strock trots out the usual canards about the Jews as colonialist late-comers to the Middle East who forcibly dispossessed indigenous populations living in the land. What he and too many others seem unwilling to accept is the historical truth that we Jews did not simply "show up" in the Middle East after the Holocaust. We have truly waited to come home for over two millenia, and Israel is that home to which we have returned. This does not mean that our having a home deligitimizes the national aspirations of Palestinians or other peoples. What is does mean is that we have no less of a right to fulfill our dreams and mission as a people than anyone else, in our historic homeland.

Mr. Strock's writing about Jews, Judaism and Israel has been incendiary and divisive, and he has made a point of attacking Christianity and Islam as well, thus engendering even more hurt and divisiveness in the capital district community. His cover is that he hates all religions equally and wishes to debunk and demystify all religious claims and authority; also, that he has a right to say and print what he likes, given freedom of the press. What he has actually done is create a toxic atmosphere that fosters hatred and misunderstanding by exploiting his pen power to spread outright lies. That is an abuse of a free press, not an embodiment of it. The organized Jewish and Christian communities are taking a number of steps to respond to Mr. Strock, but each of us has the power to respond as well. Specifically, we have the vital task of learning as much of the truth as possible about who we are as Jews, what Judaism says and does, and what Israel is all about. We have the opportunity to write, speak and teach the truth whenever we can, so that our children and grandchildren, our fellow Jews and our fellow citizens learn that truth. Isn't a fair, free, and rational exchange of ideas without fear of reprisal or repression what American civil liberties are all about? If Mr. Strock chooses to use his authority to lie and behave unfairly, then we have to choose to correct those lies and help others to understand the Jewish experience. Finally, we need to keep building bridges between us and the wider community, not just for our own sake but for the sake of all our citizens.

May we continue to be strong in our fight against bigotry and demagoguery, as Jews, as Zionists, and as proud American citizens.

BEING TAKEN WITH LOVE, EVEN AFTER DEATH DO US PART.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:52:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Shmini Shel Pesach, Shir Ha-Shirim, and Yizkor, 5772.

Shabbat shalom and chag sameach.

As some of you know, throughout the week of Pesach, I have been exploring the meaning of the drinking of the four cups of wine that structure the seder ritual and enhance our celebration of our freedom. We have studied the verses from the book of Exodus in which God employs at least four different verbs to describe God’s promise of liberation to the people of Israel. These four verbs are seen by the Talmud as the literary basis for the four cups of wine at the seder.

The last verb in the Bible’s list is v’lakachti, which means literally, “I (God) will take you Israelites to be my people.” Most commentators on the Torah explain that God’s promise to take us to be God’s people was fulfilled at Mount Sinai, when God gave us the Torah, thus signifying that we were not only physically free from slavery, we were spiritually free as well. This verb, v’lakachti, is used in other parts of the Torah as well as later Talmudic literature as a reference to a man taking a woman and making her his wife. Though this technical term for marriage and the imagery accompanying it may disturb us because it is sexist, it provides us with a rich portrayal of how Jewish tradition has always understood the Exodus from Egypt and our receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai: God removes us from slavery to Pharaoh and marries us, with the Torah serving as our ketubah, or marriage contract, on our wedding day when we truly become a people married to God. It is no wonder, then, that we chant Shir Ha-Shirim during Pesach. Its erotic love poetry about a man and woman desiring each other became a preeminent symbol of the romance between God and the Jews that resulted in God taking us to be God’s bride.

One of the most evocative images in Shir Ha-Shirim is of the woman lying on her bed at night, unable to sleep because she is tormented by thoughts of her lover from whom she is separated. We read in chapter 3:1:
Upon my couch at night//I sought the one I love//I sought but found him not.
The sages of the Talmud interpreted this verse to be a lament of the Jewish people before God. There are physical and spiritual nighttimes when we are either oppressed by others or when we drift away from the Torah. At those times, we lie not on a lover’s couch but upon a sick bed, tormented by our alienation from God. Only through our efforts and God’s love is the rift between us repaired so that we can continue to live as individuals and as a people.

The image of the couch in Shir Ha-Shirim is invoked to describe a physical romance between two people, and a spiritual romance between the Jewish people and God. As we will see during Yizkor, the image of the couch is also invoked in the beautiful memorial prayer, Eil Malei Rakhamim. There, we not only call forth memories of our loved ones before God, we call upon God to protect their souls by having them lie upon their couches in peace, in the afterlife: v’yanukhu b’shalom al mish-k’voteihem. What strikes me about this image in the memorial prayer is its firm assertion that those we love and remember who have died, are not really deceased, but alive with God in a place of rest and peace upon heavenly couches that are attended to by God. This is not only a theological image, and it is not necessarily trying to make some forced assumption about immortality and the soul. It is a poetic image that binds us, our loved ones who have died, and God together in the hope that our love, their love, and God’s love keeps them alive in spirit, even when their bodies are no longer alive. We hope for our loved ones that the couch – one metaphor for life experience- that may have been a place of turbulence and torment during their lives- is now the setting for peace and rest for their undying spiritual selves that we remember with sadness, but also with love.

SQUEEZING THE GRAPES OF REDEMPTION.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:50:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Shvii Shel Pesach (Pesach, Day Seven), 5772.

Chag sameach.

During the first two days of Pesach, I explained that in each dvar Torah for the holiday I would discuss the four cups of wine at the seder, with a close look at their form, function, symbolism and where tradition derives them from. You may recall our having looked at Exodus, chapter 6:6-7, which contains four different verbs that refer to God’s promised liberation of the Israelites from slavery. The derivation of the four cups of wine from these four verbs is found in the Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Pesahim, 10:1. There, we learn about three other sources in the Bible that hint at our practice of the four cups. These include the mention of four cups of bitterness that will be drunk by the Jewish people when we are under the thumb of different rulers and the four cups of salvation that we will drink when God redeems us from oppression in the messianic era. Each of these references to four cups that are drunk by the Jewish people actually makes sense as a poetic basis for explaining the source of our seder ritual. According to the Mishnah, the oral Torah, we begin telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt bi-g’nut, in a state of degradation, and we finish telling the story bi-sh’vach, in a state of praise: we were once slaves, then we became free; we once were slaves to idolatry, then God made us God’s people. This Passover story is a paradigm for and a microcosm of the Jewish experience throughout history: we have drunk many cups of oppression and we continue to drink many cups of deliverance. We will finish doing this when we and the world are finally redeemed by God during the ultimate messianic redemption.

However, one more creative allusion to the four cups of seder wine is found in the Jerusalem Talmud, and at first glance it makes no sense at all in this context. If you open your Humashim to Genesis 40:9-11 on page 243, we will read a passage from the story about our ancestor Joseph’s encounter with the royal cup-bearer in prison:

Then the chief cup bearer told his dream to Joseph. He said to him, “In my dream, there was a vine in front of me. On the vine were three branches. It had barely budded, when out came its blossoms and its clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes, pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup, and placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand.

Notice that in telling his dream to Joseph, the cup bearer uses the word “cup” three times. Joseph, of course interprets his prison mate’s dream correctly. In three days’ time, Pharaoh celebrates his birthday by pardoning his cup bearer and restoring him to his former position. In fact, we read later on, in chapter 40:21, page 245:

Pharaoh restored the chief cup bearer to his cup bearing, and he placed the cup in Pharoah’s hand.

These four mentions of the word “cup” in our story are taken by the Jerusalem Talmud as a hint to the four cups of wine that we drink at the seder.

All of the Talmud’s explanations for the source of our seder drinking ritual are essentially asmakhtot, after-the-fact rationales based upon the Bible, in this case for what was likely already a very ancient Jewish seder practice. However, as I already mentioned, this one asmakhta about Pharaoh’s cup bearer seems to make the least sense of all of them. How can the four cups of the cup bearer’s story be connected at all to the four cups of wine at our seder? The cup bearer was a non-Jew who had the good fortune to meet Joseph at the right time in his life and to be pardoned by Pharaoh, likely on a capricious whim of the latter, so that his life was saved and he was able to go back to serving in the royal court. This is hardly the basis for the story of our Exodus from Egypt. Other rabbinic sources explain that the cup bearer’s whole account is actually a veiled reference to the redemption of the Jewish people from Egypt, with the cups of wine and the grape vine serving as symbols for the means by which God would vanquish Pharaoh and save us from his clutches.

Obviously, there is no arguing with this kind of poetic license, because that is what an asmakhta is: a poetic marshalling of biblical sources in a playful way to make a point after the fact and “prove” as it were that some tradition or innovation actually has its roots in an authoritative biblical text. This being the case, allow me to offer an asmakhta explanation of my own based upon the verses about the cup bearer’s dream from Genesis. I make no claims that our sages would have agreed with me about my interpretation, but as we say in the rabbinic world: ein m’shivin al ha-drash: creative interpretations on the stories and ideas of biblical narrative should abound without anyone critiquing the creativity of anyone else. I suggest that these verses we quoted from Genesis should actually be taken in their most universal sense. Joseph the Hebrew is about to interpret the dream of redemption of his non-Jewish prison mate who just wants to be rehabilitated by his boss, Pharoah. The cup bearer wants to get out of prison, to receive the king’s favor, and to get back to his old job that must have supported him pretty well. In the end, as Joseph predicts, this is what happens. Yet, implicit in this story of the cup bearer’s good fortune is a darker story about the caprices of a powerful king who can raise a man like the cup bearer out of prison or behead a man like the royal baker, the other character in the Genesis story who did not fare as well. The fortunes of these two men, like that of Joseph, were utterly dependent upon other all-powerful elites who, no matter how benign they appeared, could turn on an underling and make or break a man’s life as part of a trifling bit of entertainment for a birthday celebration. Perhaps the rabbis of the Talmud connected the four cups of wine of the seder to this story to teach a more ominous, universal lesson about slavery and redemption. Unchecked by a power greater than oneself, whether the fear of God or the rule of law, the best leader easily degenerates into a tyrant whose decisions about the fate of others are vindictive and destructive. In the shadow of absolute power, even those who could be considered politically and economically fortunate, really have little real control over their own lives; how much more so the members of society with no money, prestige, or connections. sitting at their seder tables under the thumb of Roman occupation, our sages may have wanted to connect the night of redemption from Egypt to this disturbing story about the cup bearer because it is a story about incomplete liberation and freedom. They may have wanted to remind us that human authority and power should never be left unchecked and that the Pesach celebration is not only about our successful liberation from Egypt, but also about the many Egypts that remain throughout the world for millions, not just Jews.

