Lessons From Giving

February 28th: Terumah
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

Terumah begins the most anachronistic section of the Torah: the instructions for and the construction of the Mishkan, the “tent temple” that our ancestors used for worship in the wilderness and for the first few centuries in the Promised Land. Later replaced by the Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem, our Tradition never looks forward to re-assembling this Mishkan. If we ever restore the sacrificial service, Tradition teaches that it will be in a new Temple—and not in a new tent.

Why, then, do we spend so much time—five Torah portions!—focusing on details that we will never need again? The simple answer is that this comes with the territory when one reveres an ancient text. It is in the Torah, and we read the Torah. The task becomes one of finding meaning, and here are three lessons the text can teach.

In Terumah, the initial phase of the construction, we have the building campaign.
 “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: ‘Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved to donate. These are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper; yarns of blue, purple, and crimson; fine linen, goats’ hair, tanned ram skins, dolphin skins, and acacia wood; oil for lighting, and spices for the anointing oil and for the aromatic incense; lapis lazuli and other stones for setting—for the ephod and for the breastplate. And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”  (Exodus 25.1-8)

From this detailed instruction, we can learn a lesson about the value and dynamic of giving. The story suggests that Israelites of every economic level were encouraged to give—and that both large and small gifts were welcome and appreciated. A little bit of gold here, and a little bit of gold there, and soon there was more than enough to cover the ark and the incense altar and the tent poles and carrying poles. All the gifts worked together to complete the Mishkan.

Actually, people were so enthusiastic that the building campaign was oversubscribed. In a few weeks (Parshat Vayakhel), we shall read about how Moses has to ask the people to stop bringing gifts. The artisans say to Moses, “‘The people are bringing more than is needed for the tasks entailed in the work that the Lord has commanded to be done.’ Moses thereupon had this proclamation throughout the camp: ‘Let no man or woman make further effort toward gifts for the sanctuary!’ So the people stopped bringing; their efforts had been more than enough for all the tasks to be done.” (Exodus 36.5-7)

A second lesson comes from comparing the specificity of God’s instructions in different situations. In this case, God goes into great detail, specifying the exact dimensions and specific building materials of the Mishkan and all of its furnishings. Contrast this to God’s instructions to Abram in Lech Lecha—telling him to leave his father’s house and go to the Land of Canaan. In that case, no details are included: the route, timing, destination within Canaan, and who is going along—all the travel details—are left completely to Abram’s discretion.

Perhaps the reason for this difference is obvious: sometimes the details matter, and sometimes they are not as important. We all hear the popular advice about “not sweating the details,” and this is certainly true for many situations. I remember one summer in particular where I was the supervising educator at the Jacobs Camp in Mississippi. In a spurt of great enthusiasm, I wrote lesson plans for every class, for every teacher, and thought it was great. The problem was that this micro-managing deprived the talented and enthusiastic teachers of the creative energy that is a big part of the camp experience; the program that summer was rather lackluster—and all because of my over-functioning. Here was a case where sweating the details—and not trusting other enough to do a good job—was a problem.

On the other hand, there are times when the details just have to be sweated. In Numbers 20, God tells Moses to speak to the rock and produce water for the thirsty Israelites. Moses hits the rock and suffers major repercussions. The fact that God had, in a previous situation, instructed Moses to hit a rock for water is no excuse. God is specific; Moses disobeys; and in this case, the details make a big difference. Moses is not allowed to enter the Promised Land.

A more modern and tragic example is the catastrophe of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It was cooler than expected that January morning in 1986, and the seals that kept the fuel contained in the tanks contacted with the low temperature. The people in charge thought that a few degrees would not make a difference, but just a minute after lift-off, rocket fuel leaked and was ignited by the exhaust. The spacecraft exploded, and an exciting and “routine” mission became a disaster. Seven brave explorers lost their lives.

Sometimes, the details are less than important, while other times, they are manifestly important. The key lies in knowing the difference.

A third lesson lies in the charge that God gives to the Israelites. Yes, bring the various gifts, but notice the purpose: “And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”  (Exodus 25.8) The purpose of the gifts is not obeisance but rather hospitality. The purpose of the Mishkan is to make God feel at home in the Israelite community. We can certainly understand this in terms of our synagogue—how we work for a place that is conducive to holiness and reflects respect for God and our holy community. It should also be a metaphor for the ways we construct our community and society—that we should act in ways that reflect our holy relationship with the Eternal, making God feel at home in our midst.

Thus do ancient details lead to modern insights. It is the process of Torah.

Torah, Law, and Lore

February 21st: Mishpatim
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

The art of translation is always curious. How does one give an accurate translation of the words and the connotations and the historical context and the sensibility of a text? It is seldom a straight process, and the multiplicity of translations of the Bible speaks to the complexity.

A case in point comes in the word Torah. Often translated as The Law, this is too narrow for the whole approach to life and existence which the Torah represents. Though Torah contains laws, it also holds other components which draw our attention: narratives, interpretive retellings of narratives, poetry and prayer, genealogies, and philosophical thinking. In the texts that Judaism developed from and after the original Torah, the subject matter is generally categorized as either Halachah/Law or Aggadah/Stories, and Judaism is taught in both.

