Text and the City

Tear-Water Tea: Tears and Joy for a New Year

2016-10-02T06:03:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Bronfman Fellowships | Rosh haShana 2016

My favorite book growing up was Arnold Lobel’s “Owl at Home”, especially because of one quirky tale, which always enchanted me. It’s called “Tear-water Tea”, and it starts like this:

Owl took the kettle out of the cupboard. “Tonight I will make tear-water tea,” he said. He put the kettle on his lap. “Now,” said Owl, “I will begin.” Owl sat very still. He began to think of things that were sad. “Chairs with broken legs,” said Owl. His eyes began to water.

“Songs that cannot be sung,” said Owl, “because the words have been forgotten.” Owl began to cry. A large tear rolled down and dropped into the kettle.

The list goes on for some time, and tears roll down Owl’s face and into the kettle. Finally:

“Mashed potatoes left on a plate,” he cried, “because no one wanted to eat them. And pencils that are too short to use.”

Owl thought about many other sad things. He cried and cried.

“There,” said Owl. “That does it!” Owl stopped crying. He put the kettle on the stove to boil for tea. Owl felt happy as he filled his cup. “It tastes a little bit salty,” he said, “but tear-water tea is always very good.”

I wonder now what it was about that story that so enchanted me. The license to cry, I assume, its normalization. But more than that: it’s utility! Lobel delicately said what no one else had every admitted: that tears can be the ingredients for some the world’s finest treats.

As this year comes to a close, too many questions are up in the air to be able to pass much judgement. Yet as I reflected upon this year, personally, communally, nationally (bi-nationally in my case), and globally, I felt like Owl peering into his kettle.

“Mashed potatoes left on a plate because no one wanted to eat them” was there of course, but so was “a culture of debate turned toxic”, “Wars we care deeply about – in our cities and across continents” and its friend “wars we can barely bring ourselves to take notice of”. “Deep seated cynicism” (which can barely allow tears), alongside “wide-eyed idealism”. Which all led up to simple, heartbreaking realities: “Ilness – physical, mental”, “inequality – writ large and small”, the unbearable “people I’ve hurt - and didn’t even notice”, and finally - “Human fragility”, human fallibility”.

This seemed like a good exercise for Rosh haShana: a list of things that bring tears to my eyes. If the Jewish High Holidays are anything, they are the tea kettle into which a year’s tears – of sorrow, of joy - can be shed. Prayers like uNetaneh Tokef, or simply seeing my daughter’s eating apples in honey in good health and new dresses, are an excuse for a good cry –a spiritual experience second to none. There are so few opportunities in modern life where we allow ourselves to cry, invite ourselves to shed tears, seek out the cathartic healing feeling of having blubbered for a good hour… Sorry if this seems overly morose or needlessly emotional to you. To me, perhaps from years of reading “Owl at Home,” nothing seems more appealing on the first day of the New Year.

“A Day for Crying” might in fact be the most accurate translation of the Biblical name of Rosh haShana – Yom Teruah. The Teruah, say the rabbis, is the sound of crying. Only we’re not sure what kind of crying. This becomes part of the reason why we blow the shofar so many time on this day. Maimonides summarizes it well:

Due to the great passage of time and our extended exile - we are no longer sure as to the nature of the "teruah" cited in the Torah. We do not know whether it is similar to wailing of weeping women (sounded by nine short blasts – today’s teruah), or the slow, deep sobbing of someone heavily burdened (sounded by three medium blasts, today’s shevarim), or whether it is like a sobbing which naturally turns into a wailing (i.e. a shevarim-teruah). Therefore, we perform all three variations. (Maimonides’ Code, Laws of Shofar 3:2, based on Talmud Bavli Rosh Hashanah 34a)

In an ironic twist, we’ve forgotten how to cry. To much time has passed, too much exile. So we cry in all the different ways: in low sobs, in shrill screams, in sobs that turn into screams; we do so again and again and again, until there are no more tears left in us to draw upon.

Yet the crying is never left to reside on its own. Each cry is bookended by something else – a Tekiah. The Teikah is not a cry, it is a wake up. עורו ישנים מתרדמתכם – awaken sleeping ones from your slumber. Awakening to our role in injustice. Awakening to our ability to return, heal, correct, support. Awakening a sleeping world- which thinks it's awake but is far from it. Awakening to rebirth – combating cynicism and believing again that change – in ourselves, our societies, our systems - is possible.

One wonders, if Rosh haShana, the Yom Truah, is all about crying, why is it not morose like Yom Kippur? Why do we spend most of it feasting instead of fasting, enjoying the best food and creating joyous memories? I’d suggest that while Rosh haShana is a vessel for our tears, encased by a heartbreaking call to awaken and action, it must be encased in joy. There is a deep wisdom to crying as the old year dies, and a new one is born. But it can’t end there.

In the only Rosh haShana ever recorded actually practiced in the Bible, Nehemiah and Ezra are reading the Torah to the people for the first time in centuries (or for the first time ever, if you ask Spinoza ;-) The people – realizing how distant their own practice is from that of the Torah – begin to cry. Fitting for Yom Truah, no? Yet Nehemia stops them:

Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. (Nehemiah 8:19)

לְכוּ֩ אִכְל֨וּ מַשְׁמַנִּ֜ים וּשְׁת֣וּ מַֽמְתַקִּ֗ים וְשִׁלְח֤וּ מָנוֹת֙ לְאֵ֣ין נָכ֣וֹן ל֔וֹ כִּֽי־קָד֥וֹשׁ הַיּ֖וֹם לַאֲדֹנֵ֑ינוּ וְאַל־תֵּ֣עָצֵ֔בוּ כִּֽי־חֶדְוַ֥ת ה' הִ֥יא מָֽעֻזְּכֶֽם. (נחמיה ח:י)

Or as Owl put it:

“That does it!” Owl stopped crying. He put the kettle on the stove to boil for tea. Owl felt happy as he filled his cup. “It tastes a little bit salty,” he said, “but tear-water tea is always very good.”

The Most Important Text in the Mishna: Executing the Image of God

2016-07-27T01:46:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Bronfman Fellowships | Mattot 2016

They once asked Hillel where he was going. He answered: "I am going to do a mitsva."

"Which mitsva?" "I am going to the bathroom"

"That is a mitsva??" "Yes, so the body won't disfunction"

"Where are you going Hillel?" "I am going to do a mitsva"

"Which mitsva Hillel?" "I am going to the bath house". "That is a mitsva??"

"Yes! If those who are in charge of the images [statues] of Caesar in theaters and circuses, scour them and wash them and are rewarded and honored for it -- how much more should we take care of our bodies, for we have been created in the image of God, as it is written, 'in the image of God was human created" (Genesis 1).

Shammai would not say thus, but rather would say: "Let us do what must be done with this body".

Avot deRabbi Nathan b 38a,

Commentary on “Let all your deeds be for the sake of heaven”, Pirke Avot Chapter 2:19

The human body has become the site of this year’s most intense debates and dramas. It seems like one perspective asks of us to look beyond the human body, as a way of recognizing the inherent equality of all human beings, regardless of gender, ethnicity, color, nationality and creed. The growing recognition of the right to self-definition of human beings over their body (including where Hillel will go to perform the mitzvah of going to the bathroom) also seems to want to transcend the human body as a means to freedom – even as it brings the physical body back to the center of attention. And then on the darker side of things, the resurgence of public violence aimed specifically against the human body, in far off lands and close to home, brings our very bodies – not just our beliefs and opinions – back into clear relief. These killings claim symbolic meaning in the public desecration of the human body, renouncing the sanctity of human life not only of those being killed, but by proxy of all humans watching. Some might frame this as a battle between a religious and a secular world view, yet in the Jewish House of Study, the conversation about human life is a conversation about God, for human beings – so we teach our children – were created in the image of God. As I try to navigate my own position in these debates, I find myself returning again and again to this idea of Tzelem Elohim. In it I find that the call to human freedom, equality and uniqueness is found not in overcoming the human body, but in placing the human body as the very site of infinite value and deep equality.

Yet, if we’re going to tout that old adage of “Tzelem Elohim” - being created in the image of God - around, I felt I owe myself to dig deeper into what that idea means: how it was understood, constructed, reinterpreted and used by Jews over the centuries.

Ironically, the place where a culture’s true values regarding the sanctity of human life play out is in the way they choose to end such lives through judicial means, i.e. execution (see Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” for a great exploration of these themes as the essence of modernity). Thus this summer I’ve been studying with the 2016 Bronfmanim the Sixth Chapter of Tractate Sanhedrin, which discusses how a society that believes that humans are created in the image of God would go about the problematic act of execution. The texts are gruesome and dark at times (and feel oddly like binge viewing “Game of Thrones”), but the Talmudic discussions of execution reveal how the Rabbis reshaped the Biblical execution rituals to reflect the two organizing principles that they set for the Torah: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (which they interpreted to mean: therefor even choose for them a good death”) and “In the image of God they were created”. (Want to study this with us? Take a look at these debates in this chapter of Mishna, in Beth Berkowitz’s fantastic book about execution in Jewish, Christian and Roman texts; or email me to get the source packet from my shiur this summer, which I’d be delighted to share).

But of all the fascinating details of execution – stoning, burning, hanging, oh my - there is one Rabbinic text that stands out as the (bleeding) heart of the idea of the image of God. It unfolds in a speech which is given to witnesses who seek to give incriminating testimony in a capital case. If we are to end a human life because of the words you are about to say, says the Mishna, we want to make sure you understand the gravity of human life. If there is one Rabbinic text which is most important to study, memorize and recite in our times, I believe it is this one:

How do we press the witnesses in a capital case? We bring them in [to the court's chambers] and press them: "Perhaps what you say [isn't eyewitness testimony] but your own assessment, or from rumors […] But take heed, for capital cases are not like monetary ones. In monetary cases, [a false witness] can return the money and be forgiven. But in capital cases, the blood of the victim [a wrongfully executed person] and all their future offspring hang upon you until the end of time.

For thus we find in regard to Cain, who killed his brother, the verse says: "The bloods of your brother scream out!" (Genesis 4:10) – the verse does not say blood of your brother, but bloods of your brother, because it was his blood and also the blood of his future offspring [screaming out]!

It was for this reason that human was first created as one person, to teach you that anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world; and anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world."

And also, to promote peace among the creations, that no person can say to their friend, "My ancestors are greater than yours." And also, so that heretics will not say, "there are many rulers up in Heaven."

And also, to express the grandeur of The Holy Blessed One : For a human strikes many coins from the same die, and all the coins are alike. But the King, the King of Kings, The Holy Blessed One strikes every human from the die of the First Human, and yet no human is quite like the other.

Therefore, every person must say, “For my sake ‎the world was created.”‎

(Mishna Sanhedrin Chapter 5:4, see Hebrew text below)

Here, in the middle of a procedure to kill a person, is where Jews have a conversation about the value of human life. The Mishna uses the story of the creation of Humanity to draw moral conclusions: narrative turns into nomos; myth becomes practice. Three basic teachings are expounded from the fact that in the Jewish creation story, God creates just one human being: that human life is of infinite value (every person is worth an entire world); that all lives are equal (one can’t say “my ancestor is greater than yours”); and that each human life is unique (no coin of god=human being is quite like the other). This could easily become a teaching of radical individualism – “for me the world was created!” – but instead becomes a call of infinite responsibility to human life wherever it is to be found. Ethics, existentialism and mysticism are tied together here. Witnessing human diversity and individual uniqueness becomes a testament to God’s amazing creation – and it all emanates from a great respect for the human body itself, which is infinitely unique, valuable AND equal, because it is an icon of God. Thus encountering human matchlessness becomes a spiritual experience. Building a society that truly believes that human beings are created in the image of God means creating societies where every person is recognized for their own (divine!) uniqueness, where all human beings are equal, and where every human life is of infinite value. The conversation of criminal justice must begin from this point, as must the conversation of why and how Jewish communities so often fail to reflect these values.

The ramifications of this approach lie from the dark hart of capital punishment to the Rabbinic approach to toilets, as in the opening quote from Hillel above: Just as the Romans believed that the icons of their Gods, Kings and emperors were imbued with an element of the sovereign itself, so our very bodies are imbued with an element of Divinity herself, and must be treated with the proper respect.

Shammai, mind you, is having none of this anthropomorphic nonsense. The above Mishna might be the most important text to some Jews, but to others is nothing of the sort. Yet perhaps this too explains why we value debate and dispute, machloket, in Judaism: the diversity of opinions in itself reflects the divine uniqueness of human existence… If only God created more people that agree with me, and not so much uniqueness, the world would be a simpler place…

מסכת אבות דרבי נתן נוסחא ב פרק ל

וכל מעשיך יהיו לשם שמים כהלל. כשהיה הלל יוצא למקום היו אומרים לו להיכן אתה הולך. לעשות מצוה אני הולך. מה מצוה הלל. לבית הכסא אני הולך. וכי מצוה היא זו. אמר להן הן. בשביל שלא יתקלקל הגוף. איכן אתה הולך הלל. לעשות מצוה אני הולך מה מצוה הלל. לבית המרחץ אני הולך. וכי מצוה היא זו. אמר להן הן. בשביל לנקות את הגוף. תדע לך שהוא כן מה אם אוקיינות העומדות בפלטיות של מלכים הממונה עליהם להיות שפן וממרקן המלכות מעלה לו סלירא בכל שנה ושנה ולא עוד אלא שהוא מתגדל עם גדולי המלכות. אנו שנבראנו בצלם ודמות שנאמר כי בצלם אלהים עשה את האדם (בראשית ט' ו') על אחת כמה וכמה. שמאי לא היה אומר כך אלא יעשה חובותינו עם הגוף הזה:

משנה מסכת סנהדרין פרק ד

כֵּיצַד מְאַיְּמִין (אֶת הָעֵדִים) עַל עֵדֵי נְפָשׁוֹת?

הָיוּ מַכְנִיסִין אוֹתָן וּמְאַיְּמִין עֲלֵיהֶן.

שֶׁמָּא תֹאמְרוּ מֵאֹמֶד, וּמִשְּׁמוּעָה,

עֵד מִפִּי עֵד וּמִפִּי אָדָם נֶאֱמָן שָׁמַעְנוּ,

אוֹ שֶׁמָּא אִי אַתֶּם יוֹדְעִין שֶׁסּוֹפֵנוּ לִבְדּוֹק אֶתְכֶם בִּדְרִישָׁה וּבַחֲקִירָה.

הֶווּ יוֹדְעִין שֶׁלֹּא כְדִינֵי מָמוֹנוֹת דִּינֵי נְפָשׁוֹת. דִּינֵי מָמוֹנוֹת, אָדָם נוֹתֵן מָמוֹן וּמִתְכַּפֵּר לוֹ.

דִּינֵי נְפָשׁוֹת, דָּמוֹ וְדַם זַרְעִיּוֹתָיו תְּלוּיִין בּוֹ עַד סוֹף הָעוֹלָם, שֶׁכֵּן מָצִינוּ בְקַיִן שֶׁהָרַג אֶת אָחִיו, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (בראשית ד) דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ צֹעֲקִים, אֵינוֹ אוֹמֵר דַּם אָחִיךָ אֶלָּא דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ, דָּמוֹ וְדַם זַרְעִיּוֹתָיו.

דָּבָר אַחֵר, דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ, שֶׁהָיָה דָמוֹ מֻשְׁלָךְ עַל הָעֵצִים וְעַל הָאֲבָנִים.

לְפִיכָךְ נִבְרָא אָדָם יְחִידִי,

לְלַמֶּדְךָ, שֶׁכָּל הַמְאַבֵּד נֶפֶשׁ אַחַת [מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל],

מַעֲלֶה עָלָיו הַכָּתוּב כְּאִלּוּ אִבֵּד עוֹלָם מָלֵא.

וְכָל הַמְקַיֵּם נֶפֶשׁ אַחַת מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל,

מַעֲלֶה עָלָיו הַכָּתוּב כְּאִלּוּ קִיֵּם עוֹלָם מָלֵא.

וּמִפְּנֵי שְׁלוֹם הַבְּרִיּוֹת,

שֶׁלֹּא יֹאמַר אָדָם לַחֲבֵרוֹ אַבָּא גָדוֹל מֵאָבִיךָ.

וְשֶׁלֹּא יְהוּ מִינִין אוֹמְרִים, הַרְבֵּה רְשׁוּיוֹת בַּשָּׁמָיִם.

וּלְהַגִּיד גְּדֻלָּתוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא,

שֶׁאָדָם טוֹבֵעַ כַּמָּה מַטְבְּעוֹת בְּחוֹתָם אֶחָד

וְכֻלָּן דּוֹמִין זֶה לָזֶה,

וּמֶלֶךְ מַלְכֵי הַמְּלָכִים הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא

טָבַע כָּל אָדָם בְּחוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל אָדָם הָרִאשׁוֹן

וְאֵין אֶחָד מֵהֶן דּוֹמֶה לַחֲבֵרוֹ.

לְפִיכָךְ כָּל אֶחָד וְאֶחָד חַיָּב לוֹמַר,

בִּשְׁבִילִי נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם.

וְשֶׁמָּא תֹאמְרוּ מַה לָּנוּ וְלַצָּרָה הַזֹּאת,

וַהֲלֹא כְבָר נֶאֱמַר (ויקרא ה) וְהוּא עֵד אוֹ רָאָה אוֹ יָדָע אִם לוֹא יַגִּיד וְגוֹמֵר.

וְשֶׁמָּא תֹאמְרוּ מַה לָּנוּ לָחוּב בְּדָמוֹ שֶׁל זֶה,

וַהֲלֹא כְבָר נֶאֱמַר (משלי יא) וּבַאֲבֹד רְשָׁעִים רִנָּה:

Being Sinai: Parenting as Giving and Receiving of Torah

2016-06-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Shavuot 2016

“Few adults, very few, are aware to what extent children watch their parents, constantly on the lookout for some sign of how they should approach the world; how sharp and vibrant their intelligence is in the years leading up to the disaster of puberty, how quick to summarize, to draw broad conclusions. Very few adults realize every child, naturally, instinctively, is a philosopher.” (Michelle Houellebecq in Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World)

A few weeks ago, I took a few Bronfman Fellows to visit Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses, at New York’s Romemu, and past BYFI co-director and faculty member. One thing Dianne said during that talk has been buzzing in my brain ever since that conversation. One of the fellows asked about the role of obligation in the liberal Jewish world. Dianne answered that as an educator, she first of all asks herself where people encounter obligation most powerfully in their own lives. “For me,” she said, “the seminal experience of obligation was when my newborn child cried. There it was – an undeniable obligation; a gut surge to be there, constantly, supportive, loyal. I was needed, and I was obligated. I learned what obligation meant when I became a parent.”

This answer struck me because it felt so true to my own experience, but also because it was an inversion of the way obligation was acquired as a trait in traditional society. A person’s basic experience of obligation was supposed to derive from being a child, not a parent! Josephus puts this succinctly (in a way that probably bridges Jewish and Roman education) as he ventriloquizes what parents should say to their incorrigible children:

As to those young men that despise their parents, and do not pay them honor, but offer them affronts…let their parents admonish them in words… and let them say thus to them: That they [the parents] got married not for the sake of pleasure, nor for the augmentation of their riches… but that they might have children to take care of them in their old age, and might by them have what they then should want. …[And]that God is displeased with those that are insolent towards their parents, because he is himself the Father of the whole race of mankind, and seems to bear part of that dishonor which falls upon those that have the same name, when they do not meet with dire returns from their children. (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews vol.4 260)

I’m curious if anyone has tried these lines at home recently... Not only does the idea that we gave birth to children so that they’ll take care of us in our old age strike us as odd (and self centered?) but many of us grew up on our parents saying that they made sacrifices so that we could have the life we want to have.

God, Avinu Malkenu, is often metaphorized as parent because Parent is the model of commander and obligator. Loving, caring, compassionate – but also authoritative and powerful. No wonder that the 5^th commandment, “Honor your father and your mother” is seen as the bridge between obligations between God and human, and between human and human. Our Parents are our Sinai. In their hugs and admonitions, stories and rules, Torah was given. They were preparing us for the greater Sin;ai that was to come: a relationship with God the Father.

Yet here Dianne was suggesting that Parenthood – not childhood - is a much more relevant Sinai. Sociologists have been pointing out that if in the past marriage signified the move to full adulthood and economic independence, that in today’s affluent societies it is parenting, and not marriage, higher education or professional choice, which has increasingly become the “moment” around which big life decisions are made: what identity I will have, what neighborhood I’ll live in, what family practices we will accept (the Obama’s decision to stay in DC until their daughter finishes high school seems relevant here, somehow). Perhaps this is what Moses clarified to God at the Golden Calf, when God wanted to destroy the Jewish people: Sorry Mr. Creator. Now that you’re a parent, you need to act differently. You can’t just get up and leave: you’re held accountable. True, you obligate us. But we obligate you as well.