Last week, I prefaced my first dvar Torah with an informal discussion about modern-day slavery. Millions of people who are desperate for economic security wind up being illegally trafficked or abducted and forced into slave-like conditions as prostitutes, farm workers for cacao farmers who supply some of the world’s biggest chocolatiers, and many other circumstances of forced labor. An estimated 15-27 million people throughout the world are modern-day slaves, many of them are minors, and many of them are women living under the coercive authority of abusive men. Further, modern day slaves are even living here in the United States and in Israel, two of the freest places on earth. They are far worse off than the cup bearer in the Bible story quoted by the Jerusalem Talmud, but they share with him one common condition: they have no real power to chart their own destinies and they are robbed of their dignity. If you go to Brandeis University’s website, brandeis.edu, link to its Schuster Institute of Investigative Journalism, and you will find more resources than you can stand to read about modern day human trafficking and slavery. To learn more about women, poverty, and modern slavery and trafficking, look at Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu-Dunn’s excellent book, Half the Sky.

The four cups of wine at our seders are certainly intended to celebrate the redemption and liberation that we experienced in Egypt, as well as the redemption that we experience through our reliance upon God. Yet, they can also be seen as uncomfortable reminders to us free people of the liberation and redemption that remain to be achieved by so many throughout the world. God needs us to make this freedom a reality.

Chag sameach.

HOW ELSE CAN WE UNDERSTAND THE FOUR VERBS OF REDEMPTION?

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:40:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Day Two Of Pesach, 5772.
Chag kasher v’sameach.

Yesterday, we began to look at the ritual of the four cups of wine at the seder, specifically how the four cups function as markers along the path toward physical and spiritual freedom that we take each time we celebrate Pesach. You may recall the Talmudic teaching about the hint of these four cups of wine that our sages found in the language of the Torah. You will notice the verses from the book of Exodus, 6:6-7 that we studied yesterday morning:

I am the Lord. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary judgments. And I will take you to be My people…

As we will see next week during Yom Tov, and as I alluded to yesterday, this four-verb hint used by the Talmud for rationalizing the practice of the four cups is not the only one that is taught. However, it is the one that is most popular and that is cited most often in traditional sources. For me, the big question about these arbaah leshonot geulah, these four mentions of redemption, is that they appear to be saying the exact same thing four times. Is there anything about each of these verbs, to free, to deliver, to redeem and to take that makes them distinctive? Are God and the Torah simply being verbose?

Let me suggest that we follow the sage advice of our sages: no word in the Torah is superfluous or mere verbal ornamentation. It all possesses significance, even the parts that speak colloquially, in the language of human beings, as our rabbis call it. The fun and meaning of Torah text are found precisely in the significance –manifest and hidden - of each word, even at times, each letter of Torah. That being the case, let’s learn more about these four mentions of redemption with one of the masters of Torah commentary, Rabbi Hayyim ben Attar, also known as the Or HaHayyim, after his commentary by the same name. Rabbi ben Attar lived in 17th century Morocco in what was then still a thriving Jewish community. His commentary is noted for very fine, subtle questions about the Torah as well as a great deal of application of Jewish mysticism to interpreting the text. Rabbi ben Attar wrote the following about the four mentions of redemption in Exodus that form the basis for the four cups of wine:

God told Moses, “Inform the people of Israel that My nature is one of mercy. I will be merciful toward them, and here is the list of good things I will do for them:

I will free them: this means that I will free them from the worst of the Egyptian oppression through the ten plagues, but the dread of Egyptian power will still be over them. Then…

I will deliver them: this means that I will free them finally from all oppression and forced labor prior to the Exodus. Then…

I will redeem them: this means that I will actually take them out of Egypt, through the Sea of Reeds, beyond the reach of persecution and enemies. Then…
I will take them to be My people: this means that at Mount Sinai I will give them the Torah, when they become singled out for relationship with Me.

Note what the Or HaHayyim appears to be doing. Each one of the verbs represents a different stage of the physical and spiritual redemption of the Israelites from Egypt. By itself, this idea is nothing new. The innovation that Rabbi ben Attar adds here is this: the process of liberation and redemption was taking place well before the event of liberation and redemption, when our ancestors finally went free during the Exodus. Whether you believe that God literally did the work of freeing us, or that the Exodus was a purely human endeavor, the Or HaHayyim reminds us that the transition from slavery to freedom doesn’t just happen all of a sudden, out of the blue. That is because human beings get so tangled in the dark chaos of oppression, both as oppressors and as the oppressed, that even God, as it were, has to move with relative slowness to disentangle us from the mess of persecution. Even God cannot redeem us when we ourselves are not fully ready to be redeemed or to take responsibility for our own redemption. In a more secular vein, people who have been oppressed generally need to take the time to develop political consciousness and conscience that allow them to see that they do not have to allow themselves to be abused by the power of others. Even when the overturning of oppressive power can and should be swift, - when political revolution is the better path than political evolution - the creation of new, more equal expressions of power and governance likely needs to move with thoughtful deliberateness; thus, no one is able to grab the reins of new power too quickly or self-righteously, which prevents newly freed people from meeting the new boss who just winds up being the same as the old boss.

For me, the most interesting ritual implication of Rabbi ben Attar’s explanation of the redemptive process is how it is reflected in the seder. We recline and drink the four cups of wine at the seder, like free people. Yet, as we drink each of those cups, we like our ancestors, are reenacting the experience of still being slaves as much as the drama of becoming free. We are in Egypt slowly shaking off oppression but not yet fully free, just like they were. This liminal experience of being both enslaved and free, of being on the threshold between both, is found throughout the seder: matzah is the bread of the Exodus and freedom, and it is the bread of affliction; we begin the telling of the Pesach story at the seder bi-g’nut, in a state of degradation, and only later do we journey to the end of the story bi-sh’vach, praising God for the dignity of freedom; we consume symbols of the Paschal sacrifice and bitter herbs and haroset, symbols of the bitterness of slavery. Each of these threshold rituals forces us to feel the discomfort of not being quite a slave yet not being quite free, even as we party through the seder night in celebration. That way, we never take freedom for granted, we never dismiss the possibility of slavery as merely a thing of the distant past, and we never lose our sense of humble gratitude to God for the blessings we have.

THE FOUR CUPS AT THE SEDER #1.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:33:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Day 1 of Pesach, 5772.

Shabbat shalom and chag kasher v’sameach.

I trust that your first seder was a joyous experience that not only involved a great feast with family and friends, but also an opportunity to literally taste slavery and freedom in one meal. One of the primary ritual and educational tools of the seder is the drinking of the four cups of wine. For this and the next three divrei Torah that span the four days of Yom Tov during Pesach, I want to explore this ritual of the four cups from different perspectives, ritual, halakhic, and symbolic. This is especially helpful today, the first day of Yom Tov, as we reflect upon our first seder and prepare for the second which will take place tonight.

The practice of drinking four cups of wine at the seder derives from the Mishnah, the oral Torah, specifically Tractate Pesahim, chapter 10. There, we read in the very first section that even the poorest members of the Jewish community must drink four cups of wine at the seder, and even if that requires taking assistance from the public charity fund that would be used only for those in the most dire financial straits. The rest of chapter 10 teaches us about the four times that each cup of wine is drunk: as part of Kiddush for Yom Tov evening, at the end of the recitation of the Passover story, right after Birkat HaMazon, or grace after meals, and at the conclusion of the Hallel prayer which is mandated by the rabbis of the Mishnah as a way of praising God for delivering us from Egypt. Each of these rituals to which wine drinking is connected is an obligatory practice that sanctifies our celebratory meal as a religious event.

The Mishnah never actually explains to us where it derives the drinking of the four cups from, only that each of the four major rituals of the seder is to be accompanied by the drinking of a cup of wine, over each of which the later rabbis of the Talmud required a blessing. Other rabbinic sources assert that this practice is based upon the four different verbs used to describe God’s redemption of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, which are mentioned in Exodus 6:6-7. There God explains to Moses God’s plan for freeing the people from Egypt:

I am the Lord. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary judgments. And I will take you to be My people…

God promises to free us, to deliver us, to redeem us, and to take us as God’s people. At first glance, this four-word emphasis upon liberation in the Bible is a sufficient explanation for the four cups of wine. Each celebratory cup that we drink serves as a reminder of God’s promises fulfilled in the past and of God’s promises to be fulfilled toward us in the future. However, as we will see later on during Pesach, other plausible four-fold explanations for the four cups exist, and the verses that I quoted before from Exodus can easily be interpreted to evoke five or even six words related to liberation, when the verse are quoted in full. Though these four words that evoke images of God liberating us are powerful, let me suggest a more basic reason for why we drink these four cups at the seder, as well as why we drink them when and how we do.