Though we usually use the word Torah to refer to The Five Books of Moses, Judaism actually has eight definitions/usages of the word.

(1)   The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

(2)   The Torah Scroll—the Five Books in their ancient scroll format.

(3)   The whole Jewish Bible/Tanach (which Christians call The Old Testament). In Rabbinic Judaism, this is called the Written Torah.

(4)   The Written Torah and the Oral Torah (the Mishnah and the Gemara, which together comprise the Talmud).

(5)   Any Jewish texts that continue the Rabbinic Tradition—Responsa, Law Codes, Mystical Writings (Kabbalah), Philosophical Writings, Hassidic Teachings, etc.

(6)   All Jewish knowledge—including Jewish Literature and Journalism and modern thought.

(7)   A particular story or interpretation or teaching from Judaism, as in, “Here, let me teach you a Torah.”

(8)   The sensibility of Judaism and Jewishness in which individuals have the opportunity to approach God and to live in a holy relationship with God. This definition of Torah is similar to the Chinese notion of Tao, The Way.

Whenever we hear the word Torah, we need to discern which meaning is intended.

That being said, this week’s Torah portion is actually law. Up until the Ten Commandments last week, all of the Book of Genesis and the most of the first nineteen chapters of Exodus are narrative/Aggadah. Now, however, we get a multiplicity of specific laws.

“When a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free on account of the injury. If he knocks out the tooth of a slave, male or female, he shall let the slave go on account of the injury.” (Exodus 21.26-27)

“When a man opens a pit, or digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the one responsible for the pit must make restitution—paying the price of the animal to the owner, but keeping the carcass.” (Exodus 21.33-34)

“When a man’s ox injures his neighbor’s ox and it dies, they shall sell the live ox and divide its price; they shall also divide the dead animal. If, however, it is known that the ox was in the habit of goring, and its owner has failed to guard it, he must restore ox for ox, but he shall keep the carcass of the dead ox.” (Exodus 21.35-36)

“When a man steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, he shall pay five oxen for the ox, and four sheep for the sheep.” (Exodus 21.37)

“When a man lets his livestock loose to graze in another’s land, and so allows a field or a vineyard to be grazed bare, he must make restitution for the impairment of that field or vineyard.” (Exodus 22.4)

“When a fire is started and spreads to thorns, so that stacked, standing, or growing grain is consumed, he who started the fire must make restitution.” (Exodus 22.5)

“You shall not subvert the rights of your needy in their disputes. Keep far from a false charge; do not bring death on those who are innocent and in the right, for I will not acquit the wrongdoer. Do not take bribes, for bribes blind the clear-sighted and upset the pleas of those who are in the right.” (Exodus 22.6-8)

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
(Exodus 22.21)

“If you lend money to My people, to the poor among you, do not act toward them as a creditor; exact no interest from them. If you take your neighbor’s garment in pledge, you must return it to him before the sun sets; it is his only clothing, the sole covering for his skin. In what else shall he sleep? Therefore, if he cries out to Me, I will pay heed, for I am compassionate.” (Exodus 22.24-26)

The idea here is that living a holy life involves the details of life. It is one thing to espouse the goals of fairness and justice, but how you deal with a goring ox or an out-of-control flock or a fit of temper against a subordinate? The details of life are where the Torah is lived, and God is instructing us to follow the model of creation—a grand and magnificent endeavor that necessitated lots of details: the invention of physics, biochemistry, psychology, etc., and the development that had to be carried out molecule by molecule and atom by atom. Given that God loves us and has gifted each of us with a spark of the Divine Image, God cares about us and how we are treated by others. Thus do ten commandments grow to 613. Living Torah means “sweating the details.”

“Once a heathen came before Shammai and said to him, ‘I will be converted if you teach me the entire Torah, all of it, while I stand on one foot.’  Shammai instantly drove him away with the builder’s measure he had in his hand.  The same man came before Hillel and said, ‘I will be converted if you teach me all the Torah while I stand on one foot.” Hillel converted him. He said to him: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah.  All the rest is commentary. Now, go and study.”  (Talmud Shabbat 31a)

The Ten Commandments!

THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

This week’s Torah portion brings us the indelible scene at Mount Sinai. I say indelible because, in many ways, the thundering voice of God still reverberates in the Jewish consciousness. Every aspect of Judaism and Jewishness is a response to that moment when our people encountered the Infinite One and absorbed some of its holiness.

Jewish identities vary widely—in intensity, practice, knowledge, style, and affiliation, but there is this common spiritual call that began our endeavor and has inspired generation after generation through the ages.

In my own thinking, practice, and teaching about Judaism, I have long been guided some insights developed in a Jewish education curriculum in the 1980s. In addition to the various subjects necessary in a Jewish education, it spoke about five learning modalities—angles from which to approach Judaism and understand it more fully. They were developed in re educating children, but I soon realized that these modalities or learning strategies are for much wider application: they represent a complete approach to Judaism that all of us should incorporate into our Jewish lives. In other words, when we respond to the call of Mount Sinai, each of these approaches to Judaism and Jewishness is vital.

The first is Jewish Functional Skills. These are the facts and skills that we all need to know in order to be literate and able in Jewish contexts.