In her brief statement, Rabbi Dianne had opened up a whole new theology: what does it mean to imagine God as standing at the Sinai of the Jewish People and saying: Naaseh v’Nishma. I will obey and I will listen.

And yet, as Michelle Houellebecq put it in the quote at the top, we quickly become Sinai to our children too. Perhaps not in the same terms of stark authority and obligation as in the traditional world (although that too is there), but Sinai by way of giving the initial stories, metaphors and frameworks through which the world is understood; we shape the ontology from which our children’s world will be shaped.

Parenthood turns us into storytellers, and thus challenges us to figure out what “the story” is, and how much we believe in it. This is worth dwelling upon, because stories are the perfect envelope in which to couch complex truths. Stories are containers for ambiguity, the navigating of which will be a crucial job of our children in this constantly changing world. In a call this week about parenting among Bronfmanim, many of us were asking how to respond to children’s questions when we ourselves don’t know “the answer”, or face diversity of practice in our own families. I suggested that we might not know what is “true”, but that we can definitely say what is “real” to us. And that “real” is a category our children know well. In this way, the Hebrew word Emet holds both meanings: true and real. That which parents take seriously will be held as true. What they say is always secondary. Being a parent is about receiving a Torah of Obligation, but it is also about giving the Torah on a daily basis. Perhaps that is why teaching Torah to our children has been such an important commandment in our tradition. When the Torah of our family – whatever that may be – is given from parents to children, Sinai happens anew. That’s what Shavuot is all about.

Happy receiving – and giving - of the Torah,

Mishael

p.s. Jonathan Safran Foer gives a sweet example of navigating storytelling, real and true in this in piece in the NYTimes a few years ago:

Like every child, my 6-year-old is a great lover of stories — Norse myths, Roald Dahl, recounted tales from my own childhood — but none more than those from the Bible. So between the bath and bed, my wife and I often read to him from children’s versions of the Old Testament. He loves hearing those stories, because they’re the greatest stories ever told. We love telling them for a different reason.We helped him learn to sleep through the night, to use a fork, to read, to ride a bike, to say goodbye to us. But there is no more significant lesson than the one that is never learned but always studied, the noblest collective project of all, borrowed from one generation and lent to the next: how to seek oneself.A few nights ago, after hearing about the death of Moses for the umpteenth time — how he took his last breaths overlooking a promised land that he would never enter — my son leaned his still wet head against my shoulder.“Is something wrong?” I asked, closing the book.He shook his head.“Are you sure?”Without looking up, he asked if Moses was a real person.“I don’t know,” I told him, “but we’re related to him.”

Ma zeh "Distancing"? Framing the Israeli-American Jewish Debates

2016-05-10T05:51:00.000-07:00

A presentation delivered at the Wexner Alumni Summit April 2016, Rabbi Mishael Zion

“What is American Jews’ relationship to Israel?” is a topic of much debate, discussion and handwringing in recent year. Words like crises, distancing, occupation, religious freedom, BDS and assimilation often follow (though usually not from the same people).

Leaving the conversation at that question alone is a mistake. Two important questions must be engaged more seriously: the touchier “What is American Jews’ relationship to Israelis?” and the all-but-ignored question: “What is Israeli Jews’ relationship to American Jews?”

A few weeks ago I was asked to speak at the first Wexner Alumni Summit on the topic of Stronger Together: [Re] Imagining the Israel-North American Jewish Community Relationship. My (somewhat scary) job was to address these questions in front of a room of some of Israel’s top civil servants and North America’s leading lay leaders. The process helped me clarify in my own thinking how much these two communities have contradicted and undermined each other from day one, and how they also need each other and complement each other. I tried to pull apart the various debates and arguments about whether American Jews’ are distancing from Israel and Israelis, and to address head on the way Israelis never cared about American Jews’ and why this is changing today. I believe the tension between these two communities is an important asset in ensuring the survival – or perhaps even the flourishing: morally, spiritually, Jewishly - of these two strange and unique phenomenas of Jewish history.

As Israel celebrates its 68^th year of existence I share my remarks online, in a hope that some people still have patience to read something longer than 800 word op-eds.

Intro One: A Poem and a Seafaring metaphor

The poem was written some 600 years ago, by a French Jewish merchant who returned from from a business trip in Germany, and spent Shabbat among the German Jews of Alsace. Deeply disturbed by the type of Jews he met there, he eternalized his criticism in meter and rhyme, writing the following poem. See if you can follow the Biblical pun, which allows him to claim that “לא אלמן ישראל” - The Jews of Allemand are not part of Israel:

Anonymous (late Middle Ages?)
The Day That I Went Out from France

The day that I went out from France
And towards German lands made my advance
I found cruel people at first glance
Like ostriches in the wild plain
For Israel is not Alleman [=forsaken]
What has straw to do with grain?

I had hoped to find salvation
A day of rest and relaxation
Yet their offerings lacked consideration

My heart was cleft in twain
For Israel is not forsaken
What has straw to do with grain?

I searched the breadth of all Alsace
No man knew its worth I came across
Oh, would that its ways were not such chaos —
Overriding men, the women reign
For Israel is not forsaken
What has straw to do with grain?

I’ve grown utterly sick of Ashkenazim
For each one is fierce of face, I deem
Even their beards like goats’ beards seem
Heed not their words, all said in vain
For Israel is not forsaken
What has straw to do with grain?

משורר עלום שם
יום מצרפת יצאתי

יוֹם מִצָּרְפַת יָצָאתִי
אֶל אֶרֶץ אַשְׁכְּנַז יָרַדְתִּי
וְעַם אַכְזָר מָצָאתִי
כַּיְעֵנִים בַּמִּדְבָּר
כִּי לֹא אַלְמָן יִשְׂרָאֵל
מַה לַּתֶּבֶן אֶת הַבָּר?

צִפִּיתִי לִי לִישׁוּעָה
יוֹם נֹפֶשׁ וּמַרְגוֹעַ
וּמִנְחָתָם בְּלִי שָׁעָה
לְבָבִי הָיָה נִשְׁבָּר
כִּי לֹא אַלְמָן יִשְׂרָאֵל
מַה לַּתֶּבֶן אֶת הַבָּר?

חִפַּשְׂתִּי אֶלְזוּשׂ אָרְכָּהּ
וְלֹא יָדַע אֱנוֹשׁ עֶרְכָּהּ
לוּלֵי שֶֹלֹא כְּדַרְכָּהּ
הָאִשָּׁה עַל אִישׁ תִּגְבַּר
כִּי לֹא אַלְמָן יִשְׂרָאֵל
מַה לַּתֶּבֶן אֶת הַבָּר?

קַצְתִּי מְאֹד בְּאַשְׁכְּנַזִּים
כִּי הֵם כֻּלָּם פָּנִים עַזִּים
אַף זְקָנָם כְּמוֹ עִזִּים
אַל תַּאֲמֵן לָהֶם דָּבָר!
כִּי לֹא אַלְמָן יִשְׂרָאֵל
מַה לַּתֶּבֶן אֶת הַבָּר?

Translation partly from "Soul and Gone"

Even more so than the Jews of France and Germany, we live in a time of two divergent Jewish communities. Can we envision a Jewish future which is diverse, yet deep, divergent yet in dialogue –

between American and Israeli Jews?

Our poet is one model, but when I think of a Jewish model for a healthy

Kovner's Sea of Halakha

relationship between two communities, I think of the Talmud’s “Nehotei”. In the Sea of Talmudic Halakha, the Nehotei (whose means literally “the descender”, or those who “get down”) were the way-farers, the bold travelers who went back and forth between Bavel and the Galilee, those two fabled centers of the Jewish Talmudic world. They always transmitted what was going on in the other community. If you follow their sayings closely, you realize their statements are usually game-changers. Until they walk in, the whole discussion goes one way, but once they’ve contributed their perspective, the debate goes in a whole new direction.

In many ways, you – the alumni of the various Wexner leadership programs in Israel and North America, are a room of Nehotei – each bringing ideas back and forth between the two communities. What we’ve come together here to do is to become better Nehotei together.

Intro Two: Patience, and lack thereof

We’re here to study “Talmud המביא לידי מעשה –learning that brings about action.” My job is to offer some new frames for what we all already know, to give a shared language with which we can shorthand our conversations; and to frame some of the machloket – disagreements that perhaps exist in the room, and stir up the pot a bit so that we can bring the power of this room to bear…

One disclaimer: I’m not the expert in the room. People here have written books, led initiatives, organized mifgashim, work full time or during ungodly hours after work towards these issues – some of you have been doing this since before I was born. Instead my role here today is to provide a scaffolding upon which we can rest the coming two days of conversations.

Since I believe we learn best when we discuss ourselves and not just listen, I’ve structured the second half of our time together around three hevrutot - 1:1 conversations with a pre-assigned partner, where we will ask three questions:

Who Cares? Assessing this moment in Israeli-North American Jewish relationship
What are “We”? Examining metaphors of connections between the communities
Going Beyond Mifgash: Lessons Learned and Best Practices

But before we launch into the conversation, wWe each have a story of how we became Nehotei – and I want to start by briefly sharing with you mine:

I was born in Jerusalem – but spent three years of elementary school in US public schools where I picked up a wonderful American accent. I now work in a community that bridges both communities, constantly going back and forth. But in preparation for this summit, I realized that one pivotal moment in my story determined where I am today.

Growing up in Israel, I saw the relationship between Israel and America as a one-way street. Americans were great, but I mostly met them as tourists in Israel, not in their home setting. Their job was to be the “good uncle from Amerika” - support Israel financially and politically, buy Israeli products and go home. Maybe their kids would make Aliyah (most would not), and that would make me happy, but only if they shed their accent and funny clothes and become “true Israelis.”

I come from a family that’s been going back and forth between Israel and America since before the creation of the state. My grandfather made Aliyah in 1947, and fought in the Hagana, before returning to serve as a rabbi in Minneapolis for 25 years (a story that I told in this ELI Talk called “A Tale of Two Zions”). My father made Aliyah after 1967, and has trained a generation of teachers and educators in both countries. Together we authored haggadot in Hebrew and in English that have changed the way Jews in both countries celebrate their Passover Seders, influenced how Jews in both countries tell their key identity stories.

Until I realized that the things I thought that Israeli society needed most could be learned from the American Jewish community, and vice versa. This happened to me on both a national and personal level.

I had wanted to study to become a Rabbi for a few years – but was displeased with the Israeli Orthodox training which only taught laws and not leadership and community skills. I heard about a new Yeshiva which had opened in New York – Chovevei Torah – and called up R Avi Weiss to ask if I could apply. He rejected me, saying they trained Rabbis for the American Jewish community, not the Israeli one. The rejection made me want to come even more. “Teach me how to be an American community Rabbi – I’ll already do the translating to the Israeli scene…” I said. My wife received a post-doc at Columbia University, and we were on our way

But really what was going on was a desire to shake off israeli cynicism that had set in; and a nagging feeling that encountering the American Jewish community could teach me something valuable about being Israeli.

The summers of 2005-2006 were hard ones in Israel, The expulsion from Gush Katif, the second Lebanon war hitting the following summer, we felt it was hard to believe in big dreams anymore. My wife and I realized we wanted to travel to America to drink up some of the koolaid of American naiveté, of the belief in “Tikkun Olam”, seeking a place where we can dream again – but not as a turning of our backs on Israel, but as a way to return to Israel.

What we always found funny was how we were constantly asked to choose sides. “You’re coming back, right” – the bookseller at the second hand book store in Jerusalem demanded before taking my books. “So you’ve chosen Israel over us?” asked our friends at our Upper West Side synagogue when we left New York; “תגידו את האמת, איפה יותר טוב?” – “Tell me the truth, where is it better?” demanded that passport woman at Ben Gurion…

So before we go any further, I want – with your permission – to say a few things I have no patience for in this conversation: I have very little patience for the either/or mentality of Israel versus North America; for the “where is it better” insecurities, for the competition to see “who will be the first to fail”. I have very little patience for the way people in both communities project unto the other one that everything is either “great” or “horrible” about the other community (or about their own ); I have very little patience for awkward “mifgashim”, for sticky talk of “peoplehood” and for “we are one” fluffiness, for the superiority complex of liberaler-than-thou Americans and the hubris of macho Israelis who know what “real” danger and sacrifice are like.

I could go on, but here are some things I do have patience for: I have patience for these two far-from-perfect communities, this dysfunctional family with a tendency for self-delusion, to develop their discord into the amazing machloket that it could be, to find the ways in which we can learn from each other and teach eachother – and make the most of this unique moment in Jewish history.

The “Jewish Normal” Living in Generations of Rapid change

Invite to the 8th Zionist Congress in the Hague, 1907

Just over 100 years ago, summer of 1907, in the tiny town of Eibergen (Dutch for Eggtown) a curious Manuel Zion, my great-grandfather, rides his horse and buggy from his small Dutch town to the Hague. He had heard that the 8th Zionist Congress was to take place in the city, and since he carried the unusual name of “Zion” he decided to find out what all this Zionisten thing was about.

When he returned home to Eibergen, excited if skeptical of the grand ideas and programs that were thrown back and forth in that room, he finds a letter: “You are hereby disinvited from the Jewish community’s dinner and dance – there will be no place in our community for Zionists.”

I think of this story often when I am looking for some context about how we got here and where we might be 100 years from now. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to get disinvited from the community dinner and dance on the way to a grander vision.

I’ll bet each one of us in this room has a “Manuel Zion’s story” of some kind in our ancestry, not too many generations back. These stories serve as a reminder that there is nothing “normal” about Jewish existence today. In fact, what i s so un-normal is how “normal” everything feels to those of us born into these realities. There is so much we take for granted which was not even imaginable for our ancestors.

1848 – 11 million Jews, of which less than 100,000 Jews live in Israel or America

1939 – 17 million Jews

1948 – Back at 11 million, but a Jewish state is founded by less than 7% of the Jewish people; meanwhile – a third of the Jewish people live in America;

2016 – 40% in each country, 20% in the rest of the world

2050 - projections of 8 million Jews in Israel, steady 6 million Jews in US?

So this is all very new. I say this to caution us against doomsday predictability scenarios, and also to inspire hope that paradigms shift and change, pendulums swing and social initiatives do matter (although perhaps not as much as social, economic and political factors).

Two Homes: Different, Contradictory or Complimentary?

There is one very important characteristic that is shared by the 2 communities that are the majorityof the Jewish people, and which differentiates us from the other 20% of World Jewry: both communities are very much at home, both have arrived.

That in itself is not your “Jewish normal”. If the ongoing dichotomy of Jewish existence has been exile or redemption, we now face a third option: arrival. It is not quite the messianic redemption, but it definitely feels like a final destination. In both Israel and America, a majority of the Jewish people feel that they are “at home” in the country in which they reside. And I believe that fundamentally understanding how “at home” the Jewish people are in the two homes, their two “Zions”, is extremely important to reframing the work between the two communities. You might not agree with me on this point, or you might feel that this is exactly where the problem lies. But questioning the assumptions of various Jews on “where home is” is exactly the place where I believe the conversation should start, for our two homes are extremely different from eachother:

Lets count the ways:

1. Languages: the two communities speak different languagues, Hebrew and English, ont only as their day-to-day language, but as their Jewish language. A person can be considered wholly literate without knowing much of the other communities literary cannon.

2. They define their Jewish lives very differently – the two largest groups in each community define their Jewish lives very differently, even if their practice is relatively similar: Reform/Conservative in North America vs. Hiloni/Masorti in Israel; this also means that the Haredi and Dati/MO groups in both communities find it easier to be together than the other groups, and are more often those more concerned about the relationship.

3. Political views are viewed very differently: a majority of US jews are left/liberal, majority of Israeli jews are center and right (left is a brand in severe crises in Israel); they view issues of settlements and attempt towards peace very differently;

4. The basic organizing ethic of the two communities is very different: Israel is based in a culture of obligation – מצווה, שוויוןי בנטל, אין ברירה while American Jewish community is voluntaristic – both as a practice and as an ethic. This is not a judgement, but an observation – it effects where power lies: think of the type of leadership in this room – civil servants vs. volunteer lay leaders… The Wexner Foundation mode of identifying the core leadership in each country led to very different paths, because the power and prestige lies in two very different forms of service.

5. Separate base experiences are different: ongoing threat vs. prosperity and gratitude

a. Neighborhoods: Middle East/North America – Jews in Israel aer the majority, but in their neighborhood they feel like the “Middle Eastern other” in a way that recapitulates us being the European “other” for so many centuries. But in the US, Jews are not the other, but in fact, mostly white and privileged. They are accepted as being part of the majority, yet have a self-understanding of themselves as a minority.

6. Most interestingly, Israeli and North American Jews view the threats to Israeli life very differently. 39% of Israelis think the most important long-term problem facing Israel is economic problems. American Jews – 1%. (Do any Americans recognize the name Guy Rolnik or read “The Marker”?)

Either way, it thus makes sense that the “relationship” between these two communities should be so fraught, simply because of the huge differences between them. And yet we are not simply two “different” communities, we are actually two contradictory Jewish projects that by their very nature repudiate eachother:

a. The Israeli project is about creating a Jewish “State”; its underlying assumption is that Jews will only be safe if living on their own land and organized politically. The project includes redefining what Jewish means – Judaism exists primarily in the public space; and for generation the project also included Judaism being super-ceded by Israeliness, weakening the tie to non-Israeli Jews. Its central challenge is that of being the majority. It’s blessing is also a cruse: the unique challenge of power being colored “Jewish”: maintaining a Jewish military, Jewish sovereignty, a Jewish foreign policy…

b. The North American project on the other hand has a very different kind of power. It’s central goal is proving that a prosperous Jewish Diaspora is possible, that we can be a safe and vibrant minority within a democracy which is truly welcoming of minorities. The success of North American Jews disproves Herzlian Zionism on a daily basis – Jews can indeed live safely while being a minority. The energy of the project seemingly is that of remaining Jewish – but really the project is that of being American, and ensuring the America is welcoming to minorities such as ourselves. Jews came to America and discovered they are not only good at becoming Americans, they are good at telling Americans what the American story actually is (and if Jewish helps that, great).

In these ways and others, these two projects undermine eachother, but perhaps they are also complimentary – perhaps each community is only possible because of the other community? perhaps ONLY POSSIBLE because of the other community?

Would Jews be allowed to live in Westchester NY if not for the Jewish state? Would Israel have American support if not for the organized Jewish community?

Can this implicit complementariness, played out in social and political currency, also become an overt one, in a mutual exchange of ideas?

Returning to the Origins of the Relationship: The Blaustein-Ben Gurion Agreement

Ben Gurion, Blaustein and Golda Meir, 1950

Before we examine the various answers given in your applications to these questions, I’d like to return to one of the seminal moments of the relationship between the two communities, as it shows that it was always a fraught one. On August 23, 1950, on invitation of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, the President of the American Jewish Committee and US industrialist Jacob Blaustein visited Israel.The Prime Minister and Mr. Blaustein issued statements expressing their mutual understanding about the relationship. We must remember that at the time, Americans supplied about 30% of Israel’s GDP, so its not clear how beholden Ben Gurion felt to Blaustein:

David Ben Gurion: The Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have only one political attachment and that is to the United States of America. They owe no political allegiance to Israel. The State of Israel represents and speaks only on behalf of its own citizens, and in no way presumes to represent or speak in the name of the Jews who are citizens of any other country. We, the people of Israel, have no desire and no intention to interfere in any way with the internal affairs of Jewish communities abroad. The Government and the people of Israel fully respect the right and integrity of the Jewish com munities in other countries to develop their own mode of life and their indigenous social, economic and cultural institutions in accordance with their own needs and aspirations.

Jacob Blaustein: We shall do all we can to increase further our share in the great historic task of helping Israel to solve its problems and develop as a free, independent and flourishing democracy… But Israel also has a responsibility in this situation — a responsibility in terms of not affecting adversely the sensibilities of Jews who are citizens of other states by what it says or does. American Jews vigorously repudiate any suggestion or implication that they are in exile. American Jews — young and old alike, Zionists and non-Zionists alike — are profoundly attached to America.
To American Jews, America is home. There, exist their thriving roots; there, is the country which they have helped to build; and there, they share its fruits and its destiny. They believe in the future of a democratic society in the United States under which all citizens, irrespective of creed or race, can live on terms of equality. They further believe that, if democracy should fail in America, there would be no future for democracy anywhere in the world, and that the very existence of an independent State of Israel would be problematic. Further, they feel that a world in which it would be possible for Jews to be driven by persecution from America would not be a world safe for Israel either; indeed it is hard to conceive how it would be a world safe for any human being.