The seder is, as its name attests, literally an ordered ritual experience; it is intended to help us feel like we are slaves leaving Egypt, not simply have us retell the Exodus story as someone else’s story from an inaccessible and distant past. Everything about the seder is conducted with an eye toward helping us to act and feast like newly -freed people. In the Greco-Roman world of ancient Palestine where the seder liturgy was developed, it was common for the upper classes to hold symposia, in which they mixed heavy amounts of eating, drinking, and not always wholesome partying with light intellectual discussions about philosophy, science or the arts. A common misconception is that the seder was modeled directly after the symposium. Though the form of the Roman symposium was likely the skeletal model for the structure of the seder, the content of the seder was anything but an imitation of the symposium. My teacher Professor Barukh Bokser, of blessed memory, wrote many years ago that the Mishnah I mentioned above reflects our sages’ efforts to create a distinctively Jewish spiritual experience through the seder. Their true model was the first Passover meal that the Israelites engaged in as slaves on the verge of freedom that night before the Exodus millennia ago. Of course, their second true model was the great Passover offering celebrated in Jerusalem by thousands of pilgrims who would worship at the Bet Hamikdash, the holy Temple, as one free community, prior to the Temple’s destruction by the Romans. Rabbi Bokser and other scholars point out where our sages chose to pointedly make changes in the symposium model or to ignore it altogether. First, they insured that everyone, men, women and children, rich and poor alike would be part of the seder experience, particularly the drinking of the four cups of wine and reclining in the manner of free people. The seder became a rehearsal for radical egalitarianism, something to be tasted by all members of the community within the larger values framework of redemption, even if only for one night. Egalitarianism and inclusiveness were hardly the fare of the typical symposium. Second, while they certainly expected seder participants to feast and drink as free people do, they placed the discussion of the Exodus first in the order of the evening, before the revelry and the drinking, which were considered of secondary importance in some respects. In fact, the revelry and drinking were highly regulated by the Mishnah, so that the seder did not degenerate into the bacchanalian nonsense for which Roman symposia were apparently infamous. Third, and I think most relevant, the four cups of wine were placed by the sages in the seder as ritual markers of transitions, rather than simply opportunities for a good, stiff drink. Look at where each of the four cups of wine is found. The first cup ushers in the holiday through Kiddush, which proclaims Pesach and the people of Israel holy, something that is hard to do when a people is being beaten down by an oppressor. The second cup concludes the mitzvah of telling and re-living the story of the redemption from Egypt, which is what defines us on the night of liberation. More specifically, after the telling of the story we now define ourselves as free, rather than having our identities handed to us by Pharaoh, thus leading us to a celebratory drink. The third cup follows the grace after meals, in fulfillment of the traditional requirement according to Halakhah, something not often done anymore. Significantly, this third cup of wine seems to be one more reminder to us free people that our freedom is not license for anarchy in eating, drinking and partying, but a reminder that we have the capacity to discipline our behavior voluntarily and freely. Finally, the fourth cup completes the recitation of the second part of the Hallel prayer, which our sages required us to chant as a final hymn of thanks to God, who is the real center of the Exodus story. We who are physically free can once again exercise our spiritual freedom by recognizing God, not a human being, as the supreme ruler, yet another reason for a celebratory drink within appropriate limits. Each of these transitions or stations follows a larger pattern that the four cups of wine and the text of the Haggadah reflect: first, we needed to be physically liberated from Pharaoh. Only then could we liberate ourselves spiritually and morally by exercising freely our relationship with God and a life of self-imposed discipline, the ultimate form of freedom.

Thus, far from being opportunities for making the seder a happy hour, the four cups of wine concretize and ritualize order and structure, while at the same time allowing us a certain amount of space to unwind, have fun, and celebrate the literal and symbolic taste of freedom. Ultimately, they parallel beautifully the four verbs from Exodus that are their literary basis: At Kiddush, we thank God for literally freeing us from Egypt. During the telling of the story, we praise God for literally delivering us from Egypt. After Birkat Hamazon, we recognize that God gives us the tools for spiritual redemption. After Hallel, we revel in the One who takes us to be that One’s own, which is the deeper purpose of the Exodus—to freely accept a life of mission and partnership with God in repairing the world.

WHY DID GOD TAKE US OUT OF EGYPT ANYWAY?

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:21:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Tetzaveh and Shabbat Zakhor 5772.

Even with Purim on our doorstep, we are already looking past the Hamentaschen and the madness of the Megillah reading toward Pesach, which will find us whether or not we are ready to find it. As you may know, I just returned from our biennial congregational pilgrimage to Israel, the ultimate symbol for us of Jewish freedom, power, and self-expression. Experiencing Israel always makes me do more thinking about the nature and purpose of the Jewish people, whose journey really begins with the Exodus from Egypt, that pit of slavery and oppression. So, as I begin to think about my celebration of Pesach and my telling of the story of the Exodus at the Seder, I am wondering once again: why did God take us out of Egypt, anyway?

This morning in the Torah, we completed our reading of God’s very long, complex, elegant instructions to Moshe and the Israelites concerning the construction of the Mishkan, the portable desert sanctuary, as well as of the sacred clothing to be worn by Aaron and his sons during their service in that sacred building. God began these instructions in last week’s portion, Terumah, with an explanation for all of this construction: Let the Israelites build Me a holy place and I shall dwell in their midst. Numerous are the repeated explanations of commentators that God never says that He will dwell in the sanctuary, for what mere physical building could hold God? Rather, they point out, the Mishkan is there to help us feel God’s presence dwelling among us as a community. In this week’s Torah portion, Tetzaveh, as we near the end of all the instructions for the construction, God takes the idea of the Mishkan one step further. Please look with me at Humash Etz Hayyim, Exodus 29:45-46, on pp. 516-517:

(Through the Mishkan) I will abide among the Israelites, and I will be their God. And they will know that I the Lord am their God, who brought them out from the land of Egypt that I might abide among them; I the Lord their God.

According to this passage, God not only uses the Mishkan as an opportunity to dwell among the people, God’s whole purpose in taking them out of Egyptian slavery was to be able to dwell among them and be their God. This appears at first glance to contradict Bible passages such as Genesis, chapter 15, in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will leave Egypt in order to escape suffering under Pharaoh’s thumb, and then in order to enter the land of Canaan that has been promised to them by God. Further, framing the purpose of the Exodus as being about following a portable sanctuary around nomadically in order to experience God’s presence is a very diaspora-like idea. What is the focus of our freedom and formation as a people: to be in relationship with God as we move around the world or to be in relationship with God, to quote HaTikvah – Israel’s national anthem – as a free people in our land?

I am, of course, oversimplifying the Torah here. Since we take the text as a united whole, we know perfectly well that the Torah emphasizes both divine aspirations. God took us out of Egypt not so much for the purposes of freedom itself, but in order to give us the opportunity to experience God’s presence fully so that we could be God’s servants in a covenantal relationship and a shared mission: this is the essence of the “chosen people” idea, and it applies wherever Jews are, from Jerusalem to Albany and everywhere in between. But God also made clear from the moment that God called Abraham to start a new life that this new people we call the Jews would find the greatest fulfillment of its mission and its life in the land that we today call Israel. This dual sense of our mission as the Jewish people is quite ancient and it forms the basis for contemporary religious Zionism; however, it underlies even secular thinking about Zionism which may not emphasize traditional ideas about God making us a nation, but which certainly emphasizes the need for the Jewish people to have its own home in which to thrive, express itself and make a positive difference in the world.

Having just tasted the richness of both aspects of this great Jewish mission by being in Israel, what am I going to bring to my seder table this year and how is my celebration of Pesach going to be different? Part of what makes pilgrimage to Israel so enriching for me is that, paradoxically, it leaves me feeling deeply challenged and somewhat incomplete. I have made my home in our Jewish community, my family and I are firmly rooted here, and I need not explain to you how good America has been to the Jewish people. Nonetheless, I refuse to pretend that somehow our Jewish lives in America and Jewish life in Israel are equal, for they really aren’t. Without whitewashing or idealizing Israeli life and society, I feel drawn to the rhythms and routines of Jewish identity and culture that are commonplace in Israel; its entire civil life, however secular it may be, is Jewish in a way that even the most intensive Jewish community in America simply cannot be by virtue of the fact that we are a minority here. Saturday is Shabbat, the whole country celebrates Purim almost with a passion, advertisements, street signs, and protest slogans that draw off of three millennia of Jewish sacred literature abound. Even more important, the existential anxieties of American and Israeli Jewry are vastly different, however much our two communities are intertwined as part of world Jewry. We Jews in America may feel physically safe, but we are constantly preoccupied with the threat of cultural suicide that is the result of being an assimilating minority. The Jewish state may always have to be vigilant about its physical safety, but as a living, sovereign Jewish state it can devote its spiritual and cultural energies to far more productive concerns: these include, among others, what to do with power, how to create a just society founded upon Jewish values, and the role that Israel plays as the center of the Jewish world and as a modern nation in the international community. For me, Israel is this nagging goad that I hope will never stop nagging me. It keeps whispering in my ear, “Dan, you are the descendant of those who left Egypt to enter a relationship with God in the desert, and then to enter the homeland that God gave us as an inheritance for building that relationship. You may be comfortable in the disapora, but aren’t you really still trying to follow God as a nomad like your ancestors did? That Israelite caravan with its portable sanctuary left the Sinai desert a long time ago. Why don’t you come home, and fulfill both parts of God’s plan for us when God took us out of slavery?” I will be listening for this nagging voice that is Israel when I lift up the matzah, tell the story of the Exodus, drink the four cups of wine, and finally sing “L’shanah Ha-baah Bi-Yerushalayim,” next year in Jerusalem.

I hope you will not think that I am simply blathering starry-eyed, post-trip nonsense that will wear off in a couple of weeks. I am not. I have felt this way about my place and our place in ancient and contemporary Jewish history for a long time, and my biennial trips to Israel only refine my sense of cognitive and spiritual dissonance. I am not making aliyah tomorrow, and I am fully aware of how much the State of Israel relies upon America and its Jews, however much some Israelis are into the myth that they are entirely self-sufficient. Further, I would not be doing the work that I do if I did not value what we have as a Jewish community here, and if I was not fully aware of how much Jewish life outside of Israel has yielded over the past two millennia. Nonetheless, I am happy to be challenged and pushed to remember where ideally I should be, through my encounters with the grit and the miracle of Israel, past, present, and please God, future.