The second is the Ethical Dimension of every Jewish story, ritual, and teaching. How does our religion affect our relationship with ourselves and with others? How do our attitudes and actions reflect the godliness intended in every aspect of our faith? Remember, ours is a religion which the great Hillel summarized with a simple ethical teaching: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” (Talmud Shabbat 31a)

The third is the Historical Experience of our people. Ours is a communal history—a story of how we have encountered life and history and done so in Jewish ways. We see ourselves as part of a long term process or project, with each generation continuing the Tradition it inherited. Years ago, when being introduced to a college class, the professor who invited me “warned” his students about how rabbis never give definitive answers. They always quote a variety of voices—from different times and places—answering a question with a discussion. He was right, of course, because the process which began with Abraham and Sarah continues today with you and me, and every step in that story is relevant to the continuing Jewish process.

The fourth is the Textual Experience. As much as we consult our holy and historical texts for information, there is something essentially Jewish about sitting over a text and encountering its wisdom. When Chananya ben Teradion (Mishna Avot 3.3) says “When two people sit together, and words of Torah pass between them, the Divine Presence rests upon them,” he is reminding us that studying Torah brings us into the realm of the holy and fills us with a sensibility of godly possibility. Whether in the Torah Service or study luncheons or film series or programs with our youth, text study—and the many places it leads us—is an essential aspect of Judaism.

The fifth is Creative Adaptation—how we understand the information, insights, and practices of traditional Judaism and make them our own. We all do this, choosing what is meaningful to us or our families and crafting a Jewish life and sensibility that connects us individually to God and Tradition.

There is much to be said about each of these learning and experiential aspects of Judaism, but, for this week, I want to focus on the primary text of this week’s Torah portion, the Ten Commandments.

Years ago, I visited a congregation that started every service with the congregation rising and reciting together the Ten Commandments. It was quite moving and meant that, among other things, everyone knew the Ten Commandments. I believe this knowledge is an indispensable Jewish skill, and my request this week is that every member of our congregation takes the time to memorize these ten essential teachings of our Tradition. This goes for adults as well as children, and I am particularly asking parents to spend some time working with your children on this Jewish text.

The full versions are in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, but here is a memorize-able version.

*I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out from the Land of Egypt, out of the House of Bondage.
You shall have no other gods besides Me.

*You shall not make any idols or graven images and worship them.

*You shall not take the Name of the Lord your God in vain.

*Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.

*Honor your father and your mother.

*Do not murder.

*Do not commit adultery.

*Do not steal.

*Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.

*Do not covet.

This is a text to consider, study, and discuss. First of all, however, it is a text to know by heart.

The Lord: Warrior is God's Name

February 7th: Beshallach
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

As much as we celebrate God’s miraculous rescue of the Israelites from Egypt, there is something disturbing about the violent imagery in Shirat Hayam, the Song of the Sea that Moses leads after we cross the Red Sea.
“The Lord, the Warrior, is God’s Name!
Pharaoh’s chariots and his army God cast into the sea;
And the pick of his officers are drowned in the Red Sea.
The deeps covered them; they went down into the depths like a stone.
Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power,
Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the foe!
In Your great triumph, You break your opponents;
You send forth Your fury, it consumes them like straw.”  (Exodus 15.3-7)

For us, the Exodus and the Crossing of the Red Sea is a matter of awe-inspiring salvation, but, for the Egyptians, it is about horror and devastation. God is the agent of both experiences.

We usually do not like to think about God in such violent imagery. In fact, the Rabbis of the Talmud sought to mitigate this savage impression with the following Midrash: When Moses led the men singing with joy to God—and Miriam led the women in dancing their joy, the angels in heaven decided to join in the celebration. God shushed them, however, with, “How dare you sing for joy when My creatures are floating dead on the waters?!” (Talmud Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b)

God is torn about the end of the story: though the Israelites are free and safe, God mourns for the Egyptians—who are also God’s children, also created in the Divine Image. And, yet, this remorse does not stop God from killing them. Though God is sad, God realizes that the Egyptians deserve to die—that their immoral and cruel ways cannot be allowed to continue, and that their murderous charge must be stopped before they destroy the Israelites.

In other words, the Tradition finds a tension in the story: God does not like violence, but sometimes God finds violence necessary. Fighting may be a tragic option, but sometimes it is the only way to survive. “The Lord, the Warrior, is God’s Name!”

Another tension found in the story regards the nature and availability of miracles. While the Torah clearly tells us of God’s miracles, the Rabbis were concerned that people would depend on miracles too much—and not do their parts to solve human problems. Thus do we have the Midrash from the Talmud, Sotah 37a, and Numbers Rabbah 13.7 about Nachshon stepping into the water before the waters parted. In addition to resolving the koshi of how it is possible to step into the sea (water!) on dry land, it teaches us that humans have a role in solving our own problems. Even if God helps, we must work on our own behalf.

I find both tensions on my mind as I consider the latest peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians, the one proposed last week by President Trump. Despite his penchant for the superlative, this “deal of the century” is remarkably like all the other peace plans proposed over the last hundred years, and it offers the same questions every other peace plan has asked. How much will it take for the Arabs to agree to Israel’s existence? How much will Israel be willing to give to the Arabs for peace?