Yet a few years after these statements, Ben Gurion was found back to his previopus antics, undermining the legitimacy of the North American Jewish community:

In his address to the World Zionist Congress in December 1960, Ben Gurion declared: “Since the day when the Jewish state was established and the gates of Israel were flung open to every Jew who wanted to come, every religious Jew has daily violated the precepts of Judaism and the Torah by remaining in the Diaspora. Whoever dwells outside the land of Israel is considered to have no God, the sages said… In several totalitarian and Moslem countries, Judaism is in danger of death by strangulation; in the free and prosperous countries it faces death by a kiss — a slow and imperceptible decline into the abyss of assimilation.”

The same tones heard today – a sense of mutual undermining, a threat of assimilation versus that of dual loyalty, a myth of possible distancing, declarations of co-dependency alongside “get off my turf”-ness, where there from the begininng.

Then why is there a current sense of crises, and where does it emanate from? Many of you wrote about a crises in your applications, but you disagreed on what the crises is. I’d like to share a few of the machlokot that exist in this room (and in the wider world):

Let's start with the North American perspective. Many claim that there is “Distancing” – that a younger generation doesn’t care about Israel as much as their parents did. If it exists, why? And is it a bad thing, or perhaps a good one?

1. Seminal memories – the generational gap emanates from very different seminal memories: not the Israel of 1967 which re-shaped the way in which American Jews saw themselves. Israel is experienced not as a confidence booster to American Jews, but as a liability.

2. This in large part has to do with differing views over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

o Majority of American Jews blame Israeli Policy for the current situation and resent Israeli leadership that is cynical about peace efforts. This generation doesn’t remember 1967 or 1994, but a local superpower fighting against guerilla warfare and local uprisings.

o Israeli majority feels stalemated: it supports a two-state solution on paper but doesn’t believe it is possible to achieve. Israeli society is swerving to the right, with the left crumbling and the seminal memories of move people under 30 is of ongoing Intifada.

3. An opposite reading – also heard loud and clear in the applications - sees the distancing of young people from Israel as the result of a campaign and a broad sentiment on college campuses, BDS initiatives and the bundling of various other progressive agendas with the anti-Israel cause.

4. A different approach locates the challenge in the lack of religious Pluralism and freedom in Israel. In the American Jewish community, where the Reform movement makes up the largest denomination, and core American values are also seen as core Jewish values – pluralism, religious tolerance and freedom of religion –it is hard to get excited about an Israel in which women can be arrested for reading Torah at the Kotel or where their Judaism is not recognized.

5. The flip side of this argument can be seen in the claim that it is the rampant assimilation in America which is the problem and the greatest threat to the relationship. The “vanishing American Jew” that has also disconnected from values of Jewish solidarity and obligation is eroding the bond between Israel and America

But this has been from an America-centric perspective. What happens when we look at distancing of Israeli Jews from American Jews? Not a myth of a better time, but an understanding that Israelis never quite knew what to do with American Jews.

Hebrew identity – erasing previous identity; Negation of the Diaspora – AB Yehoshua as a paradigm: diaspora is a neurosis, an unhealthy split personality; only way to be full Jew is in Israel.

What gets headlines in Israel is “Vanishing American Jews” – which fits the paradigm mentioned in Ben Gurion’s 1960 quote above. What Israelis think of Americans is: דוד מאמריקה (Uncle from America); Aipac supporters, רפורמים (“Reformim”) = “weird Jews”; תיירי תגלית (birthright tourists). They hardly ever get to encounter American Jews “at home” and thus never understand their ethos, communities and lives in context.

When do Israelis learn about Diaspora Judaism? In Poland! Israeli Education about Diaspora Judaism is state-sponsored Poland trips – and despite many exchanges, the over-arching frame of Auschwitz or IDF continues to be a powerful frame.

The challenge to my mind is that both communities seem to assume an Israel-centric frame.

What caused this frame is that while in 1948, American Jews like Blaustein perceived themselves to be at home in American, in 1967 Israel’s amazing feat allowed American Jews to feel more at home in America than ever before. As Boston’s CJP President Bary Schrage put it: Until 1967, I would often be called a “yellow, little Jew” on my way to school in Brooklyn. After June 1967, that never happened again. Israel saved American Jewish identity once in 1967, and in some people’s mind, its doing that again today, with Birthright.

Yet on the other hand, since 1977 Israel stopped being “David” and to some it became “Goliath”. Israel’s success as a modern economy and a “StartUpNation” meant that it mostly outgrew the need for financial aid from the American Jewish community.

2015: Year of Realignment?

On a strategic level, over the last twenty years we’ve seen a significant shift in the way the relationship works. If in the past the expectation was that American Jews lend their financial capital to Israel, increasingly American Jews are using their political capital to get their government to support Israel.

This has met with much success, but recently was pushed to the limit when the PM of Israel expected to see both political and communal Jewish institutions bend their support against a sitting president. There are many ways to tell this story, but it represents a watershed moment, as it brings back the old challenge of Jacob Blaustein – that of dual loyalty.

At the same time, we’re seeing American Jews becoming more unabashedly interventionist in Israeli society. The most popular newspaper in Israel is owned by an American Jewish billionaire with a very clear political agenda. Organizations like the NIF on the left and Elad on the right raise US funds to further their vision for how Israel should look.

Most recently, the Federation system and the AJC have swung their support towards political endeavors relating to freedom of religion in Israel. On the other end, the minister of Diaspora Affairs has been seeking to lead a major initiative about the Jewish identity of North American Jews – and to overthrow the Jewish Agency’s power over Diaspora politics.

There are new trends, showing a tectonic shift that is not only of distancing, but of growing closeness and intervention in the other community.

- Many young Americans are distancing from Israel at a rapid rate, while many other Americans want to celebrate their Symbolic Particularism in Israel. Yet by doing so they are undermining the liberal values that 70% of them believe in. as long as American Jews feel more at home in Israel than Arab citizens of Israel, we are weakening Israel as a democracy. The Law of Return seems to be getting in the way. On the other hand recently we’ve seen a rise in awareness of the American Jewish community: women of the wall, the Federations stepping up; issues of Jewish pluralism being tied to lending political support to Israel.

- Many Israelis still need to believe it’s Auschwitz or Tel Aviv, not NYC. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Israelis are living or have lived in North America, and have a renwed appreciation of the value of American Jewish life.

So the dyanmics of the relationship are not as simple as one of “distancing”, and never have been. Rather, there is a distancing of some and an intervention and closeness on the other hand.

I order to better effect this relationship, and understand its effect on us, we must also examine the words and metaphors we use in reference to it.

Many of you mentioned the need for a new covenant, a new paradigm. Words like partnership, non-utilitarian relationship, family, and “we need to decide to be one people.”

Metaphors have power. Each metaphor is a theory of change, it’s a strategy, implies an ethic. Being mindful of these metaphors is important.

I leave you with four questions:

1. How do we build a mutually generative relationship between two “arrived” communities that have divergent and contradictory Jewish experiences?

2. What are the tipping points, pressure points, bridges, disruptors and translators needed for such a relationship?

3. What method should be embraced: popular connection, leadership to leadership, peer to peer?

4. What are the current assets, challenges and future trends that should be taken into account?

Ending: Jewish People in Bundles

There is often much talk of a need for unity, yet I believe, like Yishayahu Leibowitz, that “No good idea ever came out of a call for unity”. Rather, a rigorous debate, an awareness of our differences, and the ability to leverage those differences in order to strengthen the connections between us, is what we aer called to do. The following Midrash displays this tension with a unqie metaphor. Do we want to build one ship, or do we want to tie many small boats together?

"ויהי בישרון מלך בהתאסף ראשי עם יחד שבטי ישראל" (דברים לג:ה)

כשהם עשוים אגודה אחת , ולא כשהם עשוים אגודות אגודות

וכן הוא אומר "הבונה בשמים מעלותיו ואגודתו על ארץ יסדה" (עמוס ט:ו).

רבי שמעון בן יוחי אומר: משל לאחד שהביא שתי ספינות וקשרם בהוגנים ובעשתות והעמידן בלב הים ובנה עליהם פלטרין כל זמן שהספינות קשורות זו בזו פלטרין קיימים פרשו ספינות אין פלטרין קיימים כך ישראל כשעושים רצונו של מקום בונה עליותיו בשמים וכשאין עושים רצונו כביכול אגודתו על ארץ יסדה.

“The LORD became king in Israel--when the leaders of the people assembled, when the tribes of Israel gathered as one” (Deutoronomy 33:5) – When they are gathered as one bundle, and not when they are divided into bundles and bundles, and so says the verse: “He who builds his upper chambers in the heavens and founds His bundle upon the earth” (Amos 9:6).

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai says: This is like a person who brought two ships and anchored them together and placed them in the middle of the sea and built upon them a palace. As long as the ships are tied to eachother – the palace exists. Once the ships separate from eachother – the palaces cannot exist.

So are Israel – when they are fulfilling the will of the Omnipresent – “He who builds his upper chambers in the heavens”, and when they are not fulfilling his will – it is as if “His bundle is upon the earth”.

As the seafaring “Nehotei” that we are, we each ride very different ships. Trying to turn them into one boat would be a bad idea. Rather, if we can – like Shimon Bar Yochai suggests – tie many boats together, then we will find ourselves living within a much richer – and stronger – two communities. The waters are treacherous, lets hope this way we can ride out the current storms… and perhaps kick up some new ones.

[1] T. Carmi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, 2006 | Translation: SoulandGone.com

[2] Jeremiah 51:5

[3] Jeremiah 23:28

[4] Genesis 4:5 – God ignores Cain’s offering

Hard Conversations: Playing Chess Esther Style

2016-03-17T08:35:00.001-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Purim 2016

Anyone who has initiated a difficult conversation knows that moment just before, hand hovering above the doorknob, trying to discern what exactly should be said to gain the desired outcome. Rehearsed lines feel empty, and a chasm yawns between what we know must be said and the zone in which we don’t know what will happen next. It is this moment that is captured in the crucial conversation of Megillat Esther.

The scroll of Esther loves conversations. There are sixteen of them in the scroll (twelve of which are with the king), and each one lasts for no more than two or three exchanges. These exchanges resemble less dialogues and more moves on a Chess board, deft strategic movements in a longer campaign. Fittingly, the game of Chess came to us through Persia, the Persian "Shāh Māt!” - Persian for "the king is helpless" - is our “Check Mate”. Like chess, in the Game of Esther the king is weak, the queen versatile, and the early moves end up determining how the end game is played out. In the crucial campaign, a pawn named Harvona makes a fateful move, while and the opponent is caught trying to capture the queen…

The longest conversation of the book is the exchange between Mordechai and Esther which takes up the bulk of Chapter Four. Mordechai begins in commanding mode, forcing Esther out a defensive position and into engagement. Esther pushes back, fortifying her protective stance. Mordechai then plays his trump card, getting Esther to switch from passive defensiveness to full offense. But when she does enter play, it is on Esther’s own terms. The chapter ends with Mordechai doing “as Esther commanded” (read the full dialogue here).

As someone who hates playing chess but loves reading the chess column in the newspaper, I’d dare to summarize the five-part conversation into three crucial moves. One leitmotif recurs in them, evoking the key theme of the Megillah.

Move 1: “And Mordechai Knew”

The Chapter opens with Mordechai “knowing”:

And Mordechai knew all that was done.

Mordechai ripped his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes.

He went out into the midst of the city,

and cried with a loud and a bitter cry (Esther 4:1)

וּמָרְדֳּכַי, יָדַע אֶת-כָּל-אֲשֶׁר נַעֲשָׂה,

וַיִּקְרַע מָרְדֳּכַי אֶת-בְּגָדָיו,

וַיִּלְבַּשׁ שַׂק וָאֵפֶר;

וַיֵּצֵא בְּתוֹךְ הָעִיר,

וַיִּזְעַק זְעָקָה גְדוֹלָה וּמָרָה. (אסתר ד:א)

Like God at the beginning of Exodus, Mordechai knows. Now he is in search of his Moses to redeem the people from their oppressor. We later find out he has a copy of the edict itself, and perhaps even some inside information from the corridors of power regarding how this decision was made. We’re not surprised: Mordechai is, after all, the epitome of the court Jew, the insider. Just as he knew before that two of the King’s guards plan on assassinating him, so now he “knows” when it is his nation that is about to be killed.

Mordechai’s response s intense: he dresses in sackcloth, paints his face in black ash, and lunges straight for the palace square – a place which is a second home to him, but in which it is well known court protocol that one many not enter in such provocative and dishonorable garb.

What is Mordechai thinking? Is this a political move of demonstration in the public square to appeal to the ruler to change his verdict? Is this a religious act, fasting and mourning, appealing to the King of Kings to do what he did in Egypt so many generations ago? Or is this perhaps a mortified Mordechai who realized that his own stubborn insistence to not bow down before the King’s new darling vizier has now doomed his entire people. Is proud Mordechai now penitent?? We don’t know, but Mordechai does.

One person, however, doesn’t know. Esther. Hidden in her harem, shielded from the news and masked from any association with the Jewish people, she’s described as enveloped in a world of courtesans and eunuchs, oblivious of the world around her. International headlines and backroom politicking are beyond her, but Shushan fashion and court protocol make their way to her room instantly. When reports of Mordechai’s severe break of protocol (or civil disobedience) reach her, she is hysterical (to be read with full Freudian and critical feminist evocation), and immediately demands to know “what is this and on what this is?” Her reaction suggests that perhaps Mordechai was not trying to impress neither King nor King of Kings, but rather was aiming at his niece, the Queen. He knew, and he knew she didn’t want to know, so he found the best way to grab her attention. But now that he has it, well, now what??

Move 2: “Everybody Knows!”

Mordechai commands Esther to go to the king and beg to him on behalf of her people. He is asking the world of Esther – to reveal that which she has sought to hide, to interfere in the matters of the court, to turn from a pretty face into an advocate of a minority whose execution has just been ordered. But Esther’s response does not dwell on these issues. They key words in her response to Mordechai’s knowledge is another sort of knowledge:

“All the king’s servants, and the people of the king’s provinces, know, that whosoever, man or woman, shall come unto the king into the inner court, who is not called, there is one law for him, that he be put to death…” (Esther 4:11)

כָּל-עַבְדֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ וְעַם-מְדִינוֹת הַמֶּלֶךְ יֹדְעִים, אֲשֶׁר כָּל-אִישׁ וְאִשָּׁה אֲשֶׁר יָבוֹא-אֶל-הַמֶּלֶךְ אֶל-הֶחָצֵר הַפְּנִימִית אֲשֶׁר לֹא-יִקָּרֵא אַחַת דָּתוֹ לְהָמִית, לְבַד מֵאֲשֶׁר יוֹשִׁיט-לוֹ הַמֶּלֶךְ אֶת-שַׁרְבִיט הַזָּהָב, וְחָיָה; וַאֲנִי, לֹא נִקְרֵאתִי לָבוֹא אֶל-הַמֶּלֶךְ--זֶה, שְׁלוֹשִׁים יוֹם... (אסתר ד:יא)

Mordechai might know something about his people, but in the process he forgot what “everybody knows”. Even Herodotus knew that about the Persian King (Herodotus I 99). Did Mordechai not notice that this empire works on adherence to strict protocol? Does he not recall that Vashti was killed because of her disobedience? Esther sees no point in getting killed in the process.

Move 3: “Who Knows?”

Mordechai’s final move on the chess board is a fascinating one. If he’s read his Bible well, he knows that prophets and messengers in the Bible never accept the mantle of leadership and action lightly. Moses, Jeremiah, Gideon, Ezekiel – they all pushed back when God told them to step up. God’s response is always to invoke his own knowledge (“Before you were born I knew you”, or “here is the sign that you shall know that I am with you”). But Mordechai takes a different approach. Something has changed. From acting out of a place of certainty (“Mordechai… commanded her to go to the King…”) he invokes a place of doubt and uncertainty:

“Who knows if for a moment like this you reached greatness” (Esther 4:14)

וּמִי יוֹדֵעַ--אִם-לְעֵת כָּזֹאת, הִגַּעַתְּ לַמַּלְכוּת

Who knows indeed. Mordechai’s words can be accepted by Esther when he offers not knowledge and certainty, but rather recognizes the uncertainty. There is no clear calling, there is no pre-destiny. Who knows. Once that is embraced, action can be taken.

Mordechai’s winning move on the chess board is an indecisive one, and in that lies its power. From here on in Esther takes over the board, leading a complex strategy that only she understands, thinking four steps in advance and setting into motion a play that will lure Haman into a trap that will end with his demise. Who knows if she would have succeeded if other things hadn’t happen by chance (or covert miracle). What is clear at the end of the chapter is that by surrendering herself to the uncertainty, and being willing to accept the worst case scenario of her actions, she can eventually prove that indeed, there was a calling to her rise to greatness.

“Who knows” מי יודע remains the cri de coeur of the Book of Esther. It is the modus vivendi for life in exile. Not necessarily the exile of the Jewish people, rather, it is a world in which God is in exile, certainty is in exile. Knowing is not enough. Accepting the fact that all our actions are “who knows” moments is the one that can allow us to reclaim agency and change the status quo. We might even find out why we reached greatness after all…

Esther Now: A Call to Read the Megillah, 2016

2016-03-10T03:27:00.001-08:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Purim 2016

Chapter Four. A man walks through the city streets, wearing sack cloth and ashes. His entire people have just been sentenced to death by the Grand Vizier. They are to be killed in a day of public violence - in an empire that prides itself on its multiculturalism. And in a twisted way, it is his fault. A long, bitter scream emits from his mouth.

Chapters Eight & Nine. The same man walks through the city streets, dressed in blue sash and organdy, himself having become the Grand Vizier. He is celebrated by all, much loved and appreciated. This time it is his people who will be performing the public violence, killing all those who sought to destroy them.

And we celebrate all this in two days of costumes and noisemakers. No wonder Martin Luther declared that Jews “love the book of Esther, which so well fits their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous greed and hope.” (“On the Jews and Their Lies” 1543)

Luther’s anti-Semitic criticism of Esther and of us, her people, is ridiculous and chilling, precisely because Esther is a tale of power and powerlessness writ large. Esther is unafraid to play out two pathologies of power: the pathology of total disempowerment of a minority vulnerable to violence in Chapter 4, and the pathology of total power turned into minority-inflicted violence in Chapter 9 (thank you Yehuda Kurtzer for this succinct distillation). These two chapters make battle in our public discourse constantly: are we living in Chapter 4, the year is 1939, and an Iranian Haman is out to get us while world leaders are busy getting drunk? Or, alternatively, are we living through a new version of Chapter 9, with Jewish power reigning like never before both in our majority-land and our minority-empire, allowing us to get away with questionable moral actions in the name of self-defense?

And just like that, this silly children’s fable has pulled us into dealing face to face with our deepest, darkest fears. Be it violence, power, exile, sex, gender, drink – Esther lures us in with its fancy costumes and silly pranks until we find ourselves talking about the most pivotal issues. As I am in the process of writing a cultural commentary about the Scroll of Esther, its becomes increasingly clear to: Esther Now.

Esther Now

More than the grand tale of leaving Egypt, more than the human moments of Abraham and Sarah, more than the grand visions and rebukes of the Prophets, it is Esther that is the most relevant book of the Bible.

Esther Now because it is the book of Jewish power and politics, and of Diaspora and disempowerment. It is the book of getting a seat at the table – and the prices we’re willing, or unwilling, to pay for that seat. It’s the book where the personal is the political and the political is the physical. It’s the book of gender, identity, political violence, sexual violence, success, individualism and calling. It is also the book of unknowing (but that’s for next week’s essay).

Esther Now because hers is the last book of the Bible, conceptually and chronologically; the scroll that bridges between the God-infused world of the Bible and the God-vacant world of our reality. No wonder the Rabbis read it as a “second Sinai”. It is the closest Biblical book to our contemporary reality. “We are all servants of Ahasuerus now” (Talmud Arakhin).You are free to read God into the tale if you want, seeing providence and prayer and calling as real agents in the world, but even then, you are a servant of Ahasuerus.

Esther Now because we are living through the tale of the greatest Jewish Diaspora to ever exist, in an empire of 50 states with its political pageants and Jewish courtesans. That other Jewish Diaspora, with its 127 states, places a funhouse mirror through which we can reassess ourselves.

Esther Now because the story is a farce, a parody, a carnivalesque fast paced streaming series of beltway politics of the type that has become so popular of late. But it is through farce that elephants in the room can be unveiled.

Who will Esther 2016 Be?

Arthur Szyk drawing himself with Haman

Each year, Purim invites the pundits to compare the current political reality to the story of the megillah. Last year it was all about Iran, with its Persian echoes. This year its going to be the Presidential Candidates (although I’d love to see a thoughtful comparison to the Supreme Court, contrasting Shushan’s farcical court of seven advisers who “know all rules and regulations” and who step in when a dispute arises between the bodies of power in the Capital to the nine wise-people of DC (oops, eight…)).