As we get ready for Pesach, what can you and I do to respond to that nagging, goading challenge, short of uprooting ourselves, Exodus-style, and living in Israel? First, if you have not been to Israel or you have not been there in a long time, begin to make plans to go there. You can go with Ohav in 2014, you can volunteer there, you can plan a family trip around a bar or bat mitzvah, you can connect with another organized tour or program. The point is for you to go, and if you won’t go, to facilitate your children and grandchildren going. Plan on having a lot of safe, wholesome fun, prepare to retrace the steps of our ancestors, and stay open to the fact that such a trip is more than a trip, it is a pilgrimage that echoes, howbeit faintly, the pilgrimages to the Jerusalem Temple from long ago. Second, if you are filled to the brim with anxieties about Israeli politics, Iranian threats, and conflicts with the Palestinians, set them aside for a while, and just reconnect with Israel as a blessing, as our extended family whom we love, just because. I am frankly so tired of the way that American Jews, on the left and the right, have reframed the Jewish state as one huge problem, as if it were a bunch of sick, dysfunctional relatives we fret over but never see or enjoy. Israelis mouth off plenty about politics and other vital issues, and they struggle with issues aplenty, but first and foremost they live their lives in their country. We Jews in the diaspora are so frightened at times of our own shadows that we can’t seem to get past this “Israel as huge problem” narrative, which is unhelpful to us and to Israel. We try not to spend all of our time talking about our loved ones in terms of what ails them and what they are not. Why, then, do we seem to do this almost obsessively when talking about our “loved ones” who are the State of Israel? Finally, be ambassadors for the Jewish state: learn more about her ancient and contemporary history, get the facts and share them with our friends, neighbors and family, Jewish and non-Jewish who just don’t know those facts. Most of all, convey your love for Israel to them with your stories, your ideas, your values, not a naïve, ignorant love of an Israel that can do no wrong, but a mature love of an Israel that gets so much right.

Today is Shabbat Zakhor, when we remember Amalekite aggression and the way that Haman the Amalekite tried to destroy the diaspora Jewish community of Persia. These themes of Purim resonate so strongly with us Jews and with all people who have tasted oppression that even in Israel, the ultimate anti-diaspora, Purim is celebrated with gusto. Just as the different passages of the Torah about the Exodus help us to do, so too, Purim and Pesach hold us in a creative tension between our experience as Jews outside of Israel and our connection to Israel: the cultural, political, physical, and spiritual center of the Jewish people. Let’s use this next month of remembrances and celebrations to remember why God liberated us from Egypt, to enjoy the sacred privilege of being Jewish that God has given us where ever we are in the world, and to never stop striving to return to the place from which Torah goes forth: Zion and Jerusalem.

SCENES FROM A JOURNEY.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:47:00 +0000

Vignettes From A Pilgrimage To Israel.

The following meditations are a sampling of some of my thoughts upon returning from two weeks in Israel with Congregation Ohav Shalom’s biennial mission.

Hebrew

Like Semitic languages in general, Hebrew is quite ordered and logical. Unlike English and other Germanic languages, the Hebrew vocabulary flows naturally from shorashim or word roots, three or four letter verb stems in the infinitive form that are the basis for different verb conjugations as well as nouns.
Consider the following examples. In Hebrew, the shoresh or verb root khazar (KH, Z, R) consisting of the letters khet, zayin and resh, means to return. If I want to say “I am returning,” an intransitive verb form, I say, “ani KHoZeR.” If I want to say “I am returning the ball,” a transitive verb form, I say “ani maKHaZiR et ha-kadur.” However, these shorashim are even more versatile. If I want to say “reconstruction,” I say “sheeKH-ZuR.” If I want to say “recycling,” I say “meeKH-ZuR.” All of these words are completely different from each other, but if you listen carefully to them, you hear echoes of the original verb stem, KHaZaR, to return.

Returning on one’s own, returning someone else’s belongings, reconstruction, recycling: they are all about return, coming back to something, bringing back something, rediscovering that which was, is, and will be.
I notice these kinds of words as I leave Ben Gurion Airport and walk the streets of Israel once again. The words of Hebrew, the street signs, the protest slogans, the Hebrew newspapers all point to a pervasive truth that is Israel, a truth brought to life by the language: to come to Israel is to return to the source, the root, to come home.

The Torah Scroll.

In Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, there is a Torah scroll on display, which had been saved from destruction at the hands of the Nazis during Kristallnakht, the Night of Broken Glass which took place on November 9, 1938. That night, on the orders of Hitler’s regime, Nazi party members all over Germany looted Jewish businesses, vandalized synagogues, raped, assaulted, and murdered German Jews across the country, as their fellow citizens - friends and neighbors – looked on in fear, apathy, or approval. This was a foretaste of the hell to come for European Jewry and millions of other people.

The scroll is now the property of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, opened up for everyone to see that the Jewish people and its God passed through the fire, badly burned but alive nonetheless. I am always intrigued by Torah scrolls, but I have been most intrigued this year as our congregation proceeds with the writing of our own new scroll. I look closely at the passage to which it has been opened, the ancient priestly blessing that Jews recite on different occasions.
May God bless you and guard you; may God cause the light of God’s face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may God lift up God’s face to you and grant you peace.

What was the intent of the person who opened the scroll to this passage? To make a cynical point? “How wonderful, Jews. Look at the blessings bestowed upon you by your God who died at Auschwitz along with you! And yet you still believe.” To make a statement of profound faith? “Jews, we and our Torah are still here. The blessing and its God are still alive.” I cannot know what the museum curator who did this was thinking. All I know is that no more than an hour’s drive from Jerusalem, in the Israeli city of Ashkelon, our sofer (Torah scribe) is slowly writing our new scroll in black ink, in this nation that grew out of the dark ashes of the Holocaust like a weed poking through a pile of rocks, yet whose attachment to this land is far older and greater. May God bless us and guard us.

The Kotel.

In his poem, “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He then wrote a painful reflection upon the forced boundaries placed between him and his neighbor, ones that defy the natural impulse for things and people to connect with one another. What would Frost have thought if he had visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem? Also known as the Kotel, it is a magnet for the faithful, the faithless, the curious, the lost, the sick, the broken, an endless humanity that streams towards it day after day, all day from every faith, every corner of the earth. They place written prayers in the Kotel’s cracks and crevices, desperate as they are – as perhaps we all are – for healing, to be heard by God, for guidance, for forgiveness. Sometimes, the prayers are not pleas, but offerings of pure gratitude, words of praise given unconditionally. The sea of people that visits loves this wall, needs this wall, looks forward to imagining an intimate conversation between each person and God at this wall, the very last vestige of the ancient Jerusalem Temple that stood on the Temple Mount. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, are there perhaps also no rational skeptics at the Kotel?

With all this, the Kotel is wrapped in irony. This most sacred place began as nothing more than the outer retaining wall of the newly renovated second Temple of King Herod the Great, one of the most brutal men to rule over the land of Israel in behalf of the Roman Empire. Perhaps equally ironic is that this place which draws people from the four corners of the earth to worship together is also a physical and social boundary between Jews who worship at it below the Temple Mount, and Muslims who worship on the Temple Mount. I feel the Kotel almost heaving, reeling from the seismic tensions between Jews and Arabs, struggling to retain not only the earth behind it but to keep peace as well, by keeping us tucked in behind safe boundaries.

The Kotel is a wall, and the Kotel is the world: an endless paradox of separation and togetherness, boundaries and oneness, peace and conflict, the sacred and the profane living in the same space, the same time. And flying above its stones, traveling straight to God’s throne of glory, are words, the tools of creation and destruction given to us by God, who waits to hear what we have done with them.

At the Entrance To the Carmel Market…

A young man, thin, lithe and agile, tap dances skillfully for money to the tunes on his boom box at the entrance to Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market. Friday afternoon here reveals a sea of colorful humanity and insanity, as even the largely secular residents of this city rush about to prepare for Shabbat and the closing of the market stalls for one day. I sit on a bench at the entrance, watching the dancer tap, tap, tap away on his wooden board like a clock tick-tocking too quickly, as he entertains the passersby who appreciatively throw in a few shekels after they clap in admiration.

In my head, I am moving in time with him, shouting to him: “Dance my friend, move swiftly against the tide of despair, the hatred of the nations, the mortal threats. Dance faster and faster, quicken your pace, and quicken the pulse of all who dance with you, this seemingly endless flow of people who are Israel, who know that they must never stop dancing, never stop moving, never stop hoping; for at the moment that they stop, they cease to live!”

He stops tapping, scowls at me and says, “Idiot, I’m not your American Zionist poster boy, so cut the crap. I’m just out here trying to make a buck like everyone else.”

Khaval Al Ha-Z’man

Lior, our group’s bus driver, has the boyish look of a sixteen year old and the swarthy dark skin of his Yemenite ancestry. His appearance is like Israel itself, old and young. To look at him, listen to his soft voice, and appreciate his modest demeanor, you would not know that in Tzahal (The Israel Defense Forces) his job was to operate a critical missile defense system using complex mathematics and computer models, something he cannot and will not say much about.

Because I am fluent in Hebrew, Lior and I converse easily. When I talk about all the great places to see and do in Israel, something about which he knows quite a bit, he greets my enthusiasm with the Hebrew saying, khaval al ha-z’man. Roughly translated, it means, “time’s a-wasting.” It normally is used to express regret that one is running out of time or to push someone else to get moving on your behalf. However, Lior seems to be using the phrase to mean, “I agree, ‘X’ is so cool.” I keep meaning to ask him how this phrase took on a new meaning, but I figure it out on my own: ‘X’ is so cool and so worth making the time for, but khaval al ha-z’man, time is sadly so tight that we can’t do or see everything that interests us.