It seems foolhardy for Israel to agree with any plan that does not guarantee its safety—or to trust blindly in assurances and treaties that may blow away with the winds of a crisis. Remember the final words of Psalm 29: “The Lord gives strength to our people; the Lord blesses our people with peace.” Put another way, when our hope is peace, a necessary precursor is strength.

It also seems foolhardy to think that anything is permanent in that part of the world (or anywhere). Much has been said about how President Trump’s plan will embolden Israel to annex Jerusalem and the West Bank—or about how President Trump’s move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem has excluded the Palestinians. But, anything moved can be moved back, and anything annexed can be un-annexed if a real peace possibility is present.

Speaking of real peace possibilities: a persistent theme of many has been the need for a “Two State Solution,” one in which Israel and Palestine live next to each other in peace, cooperation, and prosperity. It is a dream of many of us—including J Street and many other Jewish organizations in Israel and America. Some say that the unwillingness of the Palestinians to participate in negotiating the current peace plan means that their voices have been excluded. How can a peace plan proposed by only one side have a chance of succeeding?

This question assumes that the Palestinians have not been participating in the conversation, and perhaps this assumption is fallacious. What if the Two State Solution is merely a myth, a fantasy of our Western desires for everyone to “play nice with each other?” What if the voice of the Palestinians and Arabs has been very much a participant in the conversation for the last 100 years? When every peace plan from the Balfour Declaration to the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan to all the modern versions has been rejected out of hand by our Arab neighbors, is this not a statement of the Arab position—that the only real condition for peace is for Israel as a Jewish State to disappear?

I am sure that there are Arabs and Palestinians who share the same Two State idyllic dream, but how representative are they, and will their desires ever have significant support among their Arab and Palestinian brothers and sisters?

So, on this celebratory Shabbat with its militaristic imagery, I believe that we should remind ourselves of the importance of self-defense and survival. It is one thing to feel compassion for our enemies, but it is another to abandon our defenses and let our enemies complete their bloody quest.
“Adonai oz l’amo yiten. Adonai y’varech et amo va’shalom.
The Lord gives strength to our people; the Lord blesses our people with peace.”

We Are Not God; God Is

January 31st: Bo
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

When we say that Moses’ (and God’s!) demand to Pharaoh is “Sh’lach et ami / Let My people go,” we are giving a summary of close to a dozen demands that Moses places before Pharaoh. In Moses’ and Aaron’s first meeting with Pharaoh, recounted in Exodus 5, the demand is: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let My people go that they may celebrate a festival for Me in the wilderness.” Pharaoh’s response is more than negative; he makes the Hebrew slaves’ work harder by making them gather their own straw for brickmaking. This is also when God seems to decide on the long and drawn-out drama of the Ten Plagues: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘You shall soon see what I will do to Pharaoh: he shall let them go because of a greater might; indeed, because of a greater might he shall drive them from his land.’” (Exodus 6.1)

The second time is not narrated; we read God’s instructions to Moses and Aaron, and then the text just says that they spoke to Pharaoh. This is when Aaron casts down his rod and it turns into a serpent. Unfortunately, Pharaoh has some court sorcerers and magicians who can make their rods turn into serpents, too. And, even though Aaron’s rod/serpent swallows all of the magicians’ rods/serpents, Pharaoh remains unmoved.

The next several times Moses and Aaron appear before Pharaoh, the demand is similar to the first: “Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness.” (Exodus 7.16) In other words, total freedom from slavery does not seem to be included in the demand, though Pharaoh suspects that the slaves will not be coming back—and God’s initial promises to Moses include leaving Egypt permanently and traveling up to the Land of Canaan.

After the fourth plague, we see some negotiating. “Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘Go and sacrifice to your God WITHIN THE LAND.’ But Moses replied, ‘It would not be right to do this, for what we sacrifice to the Lord our God is untouchable to the Egyptians. If we sacrifice that which is untouchable to the Egyptians before their very eyes, will they not stone us? So we must go a distance of three days into the wilderness and sacrifice to the Lord our God as He may command us.’” (Exodus 8.21-23) Pharaoh agrees but later changes his mind, and there are three more plagues.

This is all in last week’s Torah portion, Va-era. When we get to this week’s portion, Bo, the drama increases: God explains the meta-strategy: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display these My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your sons and of your sons’ sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them—in order that you may know that I am the Lord.’” (Exodus 10.1-2) God is making an object lesson of Pharaoh—a man believed to be a god among men—and showing all Egypt, all Israel, and the entire world that certain behaviors are not allowed. God is in charge, and it behooves everyone to understand and acquiesce to the Divine will.

When Moses and Aaron next appear before Pharaoh, they are given permission to go, but there are conditions. “Go, worship the Lord your God! Who are the ones to go?” Moses’ answer? Everyone and everything: “We will all go, young and old: we will go with our sons and daughters, our flocks and herds; for we must observe the Lord’s festival.” Pharaoh thinks he can potchke: “No! Only the menfolk can go and worship the Lord, since that is what you want.” (Exodus 10-8-11)

After two more plagues—locusts and darkness, Pharaoh summons Moses with a proposition. “Go, worship the Lord! Only your flocks and your herds shall be left behind; even your children may go with you.”  (Exodus 10.24) This is a problem for Moses because, as the religion is not yet fully formed, he is not sure what exactly God wants for sacrifices. The Israelites need to take their flocks to make sure they have what God will demand. 