Theoretically, DC couldn’t be further afield from Shushan. If anything, DC is Shushan after Mordechai’s rise to power. Of the four (current) front runners in the presidential campaigns, one is Jewish, the other sees zealous support of Israel as a central tenant of his faith, and two have Jewish sons in law. We’ve never been closer to the king, who himself celebrates Jewish rituals in his home.

On the flip-side, we’ve also sensed how a surprising candidate out of left field, touting ego, money and race-baiting can turn a whole empire on its head. We’ve felt the chilling realization that it can happen here too (but not in Canada). Perhaps as minorities, our situation is more precarious than we are willing to admit to ourselves. Maybe Chapter 4 is not just history, perhaps it is a most probable future, if not to our minority than to those around us.

On the flippity flip side, perhaps it is in our unprecedented and quite sudden power that the greatest threat resides. Not the threat to the Jews, but the threat of us as Jews, or our brethren, using power to make others cower, bow and prostrate.

Flip side again, perhaps this attempt to translate a 2000 year old political metaphor into contemporary reality is a futile experiment. Let’s stick to a close textual reading, and see what we can make out it. It is those close readings that remain real in the long run, even as the political envelope keeps going topsy turvy.

All this should be sufficient to say that Esther merits a close reading this year, one which I hope to share with you in the coming weeks. To be continued…

Finding the Authority Within or How to Survive Advice from your Father in Law

2016-01-29T04:37:00.003-08:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Yitro 2016

“I need not expand on the importance of the theme of authority. Few are the educated people who can exist without depending on others, or develop a truly independent opinion. One cannot overestimate the power of people’s lack of internal decision making and their craving for external authority. The incredible rise in frequency of neurosis we see around us since the power of religion has been decimated serves as a measure of this.” (Sigmund Freud, Opening Lecture at the Second Psychoanalytic Conference, 1910)

This week’s Torah portion is all about authority. Its second half tells the quintessential moment of Jewish authority: the giving of the Torah at Sinai. It’s a hierarchical model of authority if ever there was one – with the Law given from up high and forced on the nation. The Israelites accept wholeheartedly, bowing their heads to Divine Authority, saying: נעשה ונשמע - We will perform and we will hearken. That’s at least how one strand of our tradition tells it. For Freud, it is the moment of the inhibiting Super-ego being crowned over the id and ego, a heteronomous power which if internalized properly will bring out the healthy and productive individual. It is a tale of human yearning for external authority.

Discussions of the trouble with external authority abound. But the story of Sinai is prefaced by another tale of authority; one which puts a spotlight on our relationship to our own, internal authority. The juxtaposition makes a claim: before we establish the role of external authority, one’s own sense of internal authority must be met face to face . This psychological exercise is played out by the quintessential underminer of authority: the parent-in-law.

Yitro, Moses’ father in law and Priest of Midian, comes to visit his son-in-law’s band of runaway slaves in their desert abode. Before leaving, the seasoned priest teaches his entrepreneuring young son-in-law a lesson in systems. Seeing Moses overburdened “from daybreak until sunset” by those seeking the ear of the leader, he advises him to create a multi-tiered human justice system which can transmit God’s word to the people without over-burdening the sole prophet. It’s a lesson in the move from charismatic leadership to bureaucratic leadership, as Max Weber will call it centuries later. But what is actually going on is Yitro calling Moses out for not recognizing his own authority, and not recognizing that the “locus of control” to his situation resides in himself.

This is how the little family spat is described in Exodus 18:

Now it was on the morrow:

Moshe sat to judge the people,

And the people stood before Moshe

from daybreak until sunset.

When Moshe’s father-in-law saw

all that he had to do for the people,

He said: What are you doing to the people!

Why do you sit alone, while the entire people must stand before you from daybreak until sunset?

Moshe said to his father-in-law:

It’s the people who come to me to inquire of God!

Whenever they have some legal-matter, it comes to me –

I judge between a man and his fellow

And make known God’s laws and his instructions.

Then Moshe’s father-in-law said to him:

Not good is this matter, as you do it!

You will become worn out, yes, worn out,

Not only you, but also the people that are with you,

For this matter is too heavy for you,

You cannot do it alone!

Rather, listen to my advice…

(Exodus 18:13-24)

וַיְהִי, מִמָּחֳרָת,

וַיֵּשֶׁב מֹשֶׁה,

לִשְׁפֹּט אֶת-הָעָם;

וַיַּעֲמֹד הָעָם עַל-מֹשֶׁה,

מִן-הַבֹּקֶר עַד-הָעָרֶב.

וַיַּרְא חֹתֵן מֹשֶׁה, אֵת כָּל-אֲשֶׁר-הוּא עֹשֶׂה לָעָם;

וַיֹּאמֶר: מָה-הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה עֹשֶׂה לָעָם?? מַדּוּעַ אַתָּה יוֹשֵׁב לְבַדֶּךָ,

וְכָל-הָעָם נִצָּב עָלֶיךָ מִן-בֹּקֶר עַד-עָרֶב.

וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה, לְחֹתְנוֹ:

כִּי-יָבֹא אֵלַי הָעָם, לִדְרֹשׁ אֱלֹהִים.

כִּי-יִהְיֶה לָהֶם דָּבָר, בָּא אֵלַי,

וְשָׁפַטְתִּי, בֵּין אִישׁ וּבֵין רֵעֵהוּ;

וְהוֹדַעְתִּי אֶת-חֻקֵּי הָאֱלֹהִים, וְאֶת-תּוֹרֹתָיו.

וַיֹּאמֶר חֹתֵן מֹשֶׁה, אֵלָיו:

לֹא-טוֹב, הַדָּבָר, אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה, עֹשֶׂה.

נָבֹל תִּבֹּל--גַּם-אַתָּה, גַּם-הָעָם הַזֶּה אֲשֶׁר עִמָּךְ:

כִּי-כָבֵד מִמְּךָ הַדָּבָר, לֹא-תוּכַל עֲשֹׂהוּ לְבַדֶּךָ!

עַתָּה שְׁמַע בְּקֹלִי, אִיעָצְךָ...

(שמות יח יג-כב)

One is enticed to read Yitro as the stereotypical conniving father-in-law: first, he spies on his son-in-law at work. Then he takes license to criticize his practices: “What are you doing?? Why are you doing it alone, and causing all these people to wait for hours??” When Moses gets all defensive (“I didn’t ask for this, they started it…”), Yitro turns to outright criticism, and finally to the sharpest weapon of the in-law: Let me give you some advice…

This is how Rabbi Hayyim Ben Attar, one of the most attuned readers of dialogues in the Torah, reads the discussion between them: “Moses heard in Yitro’s words a criticism, as if he is forcing them to only adhere to his judgement, and not to others” (Or haChayim Exodus 18:16).

Of course, the contentious reading of Yitro and Moses’ relationship is not necessarily so. We’ll never know what tones (and undertones) filled their conversation. But as the experienced High Priest teaches Moses how to run an organized religion, he also names something about Moses’ insecurities.

A basic adage of organizational psychology claims that if a dysfunction in a system is perpetualized, it’s probably because it serves a need for all parties involved. As we view the long line of Israelites waiting on Moses’ word from morning to night, it is clear what need this is serving: like New Yorkers who love to wait in line for the “best food in town”, Moses is the only authority in their eyes, the all-powerful savior from Pharaoh, and they want to receive truth, leadership and guidance from his mouth only. But what need is this burdensome dysfunctional system serving for Moses? Why does he need an external review in order to change the dysfunctional system he allowed the Israelites to create around him?

I’d suggest that Moses doesn’t change the authority structure not because he actually enjoys being the sole authority, but because he feels deeply equivocal about the authority invested in him. He doesn’t feel empowered to hand it to others because he can barely admit that he is holding it himself. True, he’s exhausted, but this too serves a need: His loudly portrayed exhaustion shields him from having to take action beyond that which is already on his plate. (Thank you to David Levin Kruss for this point. I would have thought of it myself but have simply been too exhausted and overworked this week to do so…).

The dysfunctional system created around Moses allows him to continue to locate the “locus of control” in his life outside himself. First it resides with God, then with the Israelites; never with Moses. He doesn’t see himself as holding any authority, but simply serving external referents. That is a sure way to achieve exhaustion, but also to avoid recognizing one’s own power and responsibility, one’s internal sense of authority. Yitro supplies Moses with the wake up call that forces him to take the reigns.

I find Moses’ discomfort with his new found authority very relatable. The stage of life between 30-45 or so (or 80 in biblical terms) shoves us into all kinds of new authority roles which are not simple to embrace (even as we crave them). A parent who disciplines their child, the employer who fires and hires, the supervisor sending others on complicated and risky task. Truly recognizing and wielding the “authority vested in us” is no simple task, as it forces us to come to terms both with the burden of power and with the recognition of its boundaries Often, it requires an external event - a conflict or failure or critical voice to bring us to terms with how much authority we actually do wield. Many people hold an unjustifiably inflated sense of their own power and authority, but equally pernicious are those who hold an unjustifiably deflated sense of their authority. As the Prophet Samuel says to King Saul, before firing him: “Although you were once small in your own eyes, did you not become the head of the tribes of Israel!?” Saul’s inability to recognize the burden of his own authority causes his downfall. Perhaps it is the fact that Samuel was no Yitro…

A big part of coming to terms with our own authority is recognizing what is actually being asked of us in our new role, and the mixture of projections and actual needs that people bring to us. The brilliance in Yitro’s advice to Moses is not in the judicial structure he suggests, but in the way he allows Moses to see what he, Moses, brings to the table, and in that way come to terms with his authority:

Listen to my advice, so that God may be-there with you:

Be-there, yourself, for the people in relation to God. You yourself should have the matters come to God;

You should make clear to them the laws and the instructions,You should make known to them the way they should go, and the deeds that they should do;

But you – you are to have the vision to select from all the people: men of caliber, holding God in awe, men of truth, hating gain; You should set them over the people as chiefs of thousands, chiefs of hundreds, chiefs of fifties, and chiefs of tens, so that they may judge that people at all times.

So shall it be: Every great matter they shall bring before you,But every small matter they shall judge by themselves. Make it light upon you, and let them bear it with you.If you do thus in this matter, when God commands you further, you will be able to stand, and also this people will come to its place in peace.

Moshe hearkened to the voice of his father-in-law, he did it all as he had said. (Exodus 18:19-24)

עַתָּה שְׁמַע בְּקֹלִי, אִיעָצְךָ, וִיהִי אֱלֹהִים, עִמָּךְ;

הֱיֵה אַתָּה לָעָם, מוּל הָאֱלֹהִים, וְהֵבֵאתָ אַתָּה אֶת-הַדְּבָרִים, אֶל-הָאֱלֹהִים

וְהִזְהַרְתָּה אֶתְהֶם, אֶת-הַחֻקִּים וְאֶת-הַתּוֹרֹת;

וְהוֹדַעְתָּ לָהֶם, אֶת-הַדֶּרֶךְ יֵלְכוּ בָהּ, וְאֶת-הַמַּעֲשֶׂה, אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשׂוּן.

וְאַתָּה תֶחֱזֶה מִכָּל-הָעָם אַנְשֵׁי-חַיִל יִרְאֵי אֱלֹהִים,

אַנְשֵׁי אֱמֶת--שֹׂנְאֵי בָצַע;

וְשַׂמְתָּ עֲלֵהֶם, שָׂרֵי אֲלָפִים שָׂרֵי מֵאוֹת, שָׂרֵי חֲמִשִּׁים, וְשָׂרֵי עֲשָׂרֹת, וְשָׁפְטוּ אֶת-הָעָם, בְּכָל-עֵת.

וְהָיָה כָּל-הַדָּבָר הַגָּדֹל יָבִיאוּ אֵלֶיךָ,

וְכָל-הַדָּבָר הַקָּטֹן יִשְׁפְּטוּ-הֵם;

וְהָקֵל מֵעָלֶיךָ, וְנָשְׂאוּ אִתָּךְ.

אִם אֶת-הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה, תַּעֲשֶׂה, וְצִוְּךָ אֱלֹהִים, וְיָכָלְתָּ עֲמֹד;

וְגַם כָּל-הָעָם הַזֶּה, עַל-מְקֹמוֹ יָבֹא בְשָׁלוֹם

וַיִּשְׁמַע מֹשֶׁה, לְקוֹל חֹתְנוֹ; וַיַּעַשׂ, כֹּל אֲשֶׁר אָמָר.

Yitro helps Moses differentiate between what only he can give, and what other fine people can do. He helps name the values and traits needed to do some aspects of Moses’ job (caliber, awe, truth, hating gain), so that they can be delegated to others, while highlighting the ways in which Moses is irreplaceable, the things that only he can provide: “the matters that come from God”.

We often undervalue the very things we are best at, those skills and powers that come to us most naturally. This makes sense, since that which comes naturally to me requires very little effort –and therefor I underestimate or overlook its value. It is in all the ways in which we fall short, all the skills that require enormous effort and concentration that we attribute a high value to, thus making the half empty glass of our skills feel much more important.

Yitro helps Moses recognize that it is him that they are seeking, not just God; he helps him see his own voice and importance in the system, helps him make that which is projected on him and his own internal self assessment more congruent. He thus allow Moses to loosen his grip on the untenable system that he allowed the Children of Israel to create around him. Once Moses can come to terms with his own internal authority, he can begin the work of truly bringing God’s matters to the people.

The fact that the people weren’t really ready for it, well, that’s a whole different Torah portion…

Reclaiming the Brotherhood: Facing Homegrown Misanthropy

2015-12-25T00:40:00.000-08:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | VaYechi 2015

For a few weeks now I’ve been meaning to write about my ancestor, Levi. The mythical father of my own tribe of Levites, he’s been rearing his head a lot lately. Together with his brother, Shimon, Levi is the first Child of Monotheism who unsheathed the indiscriminate sword of vengeance. In the killing of all the men of Shechem, Levi is the mascot of twisting the demand for justice and security into an isolationist and vengeful approach. He trademarked the claim, in avenging the rape of his sister Dina, that deceit and butchery are justified in the name of brotherly solidarity (“Should our sister then be treated like a whore?”). Together, Levi and Shimon hold the patent on turning Abraham’s covenant into a veil for violence.

And they’ve been accruing quite a lot of royalties lately. Each week Levi’s fingerprints appear on more and more news stories: in the religiously justified violence and extremism from various children of Abraham, but also in the increasingly isolationist approach of populist politicians. You know it’s a Levite isolationism when it condones butchering in distant camps while keeping the home camp closed and pure… Finally, for those following the latest wedding fashions in extreme-right-wing Israel, in the appalling – but not unfamiliar – call for revenge and violence from my own relatives.

As I’ve been trying to figure out what I can do amid this tidal wave, I’ve been thinking about Levi’s father, Jacob. Grandpa Jack’s weak response to his children’s misconducts is infamous. First, his lack of response upon Dina’s rape by Shechem, then his tacit approval of Levi and Shimon’s request that all of Shechem’s town circumcise themselves, and finally his repudiation of their actions, which is focused on the political ramifications with would-be allies and neighbors (“You make me reek among the settled-folk of this land!”), and not confronting the actual violence and lying involved.

At the end of his life, from the safety of his deathbed, he returns to Levi and Shimon’s actions. In the midst of this week’s Torah portions blessings to all his other children, Jacob issues the following curse:

Shimon and Levi - such brothers.
Wronging weapons are their ties-of-kinship!
To their council may my being never come,
In their intimacy may my person never unite!
For in their anger they kill men,
In their self-will they maim bulls.
Damned be their anger, that it is so fierce!
Their fury, that is so harsh!
I will split them up among Jacob,
I will scatter them throughout Israel. (Genesis 49:5-7)

שִׁמְעוֹן וְלֵוִי – אַחִים! כְּלֵי חָמָס מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶם. בְּסֹדָם אַל תָּבֹא נַפְשִׁי, בִּקְהָלָם אַל תֵּחַד כְּבֹדִי. כִּי בְאַפָּם הָרְגוּ אִישׁ, וּבִרְצֹנָם עִקְּרוּ שׁוֹר. אָרוּר אַפָּם כִּי עָז! וְעֶבְרָתָם כִּי קָשָׁתָה! אֲחַלְּקֵם בְּיַעֲקֹב וַאֲפִיצֵם בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל:

A Star of David and the Hebrew word ‘Revenge’ are spray-painted on the walls of a Palestinian home which was burned down by arsonists on July 31, 2015 in the Palestinian village of Duma, near Nablus (Zacahria Sadeh/Rabbis for Human Rights)

Nachmanides explains that Jacob’s resounding curse functionally cuts them out of Abraham’s inheritance, giving Shimon and Levi no independent share in the land of Israel (probably reflecting the fact that neither tribe had their own land in Biblical Israel). They are to be kept scattered among their brothers due to their “fierce anger”, “harsh fury”, and their “Hamas”-like ways (“Hamas” חמס in Hebrew, “deceitful wronging”, is the same verb used to describe the crimes of the generation of the Flood). For they “caused the name of God himself to be desecrated as people will claim that a prophet of God caused such hamas and robbery”.

But Nachmanides also zeroes in on the first word of the curse: Brothers. אחים:

“Simon and Levi – Brothers” – Some understood this as Jacob at first seemingly giving them credit, describing them as brothers to the core, believers in fraternity. For their hearts were passionate over the fate of their sister.

I imagine Shimon and Levi’s ears perking up as they hear their father honor them with the title which they self-identify with so strongly. “Yes, we are brothers indeed. In a family where solidarity fell apart time and again – we were the loyal ones, weren’t we?” But then his compliment turns into repudiation: if that is brotherhood, may my legacy have nothing to do with it; may my being never become associated with this version of fraternal intimacy.

Today, I hear Jacob’s curse as a desperate plea. Please, may these powers that I have unleashed into the world not take over what the name of Jacob/Israel will become. May the family that I fathered not become smothered in brotherly fundamentalism. May such “Brotherhood” (Islamic, Jewish, Christian, GOP, DNC) not become synonymous with the project of Abraham. Jacob’s curse is not a prescribed destiny, it is a charge to the rest of his children: make sure that Levi and Shimon’s ways do not come to define what being a Child of Israel means. In a twist, he turns the fraternal charge from one of violent protectionism and vengeance into one of watchful moderation, engaged repudiation, brotherly intervention to mediate the fury and anger when they arise.

Why do I return to Levi in confronting these dangerous, disgusting and disheartening trends? Precisely because Levi is my relative, he’s my backyard, the symbol of homegrown extremism. Framing this violence as coming from my own family is a way of taking responsibility for it. Not liability, but responsibility. Levi symbolizes the challenge of confronting homegrown hatred and homegrown violence.

I do so in repudiation of the fact that so much of the discourse in response to recent events has focused on othering those we disagree with, distancing ourselves from any relationship with those who take the name of our religion/nation/story in vain and desecration, and ignoring the fact that there are values at the core of this hatred that must be engaged and countered. Hiding behind words such as “radicalization”, “fundamentalism” or “populism” is a way of creating a chasm between ourselves and those “others”, and in so doing washing our own hands from any association. Levi reminds me that what we must repudiate while engaging. Study the motivations and implications, then truly rival their ideology, from up close and personal. Not let them claim the values, dreams and names which are actually our inheritance. Not let them define what Jacob’s path is in our eyes.

As one Bronfman Fellow said to me this week at the end of our joint Mifgash Shabbaton of Israeli and American Bronfmanim: This weekend I understood how for my parents and grandparents the mission statement of the Jewish People was “I am seeking for my brothers”. In response to the Holocaust, the plight of Soviet Jewry, the insecurity of Israel, they felt that fraternity called upon them to fight for Jews against their joint enemies. But today we live in the opposite reality, not of Jewish disempowerment, but in deep Jewish privilege and power. For me, she said, “I am seeking my brothers” means that I must not be silent - for my brothers faces have changed. I must seek them out and call them out – and I must do it first, for they are my brothers.

Thankful for My Portion: Thoughts on Entering, Exiting and the portion of the Bronfmanim Community

2015-11-25T06:04:00.002-08:00

Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKanah would pray when he entered the Beit Midrash (=House of Study) and when he left, a brief prayer.They said to him: What is the nature of this prayer?He answered: Upon my entrance, I pray that no mishaps should occur because of me; and upon my departure, I offer thanksgiving for my portion. (Mishna Berakhot 4:2)

Rabbi Nehunya has been on my mind. In the last three weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of entering and exiting and everywhere I went, I taught this text. Three weeks ago at our Ten Hour Israeli alumni seminar in Tel Aviv. Two weeks ago with our North American Alumni Board members in Boston. Last week in Arizona, Becky and I got to study it with Adam Bronfman (and our tireless board president, Dana Raucher). Last night – already back in Jerusalem – it was with my virtual journal group of 2015 Bronfmanim. In each place, the teaching resonated differently, but the questions were the same. I feel so thankful to be a part of this varied and spread out community and to be able to study Torah with people united by their thirst for learning, for intentionality and for community.