Perhaps I never get around to asking Lior about what he is saying, because I sense what else this phrase means to Israelis at a deeper level, and I don’t feel right asking him about it. Rightly or wrongly, Israelis have the reputation for being fatalists. Though Israel is a strong, world-class nation, Israelis live with a sense that time is never really on their side, even more than the rest of us do. However, this fatalism does not seem to breed collective despair, as anyone spending time in this turbulent, thriving, energetic country can tell you. Israelis go about their daily business, no less or more meaningfully than the rest of world…but possibly feeling greater compulsion to see more, say more, get more, give more, love more, hate more in less time, for who can know what tomorrow or even the next hour will bring them? Khaval al ha-z’man: we who live outside of Israel don’t really get the sad slippage of time the way that they do.
Khaval al ha-z’man: time’s a-wasting. We grow older, and if we are lucky we will reach seventy or maybe even eighty, as the psalms remind us; who knows if we will even be healthy, wealthy, with it enough to enjoy all the years we are given. For the Jews, being a free people in our own land is a blessing, a miracle, but have each of us tasted that blessing, experienced that miracle? If you support the State of Israel and care for Her, that is wonderful. But to truly know Israel, to be transformed by Israel, you need to be in Israel, even if only for a short period of time. Khaval al ha-z’man: hopefully, Israel will continue to defend herself from her enemies, will find peace with her neighbors, and will live for another thousand years. But you and I will not. Don’t wait to come home until you no longer have the strength to come home. Come to Israel. Khaval al ha-z’man.

CIRCUMCISION, SEDERS AND IDENTITY

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:00:00 +0000

A Dvar Torah for Parshat Bo 5772

The very first seder, about which we read this morning in the Torah, must have been a somewhat uncomfortable affair in more ways than one. Certainly, it was filled with anxiety, as the Israelites consumed the Passover offering in a rush to prepare for the Exodus from Egypt that would happen the next morning, then awoke to the sounds of anguished suffering of their Egyptian neighbors immersed in the plague of the firstborn at midnight. However, the latter part of Exodus, chapter 12, points to what may have been a different source of discomfort, by mentioning different categories of people, men more specifically, who could not consume the Passover offering. These included any non-Israelite, specifically any non-circumcised male such as one’s slave, a resident alien, two categories of employed laborers, and any Israelite who was not circumcised. The Torah makes clear that circumcision is the distinction that determines eligibility for consuming the Passover offering. We might imagine the absurdity of the scene at that first seder in Egypt: households preparing for this major feast before the Lord in anticipation of real freedom, suddenly in an uproar as male celebrants are forced to show their credentials at the door, or to submit to circumcision before they can be part of the celebration. A passage like this likely offends liberal Western sensibilities because it emphasizes exclusivity of membership in the Israelite clan as well as the primitive blood ritual of circumcision, what we call brit milah, as the price to be paid for acquiring membership. Isn’t the seder experience supposed to celebrate the universality of freedom and the struggle against oppression in which all good people are included? Further, why would the Torah demand that a man undergo a ritual such as circumcision in order to be part of what should be a beautiful reenactment of the quest for freedom?

Our contemporary seder is a ritualized re-telling of the Exodus story that has been generously reinterpreted over millennia through the prisms of many different individuals and groups seeking to find their own stories of slavery and freedom in it. Today’s seders, even among plenty of Orthodox Jews, include non-Jewish colleagues, friends, and family for whom this re-telling is often their first encounter with Judaism and the power of the Jewish experience. However, the actual consumption of the ancient Passover offering was an exclusive affair of the Jewish community; its ticket of admission was circumcision. This reflects one major value of Judaism that many people do not like but about which the Torah is unabashed: Jewish identity and community are at times highly particularistic. Further, unlike Christianity whose major criterion of membership is what or how you believe, a major criterion of Jewish membership is how you behave and what you do, including what you do with your body to show that you are part of the Jewish people.

Asserting the distinctiveness of Jewish identity and community has never been an easy thing for the Jews. It has been the major source of anti-Semitism and persecution of our people for many thousands of years, beginning with pagan and early Christian refusals to accept that the Jews have a right to be different. From the time of the Spanish Inquisition all the way through to the development of modern anti-Semitism and Nazism, this same hatred of Jewish distinctiveness took on virulent racial and blood-line overtones: being Jewish wasn’t simply a curse that could be overcome through the abandonment of Judaism, it was an inherent state of imperfection, even pathology, that could never be eradicated without physically destroying the Jewish people.

One of the most telling examples of these enormous challenges to Jewish distinctiveness has been circumcision. When they occupied the land of Israel many centuries ago, the Greeks derided this Jewish practice as a barbaric mutilation of the body that stood in stark contrast to the Hellenistic emphasis on the body’s perfection as living sculpture. Eager to fit in at the Greek gymnasium, many Jewish men of that time sought to hide this mark on their bodies, while others practiced it even under the threat of persecution and death at the hands of some Greek authorities. Later rabbis living in the land of Israel under the Romans’ occupation energetically taught their fellow Jews that circumcision is what makes the body beautiful, rather than what the dominant culture asserts is beautiful, because this is what God asks of us.

In our time, this age-old debate over circumcision has taken on a very destructive tone. Anti-circumcision activists, under the cover of child advocacy, have turned their guns on the freedom of Jews and Muslims to practice our religions by attempting to put anti-circumcision laws on city and statewide ballots across the country. They argue mostly that circumcision is mutilation no different from mutilation forced upon young girls in developing nations. Further, since there is no evidence that circumcision has any medical benefits, all it does it cruelly rob a person of full sexual fulfillment in his adult life; a person is perfect as he is from birth and not in need of such barbaric procedures. These arguments are both old and new, but they are all, in my opinion, disingenuous, and some are motivated by pure bigotry. Brit milah is a profoundly embodied sign of a new Jewish boy’s relationship with God, Jewish history and our people, as the Torah shows us in numerous passages. It bears no real resemblance to female genital mutilation which is used in some cultures to utterly, brutally control women’s sexuality and lives. Further, the argument that circumcision robs men of their sexual capacities wrongly assumes that this can somehow be measured and tested. It obsessively focuses on the anatomy and physiology of a body part as the exclusive determinant of sexuality, an offensively reductionistic way of thinking about relationships, love and desire, and it sends a crude, insidious message that Jewish men are somehow weak and disabled by virtue of their Jewishness. Finally, though circumcision’s benefits are not medically undisputed, there is a body of research indicating that it may be beneficial. However, even if this were not the case, it would be religiously irrelevant: Jews and Muslims don’t circumcise their kids for medical reasons, we do this because this is how we connect to God, history, peoplehood, our values, and our identities.

Obviously, not everyone who opposes circumcision is an anti-Semite, and I respect any Jewish family’s right not to perform brit milah on their own children, as long as they don’t try to tell me or my community what to do as religious people. However, I would ask them the following questions before they make such a decision. Is your decision motivated by a well-thought out opposition to brit milah based upon careful study of its history and meaning? Are you opposed to brit milah on the basis of misinformation that often terrorizes parents of newborns into believing that they are hurting their kids? Do you really want one of the most basic rites of passage into the Jewish family, whose power is precisely its primitiveness, to be a mere matter of choice? Can you stay open to the fact that, within the bounds of safety and parental responsibility, not every act and ceremony needs to be rational or fit the dominant culture’s demands? That religion is sometimes about leaps of faith of a whole community into a different way of living in the world, one that lends a depth of meaning to its adherents’ lives? Do you recognize that as a Jewish family the most potent way for you to be a part of the world is at times to live apart from the world, to embrace the universal by living proudly within what makes us particular?

Like the Passover offering, brit milah is an uncomfortable yet powerful reminder that to be Jewish is to choose to be more than just an individual, it is about choosing to be part of a sacred people called forth by God with a huge mission to heal the world, throughout the dimensions of time and space. It is one permanent symbol that helps us to literally embody that mission in our lives as individuals and as a community.

STALKING TZIPPORAH

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 11:27:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Shmot 5772.

You know the old sexist saw that behind every great man is a great woman? One way to think about Moses whom we met once again in the Torah this morning, is that behind him and his success stand a number of even greater women; some of them are never given names by the Torah, and almost all of them can only carry out their missions through subterfuge, since they lack the power of men in their society. The first two chapters of Exodus offer us a bonanza of these incredibly courageous women who toil quietly and subversively to resist Pharoah’s genocidal decree and to save Moses, the savior of Israel. Whether or not they are Hebrew midwives or non-Jewish midwives to the Hebrews, Shifrah and Puah exploit their expertise and their proximity to women in labor to save innocent children from being murdered; Pharaoh’s daughter exploits her position of power to violate her father’s laws, as she knowingly brings this Hebrew baby into the royal palace and raises him right under her father’s nose, even to the point of giving him a name; Moses’ as-yet unnamed sister intervenes with Pharaoh’s daughter by offering her their mother as a wet nurse to feed and care for baby Moses. All of these women enter a conspiracy of compassion against Pharaoh and the Egyptian state, using their intelligence and love for this one child and for all the children at risk, to disrupt the apparatus of a terrorist regime. The rabbis of the Talmud are so impressed by the role of women in these Torah narratives that they tell all sorts of tales about how all the Hebrew women encouraged their despondent husbands to not lose hope or the desire to bear more children. The Talmud even declares that women should not be exempted from the obligation of being part of the Pesach seder - a time –bound, positive commandment from which Jewish women would normally be exempted according to Jewish law. They reason historically that women were also active participants in the redemption from Egypt, and they too must be part of the seder experience.