Pharaoh dismisses Moses and Aaron with this strangely prophetic warning: “Be gone from me! Take care not to see me again, for the moment you look upon my face you shall die.” Moses agrees: “You have spoken rightly. I shall not see your face again!” (Exodus 10.28-29)

All though this drama, we see Pharaoh refusing God’s demand, experiencing a plague, relenting and agreeing to let the people go, but then hardening his heart and changing his mind. It is maddening for the reader, and it is maddening for the Egyptians. Even Pharaoh’s courtiers want him to let the Israelites go. “How long shall this one be a snare to us? Let the men go to worship the Lord their God! Are you not yet aware that Egypt is lost?” (Exodus 10.7)

Little do they know that the time for strategizing or negotiating is over. They have committed themselves to evil, and now they are in God’s punishment phase. God is using them all as examples of what happens when people think they are gods and can spurn the laws of decency and fairness.

When I try to look at Pharaoh with empathy, feeling the pain that this great man brings to his people, I find myself focusing on his negotiating. “Okay, you can go, but just the men. Okay, you can all go, but not with your flocks.” He is negotiating as though he has some power—both political and moral. The fact is, however, that he is utterly without power. He is morally bankrupt and incapable of effecting any solution he deems strategically sound. Who knows if God would accept his sincere repentance, but he persists in the fantasy of still being in charge—of still having divine power.

When we are wrong, may we realize it and admit it and not make things worse.
When we are wrong, may we realize that our egos or status are not the most important concerns.
When we are wrong, may we look for ways improve—for ways to repent.

Every Biblical character is a potential role model for us. As much as we may want to emulate someone like Moses or Miriam, let us beware the follies of Pharaoh. Let us search our deeds, compare them to the standard of godliness, and make corrections before it is too late.

Where Was God When We Suffered? Where Is God When We Suffer?

January 24th: Va-era
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

Though the Torah text describes Moses’ responses to God at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3.11) as awe and reluctance (“Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?”), the Midrash also has Moses questioning the Divine plan. As God sketches the plan for Yetziat Mitzrayim, Moses realizes that, with all the plagues and all the repeated negotiations with Pharaoh, the Exodus will take a year. Why, he questions God, can You not free them immediately? During this year, the Israelites will continue to suffer, and many may not even survive to see freedom. God’s first inclination is to destroy Moses for his impudence, but that impulse is checked by God’s sense of compassion. Moses is not arguing for his sake but rather for the sake of the suffering Israelites.

We know that the story of the Exodus has a glorious ending: God bears us “on eagles’ wings” out of Egypt and chooses us as a “treasured possession among all the peoples.”  (Exodus 19.4) However, before this wonderful ending, the Israelites endure some 400 years of slavery. We thank and appreciate God for the Exodus, but we also wonder where God was during all those horrible years of suffering.

In addressing this perplexing and tear-stained question, our Tradition speaks not only about the suffering in Egypt but also about all human suffering. Where is God when people are in pain? Why does God allow the innocent to suffer?

The initial answer, based on Deuteronomy, is that people deserve what they get. Good things are not just good luck; they are rewards for following God’s commandments. Bad things are not just random or bad luck; they are punishments for disobeying God’s commandments. Though the particular sins may not be known, God knows, and suffering people are bidden to search for their hidden sins—in the hope that repentance will nullify the harsh decree.

The problem with this explanation is in human experience and observation. All too often, we see justice turned upside down for too many good suffer and too many evil prosper. In the Book of Job, the Narrator says this directly: though Job is entirely blameless, he and his family suffer nonetheless. Where is God’s justice? The answer in Job is that God’s justice is beyond our understanding. We should trust in God’s justice though we do not understand it.

This answer works for some people, but it does not for others. Though we are assured that God is ultimately just, the evidence is just not supportive, and we search for other and better explanations. The term for this question is theodicy: how can an all-good and all-powerful God can allow or cause evil? Some suggest that there is no God. Some suggest that God is not a conscious intervener, but rather a non-conscious force in the universe that holds everything together and induces us to goodness. Some suggest that God’s justice is not limited to this world—that the scales will be righted in the Afterlife. Lurianic Kabbalah suggests that, while God is all-good, God is not all-powerful. Though extremely powerful, God cannot deal with everything, and, in this absence of Divine power, evil and imperfection arise and do great harm. This idea—called the Limited God—teaches that God needs our help and urges us to tikkun olam, where we combine our godliness with the power of the Divine to repair or perfect the world.

A few Midrashim anticipate this Limited God understanding of the Deity, though they preceded Lurianic Kabbalah by many centuries. In one, the commentator focuses on a mysterious passage in Exodus 24. When Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu and the seventy elders of Israel ascend Mount Sinai to seal the covenant, “They saw the God of Israel: under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity.” A pavement of sapphires!? The Midrashic answer is that this building project is what God built when God was a slave alongside us in Egypt. Though God did not rescue us in those first 400 years of slavery, God was not absent. Indeed, God was with us, laboring with us and suffering with us.

Another Midrash compares God to a mother whose daughter is in labor. The mother cannot solve the problem: the labor is in process and the daughter must go through it. However, the mother can be present with the daughter, comforting her, encouraging her, and helping her through the difficult process. God was like that with us in Egypt: suffering with us, comforting us, and giving us strength to get through the impossible.