As a Thanksgiving gift, I wanted to share with you some thoughts about this text (here it is in a sourcesheet format, in case you dare share it at your table). And as my own personal moment of Thanksgiving, I want to share some unabashedly promotional snapshots from the Bronfmanim community which have inspired me these last few weeks. As Paris and Brussels, Jerusalem and Gush Etzion, New Haven and Chicago, become ever more complicated places, I return to the power of the Bronfman community to serve as an antidote to polarization, a breath of inspiration amid cynicism, a model for a community of nuance amid disagreement.

***

On any given day, we find ourselves entering and exiting a variety of locations and contexts. In each place we have a different role to play, a specific responsibility, a different amount of power we can wield. We might even hold different names in each context (friend, father, boss, student, employee, client, daughter…). We move between these contexts constantly, and sometimes - like a whisper only we can hear - the context is switched and our role becomes entirely different than the one before it. In this decade of smartphones, our contexts keep switching and overlapping in faster and faster succession. We are constantly entering and exiting.

But then Nehunia ben haKanah stands at the doorway, and pauses for a brief prayer. “What is the nature of your prayer?” they challenge him. “Upon my entrance, I pray that no mishaps should occur because of me; and upon my departure, I offer thanksgiving for my portion.”

I’d suggest Nehunia’s prayer is a call to intentionality as we enter and exit our various contexts. He’s warning us about the detriments of not noticing the context that we’re in, not being aware of the role, responsibility, and power that we wield; of the name we must answer to. His solution for himself was to create short moments of intentionality, kavana, and tefilla. He allows his hands to shake a bit, before entering a role of power and responsibility. Let no mishap happen because of me. Then, upon exiting, he brings his hands together in thanksgiving and appreciation, ensuring that next time he enters, he recalls the goodness and not just the trepidation.

Nehunia’s personal prayer is metonymic of the entire project of Mishna Berakhot, the tractate from which this aphorism is taken. Berakhot is a calling to live intentionally in the world, and it offers a unique formula, which one could call “The Secret Structure of Jewish prayer”, but I prefer to call it: The Art of Sandwich making.

Berakhot encourages us to sandwich our experiences, trials and tribulations with brief prayers. “Before one enters a city, say one prayer. As you leave the city, say one prayer”. We are called to say a blessing before eating, and four blessings after. So too with waking and sleeping, with learning, with seeing an old friend. We even say blessings before we say blessings, and say blessings after we’ve said blessings. Sandwich upon sandwich upon sandwich.

Yet before it became a ritual murmuring, it was a call to intentionality. A note to self: be wary of the power you wield. A reminder: be thankful for our portion. I’d like to enter all my contexts the way Nehunia enters the Beit Midrash.

Learning, Service and Reciprocal Kindness

The last two words of Nehunia’s prayer deserve an extra focus. He gives thanks, acknowledgement – a noble and universal sentiment – but not for his destiny, or calling. Rather, for his portion. As he leaves, he demarcates an area which is “his portion”. The language is interesting: “portion” acknowledges that what he has is part of something larger than himself, that he is simply a part, a portion, of a grander scheme. Yet on the other hand, it is undoubtedly his. “My portion”. May my portion be among those that are thankful for their portion. merely my portion, yet it is mine nontheless. Even if I never get to see the whole.

This past month I’ve been lucky to experience many such moments of thanksgiving; of seeing that portion that we at the Bronfman Fellowships have received in the world. They are the outcome of the hard work of our amazing team; of the trust, thirst and care that you - our community - invest in it, and of the fruition of Edgar's vision which Becky and I have been lucky to call our portion. And it feels both entirely new and as old as the most cliched Mishna in our tradition. Our portion stands on three things.

When eighty busy Israeli Bronfmanim in their twenties and thirties take two days out of their lives to re-immerse in deep face to face conversations, or when fifty college students cram into a room at ten o’clock on a Friday night because of a thirst to engage in a kind of study too rare on their campuses – our portion is one of true learning, Torah Lishma.

When ten friends drive three hours in the desert to console a Bronfman alum they hadn’t seen in years as she buries her estranged father surrounded by strangers – our portion is one of Gemillut Hasadim, reciprocal kindness and support.

When Israeli and North American alumni board members come together across time zones and language barriers to discuss with seriousness and enthusiasm how to allocate money that you entrusted in their hands, and to discuss whether to support projects in communities distant from them geographically and ideologically, yet that they care about deeply, our portion is one of Avodah, service and social responsibility.

As I exit this month of Bronfman busyness, I pray that these moments illuminate something on your end as they have in mine. In a world of many mishaps, I give thanks for a community that helps me regain faith in learning, service and communal support. As clichéd as that sounds, sometimes faith in clichés is what the world needs more of.

Happy Thanksgiving

Mishael

רַבִּי נְחוּנְיָא בֶּן הַקָּנֶה הָיָה מִתְפַּלֵּל בִּכְנִיסָתוֹ לְבֵית הַמִּדְרָשׁ, וּבִיצִיאָתוֹ תְּפִלָּה קְצָרָה.

אָמְרוּ לוֹ: מַה מָקוֹם לִתְפִלָּה זוֹ?

אָמַר לָהֶם:בִּכְנִיסָתִי - אֲנִי מִתְפַּלֵּל שֶׁלֹּא תְּאַרַע תַּקָּלָה עַל יָדִי. וּבִיצִיאָתִי - אֲנִי נוֹתֵן הוֹדָאָה עַל חֶלְקִי.

Being Abraham’s Child in a time of Human Darkness

2015-10-23T04:19:00.003-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Lech Lecha 2015

“Suddenly, from Ur Kasdim / the Father of Multitudes

Shined forth like a star / to illuminate the darkness.

You deferred Your anger / When you surveyed his deeds."

(Poem for Yom Kippur Avodah service, 7^th Century)

As the children of Abraham continue to find themselves killing eachother this week, from his birth place in Ur Kasdim, through his chosen home Beer Sheva and all the way to his final rest place in Hevron; as droves of his children are forced leave their homeland, making their way to Europe in tents and encountering his other children in their steady homes; I’m asking myself what it means to be a child of Abraham in our generation.

Meir Pichadze, Georgia-Israel

Many Abrahams

Tell me who your Abraham is and I’ll tell you what kind of Jew you are. Or Christian, or Muslim…

Is your Abraham the knight of faith, who binds rationality and morality on the altar of God’s love? Is your Abraham (and Sarah!) the generous host of a tent open to all four corners of the world, or the aged traveler who has taken upon himself to wash the feet of all weary travelers? Perhaps your Abraham is Maimonides’ Socratic philosopher, seeking the truth until he finds the One God? Or is he the moral prophetic voice who was chosen in order to “teach his children… paths of justice and compassion”? Is your Abraham the blinded visionary, manipulated by competing loves to wives, God and children? Or is Abraham the meticulous Halakhic man, who intuited Jewish law long before the Torah was given at Sinai?

Like Alexander the Great’s empire, Abraham’s legacy is too great to be inherited by any one person or position. It is forever divvied up into competing lands. God’s name for him has proven true: Abraham is not just Av-Ram (Great Father), but Av-RaHam - אב המון גויים – the father of a multitude of nations. Indeed, in his personality and lore he himself is multitudes. The gift of the Hebrew vowel, ה"א, in his name is the gift of multitudity (new word?). Perhaps we all are multitudes, we simply haven’t been given as many tests (opportunities) as Grandpe Abe to allow our multitudes to shine.

In Me’a Shearim one can buy children’s books about Abraham according to your Ultra Orthodox sect. In one Abraham is dressed as a Lithuanian yeshiva student, in another he dons the garb of a devout Hassid. In the PJ Library version he looks somewhat suburban (somewhat less popular in Me’a Shearim). One can scoff at the anachronisms of Abraham’s portrayal, but I believe being Jewish means telling about myself a story that begins with Abraham, and that portrays my life values and dilemmas as illuminated by Abraham and Sarah’s lives (and, like real family, without covering their blemishes either). Retelling our parent’s stories as a way of uncovering our own.

The great thing about Abraham’s story is, it has no clear beginning. No one knows what caused God to appear to him one day and command: Lech Lecha, “go forth”, or “go to yourself” as the Zohar reads literally. Is this proof that God’s grace is random, falling on a person without prior warning, as Paul described it. Or is there a backstory that the Torah leaves out, leaving us to imagine, retell, fabricate – and through the work of midrash to weave ourselves into the fabric of Torah.

Human Darkness

Thank God, the Torah does not begin with Abraham. Our story begins with the birth of the world, and of humanity, and while this week we begin zooming in to the narrow story of Abraham’s family, a Jewish posture in the world must always be rooted in the larger human story. The sad news is the early chapters of Genesis reveal humanity in our bleakest vulnerability and violence.

In this reading, I’ll be following a 7^th century Hebrew poem, called “You Established,” אתה כוננת. The poem, which is included at the bottom, is repeated today in the Sephardic Avodah service for Yom Kippur.

You established the world
from the beginningYou founded the earth
and formed creatures. […]But they broke the yoke
and said to God “Go Away!”Then You took away your hand
and they withered instantly like grass.

From Adam to Cain, from Nimrod to Noah’s generation, humanity breaks away from God and his word, breaking the yoke and yelling: “Go away!” I used to read this as a moralistic tale telling me that I as a Son of Adam am weak and insubordinate – and must therefore bend my will to my teacher and whatever book of religious law she was making me feel guilty for not keeping. But hidden among the lines of the narrative is an opposite reading of the story. Yes, human beings ARE prone to violence and insubordination, but God was complicit here. When they yelled “Go away!, he indeed left them. “You took away your hand / and they withered instantly like grass.”

Human and Soil: Adam and Adamah

For ten generation, from Adam to Noah, the soil is damned and infertile. Apres deluge God declares: “I will never curse the soil again on humankind’s account; since what the human heart forms is evil from its youth.” The soil is freed from paying the price for Humanity’s mistakes (until the industrial revolution, I guess) and Noah becomes the “first man of the soil”. Grapes grow for the first time since Eden, but God does not return to humanity. Like a parent livid with his children’s behavior, God decides to stop tearing the house down on their account, but never calls them again. No one really expects human beings to behave otherwise, so what good would consequences have. “Go away, you say? Fine!” And so for another ten generation, a god-less world.

It could have remained that way forever, until –

Suddenly, from Ur Kasdim / The Father of multitudes

Shined forth like a star/ to illuminate in the darkness.

יָחִיד אַב הֲמוֹן פִּתְאֹם כְּכוֹכָב

זָרַח מֵאוּר כַּשְׂדִּים לְהָאִיר בַּחשֶׁךְ

כַּעַסְךָ הֵפַרְתָּ בְּשׁוּרְךָ פָעֳלוֹ

What did Avraham do that was so sudden, so illuminating? How was this star born, and what light did he bring forth? The Torah never tells us. We’re left to our own midrashic devices – smashing idols, philosophizing in the marketplace, generously hosting, fervently believing, building a powerful couplehood with Sarah despite barrenness, or perhaps going on the journey even before being called to do so.

Whatever it is, it got God to pay attention. You deferred Your anger when you surveyed his deeds. We don’t know if Avraham was even trying to get God’s attention. I’d like to believe he was just doing it in order to illuminate the darkness he found himself living in. That’s how starts usually begin to glow. Whatever it was, it soothed God’s anger. It allowed God to believe in human beings once again.

Here then is a vision for Abrahamic religion: shaping people and communities that inspire God to believe in human beings anew. How far we are from this vision. Being a child of Avraham is acting in a way that gets God to believe in us again. Being Avraham’s child is acting in a way that gets human beings to believe in themselves again. Not waiting for God’s cues, or anyone else’s for that matter. Simply taking action and alleviating the darkness, the dryness. From Ur Kasdim to Beer Sheva, from Jerusalem to California.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mishael

You established the world from the beginning

You founded the earth and formed creatures.

When you surveyed the world of chaos and confusion

You banished gloom and put light in its place.

You formed from the earth a lump of soil in Your image

And commanded him concerning the tree of life

He forsook Your word and he was forsaked from Eden

But You did not destroy him for the sake of the work of Your hands.

You increased his fruit and blessed his seed

And let them flourish in Your goodness and live in quiet.

But they broke the yoke

and said to God “Go Away!”

Then You took away your hand

and they withered instantly like grass.

You remembered your covenant

With the one who was blamesless in his generation (Noah)

And as a reward You made him a remanant forever.

You made a permanent covenant of the rainbow for his sake

And in Your love for his fragrant offering You blessed his children.

Suddenly, from Ur Kasdim

The Father of multitudes

Shined forth like a star

to illuminate in the darkness.

You deferred Your anger

When you surveyed his deeds.

And when he was old

You looked into his heart.

(אתה כוננת, “You Established” Poem for Yom Kippur Avodah service, 7th Century, translation Swartz and Yahalom edition, pg 70)

אַתָּה כּוֹנַנְתָּ עוֹלָם מֵרֹאשׁ

יָסַדְתָּ תֵבֵל וּבְרִיּוֹת יָצַרְתָּ

בְּשׁוּרְךָ עוֹלָם תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ

גֵּרַשְׁתָּ אֹפֶל וְהִצַּבְתָּ נֹגַהּ

גֹּלֶם תַּבְנִיתְךָ מִן הָאֲדָמָה יָצַרְתָּ

וְעַל עֵץ הַדַּעַת אוֹתוֹ הִפְקַדְתָּ

דְּבָרְךָ זָנַח וְנִזְנַח מֵעֵדֶן

וְלֹא כִלִּיתוֹ לְמַעַן יְגִיעַ כַּפֶּיךָ

הִגְדַּלְתָּ פִרְיוֹ וּבֵרַכְתָּ זַרְעוֹ

וְהִפְרִיתָם בְּטוּבְךָ וְהוֹשַׁבְתָּם שָׁקֶט

וַיִּפְרְקוּ עֹל וַיֹּאמְרוּ לָאֵל סוּר מִמֶּנּוּ

וַהֲסִירוֹתָ יָד כְּרֶגַע כֶּחָצִיר אֻמְלָלוּ

זָכַרְתָּ בְרִית לְתָמִים בְּדוֹרוֹ

וּבִזְכוּתוֹ שַׂמְתָּ לְעוֹלָם שְׁאֵרִית

חֹק בְּרִית קֶשֶׁת לְמַעֲנוֹ כָרַתָּ

וּבְאַהֲבַת נִיחֹחוֹ בָּנָיו בֵּרַכְתָּ

טָעוּ בְעָשְׁרָם וּבָנוּ מִגְדָּל

וַיֹּאמְרוּ נַבְקִיעַ הָרָקִיעַ לְהִלָּחֶם בּוֹ

יָחִיד אַב הֲמוֹן פִּתְאֹם כְּכוֹכָב

זָרַח מֵאוּר כַּשְׂדִּים לְהָאִיר בַּחשֶׁךְ

כַּעַסְךָ הֵפַרְתָּ בְּשׁוּרְךָ פָעֳלוֹ

וּלְעֵת שֵׂבָתוֹ לְבָבוֹ חָקַרְתָּ

Returning to our Senses #3: Ears

2015-09-21T01:00:00.001-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Shabbat Teshuva 2015

This High Holiday season I am exploring texts and inspirations about our sensory organs, as a path to approaching Teshuva. Returning to our senses. This piece reflects on the ears. (Check out previous installments: the Eyes and the Mouth).

You have heard my voice:

Do not hide your ear at my breathing,

at my cry. (Lamentations 3:56)

קוֹלִי שָׁמָעְתָּ, אַל תַּעְלֵם אָזְנְךָ לְרַוְחָתִי לְשַׁוְעָתִי (איכה ג:נו)

Yom Kippur is the time of the ear. On the day in which we refrain from putting food in our mouths, keep our hands to ourselves, and direct our eyes inwards - our ears perk up, ready to do some work.

***

The first day of Rabbinical School. My teacher in pastoral counseling (and life) Dr. Michelle Friedman tells us sharply: “You might think you’re here to learn what to say to people, to acquire the Halakhic answers, the teshuvot. In fact you are here to learn how to listen. When people turn to Rabbis, they are rarely actually seeking advice. They are seeking to be heard. You are here to learn how to listen to people. You’re here to grow a pair of ears.”

Ears are quite awkward. Protruding, strangely shaped, and – unlike the ears and mouth – lacking a proper cover. What is the spiritual work of the ear?

The school of Rabbi Ishmael taught: Why is the ear made of stiff parts, but the ear lobe soft? So that if a person hears something improper, they can fold the lobe into the ear. (Talmud Bavli Ketubot 5a)

Before a trend of folded-lobes becomes a big thing, it is worth giving some depth to this idea. At first glance it is yet another knee jerk moralism, blocking out what the world has to offer in an act of self-ghettoization. But for Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, in his 16^th century ethical-anatomical treatise “The Palm of Devorah”, it is about learning to hear the universe the way God does:

One ears should be ever open to hear only the good. Evil speech and ugly rumor should be barred from entering the ears, just as the Divine ears do not allow any cry of criticism or evil talk enter them. So too, a person should listen for the good and useful things; and anything which is angering - should receive no hearing whatsoever. (Tomer Devorah Chapter Two)

Yet filtering out the bad and hearing only the good is just the first level. Psychologists and Philosophers of Language have taught us just how hard it is to truly hear the other, to hear beyond hearing. This begins with differentiating between what I am hearing and what is being said to me. Our auditory input is experienced through veils of our own projections and interpretations, anxieties and concerns. Can we ever hear beyond all the veils?

Hearing beyond hearing begins with being attuned to oneself – so that all of my projections and anxieties can be set aside, in a pile of their own. Next, we seek to listen beyond the speaker’s own projections towards us, their reactions and messiness, to that which is at the heart of the matter. I am continuously jealous of a good therapist’s ability to say: “Here is what they are actually asking when they are saying this…”

Hearing beyond hearing should not be misconstrued as a dismissal of the express content of the statement. I still vividly remember my frustration when – as a child – I would have a tantrum and my parents would say: “You’re not angry about X, you’re simply tired”. If I wasn’t angry until then, I became angry once that was said (I now clumsily make the same mistakes with my children…).

Similar to the way every musical frequency creates multiple overtones without negating the fundamental tone, thus refining our hearing involves being able to hear and differentiate the various fundamental tones, overtones and harmonies created within what is being said – and registering each of them independently.

Hearing the Overtones

The ability to hear the overtones of all people is how Rabbi David Cohen, the Nazirite Rabbi, understands Avraham. He interprets Avraham’s name – Av Hamon Goyim – the father of many (hamon) nations, to derive from the Hebrew word המייה (hem-ya) which means song or harmony. Thus Avraham: Father who understands the harmonies of people. Abraham could hear both the individual tones and the overtones, truly hearing the yearning of the heart of each person and nation. And it is in the overtones where people who seem to be singing different notes are actually aligned and harmonious. To be Jewish, a child of Abraham, is to hear the music surging forth from every human being.

R. David Cohen, The "Nazirite"

For Cohen, Judaism is all about ears. His masterpiece, titled “The Hebraic Auditory Logic”, claims that while Western logic is based on the primacy of the visual, that which can be seen and contemplated, Judaism is all about the auditory. Just as the English language continues to encode the assumption that eyesight is the path to truth (“Seeing is believing”, “seeing the light”, “world-view”, “I see” refers to comprehension, etc.) thus Judaism espouses an “auditory logic”: truth is achieved through the ears. Hear O Israel is much more central than See. God cannot be seen, but is achieved by hearing. To hear God means to obey him, thus the centrality of Halakha and actions in Judaism. According to Talmudic Damages, if one deafens the other, they must pays damages as if they took their entire life away. Functional ears are what make life worth living.

Between Hearing and Obeying

I am in synagogue, the Yom Kippur prior to my Bar Mitzva, reciting the viduy confessional of sins. Apparently beating my chest quite enthusiastically in the process. A compassionate face turns around and says: “You know, beating on the chest is not a form of self-punishment. We are simply knocking on our hearts. Hopefully it will hear the knocking and open up.”

At first glance, Yom Kippur is a day in which we account for whether we heard God in the past year. We confess – sounding to our ears all the ways in which we failed to fulfill Gods word, lishmoa be’kolo, to follow his voice. But keeping Yom Kippur as a test of obedience is missing the point. To obey refers to a power dynamic, while to hear is first and foremost a relational category. Perhaps we didn’t always obey – but did we hear God nevertheless?

Not that hearing is any easier. Obeying can be done from a distance. Hearing God assumes proximity. It is a much scarier affair. Adam and Eve, having failed to fulfill God’s commandments, reflect this first:

“God called to the human and said to him: Where are you? Ayekah?