Because of all the courageous, quick-thinking behavior of these heroines, Tzipporah’s arrival on the scene in this Torah portion stands out as an enigma. She and her sisters are portrayed initially as shepherdesses- in-distress whom Moses the Egyptian stranger must save from the male thugs hassling them at the local well. When Reuel, her father, questions her about why she did not offer Moses hospitality after his brave act of kindness, we get the feeling that she is a somewhat passive, perhaps not-too-bright eldest daughter, or that she is perhaps a rather young girl. We read that Moses marries Tzipporah, in accordance with ancient near eastern marriage laws requiring the eldest daughter to be married first. After that, all we are told is that Moses takes leave of his father-in-law to return to Egypt on a mission from God to redeem his people, and that he takes Tzipporah and their son, Gershom with him into the heart of the danger. We never hear about Tzipporah’s reaction to her husband’s decision, and later rabbinic writers have to supply an imaginative dialogue in which her father tells his son-in-law that putting his wife and child in the way of harm is a really bad idea. Later rabbinic interpretations of the Torah suggest that Moses becomes celibate as he gets closer to God during the forty years’ wandering in the desert, thus presumably leaving Tzipporah in a miserable married state with an emotionally and sexually unavailable spouse. A very late midrashic source even imagines Tzipporah lamenting to Miriam, her sister-in-law, about the terrible situation of the wives of communal leaders.

It seems that only one biblical story, an extremely strange and elliptical one, offers us a much more forceful, complex view of who Tzipporah really is. Turn back with me to this morning’s Torah portion in Humash Etz Hayyim, pages 336-337, verses 24-26:

At a night encampment on the way, the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him. So Tzipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when He (God) let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”

Everything about this bizarre, chilling story hints at even more ancient tales of the angry God or gods being warded off by blood, which serves as an apotropaic, a magical ritual or device that protects people from evil. For a parallel example, think about the blood of the first Pesach offering being splashed on the doors of the Israelites to ward off the impending plague of the firstborn. In our scene, at least as it is understood by many commentators, Moses has failed to perform brit milah, circumcision, on his son, who is now presumably the one imperiled by God’s desire to kill him. Circumcision is the sign of the covenant, and without it a person cannot be part of the covenanted community.

A lot is unclear in these verses: is Moses in danger or is their son in danger? Does Tzipporah take the foreskin and touch it to Moses’ leg or to their son’s leg? What is a bridegroom of blood, and who does it actually refer to, Moses or the child? What is very clear is that Tzipporah not only acts in this crisis situation, she acts quickly and decisively to stop God from hurting her family. How astounding it is that only Tzipporah is named here, along with God, with no men intervening. She and God are alone in a life-and-death battle that requires the actual drawing of blood, not for death but for life. Even more astounding is that Tzipporah takes the radical initiative of performing a brit milah, a religious circumcision, one of the most sacred, mysterious Jewish rituals that focuses exclusively and publicly on the religious identities and power of Jewish men. The Rabbis take this mysterious biblical tale and expand it into an even wilder tale in which Tzipporah sees God’s angel swallow Moses, from his head to his genitalia, and she then realizes that her family is in mortal danger because of Moses’ dereliction in carrying out the mitzvah of circumcision on their son, a mitzvah she values highly.

This portrayal of Tzipporah is refreshingly paradoxical: she is deeply faithful to her adopted religion, including its male-centered rituals and leadership, yet within that framework she is an aggressive advocate for her family, she takes bold religious initiatives, and she fights openly with God! Though they make many patriarchal assumptions and rules about women’s status, the Torah and its rabbinic interpreters recognize Tzipporah’s public activism as a normative role model for traditional Jewish women. Sadly, this model is being seriously threatened in parts of the Jewish world today, as Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy (in Hebrew, Haredi) grows increasingly belligerent and misogynistic. Using Jewish laws of modesty as an excuse, some rabbinic authorities and lay leaders here and especially in Israel have intensified their campaign to utterly segregate men and women in ways frightfully reminiscent of Jim Crow laws in the south. These have included sex-segregated private bus lines that are publicly franchised by New York City in Brooklyn and public bus lines in Israel that are illegally segregated in religious neighborhoods. In both circumstances, women are literally relegated to the back of the buses. Another recent example of brutal sex segregation was the sickening harassment of 8 year old Naamah Margolis of the Israeli city of Bet Shemesh, who was spat upon and verbally abused as she walked to the new Orthodox girl's yeshivah that she attends in that city. Her harassers, members of a violent Haredi faction, claim that she and other girls were not dressing modestly enough to be allowed to walk in public. The outcry from all segments of the Israeli street, including some in the Haredi community, as well as community leaders and politicians, has so far been significant, and peaceful protests against the encroachment upon women's rights -and upon democratic protections- within Israeli society have been growing. Still, such brazen public attempts at repressing women are chilling.

The Haredi community has never supported the religious equality of men and women; it is not egalitarian, and it is not our right to tell Haredi Jews that they must practice Judaism as we do. However, what I am describing is not traditional religious practice, but the perversion of Jewish law in an effort to forcefully silence the public voices and presence of women, even if American and Israeli law and culture forbid someone from doing so. Particularly in Israel, where aggressive Haredi political parties often have their fragile government coalitions by the throat, the growing repression of women is encroaching upon public space and the rest of Israel’s citizenry. This adds to an already contentious relationship between religious and secular Jews around a wide variety of issues that engender deep resentment and divide Israeli society. We are not Israeli citizens, yet as Jews, Zionists, and supporters of democracy, we have a genuine vested interest in helping all women in the State of Israel to live freely and without fear. The increased public repression of women is one canary in the coal mine of Israeli democracy that is facing increasing challenges from political and religious ultra-rightists in the Israeli government and religious community. Under the guises of security and religiosity they are slowly eroding basic protections for women, minorities, and those with differing political view points. This is not good for Israel as a democracy. Yet it is also not good for Israel as a young, vibrant society. Israel needs Shifrah and Puah, the daughter of Pharaoh, Miriam and Yocheved: women who have the strength and the courage to work with men and challenge men to continue to build a state and a Jewish people founded upon justice. Most of all, Israel, the Jewish people and the world need Tzipporah: women for whom Judaism matters vitally, and who are also not afraid to speak their minds and act forcefully in behalf of others in the midst of crisis, when the gravity of the hour calls for it.

CHICKEN LITTLE, FALSE PROPHETS, COMMON SENSE AND THE RULE OF LAW.

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:46:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Reeh, 5771.

Do you remember the story of chicken little? According to Wikipedia, “There are several Western versions of the story, of which the best-known concerns a chick that believes the sky is falling when an acorn falls on its head. The chick decides to tell the King and on its journey meets other animals which join it in the quest. After this point, there are many endings. In the most familiar, a fox invites them to its lair and there eats them all.” The story is actually listed in one of the folklore indexes in the category of world-wide folktales –in this case a fable- that make fun of paranoia and mass hysteria .

I have been thinking about Chicken Little as I’ve read Parshat Reeh, in particular its warnings about false prophets. Let’s read what Deuteronomy has to say about them, Humash Etz Hayyim, pages 1068-1069:

If there appears among you a prophet or a dream-diviner and he gives you a sign or portent, saying, “Let us follow and worship another god” whom you have not experienced; even if the sign or portent that he named to you comes true, do not heed the words of that prophet or that dream diviner. For the Lord your God is testing you to see whether you really love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul. Follow none but the Lord your God and revere none but Him; observe his commandments alone, and heed only his orders; worship none but him and hold fast to Him.

Far from merely warning us away from disloyalty to God, the Torah is also warning us not to engage in chicken-little style behavior: that state of being instantly smitten with something, some idea or someone we encounter, even something, some idea, or someone whose pronouncements about truth are so impressive as to seem absolutely definitive. We need to guided by what the great Torah commentator, Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra, refers to as shikul ha-daat, the patient, sober use of reason and good, common sense. Even if a prophet calling us to worship another god produces the promised sign or portent as proof of his legitimacy, we should still not be fooled into believing him, because his claim is still at odds with what we know about God and truth.

This prohibition that Moses gives to the Israelites is true to the form and content of Deuteronomy: it emphasizes absolute loyalty to the one, universal God, even when the faithful person is faced with seemingly compelling evidence to the contrary from a charismatic figure who can back up his or her claims with miracles. Deuteronomy spends a great deal of energy appealing to the people’s good sense and reason, constantly reminding them that they personally experienced God’s redemptive power during the Exodus from Egypt, as well as God’s appearance to them to give them the Torah at Mount Sinai. Signs and portents that support the idolatrous claims of a prophet or diviner might be wondrously seductive, but they are merely tests by God to determine the people’s fidelity to God.

This last argument at first glance feels like a bit of circular reasoning: follow God only, not a false prophet; how do I know he’s a false prophet? He tells you to worship gods besides the God of Israel; but he’s given me signs and wonders that prove his point that I should follow other gods; no, his proof is really a test by the one true God to determine your loyalty; but how do I know it’s merely a test from God, and not a real sign from that prophet? Because that prophet is telling you that you should worship other gods, besides the one true God, so he must not be telling the truth, and his signs must be God’s test, not real signs.

However, we should not be fooled by what appears to be mere circular reasoning. What this passage of the Torah is warning us not to do is mistake the bells and whistles of charisma for the not always popular appeal of reason, and loyalty to the sober boundaries of Torah as determined by the ongoing process of interpretation of a living faith community. Dynamic personalities and emotional appeal can make a huge difference in our lives by inspiring us and giving us meaningful narratives by which to live. However, they are no replacement for truth arrived at through the use of reason, the discovery of fact, and the rule of law. It is far too easy for a demagogue to use all kinds of verbal and emotional sleights of hand –what the Torah referred to as signs and portents- to make an impressive point that convinces people to follow him or her, despite the extremism of his or her claims. The balancing of personal faith with personal reason is a very difficult challenge, but it is the only way to keep faith from degenerating into spiritual fascism and self-destruction, and to keep reason from degenerating into soul-deadening, inhumane rigidity.