A final consideration for this thorny theological question also suggests that God was not absent. God was aware of our plight in Egypt, but God was hoping that we would free ourselves. The clue comes from Exodus 6.6-9 where Moses goes to the Israelite slaves and gives them God’s message: “I am the Lord. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements. And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God.” However this hopeful message falls flat: “But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.” 

Perhaps God was parenting Israel as a parent supervises a child learning to walk or learning to handle things on his/her own. If a parent intervenes every time there is a problem, the child does not learn self-reliance. Similarly, God watched Israel, aware of the suffering but hoping that they would extricate themselves from slavery. As long as was a chance, God waited. However, when the hope died—“their spirits crushed by cruel bondage,” God realized that it was time to intervene.

The long and short of it is that Tradition cannot imagine a God Who does not care or Who is not paying attention—or Who is not present for us in our most difficult moments. We celebrate the Exodus and the incredible miracles when God rescued us, but we should also look for signs of God’s Presence in the midst of our difficulties. God is always with us—watching us, feeling our pride or our pain, encouraging us or comforting us, and always hoping that we will bring forth the Divine energy that we carry within.

Redemption and Purpose: Beginning the Book of Exodus

January 17th: Shemot
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

Jewish Tradition identifies three primary characteristics of our relationship with God. God is our Creator. God is the Revealer of Wisdom. God is our Redeemer. Creation happens, of course, at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, though mystics see it happening continually all the time.

As for the Revelation—the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai—and the Redemption from Egypt, they are the focus of the Book of Exodus which we begin this week. Exodus in summary may be expressed this way: God frees us from Egyptian slavery and reveals to us the Torah at Mount Sinai—giving us freedom and holy purpose in one dramatic process.

The slavery which begins the Book of Exodus is, in some ways, a surprise. Things have been good in the Goshen section of Egypt for many generations. Joseph’s good offices for the sake of Pharaoh earn him honor and his Canaanite relatives a safe haven from the famine afflicting their land. But, as we read in Exodus 1.8-11: “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And, he said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise, in the event of war, they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.’ So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor…”

There is some foreshadowing, however. In Genesis 15.13, God appears to Abram in a dream: “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years; but I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end they shall go free with great wealth.”

There is also Joseph’s prophetic statement which we studied just last week, in Genesis 50: “God will surely take notice of you and bring you up from this land to the land promised on oath to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” Joseph even arranges to be embalmed and taken with the Israelites when that future redemption comes.

Egypt ends up being a very bad place for the Israelites, but only after many years of good life there. This is, unfortunately, a pattern of Jewish history—and of human history in general. Life is not permanent, and the places we find good to live are not good permanently. The only thing permanent is God—and God’s call, and we are left to be flexible and innovative as we negotiate the temporary nature of everything. 

Many of us have visited archeological sites in the Middle East—or read about them in books like James Michener’s The Source, and we have learned about the curious phenomenon of tel’s. Hebrew for hill, a tel is a hill formed by numerous layers of civilization. People choose a place to live for a variety of reasons—fresh water, fertile land, good hunting, defensive topography, and they live there, sometimes for many generations. Something happens, however, and the city dies: the survivors move away, and dust settles on the site, sometimes for hundreds of years. Later, another group finds the site desirable and builds their city there. They live on the site for many generations, but something happens, and they abandon the site. More dust collects, and their city too is buried. When this process happens over and over again—over a several thousand year history, the site gets progressively higher as city is built over city again and again. Digging into these tel’s found throughout the Middle East reveals layer upon layer of ancient civilization and give us all the benefits of archaeology. It also reminds us of the impermanence of our existence on earth—and of our resilience in adapting to new and different situations.

Though America is a comparatively new country in Jewish history, we have been here long enough to have made many moves. The history of our own congregation is indicative of that mobility. The original Jews in Central Pennsylvania settled in places like Lock Haven, Altoona, Lewistown, and Bellefonte. Just 100 years ago, Jewish students at Penn State attended mandatory chapel led by a rabbi who traveled weekly from Williamsport. Demographics have changed things, and now we are the most thriving Jewish congregation between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh—with many of the other congregations dwindling or out of operation.

Fortunately, our Jewish value of respecting our ancestors and our past has manifested itself in taking over the legacies of previous Central Pennsylvania congregations. We have the Torah scrolls from the Philipsburg and Clearfield congregations—and include their former members in our congregation. We also have the Yahrtzeit Plaques from Clearfield and include those names in our weekly Yahrtzeits. We have taken responsibility for the Jewish cemetery in Philipsburg and a Civil-War era Jewish cemetery in Bellefonte.

Fortunately, other congregations have taken up the same mantle, remembering the original Jewish communities that served our people in their sojourning in many small towns throughout America. I remember with particular fondness visiting Temple Emanu-el in Birmingham and seeing the Jasper Room, a meeting room filled with the sacred artifacts of the little congregation in Jasper, Alabama, where I served for two years. One can find similar remembrances in the Museum of the South Jewish Experience in Utica, Mississippi. The Ark is from the old Temple in Vicksburg; the chandeliers are from the old Temple in Canton, Mississippi. Windows and pews and Torahs reflect the many places where our people sojourned and where they sought God’s Presence.