He answered: I heard the sound of You in the garden,

and I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself” (Genesis 3:9-10)

According to the Midrash, God’s voice continues to call out, asking humans “Where are you? Ayekah?” Avraham was not the first human that God spoke to. He was simply the first who heard… and didn’t run the other way. He heard… and fulfilled.

During Mussaf of Yom Kippur, we retell the story of the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies. At the experiential center of the retelling is the moment in which the High Priest, as part of his confession on our behalf, recites God’s explicit name, the shem hameforash. When the Israelites in the Temple, and respectively when we in synagogue, hear this recitation, we fall to the ground. The ripples of hearing God’s explicitness in this world is such a visceral auditory experience that it makes us become embryonic once more. We turn hearing from a passive experience into a full body dance, repeated multiple times.

Yom Kippur is the day in which we reflect on our hearing God in the world. The externalities of it refer to obeying, but the internality relates to the ability to hear God’s call to humanity. We knock on our heart and ask: Where are you?

To hear the question - and not hide.

God, Hear Us

Neillah at the small and crazy Yom Kippur minyan I pray at in Jerusalem. The fast is all but over, most other synagogues breaking out the refreshments, the supernal gate about to be locked. But we’re still singing: we’ve got our foot in the door, preventing the gate from closing. We cry out: “Hear our voice, God. Don’t let your ear ignore our call, our cry. We ain’t leaving until you do…”

Like good Jews, we answer God’s Yom Kippur question with a question. Time and again on this day, we open the ark and ask: Can you hear us? We demand: שמע קולנו, Hear our voice! We cajole: You have heard my voice: Do not hide your ear!

The ark becomes God’s ear, and we rise to meet it and to call out: Hear our voice. Make our lives matter. Don’t ignore us.

At the end of the day, the sharp sound of the Shofar clears our ears - and God’s. In the newborn year, may our ears be open – to God’s question, to our own, to others.

Gmar Hatima Tova,

Mishael

Returning to our Senses #2: Mouth

2015-09-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Rosh haShana 2015

Exploring texts and inspirations about our sensory organs, as a path to approaching Teshuva. This second piece reflects on the mouth. (Check out #1: Eyes).

Death and Life are in the hand of the tongue,

and those who love it will eat its fruit. (Proverbs 18:21)

מָוֶת וְחַיִּים בְּיַד לָשׁוֹן, וְאֹהֲבֶיהָ יֹאכַל פִּרְיה. (משלי יח:כא)

Our mouth is a most curious anatomical beast: a vacancy, a receptacle holding lips, teeth and tongue. It is rare among our organs in being both an input and an output mechanism. Eat-speak-interiorize, as Derrida puts it. It is the gatekeeper of the body, the primary organ through which foreign objects are allowed to become part of our selves. From the baby’s initial cry, to its subsequent suck, mammals experience the world through mouth before anything else. As the locus of eat-speak-interiorize Psychoanalysts saw the mouth as metonymic of the ego. As Jean Luc Nancy put it:

There is – there once was – a mouth that opens and says: I write, I mask myself, I fabulate, I am my body, I am a man – always inextricably uttering: I take refuge in myself or I distinguish myself. The ego says: neither the presence nor the absence; neither the structure, not the feign of the subject – but the utterly singular experience of the mouth that opens and closes [itself] at once. A tongue moves there. (Jean Luc Nancy, Ego Sum)

The Talmud placed enormous on the mouth, as one would expect from the creators of the “Torah on the Mouth”, תורה שבעל פה. Often the tongue is described as an uncontrollable fiend, a loose and ferocious dagger which needs to be encased behind tooth and lip, lock and key:

R. Yohanan said: The Blessed Holy One said to the Tongue:

All members of the human body are tense, while you lie loosely;

all members of the human body are outside, while you are guarded inside;

not only that, but I surrounded you with two walls, one of bone and one of flesh; thus it says:

“What shall I do to you, and what more can I give you, O deceitful tongue?”

(Talmud Arakhin 16 quoting Psalms 120:3)

While the midrash focuses on speech, this could easily be said of eating too. The eating is by definition insatiable – for while the stomach that can be satiated, but never the mouth or tongue. The mouth is the locus of consumption, and on its own knows no limits. Indeed, as we’ve lost the effort that procuring and creating food once required - and with it all but lost the rituals of mindful eating – the mouth can easily be framed as the symbol of our consumerist selves.

But the claim that the body, mouth or tongue is inherently the enemy of the good doesn’t hold in most corners of Jewish tradition. Rather, the mouth is the primary site through which the self will show whether it chooses good or bad, life or death. As Rava puts it: When we seeks life – we do it with our mouth. When we seek death – we do it with our mouth. (Talmud Arakhin 15b).

Fittingly, Rosh haShana offers us many rituals of the mouth. Through eating, speech and sound, the mouth is placed at the center, inviting us to return to this most primal of organs, where our selfhood, indeed our very humanity, are epitomized.

Simanim: Rituals of Mindful Eating

In the documentary film “Unknown White Male,” the protagonist loses his memory while on the subway, waking up in Coney Island without any recollections. In one scene two friends take him out to dinner, to eat all the things he never knew existed. Cheesecake, strawberries, sushi and steak ensue. Mango – who knew! I’ve always been jealous of the concept of being reintroduced to taste in such a manner.

Sitting around the Rosh haShana table, we place symbolic foods ripe with blessings for the new year. In a deliberate process, we taste the foods and bless the new year in their symbolism. Traditionally the site of numerous Hebrew puns, our family tradition has become to have guests bring an object – edible or not – with which to bless the new year. But beyond punning carrots and honey coated toddlers, there is an opportunity here to allow the first eating of the new year to help us reset the way we will eat this year. Hitting the reset button on ourselves begins with hitting the reset button on our mouths. Returning to the primacy of taste – sweet, sour, bitter – we make the tongue alive again, as if it was created anew today. Hopefully our own renewal will ensure.

Creation: Bridging the Chasm Between Speech and Action

Before creation, there was speech. God, in the Biblical story created the world through speech: “And God said let there be Light – and there was light”. This aspect was intensified by the Rabbis, becoming a key characteristic of God’s praiseworthiness: “Blessed is he who said – and the world was created” ברוך שאמר – והיה העולם. For the Rabbis the world was described as constructed of strings of words and letters, God’s speech projected eternally out into the cosmos, keeping all of creation in place.

If God is God in the aspect that his speech is his action, and his action is speech, what does that say about us? While we humans are differentiated from the animal kingdom thanks to our ability to speak, the fact that we are not yet Gods emanates from the all-too-human chasm between our speech and our action.

As we pour mountains of words about the new year we hope to enter, we are invited to ponder the gap between our statements and our actions. Seeking to walk in God’s path includes trying to better bridge the chasm between our speech and our actions. As creation by speech becomes renewed this Rosh haShana, we can pray to become renewed ourselves in the way our speech and our action correlate.

Shofar: Returning to the first voice

Before speech, there was voice. Speech is defined, but voice, like the cry of the newborn baby, says it all without reducing it to specifics. Returning to who we really are means trying to reach back to a place before words and vowels. Rosh haShana is called Yom Truah, יום תרועה, the day of Wail – usually understood as the wail of the Shofar. But the Torah also strangely calls it a day of Zichron Truah, זכרון תרועה – the memory of a wail. What is the wail stored in our memory above all? Perhaps it is that moment in which we were all mouth, emitting the vulnerable wail, full of potential. Zichron Truah, the moment in which we became an ego, yet also so dependent on mother (parent!) and world that we were truly “part of” more than autonomous egos. One hundred voices, one hundred wails. Will it be enough to bring us back to that initial moment, full of promise? Will it be enough for us to see others from that perspective, as creations who were once just mouth, a vulnerable wail? Will it be enough to remind the Creator that at our core, we are but vulnerable wailers, mouths calling out to reconnect to the source of good? As we lift the shofar to our mouths, lets pray it is.

Shana Tova,

Mishael

2015-09-04T04:56:00.002-07:00

Returning to our Senses #1: Eyes

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Elul 2015

Three organs are under a person’s control:

the mouth, the hands, and the feet.

Three are not under one’s control:

the eyes, the ears, and the nose.

Midrash Tanhuma, Toledot #12

This summer I studied with the 2015 Bronfman Fellows about various commandments relating to our senses and organs. Our focus was commandments of the Mouth: eating, gossiping, rebuking and praying. But the text that seemed to spark the most amount of thought and debate was the quote above from the Tanhuma. Are our organs under our control? Do we want them to be? Inspired by these questions, I’ve been using Elul, with its invitation for reflection and returning, to try to “come to my senses”. Focusing on how I control my sensory organs - and how they control me. Between now and Yom Kippur I hope to share texts and inspirations on those organs that are under our control (according to the Midrash), and those that aren’t.

This first piece reflects on the eyes.

***

גַּל עֵינַי וְאַבִּיטָה (תהלים קיט:יח)

Uncover my eyes / So I can see (Psalms 119:18)

THIS has been a troubling week for our eyes. A human crises of global magnitude, brewing for years, crashed upon our eyes with one poignant, painful image. What the eyes have taken in cannot be erased. Cover my eyes, the online world begged. In our usual human weakness, it was not until the eyes SAW that we were shocked into realization, and empathy set in. Will action follow? "Uncover my eyes / so I can see."

Our eyes can be a wonderful moral actor, allowing us to go beyond ourselves and see the Other. And yet they are also our biggest adulterers. Our eyes are always somewhere other than where we are. Always hungry, on the prowl, never satiated. Beyond our control, says the Tanhuma and gives up. Yet a deeper look teaches that it is not simply about what we see, but what kind of gaze we embrace; what kind of eyes we develop.

Slit Eyed Looks

“Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai said to his students:

Go out and see – what is the key to the straight path a person should choose?

Rabbi Eliezer said: A good eye.” (Mishna Avot 2:9)

“We have sinned before you in narrow eyes

We have sinned before you in conspiratorial eyes,

We have sinned before you in proud eyes,

We have sinned before you in baseless hatred.” (From the Yom Kippur confessional)

עַל חֵטְא שֶׁחָטָאנוּ לְפָנֶיךָ בצרות עין... בשקור עין... בעיניים רמות... בשנאת חינם

IN the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides writes that 90% of all evil in the world is caused by man (the rest by the laws of nature, by the way, not by God, God forbid). The reason for human evil – is that Man experiences the worlds resources as a zero sum game. If you have something, it means there is less for me. The crucial resources are not just land, money, belongings, but eventually – love. Is there enough love for me too? That essential question of sibling rivalry, epitomized by what Cain felt that morning when God paid attention to Abel’s offering, and not to his. This town isn’t big enough for the both of us.

“Narrow eyes” refer to employing a zero sum game view of the world. “What you have – I want. The fact that you have it and I don’t makes it impossible for me to be happy for you”. I cannot look at the Other without immediately comparing to my own state. Narrow eyes engender conspiratorial eyes: “How can I get that for myself”. Both reflect an inability to see the Other on their own terms. The narrow glance – unwilling to be satiated with my own share – is the root of our betrayal of the Other, and of ourselves. Faith, says Rav Shneur Zalman of Liady, is about believing that “there is enough”, that the world is not a zero sum game. Turning from a materialistic world view to a spiritual one. What Rabbi Eliezer called: “Having a good eye”. Narrow eyes at their core are heretical – they claim that God does not have enough love in the world for everyone.

Eye to Eye, Face to Face

It is striking that the Yom Kippur confession focuses not on the actual transgressions against others, but on the distortions of our consciousness which led (or even just potentially might lead) to harming others. Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) connects narrow eyes to the next sin on the list: baseless hatred.

“The distortions of Narrow eyes and Conspiratorial Eyes are intertwined and cause the third and gravest sin: Baseless Hatred. Hasidism interpreted Baseless Hatred (Sinat Hinam) as hatred that emanates from the basic existence of the Other. The very fact that he exists irritates and burdens me. He burdens me because his very gaze causes me to lose my freedom, and from there a deep hatred rages forth, seeking to eliminate them.

This sin is the source of shame – we can no longer look eachother in the eye, face to face. Standing “face to face” represents a sphere in which we can treat eachother favorably, celebrate in the others existence. Kabbalah describes the mythical process of the High Holidays as generating a return of the divine faces back to being “face to face “, bringing back the simplicity, the warmth and the trust to relationships.” (“At the Door”, Rav Shagar Sermons for the High Holidays, 2001).

Breaking the Gaze

Within the writings of the great Teshuva movement called Gender studies, Laura Mulvey has taught us to see the male gaze employed all around us. Her call for Teshuva focused on the film industry, the way the camera lingers over the curves of a woman's body, putting the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. She’s allowed us to see how from “high” western art to street billboards to HBO, we’re constantly invited to internalize a sexualized gaze. In my dreams I envision a coming together of feminist theory about the male gaze and halakhic moralisms about keeping of the eyes (shmirat ha-eiynayim). In one respect this is the most patriarchal of Halakhot: don’t gaze at women says the Shulkhan Arukh (Even haEzer 21). Any flight between New York and Tel Aviv invites an encounter with an Ultra Orthodox man lowering his eyes when confronted with a women (then asked to be moved to a different seat on the plane…). The most jarring move of modern “modesty” discourse across religions has been the externalizing of the male gaze: instead of men being required to control their gaze, women are required to dress in a way that keeps the eyes of those men for them. The internal moral move of changing our gaze has become an external – and immoral - demand from others.

Can we get Shmirat haeiynayim to “do Teshuva”, returning to its source as a conjunction against applying the sexualized male gaze towards other people? One good place to start is with the Shulkhan Arukh’s commentator the Magen Avraham, who explains that the prohibition on looking at women is not about mere looking but about embracing a certain kind of gaze. Just as we are prohibited from “feeding our eyes” off the Priests when they offer Birkat Kohanim (the Priestly Benediction), he explains, so we must not “feed our eyes” off of people in a sexualized look. Helping our world wean itself off of the sexualized male gaze – and the fundamentalist response to it – could be a wonderful joint agenda of Feminists and Halakhists.

Eyes of Beauty, Eyes of Praise

So how should we look? Where does having a good eye start? Our technological age allows our eyes to see anything and everything in the world. We have seen it all before, on some google search somewhere. This spring I travelled to Arizona, encountering with my eyes some of the most beautiful views I had ever seen. Yet at first the redness of the rocks did not influence me – I had already seen it on my beautiful HD computer screen. The 2D HD image in my memory prevented me from truly seeing, from making room for a new, full gaze, of the beauty I had around me. My eyes were weary, cynical and unappreciative. It took several hours, days, until I could truly see what was right in front of me. And if it is so for radical beauty – how much more so for mundanity.

"I want to always have eyes to see / the beauty of the world and to praise” wrote Natan Zach, begging to "never become blind to the beauty of the world". As Rosh haShana celebrates the birth of the world, it’s a time to turn weary eyes into fresh eyes, to appreciate the beauty of creation, to embrace eyes that seek it out. Taking Rosh haShana as an eye-cleanse – from screens, from cynicism, for mundanity – to eyes that see so much beauty it makes us burst into praise. When our eyes dwell on beauty, forcing us to appreciate the inherent beauty found in the mundane – we can see the world, others and ourselves anew, and believe the world is not a zero sum game after all.

Moonshine Shavuot: In Search of Obligation: Robert Cover and the Talmud

2015-05-21T04:10:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Moonshine Sivan | Shavuot 2015

If you believe in mythical time, on this coming Saturday night the Torah will be given to you. Again. Shavuot doesn’t celebrate a historical event from the past, but rather a real occurrence that is about to take place. You don’t want to be caught off guard.

So we stay up all night and study Torah. Or at least we make a point, on this coming Saturday night, to study something. With a hevruta, teacher, child - or on our own. Mythical or not, we thus signify to ourselves that we are part of this thing called Torah, given to us anew each year.

This month’s Moonshine, dedicated to Shavuot and the month of Sivan, offers a Talmudic discussion and an article by a legal theorist, on the themes of Choice and Obligations, Rights and Commandments. Like all good learning, it’s psychology, political science, history and current events all rolled into one, if you take it there...

In case you haven’t yet made other arrangements, this might make a fine offering for Shavuot night learning.

***

What was given on Shavuot? What does “receiving Torah” mean?

In one reading, it is about mitzvah, being commanded. On Shavuot we celebrate being part of a path and destiny which is larger than ourselves. We bow our head to the authority on the mountain which has chosen us as their tool. We shall obey and we shall hear.

In another reading, though, on Shavuot we received Text. With Divine Text came Human Interpretation: questioning, understanding, misinterpretation, debate. Text invites our full autonomous self to engage, study, challenge – as a way of seeking (divine) truth. The authority of the text does not undermine my own authority, in fact it recognizes my autonomy, requires it, albeit challenging me to redeem myself from the vain and mundane. At its core lies a moment of personal choice.

These two readings play out – famously – in the Talmud (Shabbat 88), a text worth returning to each Sahvuot. The first opinion is that of Rav Avdimi. Mount Sinai hovering over my head, I have no choice. Accept the Torah – or die. Generations later, I might never have stood at Sinai, but that is the whole point: it isn’t about me. I am obligated.

Rava is having none of it though. “If that is the case,” says Rava, “then the binding nature of the Torah is like that of a contract signed under coercion – unenforcable.” Since God gave us text and law to study, we have developed based on it a self understaning of the importance of choice in the legal process. The Torah is a contract like any other – and must abide by the (human) rules set for it.

(There’s a third opinion, but that would take us to a whole other holiday. Study the full text here).

This classic discussion is played out in the essay “Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order” by the late and great Yale legal theorist Robert Cover. What is described about as an internal Talmudic debate, Cover takes as the basic difference between the “fundamental word” of the Western political tradition - “rights” - to that of Jewish law - “obligation”. Cover begins by playing out the two fundamental words of each tradition and the myths that fuel them:

Social movements in the United States organize around rights. When there is some urgently felt need to change the law or keep it in one way or another a “Rights” movement is started. The story behind the term “rights” is the story of social contract… making the collective arrangement the product of individual choice and thus secondary to the individual.
In Jewish law an entitlement without an obligation is a sad, almost pathetic thing… A child does not become emancipated or “free” when he or she reaches maturity, rather the child becomes bar or bat mitzvah – literally, one who is of the obligations” The basic word of Judaism is obligation or mitzvah. It is intrinsically bound up in the myth of Sinai, a myth of heteronomy. The experience at Sinai is not chosen.

When I first read this, I thought Cover was positing the power of Obligation as a traditionalist Jewish apologetic or as a conservative’s yearning for a lost past. Yet as he deepens the discussion, it becomes clear that he is expressing the yearning of the Liberal to obligate himself and his society in distributive justice:

A jurisprudence of rights naturally solves certain problems while stumbling over others. It has proved singularly weak in providing for the material guarantees of life and dignity flowing from the community to the individual. While we make talk of a right to medical care, the right to subsistence, the right to an education, we are constantly met by the realization that such rhetorical tropes are empty in a way that the right to freedom of expression or the right to due process are not… The “right to an education” is not even an intelligible principle unless we know to whom it is addressed. Taken alone it only speaks to a need. A distributional premise is missing which can only be supplied through a principle of “obligation”.
I believe that every child has a right to decent education and shelter, food and medical care; I believe that refugees from political oppression have a right to a haven in a free land… I do believe and affirm the social contract that grounds those rights. But more to the point I also believe that I am commanded – that we are obligated – to realize those rights.

Cover invites us to seek out this Shavuot how we can reclaim commandedness and obligation in service of the projects we believe in. The language of rights is powerful, but insufficient (as is the language of Obligation). It is an American question, and a Jewish one. No one likes being commanded, and yet we seek to be obligated to the things that matter most. Otherwise we'll never make it from the foot of the mountain to the promised land.

***

Dedicated to a theme in the Jewish month, Moonshine is a combination Dvar Torah and springboard for learning in the coming 30 days. Moonshine - in honor of the Hebrew month’s commitment to the lunar cycle, with a hint of distilling fine spirits off the beaten track and - perhaps - intoxication.

Making it Count: Studying Sefirat Omer, Judaism’s Best Game

2015-04-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Moonshine Iyar 2015 | Text and the City

“From the morrow of the Sabbath you’ll count fifty days,

And offer up a new offering to the Lord” (Leviticus 23)

Few things are sillier in Judaism than Sefirat haOmer, “counting the days” from Passover until Shavuot. This innocuous spring ritual consists of ritually reciting a number each night, then repeating the way that number divides into seven. Today is the Twelfth day, which is one week and five days to the Omer. Those who can count the correct number each night through forty nine, win a hefty portion of cheesecake on the fiftieth night. Undoubtedly, if it wasn’t for the brilliant game layerof Sefirat haOmer (forget one night, and you’re out…), this ritual would never have survived three thousand years of Jewish upheaval. Yet dig into the silliest rituals and you’ll find microcosms of the biggest questions.