How do these teachings apply to us? The presidential election is a little over a year away, and already a whole group of prophet-wanna-be’s are crowding the presidential candidate playing field, each of them hawking his or her form of signs and portents. Each will campaign in poetry and govern in prose, a conceit which we are used to, and which we largely accept as the price to be paid for a free electoral process and a complex system of checks and balances. Each will make near-prophetic claims about what ails America and the world, then make sweeping pronouncements about what he or she will do to solve our problems. To paraphrase our Torah portion: warning, America, we are being tested: can we resist the apparatus of America’s false prophecy arsenal-- the prettily packaged promises, the telegenic shots of baby-kissing shape shifters who keep crafting their messages to the latest voting bases, and the shameless use of obscene wealth to crush opponents in elections? Can we see past the false prophecies of jingoistic fear mongering, of race baiting? Can we curb our own idolatrous impulse to set aside the sober search for truth and fact out of a desperate need to be coddled by the soothing words of people who tell us what we want to hear, and not what we need to hear? Can listen past the smoke-and-mirrors to discover the ideas and leaderships qualities that will make a great leader for the future?

These are frightening days for America and the world, and as Chicken Little would have said, it feels at times like the sky is falling. Precisely when things feel this way is when the Torah raises its warning to us about false prophets, reminding us that it will take all of our moral, spiritual, and intellectual courage not be taken in by their impressive signs and portents. We will need to ask tough, thoughtful questions about the claims of those who rise up among us, and who might speak charismatically in the name of truth, yet whose claims turn out to be nothing more than calls to us to worship false gods of hysteria or complacency that cannot save us. The Torah of the one true God reminds us: follow none but the Lord your God. Pursue the truth and the values that make us Jews worthy of being God’s people, and that make us Americans worthy of our nation’s legacy.

THE MEANING OF OUR WANDERINGS

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:41:00 +0000

In Torah portion Ekev, as we go more deeply into Moses’ second speech to the Israelites prior to their entering Canaan, look carefully at how he explains to the people the meaning of their having wandered in the desert for forty years. In Deuteronomy, chapter 8, Moses makes clear what God’s intent was: to test the people’s faith by simultaneously subjecting them to hardships and supporting them. God, Moses tells them, was like a parent disciplining his child, constantly refining their spiritual resilience and clarifying their consciousness of the true source of their blessings. Some of my students and I were stunned when we recently studied this portion in comparison with Numbers, chapter 14. There, God berates the Israelites for their faithlessness and their attempt to return to Egypt, due to their fear-filled refusal to try to conquer the promised land. God declares explicitly that the generation of former slaves would die in the desert, while their free-born children would possess the promised land after the whole slave generation had died out over a period of forty years of wandering.

Look at the contrast between these two explanations of the same event. God declares that the forty year wandering was decreed by God out of anger, as punishment for Israelite intransigence. Moses later reads the history of the forty year wandering in a radically different way: it was a form of spiritual discipline imposed by a loving God upon this people that needed to grow up spiritually and emotionally. Interestingly enough, Moses explanation is followed by his command to them that when they enter the land and enjoy it to the fullest, they will thank and bless God for all of it: an even more emphatic way of saying that their wanderings were a teaching tool for developing in them a sense of appreciation and gratitude.

Which version explaining the forty year wandering of the people is correct? From the Israelites’ back-looking perspective, perhaps both. God did punish the people for their rebellious intransigence, but God also wanted to refine the people’s understanding of where their support and blessings truly come from. Moses seems to be telling the people and us that we read our lives in many different ways. The goal of a cultivated spiritual perspective on life is twofold: to look with maturity at the reality of the hardships we experience, without pretending them away. At the same time, we try to interpret those hardships and challenges in ways that help us to form a meaningful appreciation of our experiences, what we learn from them, and how we grow in compassion as a result of them.

TORAH CURES THE TONGUE

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:44:00 +0000

Dvar Torah For Parshat Dvarim//Shabbat Hazon 5771.
אלה הדברים אשר דבר משה אל כל ישראל

“These are the words that Moses spoke to all of Israel…”

Thus begins this morning’s Torah portion, the Book of Deuteronomy, and the great, eloquent speech that Moses presents to the people just as they are about to leave the desert and their past lives as slaves, in preparation for entry into the promised land. In her introduction, Rabbi Kieval pointed out the significance of Moses opening Deuteronomy with his speech, for we have known him throughout the Torah as a stutterer, who is slow of speech, and in need of his brother, Aaron, to be his mouthpiece. Moses has grown over the forty years of Israelite wandering, and the Torah emphasizes this as he is preparing to die.

What is also significant is that Moses –not God- is the focal point of this opening verse of Deuteronomy. Moses, the humblest man upon the earth, whose burial site is not even known and who is never even mentioned in the Haggadah that retells the Passover story, is at the center of Deuteronomy’s drama of entering Canaan, and as a preacher no less! The opening sermon in Deuteronomy Rabbah, an early collection of rabbinic homilies on this book of the Torah, also makes Moses the focus of Deuteronomy for a very important reason. After explaining some rules concerning whether or not a Torah scroll may be written in translation, the rabbi giving the dvar Torah weaves together an intricate set of proof verses and word associations to prove that the words of Torah can cure speech impediments, and that in fact they cured Moses’ problems with speech. How do we know, the homilist asks? Before receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, when he stood before God at the burning bush, Moses begged off his mission to Pharaoh by telling God, “I am not a man of word…I am slow of speech.” Here, on the borders of the promised land, forty years after receiving and teaching the Torah, Moses the law giver has also become Moses the eloquent speaker who prepares the people before his death.

In this opening passage of Deuteronomy Rabbah, we find God personally testifying that God’s gift of Torah is so precious because it cures the tongue of its maladies. Our sages were referring specifically to the actual disorders of speech, such as that of Moses who was miraculously healed and turned into a great public speaker. However, I cannot help hearing the other morally weighty meaning of these words that they would have intended: engagement with Torah heals us of the sickness of Lashon Harah, the evil speech of gossip and slander that destroys people, relationships, and communities. It is obvious that Torah does this by teaching us the rules of civility and moral self restraint, by forcing us to focus our words and speech on holy matters, and not garbage, and by allowing us to learn the value of carefully measured, well thought out words. Certainly, the sages of the Talmud understood that the life of Torah study could actually result in dangerous uses of speech, because heated debate over matters of Torah sometimes has a way of degenerating into name calling and public humiliation. However, they more often exemplified in their lives the value of Torah as a path to healing and peace through its harnessing of human speech for good purposes.

How significant, then, that evil speech is at the center of the most famous story about why Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, a tragic event that occurred on the ninth day of Av, which we will commemorate on Monday night and Tuesday. An enemy of one of the notables of Jerusalem was mistakenly invited to the man’s home for a party. The host roundly humiliated the man who had shown up, thinking that they were to be reconciled. As he threw the man out of his home, the rabbis of the community who were at the party passively watched the scene and did nothing to stop it. Wounded by such despicable behavior on the part of his enemies and the rabbis, the man went to the Roman authorities and slandered them, claiming that they were plotting a rebellion. The emperor marched on Jerusalem and destroyed our holy Temple. As actual history, the story has little merit. As a moral object lesson it is brilliant. In his book analyzing great rabbinic stories, my colleague, Professor Jeffrey Rubenstein, argues that this story is a good example of rabbinic self-criticism. The sages of a later time are criticizing their own class for failure to heed the words of Torah by doing the right thing: defending a humiliated person who has been wounded by words and working decisively to stave off disaster. I also see in this passage its more obvious message: words used in acts of senseless hatred have genuine ripple-effect potential to destroy an entire community. Like a caustic chemical, they corrode the life of our community from the inside, so that enemies from without have only to show up at our doors and easily finish us off. This is a moral message that we learn in the Torah, and it is a truth that underlies a good deal of ancient and contemporary history.

The poet Emily Dickinson once wrote: A word is dead//When it is said//Some say.//I say it just//Begins to live//That day. She was talking about the power of poetry, but she likely also was referring to the power of words in general. On this Shabbat Hazon, the Shabbat preceding Tisha B’Av, let’s allow ourselves some quiet moments to think about how words come alive in our own lives, from our own mouths, as forces for healing and destruction. Let’s also recommit ourselves in the midst of this period of deep sadness to a life engaged with the words of Torah, words that can heal our tongues and harness our speech for good and holy purposes.

Shabbat shalom.

KOL NIDRE

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Short Fiction By Dan Ornstein

KOL NIDRE.

Some swore that the building was haunted by ghosts, for the relentless creaking of the wooden beams in its roof would make you shiver and wonder if you were hearing davveners long gone. Bernie, the old hazzan who had been pushed by the congregation into retirement, didn’t have to wonder; he listened to them with aching familiarity. Each morning, before his cool, young replacement breezed into the synagogue office, Bernie shuffled around the darkened sanctuary, where his voice had built a bridge of prayerful melody between God and people for decades. All those spirits of his glorious cantorial past floated by and with him: the bar and bat mitzvah students proceeding haltingly, then confidently, with their parts of the Shabbat service; the tearful, thankful parents at their sons' brises and their daughters’ namings; his late wife, Roberta’s, soprano lilt when she sang in the choir; his own tenor loveliness when he chanted Kol Nidre, and helped everyone achieve God’s remittance of their hasty vows and promises for the coming year, at the beginning of Yom Kippur.