Egypt was a fine place for many generations, but things changed, and we journeyed back to the Land of Israel. It was a fine place for many centuries, but things changed—in 586 BCE and again in 70 CE. Then, with God’s help and our own faith, we sought other places to live and pursue our holy mission—striving to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19) and a “light unto the nations” (Isaiah 49.6 and 42.6). Now, some of us are back in the Land of Israel, and others pursue our lives in other places, but the mission remains the same: to bring God’s wisdom to all the world and to show how life can be holy. In a world of impermanence, the only permanent things are God and God’s call to holiness.

Loyalty and Self--and the LSU Fight Song

January 10th: Vayechi
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

Two wisdom texts present themselves this week. The first, of course, is our Torah portion. After the death of Jacob, Joseph’s brothers worry that he will exact punishment for their sins against him—for selling him into slavery and abandoning him for years. “But Joseph said to them, ‘Have no fear! Am I a substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result—the survival of many people.’” (Genesis 50.18)

My second text is one of the Louisiana State University’s fight songs:
“Hey, Fightin’ Tigers, fight all the way!
Play, Fightin’ Tigers, win the game today!
You’ve got the know-how; you’re doing fine.
Hang on to the ball as you hit the wall,
And smash right through the line!
You’ve got to go for a touchdown, run up the score:
Make Mike the Tiger stand right up and roar!
Give it all of your might as you fight tonight
And keep the goal in view: victory for LSU!”

In both texts, we have an awareness that the individual’s fate is less important than the group’s—or, to put it another way, that the vicissitudes of an individual’s life can be transformed into significance by virtue of their contributions to a greater goal. In the case of Joseph, maturity and piety help him see that his sufferings are merely steps along the way of a greater good: “Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result—the survival of many people.” In the case of the LSU football team, the hope is that the individual players will use their talents in a concerted way and thus deliver a victory for the greater community: “Victory for LSU!”

Of course, one of the problems of group dedication and loyalty is that the group’s needs may not be in the best interest of the individual who is being asked to sacrifice. One thinks of how many athletes suffer lifelong injuries acquired in the pursuit of temporal glory. Is it team loyalty? Or, does the danger dissolve in the joy than an athlete feels when doing that which he/she has trained so hard to do? As the Psalmist reflects on the sun’s enthusiasm in lighting up the world, “It is like an athlete, rejoicing to run the course.” (Psalm 19.6)

One also thinks of the sacrifice some athletes are asked to make sitting on the bench. At Ohio State in 2014-2015, Cardale Jones was willing to sit on the bench behind the first and second string quarterbacks. Little did anyone imagine that both would be injured and that Jones would lead Ohio State to the National Championship. On the other hand, Joe Burrow (Burreaux) was not willing to sit on the Ohio State bench, transferred to LSU, and has had a pretty good year (leading the Tigers to the national championship game and winning the Heisman Trophy). There is also the case of Jalen Hurts, an outstanding quarterback at Alabama who lost the starting job to Tua Tagovailoa and then transferred to Oklahoma. No one could anticipate Tagovailoa’s season-ending injury in November, but, when it happened, Hurts was long gone, and Alabama was left wallowing outside of the BCS for the first time in many years. There is also the case of Alabama coach Nick Saban, now known in Louisiana as Nick Satan for showing disloyalty by leaving LSU and going (very successfully!) to their arch rival, Alabama. Loyalty is important, but to what?

Getting back to the Bible, let us consider the many ways loyalty is a factor in the Joseph saga. Joseph shows loyalty to his father but not his brothers when he gives bad reports about their work. His brothers obviously betray him and their father when they put him in the pit and lie about his “death.” He shows loyalty to his employer Potiphar—and to God’s morality—when he refuses Mrs. Potiphar’s amorous advances: “How then could I do this most wicked thing, and sin before God?” (Genesis 39.9) He shows loyalty to God when he attributes his ability to interpret dreams to God. Pharaoh says, “I have heard it said of you that for you to hear a dream is to tell its meaning,” but Joseph responds, “Not I! God will see to Pharaoh’s welfare!” (Genesis 41.15-16)

Joseph and Pharaoh show a kind of loyalty to the Egyptian populace, storing the excess grain during the seven years of plenty and then distributing it during the seven years of famine, but the loyalty comes at a price: Pharaoh grabs all the peasants’ land. Pharaoh shows loyalty to Joseph by taking in the Hebrews during the famine and giving them the region of Goshen, but, after several generations, a new Pharaoh “knows not Joseph…” (Exodus 1.8) and imposes slavery.

Though Joseph eventually shows loyalty to his family, the Torah does not explain why he does not go searching for them when he ascends to the right hand of Pharaoh. Even if he is busy, such an important personage could send agents to find his father and brothers and have some kind of contact. That he does not suggests a continuing hurt on his part—and a sense of profound betrayal: why do they not search him out and buy him out of slavery?

We have no indication that Joseph suffers tranquilly during all those years in slavery and prison. The greater Divine purpose he recognizes in Genesis 50 (“Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result—the survival of many people.”) seems to be an insight he develops after many years of hurt and anger. This is why Joseph is one of the best Biblical examples for us: he starts off imperfect and improves with age. A spoiled, impetuous, conceited, tattle-tale, he matures into responsibility, piety, and forgiveness. At the end of his saga, he is a much better man than when it begins.