This month’s Moonshine is an invitation to dig into Sefirat haOmer through three lenses: read the original verses in Leviticus, study Nehama Leibowitz’ exploration into the meaning of the original Omer ritual through traditional commentaries, or explore the Hasidic-psychological reinterpretation of the Omer in a delightful essay from the “Netivot Shalom” Rebbe of Slonim. You can even order a Sefirat haOmer spiritual workbook online. Sure, counting the Omer began a few weeks ago, but there are still five weeks left to make it count. Download one of these resources and study it before the fifty days are up.

A recap of some of these ideas and my own thoughts follows.

***

I love digging into the genealogy of Jewish rituals and uncovering their layers: the fossilized remains of ancient food, the lava-like polemics that have since frozen over, the small gems of interpretation that have crystallized amid the rocks. Studying the sources one finds that what at first seemed to be an empty shell of meaningless actions, held together by a sense of tradition, is actually a flourishing field. Feeding off the nutritious geological wonder hidden below it, it offers a fertile land for growth and rootedness today. Or something like that…

Such is the ritual of the counting of the Omer. At the bedrock level, it is an agricultural ritual of marking the grain harvest season, and counting from the very first crops to the peak of the harvest fifty days later, as described in Vayikra 23. It was a sanctification ritual of food and labor, recognizing the source of this goodness and zooming out to the larger purpose of our life’s work. In 16^th century Tsfat, R. Moshe Alshikh described it as a corrective to affluence at the time of reaping profits:

“Affluence has the most pernicious effect on a person’s character, causing them to be haughty and arrogant… This can be avoided if a person acknowledges that Divine source of wealth instead of boasting that ‘my mighty hand has gotten me this wealth’ (Deut. 8:17). With the onset of the barley harvest, which is the earliest before beholding the abundant produce in the storehouses and on the field, man must recognize that his strength is illusory, for ‘all is vanity’ (Keheleth 3:19). Thus God has commanded us to offer up the earliest product of the harvest presenting the priest one omer as a token of gratitude… only after the omer has been offered up on the altar may Israeli enjoy the new produce of the year.”

But that agricultural reality ended hundreds and hundreds of years ago – covered over by a layer of Roman war and destruction. But the keen geological eye also recognizes the remnants of a great Jewish war, a huge intellectual debate between Pharisees and Sadducees, repeating a few centuries later between Karaites and Rabbinites. The focus: the start day of the Omer, and thus the date in which Shavuot is celebrated. Is it fifty days after Passover, or fifty days after the Shabbat after Passover? How does this frozen over lava of a debate resonate today? I hear in it echoes of the question of the Enlightenment: is liberation an end in itself, or only in the sense that it lead to a greater good? Is the Passover Exodus a sufficient redemption, or does it only bear meaning in its connection to the the covenant at Sinai on Shavuot? In other words, are Independence and liberty a goal in itself (negative freedom), or do they only set the stage for the achievement of a larger vision of society (positive freedom).

Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch in 19^th century Germany claims that’s what the counting of the Omer is all about – creating a trajectory from liberation to construction, from exodus to obligation:

You have celebrated the Feast of your Liberation (Passover) and remembered before your God your independence, living in your land and eating its produce. You have therefore reached your freedom and the benefits of independence, the very goals all nations aspire to. You, however, are but on the threshold of your calling as a nation, and have started counting the days to the attainment of another goal. The Torah expresses the commandment of the Omer thus: “From the first time you put the sickle to reap the crops, you shall commence to count seven weeks” (Deut 16:9). When others cease to count, you being your counting.

Independence is amazing. It will be celebrated in Israel this week; will be reclaimed in every speech of an American presidential candidate in the coming 18 months; in the mouth of every graduating student this spring. But what is the goal of this independence? How does it tie into the achievement of a greater calling? It’s easy to agree about independence, but it’s what we do with it that matters. The counting begins now.

As one reaches the top of the Omer geological formation, a new layer appears. It is not about agricultural reality or national calling, but about personal journey. In the hands of Kabbalists and Hasidim, Counting the Omer becomes a psychological journey, an act of self-transformation, a tool of individual redemption. The grains of wheat turn into illuminations, the counting - a process of ethical and spiritual distillation. The Rebbe of Slonim articulates this best in his “Netivot Shalom”, then takes it in a surprising direction:

Counting (“sefartem” ספרתם) refers to the word sapir, meaning light, illumination. Thus “u’sefratem lachem” – ספרתם לכם – comes to mean “create for yourselves illuminations”. And these illuminations refer specifically to the elements of “on the morrow of the Sabbath”. The work of Sefirat haOmer should be specifically in the secular and concrete elements of life, those of the “morrow of the Sabbath”. Thus the seven weeks of the Omer are for finding elevation and holiness within that which is permitted, the bodily pleasures, the breadFor bread has two meanings in the Torah – actual bread, and sexual intercourse – food and sex. Distilling our relationship to these two elements is the new grain offering we are asked to offer at the end of the fifty days.

(A full translation of the Slonimer’sessay on Sefirat haOmer is attached here, in my humble translation. To explore the Omer as a journey of personal self transformation, I recommend Simon Jacobson’s delightful booklet: “A Spiritual Guide to the Counting of the Omer”)

Suddenly we are back in the world of actual grain, the Omer is about how we deal with “Bread”. Yet as the Slonimer notes, it is no longer about us as producers of grain, but as its consumers. This is where we need the work of refinement and distillation. Its not an easy process – and it requires disciplined daily work in order to be met.

Anthropologists have notes that good ritual is one which offers a very specific container yet leaves a lot of room for varied interpretation. Add onto it the game layer of the Omer, and you have the trappings of some excellent ritual. Life – at its base - is counting the time go by. Lets make that counting count.

Happy counting,

Mishael

Netivot Shalom on Sefirat haOmer | A New Grain Offering Translation

2015-04-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

Sharing an abridged and "fast and loose" translation of my favorite modern Hassidic text...

“And you shall count for yourselves from the morrow of the Sabbath, from the day of bringing the Omer sheaf, seven whole weeks, until the morrow of the seventh Sabbath you shall count fifty days – and then bring a new offering of grain to the Lord: Two loaves of bread…” (Leviticus 23:15-17)

We must understand the significance of this “new offering of grain”; and why the Torah doesn’t give a specific date for Shavuot, only naming it the fiftieth day; and why we count forty nine days when it says to count fifty. And through these questions we can understand the deeper purpose of the Counting of the Omer.

For the entire period from Passover until Shavuot is one unit, in which the Exodus out of Egypt is completed. For the entire purpose of Passover is that it is “the time of our freedom”, in other words to exit into freedom from the enslavement to Pharaoh in Egypt – meaning the enslavement to the klipa, the external shell of Egypt. But this liberation is not completed until Shavuot, for “you do not have anyone as free as one who busies themselves with Torah”, and as it says “When you liberate the people out of Egypt – you shall come and worship me on this mountain” – meaning that the liberation from Egypt is only complete when you have worshipped Me at Sinai. For the Exodus and the Receiving of the Torah are one thing and stand on a continuum. For until a Jew goes through the period of cleansing and arrives so at the Receiving of the Torah – there is no complete “time of our freedom”.

Thus the period of Sefirat haOmer includes two aspects. The first is the completion of the Exodus, as it says in the “Divrei Moshe”:

[…] Just as the Exodus is mentioned in the Torah in regard to the commandments fifty times – so there are fifty aspects of leaving Egypt. And even after having left Egypt in one aspect – there are still many more aspects to be liberated from, up to fifty times. And in these fifty are included all the personal traits and attributes. For in each of them there is an aspect of Exodus. As the midrash states on the word “hamushim - armed did Israel leave Egypt”, to read “hamushim - only one in fifty left Egypt” that on the first day of Passover they were liberated from only one portion in fifty out of Egypt, and they were liberated in only one aspect of the 50 required for completion. And they had to go through another forty-nine days until they could leave out of all 50 aspects of the exodus.

Thus the goal of Sefirat haOmer is being a continuation of the “time of our freedom”: that in every day we have an exodus out of one more element of Egypt, until we reach the telos of the Exodus – which is the receiving of the Torah. And this is the point of the 49 days of the counting – to purify us from our shells and impurities – in other words to be liberated and redeemed from all fifty aspects of the impurity of Egypt.

Based on this we can understand why it says “you shall count fifty days”, for the number fifty includes also the first day of Passover, during which we are liberated from the first part of fifty of the Exodus, and then during the other days we leave the other 49 aspects. Now we can understand the need for the counting to be complete, such that if one missed one day of the counting – they can only count without saying the blessing. For every day of the Omer has an aspect of the Exodus, and if you missed one – you have not fully left Egypt.

Moreover, the counting must be continuous from the first day of Passover. Because all of the energy of the days of the counting come from the illumination of the first day of Passover. As the Rabbi Moshe of Koznitz says:

The first night of passover has an aspect of expansive mind (gadlut mohin) – for the light comes directly from the Creator unnaturally and suddenly – and then this expansiveness disappears and the person falls into smallness of mind (katnut) and a person must then collect the holy lights gradually one after the other in the days of the Counting (Sefirah), to elevate from one aspect (sefirah) to the next and to elevate themselves each time more and more until the holy day of Shavuot arrives, the day of the Receiving of our Torah, to arrive at that point to the essence of that first illumination from the first day of Passover – for that illumination gives power to the person to return to their initial strength. And all this is possible thanks to the light revealed on the first day of Passover, and even though that light disappears – there is still the trace of it (reshimu) from which one can get the power needed later in the days of Counting to strengthen and climb from one aspect to the next, each day a little more, until they arrive at Shavuot to that same initial illumination.

The second aspect to the Counting of the Omer is in its being a preparation for Shavuot and the receiving of the Torah. This aspect is rooted in what Rabbi Hayim Vital says: that the purification of one’s personal traits, the work of the midot, is in itself the creation of a chair and carrier in which to receive the Torah. For as long as a Jew does not purify their traits, they cannot receive the Torah, and the Torah cannot reside in them. Therefore as a preparation for receiving the Torah God gave us these days of Counting – during which the work is to purify our traits so that we will be worthy of receiving the Torah.

And they say in the holy books that the 49 days of Counting equal in gimatriya Lev Tov לב טוב – a good heart, which alludes to all the traits relating to interpersonal behavior, bein adam lehavero. As it says in Pirkei Avot: “Rabbi Yohhana ben Zakkai had five students and asked them: “Go and find what is the best trait a person can seek for themselves… and Rabbi Elzazar ben Arakh said: Lev Tov, a good heart; and R. Yohnan ben Zakai said: I see the words of Ben Arakh for his trait includes all of yours.” For the heart is the source and root of all personal traits.

And furthermore 49 in gimatriya is El Hai אל חי – Living God. As the AR”I, R. Isaac Luria, says is the name of the sefirah of Yesod, that when one purifies themselves in this sefirah they can feel the beating pulse of Divinity.

So the role of the days of the Sefirah is to purify and distill all the traits, both those relating to interpersonal behavior, seeking to achieve a Good Heart - Lev Tov, and those relating to one’s relationship to God – to achieve the experience of Living God, El Hai. For this is the true preparation needed in order to receive the Torah on Shavuot - dependent on the work of distillation which takes place on the days of the Omer.

And as the Maharal of Prague wrote, that the true wholeness in a person requires three elements: Whole with the creator, whole with their companions, whole with themselves. And it is this type of wholeness which a person must strive for during this period, so that they will be worthy of the Torah residing within them. Thus the days of the Counting are a period of purification of our personal traits in order to receive the Torah. […]

And from this we can understand what the Torah means when it says “you shall count fifty days, and offer up and new grain offering to the Lord” (Lev. 23) – for this is the purpose of the days of Counting, that once a Jew has purified themselves and distilled their traits during seven whole weeks, then they will attain on Shavuot to “offer a new offering to God” in receiving the Torah. As it says in the Kli Yakar that the “new offering” refers to the Torah, as the Rabbis say “ every day the words of the Torah should appear to you as new” and each and every year these is a new receiving of the Torah. And this is why no exact date is given for Shavuot in the Torah – because the receiving of the Torah is dependent on the continuum which begins with the first day of Passover, and all the days from Passover, through the counting, until Shavuot – are all one continuous unit. And the more one invests in the work of purifying their traits and the work of interpersonal relations – so do they achieve a higher aspect of the Torah on Shavuot.

For the continuum works thus: The initial illumination which God shines on from high is an awakening from above (it’aruta d’leila) – for such is the “passing over” of Passover – and it all but disappears. Yet it leaves a trace throughout the 49 days which allows the Jewish person to slog and toil in refining their traits – creating an awakening from below (it’aruta d’letata). And it is based on this toil that the Jewish person creates the ingredients from which to offer a “new offering” on Shavuot, and arrive ready to receive the elevated illuminations of Shavuot and the Torah.

And my grandfather, in the Beit Avraham, says on the verse “and you shall count for yourselves from the morrow of the Sabbath” – counting (“sefartem” ספרתם) refers to the word sapir, illumination, in other words “sefratem lachem” - create for yourselves illuminations. And these illuminations refer specifically to the elements of “on the morrow of the Sabbath” – that the work of Sefirat haOmer should be specifically in the “secular” and concrete elements of life, those of the “morrow of the Sabbath”. […] For the seven days of Teshuva between Rosh haShana and Yom Kippur are for transgressing the forbidden, for correcting outright sins, but the seven weeks of the Omer are for finding elevation and holiness within that which is permitted, the bodily pleasures. […]

And thus we can explain why on Shavuot the offering in the temple was of two loaves of bread. For bread has two meanings in the Torah – actual bread, and sexual intercourse (as it says in relation to Joseph and Potiphar - “he allowed him all but the bread which he eats”). And this is the new grain offering we are asked to offer at the end of the fifty days.

This explains the contradiction regarding Hametz on Passover and Shavuot. For during Passover one must annihilate all hametz, implying that one must distance themselves from hametz in totality, and yet during Shavuot the Torah commands us to bring an offering of two loaves that are specifically made of hametz.

And we can explain this by relating to the two aspects which are called “bread”. That indeed before one purifies themselves in those two elements – food and sex, which are called bread – one must treat them like hametz, like something which is totally unnecessary. For while one is stuck in the 49 aspects of impurity, one cannot offer up an offering to God from among that which is impure. But once one has gone through the process of purification of the 49 days of counting, once they have purified themselves in those elements of “the morrow of the Sabbath”, then they can offer a new offering to God, even one that is from Hametz.

[1] Translation Rabbi Mishael Zion, fast and loose.

“And Here the Child Asks”: Passover and the Pillars of Jewish Parenting

2015-04-02T22:15:00.002-07:00

Tonight is the most important night of the Jewish year. It isn’t Yom Kippur, Holocaust memorial day or Hanukah. And it doesn’t take place in your Synagogue, or in Israel, or anywhere where you aren’t. It is Seder night, and it takes place in your dining room.

Seder night has a radical claim at its heart: that before Judaism is a religion, or a people, or a culture – it is a story; one that is told in a family context, in the first person. It is a story that is to be questioned, but also experienced, celebrated, dramatized and eaten. It is a story that is turned from narrative into nomos, from fable into values and practices – as we open the door for others. And it takes place at home, around your table.

If we were to choose a National Jewish Parenting Day, it would be Seder night (both of them!). Already in the Torah, before the Israelites even left Egypt, God and Moses fast forward to the quintessential moment of parenting: “And when your children asks you, 'What does this ceremony mean to you?” (Exodus 12:26). This scenario is repeated three times, which – with the addition of one unasked question – will become the basis of the midrash about Four children at the Seder table. And it is upn this basis that the Rabbis turned Passover from a Temple based holiday – one which takes place there, away from home – to a home-made holiday, which always begins right here.

Passover Night puts into focus the two pillars of Jewish parenting: Calendar and Table. Nothing new here, it might be trite (“we’re all wise, we all know the story”), and yet I find it worth repeating: Calendar and Table are the two vehicles through which Jewish parenting takes place. And they both begin at the home, not with the outsourcing institutions of Jewish education we’ve become so dependent on.

Calendar. The Jewish story is first of all conveyed through the calendar, and that has remained its strongest suit to this day. Families who do not shape their lives around the daily observances and commandments of Halakha, nevertheless tie their family life to the Jewish calendar. Stories are thus woven into the temporal rhythm of the family, like birthdays that come around whether we like it or not. Awkward rituals containing memories demanding to be told, repeated. At its best, the very experience of time reminds us of the story, such that creation itself seems to be repeating the tale: the smells of spring herald the retelling of the Exodus; the darkness of winter beckons for the candles of Hanukkah; the falling leaves invites the reflectivity of Rosh haShana. As Heschel would put it, Judaism builds palaces in time, allowing the stories to reside not only in locations and institutions, but wherever we are. And as Yosef Haim Yerushalmi and Mircea Eliade taught us, what matters in the Jewish calendar is not history but memory. Did the stories “happen”? They exist not in the past, but in mythic time which repeats itself every year. In our modern technological life, as time has become an ever scarcer resource, the power of shaping time around our stories – even just a few times a year - cannot be underestimated, for our children and for ourselves.

Table. “As long as the temple existed – the altar would atone for Israel. Now – a person’s table atones for him.” (Talmud Brachot 55a). Faced with a dislocated Judaism, the Rabbis turned the family table into the central location of Jewish practice, and this continues to be the most powerful invention of Rabbinic Judaism. It was often trumped by the synagogue and the house of study/school, and has recently been sidelined by an era in which Jews sought to reclaim the public sphere and political space. And yet the family table must be the central altar, nothing really rivals it. Around the family table stories are told, conversations are had, and values are put into practice. Tables are always places of rules and mores - Parents try and teach their children how to “behave like human beings” and children challenge and undermine their parent’s authority – but can be so much more than that. Hospitality, that Abrahamic Jewish practice, challenges us to expand our table to people of all stripes and backgrounds.

Passover night is THE night of Jewish table, creating a constitutive moment that can then be translated into year round rituals, as we reconvene on a smaller scale around the table on Friday nights and other holidays. On Seder night, wrote Philo, even as the altar in Jerusalem still stood, “every home takes on the semblance of the Temple and receives its glory, the main course becomes the holy offering, and the participants are invited to purify themselves. Every other day of the year ritual is led by priests – on this night every family become the practitioners of the holy of holies.”

Four Questions, which are One: From Theory into Practice

All this sounds great in theory, and is most challenging in practice. Here are four questions raised in a recent conversation among parents in preparation for Passover. All four are different renditions of the question: Who am I doing this for?

The focus on children and parenting can often make the ritual feel empty and boring to parents. How do we avoid the infantilization of Jewish rituals to the point that grown ups – or teenage children – feel left out?

I’ve become more observant once I had children, creating a strong culture of Jewish calendar and table practices in the absence of much Jewish community around me. The desire to raise my children within the Jewish story becomes stronger the more I see it as a healthy antidote to a vapid consumer culture. Yet each year as I clean I wonder – if I’m mostly doing this for my children, why practice these rituals when they’re not watching? How much effort should I then spend on the pieces that don’t feel like they are particularly relevant - or noticeable – to children? Will they know that that I’m “only doing it for them”?

It’s all well and good to talk about storytelling at the Passover Seder, but the ritual itself allows very little room for it. Between the order of the Haggadah and the desires of the various guests and hosts, and the fact that everyone basically knows the story too, what exactly are we aiming for on this night? Getting the children to focus for a few minutes is hard enough, and rarely happens “in the right moment”, so how do I know that we’ve “performed the ritual as it should be” and be able to relax my grip the rest of the time?

I am not a parent, and have little interest in a night that is so child-oriented, when I am not one. What of all this relates to me?

Like on Seder night, these questions are deeper than any answers one can give. But a good sounding board for these questions can be found in Maimonides’ discussion of Seder Night:

One must make changes on this night, so that the children will see and will be motivated to ask: "Why is this night different from all other nights?" until he replies to them: "This and this occurred; this and this took place."

What changes should be made? He should give them roasted seeds and nuts; the table should be taken away before they eat; matzot should be snatched from each other and the like.

When a person does not have a son, his wife should ask him. If he does not have a wife, [he and a colleague] should ask each other: "Why is this night different?" This applies even if they are all wise. A person who is alone should ask himself: "Why is this night different?" (Maimonides Code, Hametz uMatza 7:3)

וצריך לעשות שינוי בלילה הזה--כדי שיראו הבנים וישאלו ויאמרו, מה נשתנה הלילה הזה מכל הלילות, עד שישיב להם ויאמר להם, כך וכך אירע וכך וכך היה.

וכיצד משנה--מחלק להם קליות ואגוזים, ועוקרים השולחן מלפניהם קודם שיאכלו, וחוטפין מצה זה מיד זה, וכיוצא בדברים האלו. אין לו בן, אשתו שואלתו; אין לו אישה--שואלין זה את זה מה נשתנה הלילה הזה, ואפילו היו כולן חכמים. היה לבדו, שואל לעצמו מה נשתנה הלילה הזה.