One Sunday before Yom Kippur, he stood alone in that cavernous space that the board members had recently stopped calling a sanctuary. “Too old, stuffy, and alienating,” they had declared. “From now on, we refer to it as our beit kesher, the spiritual connection center.” He chuckled bitterly, thinking about their latest ridiculous attempt to replace religion with religious hipsterism, which was right up there with the open-toed-sandaled rabbi, and with Bernie’s baby faced, guitar playing successor. He stepped onto the bimah and saw himself chanting Kol Nidre the previous year, his final time before the people he had served faithfully betrayed him. Roberta’s voiceless face had appeared before him then, making his old voice creak worse than the roof, and his eyes flood with tears. He had lost his place in the Mahzor, standing in front of the open ark and before a thousand dead-silent congregants.

After the board refused to renew his contract and his lawyer persuaded him that suing them on grounds of ageism was futile, Bernie’s friends tried to convince him to continue tutoring students. He taught wonderfully, so they thought it would be the perfect post-retirement job for him, but he declared that he would never again work for the congregation. The Religious School was in session that Sunday, so the chapel just across the lobby from the sanctuary was filled with students practicing prayers. Angry but unable to curb his hunger for his memories, Bernie snuck outside the chapel door to eavesdrop. A muffled chant wafted into the hall from inside. At first, he assumed it was just the perpetual ringing in his ears, but when it would not stop plaguing him he forced himself to open the door and walk in.

Around a table, his junior colleague struggled to engage twenty bored, restless seventh graders. Near them lay their iPads, iPods, and iPhones, the gleaming armaments of modernity that they reluctantly shed when they entered that holy ground. The young cleric stood in the middle, pressing the clunky REWIND and PLAY buttons of an old tape recorder, and desperately attempting to keep them interested in the retro-toy. Bernie recognized the tape of Kol Nidre he had made years ago for a nursing home resident too frail to attend services. As the kids’ attention wandered to their queer looking old guest, their teacher looked up at him in nervous surprise and said, “Cantor, welcome. We found your old recording in the music library.”

Bernie listened and wondered:

Sh’vikin, sh’vitin, b’teilin u-m’vutalin, lo sh’ririn v’lo kayamin.

“All vows—null and void, no longer valid and binding.”

Should he move towards the table?

(c)2011 By Dan Ornstein

CATS AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:54:00 +0000

CATS AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS.

Short Fiction By Dan Ornstein

Peter Katz sits in Dr. Roberts’ office, his eyes puffy from crying through the weekly therapy session.

“I feel almost paralyzed by these ongoing anxieties of mine about whether Linda wants to stay with me. Last night and this morning…I swear, Doctor Roberts, they were about the worst I’ve ever lived through in the four years since she and I got married.”

“Mmm…,” Roberts hums with professional empathy. “Well, what happened?”
Katz pauses to compose himself. “We made love last night with this incredible intensity, but when we were done, she just…went to sleep. No ‘I love you’, no acknowledgement of how she felt about me…about us. I didn’t know what to make of it, and I was up half the night as a result.”

“Maybe she was just tired,” the therapist suggests.

Katz thinks about this and says, “Maybe. I slept so fitfully, but at one point I had this vivid dream, one that made me feel peaceful about our relationship.”

“Go with that,” Roberts says to him.

“In the dream I was looking at an old Far Side cartoon by Garry Larsen. Two romantically involved alley cats are sitting on a fence looking out at a full moon. In the caption, one says to the other, ‘If I had two dead rats, I’d give you one!’”

“How did the scene feel to you as you dreamed it?”

“Well, I could sense that the female cat was the one talking, and that I was the male cat. I get it that Linda and I are the two cats in the dream, which is why I awoke feeling more secure.”

Roberts asks him slowly, “So, then, what happened this morning?”

Katz pauses again, a soft, expanding water balloon waiting to burst. “At breakfast this morning, she wouldn’t look up from her paper and coffee when I kissed her. Five minutes later, she burst out laughing, almost guffawing! When I asked her what was so funny, she told me, ‘It’s the joke- of- the- week in the comics section. What has four legs and chases cats?’ I wasn’t in a joking mood so I just said, ‘I dunno. What?’ Then she gave me the punch line: ‘Mrs. Katz and her lawyer!’”

Katz begins to cry uncontrollably. The psychologist suppresses his urge to laugh while also feeling tears come to his eyes. He sits with his client in silence, as he absentmindedly strokes a stuffed toy tabby, the ragged artifact of a romantic day at a county fair -and a love betrayed- long ago.

© 2011 By Dan Ornstein

GOD, PLEASE CALM DOWN!

noreply@blogger.com (Rabbi Dan Ornstein) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:50:00 +0000

To everyone and anyone reading my blog:

My regrets and apologies for such a long hiatus in posting new essays to my blog site. I have been distracted by many things over the past several months, and I am finally getting back to posting new materials on a regular basis. Below is my sermon from yesterday morning's Shabbat service that I was unable to deliver, due to time constraints. I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to sending out more writings soon, including two short stories that I have not been able to get published. All the best,

Dan

(Below is my dvar Torah For Parshat Korach, 5771.)

We modern, Western Jews have been deeply influenced by medieval Jewish philosophy, particularly Maimonides, when it comes to imagining Who God is and how God acts. In the first chapter of his classic Code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides begins not with a discussion of law, but a philosophical discussion of Jewish theology, specifically defining the nature of God and God’s interactions with the universe. He writes that, “Once we have established that God has no body, it becomes clear that God cannot be subject to those things that happen to or define the body…including anger, laughter, happiness, sadness, silenced and speech.” (MT 1:11.)

I always chuckle when I read passages such as this one. Even though Maimonides and other Jewish philosophers do a magnificent job of explaining away metaphorically descriptions of God’s emotions found throughout the Torah, those same descriptions remain there, staring back at us in all of their discomfiting post-modern glory. They defy our quest for sanitized, comfortable depictions of God by forcing us to contemplate God’s very human feelings and emotions, particularly God’s intense anger, that the Torah describes all the time.

I cannot survey and analyze with you all such examples in one d’var Torah. However, we will let two distinctly different scenarios of Moses’ appeasement of God suffice for this morning. One is found in last week’s parashah, Shlach L’kha. After ten of the twelve scouts sent into the promised land come back to warn the people not to enter the land out of fear of danger, God threatens to destroy the entire people, who have become rebellious and are attempting to appoint a chief to lead them back to Egypt. Moses, who always intervenes with God when God angrily threatens such things, appeals –as it were- to the divine ego. (See HEH, p. 846, Numbers 14:15-16) “If You then slay this people to a man, the nations who have heard Your fame will say, ‘It must be because the Lord was powerless to bring that people into the land He had promised them on oath that he slaughtered them in the wilderness.’” Moses then asks God to remember God’s own self-description as a compassionate God Who is slow to anger. (This description, I remind you, was given to Moses by God after God threatened to destroy the people because of the Golden Calf incident.) God then relents but makes clear to Moses that the slave generation will never enter Canaan, only their free, desert-born children will.

The second scenario is found in this morning’s parashah, Korach. Angered beyond control by the brazen attempts of Korach and his select group of leaders to grasp priestly and political power that is not theirs, God threatens again not only to destroy them, but the entire people of Israel. Whereupon, both Moses and Aaron plead with God (HEH, p. 863, Numbers 16:22), “O God, Source of the breath of all flesh! When one man sins, will You be wrathful with the whole community?” God once again relents and instructs the two leaders to warn the Israelites to separate from Korach and his friends, whereupon God is able to wreak justice upon these perpetrators alone. Moses’ and Aaron’s reasoning almost echoes Abraham’s reasoning with God when he convinces God to separate the innocent from the guilty before destroying Sodom and Gomorrah: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth act justly?” In our parashah, Moses and Aaron criticize God for the way that God wants to act on divine anger by reminding God of the imperative of divine justice. In fact, later Torah commentators are of two opinions as to exactly what they are saying in this one verse. Some of the commentators assert that Moses is telling God, “You know better: You have the wisdom to tell the difference between good and evil people, so use Your divine intelligence and do the right thing!” Others assert that Moses is telling God, “You know better: You know that destroying innocent people along with those who are evil is wrong, so why are You threatening to do this now?” Whichever opinion about this verse one accepts, it is clear that they are taking God to task for potentially not acting justly.

Two different modalities for reasoning with our angry, passionate God emerge from this brief analysis. The first appeals, again –as it were-, to divine ego. Moses appeases God almost laughably by appealing to God’s desire to maintain a good reputation with the nations of the world. The second appeals to the imperatives of divine justice. Moses demands of God courageously, but almost matter-of-factly, that God behave… well… like a mensch. This latter modality presents us with a wildly paradoxical picture of the biblical God being held to a high human standard of justice that has its source in God’s commandments, is not always achievable by human beings, and at least here, is almost not achieved by God, God-Self, Who basically needs a human being to remind God about how to act. Is God testing Moses’ political and moral acumen? This is a nice thought, but it is not borne out by the text. More likely, the commentators on the Torah are on the mark: God, who is our source of justice and morality, at times needs superlative human beings to appease God and to demand good behavior of God. Maimonides’ very static, impassive picture of God is a far departure from the Bible’s descriptions, even if one assumes that the Torah’s narratives are meant only to be taken allegorically or metaphorically.

What does all of this scandalous thinking about God’s relationship with Moses –and by extension with human beings- teach us about this relationship? First, it reminds us that, as we have seen before in the Torah, God grows, along with our thinking about God, and along with us as growing, fluid individuals. As my friend, Rabbi Brad Artson teaches, our relationship with God is never static, because we and God are never static. Second, our Torah passages point out to us an important foundation of moral and spiritual life that is at the heart of the Torah. As Rabbi David Hartman teaches us in his book by the same name, a living covenant with God is one in which we might at times appease the Master of the universe. More likely, however, it is one in which we stand, howbeit respectfully, before God and demand that the Judge of all the earth act justly, just as God demands of us. If we and God can rightly demand this of each other, is it not the most enduring model of what we should demand of ourselves and each other in daily life, as well? Shabbat shalom.