Maimonides’, based on the Talmud, grounds Passover night in a series of games, surprises and changes – which are all aimed at eliciting spontaneous, real questions from the audience. “Snatching matza” is the afikoman game, “seeds and nuts” are the desserts of old. Give out candy, do strange things – anything to keep this night alive, fun and relevant.

But a moment before Passover night turns into a child-oriented circus, Maimonides pauses to ask: what if the classic imagined audience is not there? What remains of Passover without parenting? “A person who is alone should ask himself: Why is this night different?”

I find the image of a person, sitting along and asking themselves questions on Passover night, to be the most poignant image of ideal parenting. Anything we do with our children, ideally, would be something we would do on our own, for ourselves, if we could. And when we do it with our children, the engine for it should not just be in them – our desires, fears, or hopes for them – but in something in ourselves. This is not about being self-serving, but about integrity, acting from a place of existential grounding, from our best selves. Children sniff it out immediately if it does not emanate from such a place.

Granted, we are rarely our best selves when we are alone in a room. So much of early parenting is trying to regain best practices which we allowed slide during adulthood (clean language, no snacking between meals, limiting screen time, making time for what really matters). In fact, it is far easier to do things for our children and to expect of them the highest behavior – while struggling to reach those bars ourselves. In response Maimonides’ offers an image of parenting as a series of concentric circles – ideally we should be having the same conversations with our children as we have with our spouse, our friends, ourselves. Parenting allows us to put on a mask of our best self, or a mask of an ideal world which we want to give our children – but we must make sure that the mask is never too distant from who we are by ourselves, with our friends and with our spouses. And the relationship should work both ways: the stories we tell our children, the questions they ask of us, must shape who we are as adults as well. In that sense, talking about parenting is just a way of talking about who we want to truly be. Turning that into practice, well for that we need a whole bag of tricks up our sleeve – for our children as for ourselves.

Hag Sameach,

Mishael

מתנה לחג: פסח | ביעור החמצות

2015-03-30T02:50:00.000-07:00

An Amateurs’ Guide to the 2015 Israeli Elections

2015-03-12T07:54:00.001-07:00

I don’t usually write about politics, but thought I’d share some thoughts on the upcoming Israeli elections. Hope this is helpful in making sense of what’s going on and looking forward to learning from other voices that see things differently than I…

Mish

An Amateurs’ Guide to the 2015 Israeli Elections | Mishael Zion

Israel is going to the polls on March 17^th, for the third time in six years. The campaign began with most Israelis fatigued and cynical, but schisms and unions among Israel’s political parties have energized these elections and offer a poignant glimpse into the changes that Israeli society is experiencing. Much attention is given to Netanyahu’s prospects of becoming prime-minister of Israel for the fourth time, and the enormous energy spent to replace him (check out the videos on this FB page). But the real drama unfolding in Israel’s streets, cafes and living rooms is the dilemma of the undecided. Recent polls have shown that upwards of 20% of the population say they have not yet decided how to cast their vote. Likud and Labor are currently polling neck-and-neck, so it is the number of seats which the small parties will receive that will determine whether Labor’s Isaac Herzog can create a coalition of 60+ Knesset seats, or if Netanyahu will receive the reigns yet again.

Since I know many Americans have a hard time keeping track of Israel’s gazillion-party-system (which is almost as broken as the two-party-system), and in an attempt to justify the many hours I’ve spent reading analysis and watching videos on my facebook feed, I offer four fictional, stereotypical and totally biased narratives highlighting some of the questions Israeli voters are asking themselves. You’ll notice that Iran and the Palestinians, US-Israel relations and ISIS are not the focus here – that already is saying something. At the end of each narrative I’ve provided some of the recent poll numbers. Videos from each party’s campaign with English subtitles can be found here (and here's John Oliver's hilarious recap). Hope this is helpful as the elections unfold in the coming week and look forward to questions and alternate readings…

The Centre-Right: Will the real Begin please stand up?

Aryeh Deri and Moshe Kahlon

I’m your Jerusalem cab driver, Mickey. What’s that? Yes, I was born in Algeria, and I’ll never forget how my father’s honor was denigrated by those anti-religious euro-centric Ben Gurion-ists. The first politician who got my loyalty was Menachem Begin, who spoke to us at eye level, and it’s been Likud straight through ever since. But recently Netanyahu has lost me. All this talk of Iran – well, sure, its important, and he’s the ONLY ONE who is strong against a hostile world – but we’re struggling down here. Bibi talks about a “Start Up Nation” – but we haven’t seen a cent of that. This time I’m thinking of voting for Moshe Kahlon. He’s all that’s left from the Real Likud, the Begin way. He’s a good guy, and his cell phone reform saves us 200 shekel a month. Let him be Minister of the Treasury and lets see if he can do that to 3-4 other industries, that’ll be worth my vote. My wife says we should vote for Shas. Aryeh Deri is back now, and he’s been banging the drums of anti-Mizrachi discrimination – saying he’s the only one who ever did anything for the “transparent” ones in society, emphasizing the “Mahlouf” in his name. Funny, that was my name growing up too, but everyone calls me Mickey. But now they say Kahlon and Shas might join a Labor coalition, maybe it’ll be Bibi after all…

Likud | Binyamin(“Bibi”) Netanyahu, polling at 20-25 seats | Bibi as the National Babysitter

Kulanu | Moshe Kahlon | 7-10 seats | Claiming Begin’s true path

Shas | Aryeh Mahlouf Deri | 7-10 seats | Transparency – Mizrachi Israelis

The Liberal Left: Zionist after all or united with the Arab List?

I guess I’m your classic secular Tel Aviv stereotype, a literary editor at a publishing house, still stinkin’ smolani”, with a long, hissing S, my whole life, but the verbal violence turned physical in the streets of Tel Aviv this summer. It sometimes feels like all my friends have moved to Berlin or Berkeley, and lecture me on how Zionism is passé. Still, the social protests of 2011 brought back some of my faith in this society, and the Meretz Knesset members make me proud with their struggles for women’s rights, LGBT rights, a welfare state. I’ve voted Meretz ever since Rabin was assassinated – still remember crying for him in the square for days – but last elections I voted Hadash, the veteran Arab-Jewish communist party. It was a statement of the inability of the State of Israel to be both Jewish and Democratic – and I know what side of the equation I’m on. But now the Arab parties have all united, and a vote for the exciting new Hadash leaders is also a vote for the ultra-nationalist Palestinian parties and the religious Muslim Movement. If Labor wins, my Meretz vote might find itself supporting a watered-down coalition with haters from the right. But can I vote for transcending the Jewish-Arab divide when half the candidates draw that line from the Arab side?

working on my first novel, and proudly in Israel’s far left wing. I’ve watched this country take a swerve to the right, becoming more “Jewish” then I ever remember it, increasingly dominated by an ethno-centric discourse which casually hates Arabs and recently began to proudly hate Leftists. I’ve been called “

Meretz | Zehava Galon | 4-6 seats | Meretz against voting Labor

United Arab List | Aiman Ouda | 12-15 seats | United Arab List Theme Song

The Religious Right: Jewish Home or All-Together-Now

HaBayit haYehudi: Female leadership

Adi and Yishai Schwartz live in Ranana, met in Bnei Akiva, have 4 kids, and like everyone else they know - are voting for Naftali Bennet’s modern-orthodox “Jewish Home”. Bennet announced that he is no longer apologizing: not apologizing to the world for the so-called Occupation, not apologizing to the Palestinians for their so-called suffering (it’s isn’t suffering when its self-inflicted). But truly he stopped apologizing to the secular Israelis for the fact that religious Jews were late comers to the Zionist endeavor. It is time religious Jews teach something about Zionism to secular Israelis. Even Yishai’s secular partner at the law firm is voting Jewish Home this time. But the Schwartz’s are distraught – their youngest son Nerya came back from Yeshiva and announced that he is voting for the new schismatic party “Yachad”, formed by renegade Ultra-Orthodox “Shas” Mizrachim, far-right religious Zionists and Kahanists. Nerya criticizes Bennet (and by proxy, his parents) of not truly

Ultra Orthodox, Mizrachim and Dati'im: Yachad

listening to Rabbinical authority, of being “light”, aspiring to be like Westernized secular Israelis instead of more like the Torah-true Ultra Orthodox Jews. Ever since his fiancé’s family was evicted from Gush Katif, his faith in the State of Israel being a vehicle of God’s will has imploded. The exuberance felt at the “Yachad” party gatherings is huge – finally ultra orthodox Jews can say they are right-wing and admire Israel’s strength, and right-wing religious Jews can say they admire Haredim. They believe in love (of Jews), unity (with Jews) and solidarity (with Jews, especially religious ones). Who can argue with that?

HaBayit HaYehudi | Naftali Bennet | 10-15 seats | Bennet’s Aplogizing Hipster

Yahad | Eli Yishai | 4-6 seats | Rabbis United

The Centre Left: The Ashkenazim who lost the Country

Yair Lapid and Isaac Buzi Herzog

Eli and Sarit Katz are sick and tired of a political discourse that overlooks their daily needs. Iran shmiran, they have been married 15 years and are still renting in Herzliya, having watched apartment prices soar over the past 8 years. They work hard - he’s in sales, she’s an accounts manager. They own 1.5 cars, have 2.5 children and 0.5 pets. Did I mention that they are Ashkenazi? In the 90’s they voted for Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, and wanted to believe in peace with the Palestinians, but the second Intifada and the wars with the Hamas in Gaza have made them cynical of talk of “peace”. They believe in a “normal Israel”, one located in Western Europe, not the Middle East, and would happily get rid of the West Bank – its Jewish or Palestinian residents – as long as someone can promise them that flights from Ben Gurion airport will continue unabated. They want to feel there is a future for them and their kids here, one where they can afford to buy a house and make a normal living - so last elections voted for Yair Lapid - whose good looks first charmed them as Israel’s prime-time talk show host. Yair talked about middle class and promised to force Ultra-orthodox Jews to serve in the army and join the workforce. He made good on the promise (sort of), but achieved little else. Now this Herzog kid is gaining steam, and suddenly seems like he can actually push Netanyahu off his seat. Sure, he’s unimpressive at first, but he’s growing on them. It’d be nice to vote for Labor again, and the cadre of politicians in Labor’s list is more impressive than Lapid’s minions. Huh, we’ll have to wait for the last day to really make a call…

Labor / Zionist Camp | Isaac (“Buzi”) Herzog and Tzipi Livni | 20-25 seats | Last minute to save the country

Yesh Atid | Yair Lapid | 10-15 seats | Yair Lapid on tour

This is far from the whole picture (see below), but I hope it’s somewhat helpful.

What’s next? The prime ministership is assigned to the party which can assemble a majority coalition of 61 seats (out of the Knesset’s 120). It is generally assumed the Kahlon, Lapid and Shas will join any coalition, but more parties would prefer a Netanyahu led government. Thus while Labor might receive the largest amount of seats, it might not be able to cobble together the majority needed to make Herzog prime minister. Netanyahu’s Likud has more options, but if it dips below 20 seats, will have a hard time justifying it. Everyone knows there will be a few big surprises when the final results come in Tuesday night. What they will be, and how they will shape Israel’s future – are anyone’s guess.

p.s. Missing from the picture are the Asheknazi Ultra Orthodox (UTJ) party polling at 6-8 seats, and Avigdor Liberman’s party, hit hard by corruption charges but keeping its base of Russian voters at 4-6 seats. Lieberman, Meretz and Yachad are all teetering on the 4-seat-minimum for entrance into the Knesset at all. If any of those don’t pass muster, the coalition picture will change significantly. Finally, was below the 4-seat-minimum, but most fascinating of all, is a party of Ultra Orthodox women who refuse to vote for the Ultra Orthodox parties because they do not give representation to women. A harbinger of the way feminism is changing Israeli society on a daily basies.

Big Data: Law, Randomness and Choice in Esther

2015-02-20T00:01:00.006-08:00

Moonshine Adar | Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Purim 2015

It’s easy to underestimate the story of Esther. With its burlesque scenes, over-the-top characters and ancient court politics, it can seem uninspiring. Its setting in the child-friendly Purim and its violent ending make it seem juvenile, if not inappropriate. Yet the scroll of Esther is the Biblical book which comes closest to describing our current reality. I am not referring to Iranian plots against the descendants of Mordechai, but rather the attempt to navigate an absurd world, caught between the opposite poles of randomness and law, without divine guidance.

This month’s edition of Moonshine includes two explorations of themes in the Scroll of Esther. As always, while sharing my own thoughts about the text, this is to be read mostly as an invitation to one’s own studying of the text. Esther’s 10 chapters are a quick and fun read - especially if you try JT Waldman’s animated version. Understanding its structure is another good shortcut, as is focusing on chapters 1-7. Scroll down for three questions to ask oneself (or your hevruta) as you study this tale.

Wishing you a joyous month of Adar, a Purim of revelry and – who knows – perhaps even a positive reversal of fate…

Mishael

1: Dat and Data: Between Randomness and Law

Purim is - literally - the celebration of randomness. As the Scroll itself says: “That is why they named these days “Purim” – from the word Pur [=lot]”. In the darkest moment of the scroll, the date for Haman’s malicious plot to exterminate the Jews is determined by a random lot (“pur”). At its brightest moment, the salvation too feels random, not so much a final redemption as much as a temporary political windfall. Indeed, the whole book, with its giddy King, comedic reversals and lack of divine providential voice attempts to make the reader feel like they are living in a reality governed by randomness.

The experience of randomness is magnified by its juxtaposition against the often overlooked theme of the book: Law. Throughout the scroll, though, the word used to describe law is not the Hebrew mishpat or din (Hebrew for justice), but the Persian form – dat or data. The Persian word “dat” made its way into both Biblical Hebrew and European languages. Its uses in our 21^st century allow a whole new reading of the story of Esther. In modern Hebrew the word “dat” means not law but religion. In English Data signifies transmittable and storable information, the modern correlate of the Persian imperial dat. More basic than knowledge or wisdom, data is the most basic element, with a promise of objectivity and constancy. Data is a building block upon which a worldview can be built. Today, the ascendant promise of Big Data attempts to turn the seeming randomness of life into immutable containable information. Yet in Shushan data has failed.

As first glance the use of “dat” is so ubiquitous that the impression is that Ahasuerus’ (Xerxes’) kingdomis a bastion of rule and regulation. Historically the Persian empire is regarded as the earliest and most impressive imperial bureaucracy – an efficient legal system spanning from Africa to India. But is quickly becomes clear that dat is an empty signifier. In chapter 1 we are introduced to Ahasuerus’ counsel of wisemen who “know law and justice” (יודעי דת ודין). The King goes through great pains to ensure that his dat is known throughout the kingdom – notice all those horsemen appearing again and again in the story. Haman describes the Jews as “not obeying the dat of the King”, even the virgins are seeped in a regimen of myrrh and perfumes for six months as is the “dat of the women”. At the height of the dramatic reversal the King himself adheres to the immutability of his own laws, as he tells Esther and Mordechai: “A document written in the king’s name and sealed with the king’s signet – cannot be revoked” (Esther 8:8). The rule of dat is complete – and thus revealed in its absurdity. When even the king himself cannot change his own laws – you know that something is horribly wrong. Like a snake biting his own tail, in Ahasuerus’ kingdom the opposite poles of law and randomness have combined into one.

Unlike Data, which seeks to be a representation of what is real in the world, collected and analyzed to create information suitable for making decisions, Dat in Shushan has become an empty signifier, an arrow pointing towards nothing at all. I would contend that this is not just a critique of Shushan’s Laws, or Diasporic Law, but of law as an institution. The scroll is warning us that dat (and by proxy, data) will not contain meaning or truth in themselves. It is what one does with them that makes the difference.

The opposite poles of sheer randomness and insipid law can easily lead one into despair, or more likely – cynicism and passivity. Perhaps this explains Esther’s deep passivity – both during the virginal pageant and in response to Haman’s decree. In fact, her success is due to her malleability and passivity, a survival mechanism that shows itself to be a powerful strategy (Esther “asked for nothing other than what Hegai Keeper of the Women told her to take”; “Esther obeyed the word of Mordechai just as when she was in his ward“ Esther 2:15,20). As opposed to Vashti who tried to take her fate in her own hands – and failed, Esther is determined to ride the wave of randomness and let the chips fall as they may. She has felt the randomness of dat on her own body and happened to triumph. Now in the palace she has resigned herself to passivity and cynicism, hoping that the next stroke of randomness will also work out in her favor.

2: Who is this? Moments of Existential Choice

Yet it is on the backdrop of randomness and law – that the Scroll of Esther focuses again and again on personality. More than any other book, Esther is an in-depth exploration of its characters. Even as they are all stuck between the poles of randomness and law, each character – save Ahasueres himself – is highlighted in exercising their agency. This focus on moments of choice, decision and determination doesn't become irrelevant when faced with randomness and law, but is described as a deep response to it (reminiscent of Viktor Frankel’s response to radical evil and suffering). Each character's moment of choice is juxtaposed against the vapidity of law, dat, in Shushan. Meaning is derived not from dat, but from an existential agency enacted despite of it.

Vashti epitomizes this moment of choice by being the one who says no. She refuses to appear in front of Ahasuerus and the men of Shushan in the middle of their revelry. Elias Bickerman explains that this is in fact an existential moment for Vashti. While concubines would appear at the King’s behest at parties, a queen in the Persian empire would leave before the imbibing began. Being asked to appear “with the royal crown on her head” forced her to fight for who she was – a queen, not a concubine.

Mordechai makes two choices – each one more dangerous than the next – to refuse to bow to Haman, and to practice civil disobedience – flouting of the dat – by appearing in the Court wearing sackcloth and ashes. Haman too seeks to know himself. Despite trying to trap the Jews in the claws of the law, he finds himself doubting his own plan, and wants to hang Modrechai even before the (random) date assigned for killing the Jews. This last flirt against the randomness that he himself unleashed is the cause of his downfall. When this last ruse is discovered by the King (Thanks Harvona!), Haman gets hung on the stake that he himself had prepared for Mordechai. Finally Esther – who in chapter 4 receives a sharp wake up call from Mordechai– decides to go to the King “not according to the law”. Esther is urged and challenged by Mordechai, but she is not described as obeying him, she is not simply replacing one dat with another, as some readers would contend. In fact, once Esther agrees to take on the task of convincing the King, she is the one who dictates the terms and devises the plan, and Mordechai is the one described as “fulfilling the command of Esther”. Choice will trump law, and will triumph.

The only one who never seeks to know himself is the King. Ahasueres does all he can to avoid thinking independently and existentially. He will follow the dat with blinders on and will follow advisers when law offers no remedy. He will never overturn his own decision – for that would require an act of self-negation – which assumes the existence of a self to begin with. The King’s lack of introspection and self-knowledge as a way to avoid

Persian royal ring

any decision making is most evident in his hurry to get rid of the King’s seal, the insignia of decision making, of authority and power, the ring of responsibility. His is the most cynical response of all.

Understanding the functional absence of King Ahaseures puts a greater claim of responsibility on the other characters, as Haman and Mordechai understand well. But it also shines a light on the absence of the other King. God's disappearance from the stage of history denies our characters the ability to claim that they are called by an external force. There are no prophets, no messengers of God (or of Satan), no larger authority. There is plenty of ego, randomness and empty law. The only thing that remains is choice.

We live in a world of everchanging randomness and empty laws, says the Scroll of Esther. Call it Shushan, or diaspora, or post-modernity. What remains meaningful then? Knowing oneself and acting from that place. In our turning Purim into a celebration of the Carnivalesque, dressing up as someone other than ourselves, getting legally drunk while behaving OCD about hearing every word of an ancient scroll - we name the randomness and absurdity of life and law. But we are also called to an existential moment of facing who we really are. Caught between the harshness of data and the randomness of history – it is our existential choices that retain meaning.

3: Three questions for studying Esther:

Notice that some characters are “flat” (Ahasueres, Mordehcai) and others “round” (Haman, Esther); for some characters we are privy to their inner monologue (Haman) and/or emotions (Ahaseures), while others we never encounter their emotions or thoughts (Esther and Mordehcai). Why does the author portray the characters in such a way, and how would the story be told differently by changing these characterizations?
The opening two chapters set up the rest of the story, inviting the reader into the worldview of the story. As Michael Fox writes in his commentary on Esther: “The sensuality [of the virginal pageant], like the burlesque of the opening banquet, softens the mood and puts the reader off-guard, making the coming danger all the more harsh” (pg. 36). What can thus be said about the last three chapters of the book?
The banquets – lining up the banquets allows one to identify the inner structure of the story. What do you make of this lineup:

Michael V Fox c

Dedicated to a theme in the Jewish month, Moonshine is a combination Dvar Torah and springboard for learning in the coming 30 days. Moonshine - in honor of the Hebrew month’s commitment to the lunar cycle, with a hint of distilling fine spirits off the beaten track and - perhaps - intoxication.