As for loyalty, it is—as are most noble aspirations—a matter of balancing the opportunities for service with the need to take care of oneself. As Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Pzhysha might have said today in referencing the college football transfer portal, “Every player should have two pockets. In one, there should be a piece of paper saying, ‘I am but dust and ashes: a part of the team to which I dedicate myself.’ And, in the other, there should be a piece of paper saying, ‘For my sake was the whole world—or, at least, the Heisman Trophy—created.’”

Life Can Be Messy

December 20th: Vayeshev
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

This week’s Torah portion has one of the strangest stories in the Bible. It involves Judah and his two older sons, Er and Onan, and Er’s wife, Tamar.

We begin with an unexpected and unexplained death: “Judah got a wife for Er, his first-born; her name was Tamar. But, Er, Judah’s first-born, was displeasing to the Lord, and the Lord took his life.” (Genesis 35.6-7) We do not know what was displeasing about Er. One possibility is that this kind of Biblical description is post hoc, ergo proctor hoc reasoning. Since young people do not die, and since no one killed him, it must have been God—Who must have had a reason. In the absence of the kind of medical explanations we have today, the ancients just attributed such mysterious occurrences to God.  We find this kind of explanation several times in the Bible, and it may be more a figure of speech than a theological judgment—something akin to the way we say, “God knows,” as a sign of our exasperation.

In the wake of Er’s death, we have the first mention of the ancient Yibbum or Levirate Marriage: when a married man dies before fathering a child, his brother is required to marry his widow. “Then Judah said to Onan, ‘Join with your brother’s wife and do your duty by her as a brother-in-law, and provide offspring for your brother.” (Genesis 38.8) Since the dead brother can no longer provide a child for his wife, his brother takes on this obligation.

Some see this as a provision for the Hebrew Bible’s understanding of the afterlife. The teaching was that, when people die and go to Sheol, there is no reward or punishment other than the dead’s awareness of how their descendants are doing. Thus, one of the best blessings in the Bible is, “May your descendants possess the gates of their enemies,” and one of the worst curses is, “May you have no descendants.” This may also express a concern about the dead man’s name and share of the land. And, this might present a solution to the problematic status of the widow. In a society where a woman’s status is defined by her relationship to men—as a daughter, a sister, a wife, or a mother, a childless widow has no status or protection. Getting her a child gives her a status in society.

His obligation to his brother or sister-in-law notwithstanding, Onan does not fully embrace this custom/commandment. “But Onan, knowing that the seed would not count as his, let it go to waste whenever he joined with his brother’s wife, so as not to provide offspring for his brother.” (Genesis 38.9) There seem to be three levels of sin in Onan’s behavior. First, notice how the text describes his offense against his brother: “so as not to provide offspring for his brother.” Of course, there is also the way he is using Tamar—putting her through the humiliation of sex with a man she does not love and then denying her the possibility of motherhood. And, there is the sin against God of “wasting his seed,” letting his semen go onto the ground. As the Torah puts it, “What he did was displeasing to the Lord, and God took his life also.”

Tradition focuses on the “wasting his seed” sin and has seen Onan’s punishment as a warning for any ejaculation outside of intercourse. Adding a layer of legend to the prohibition is the story and fear of Lilith, Adam’s first wife. Tradition explains that nocturnal emissions are a result of the succubus Lilith, procuring semen so that she can give birth to demons, and there are a number of meditations and prayer practices to protect men against such an occurrence. Among the famous techniques is a series of Psalms, prescribed by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov. This concern about “wasting seed” has also been the cause of Tradition’s prohibition of condoms for contraception and, in some cases, the collection of semen for in vitro fertilization. In the teaching of Roman Catholicism, this story is the basis for the prohibition of all forms of artificial contraception.

Meanwhile, Judah is out of adult sons, and Tamar is out of husband possibilities. Judah suggests that she return to her family of origin and wait until his little boy, Shelah, grows up. Judah is not really planning on getting them together because he believes her to be bad luck. “He too might die like his brothers.” (Genesis 38/11) Judah seems to be hoping that Tamar will forget or be married off to someone else.

I’m not sure what to think about Judah. On the one hand, he seems to be unconcerned for Tamar and her grief and her future. On the other hand, he must be devastated at the loss of his two sons—and fearful for the future of his remaining son. It is a terrible family crisis.

When Shelah grows up, he is not matched with Tamar, so Tamar takes matters into her own hands. She disguises herself as a prostitute at a place frequented by her father-in-law, has relations with him, and finally gets pregnant. When Judah hears about her pregnancy, he is furious about her behavior—not realizing his role in the pregnancy—and insists on her execution. Then, when he confronts her, she shows him his seal and his cord—which he had given her as a pledge of payment. Realizing his mistakes, Judah relents and admits, “She is more in the right than I, inasmuch as I did not give her my son Shelah.” The Torah adds that he was not intimate with her again. (Genesis 38.26)

What are we to make of this messy, messy story? One lesson for me is that life was as complicated for our ancestors as it is for us. We are not in control. Often, we cannot understand why things happen. We feel both the appeal and the constraints of social convention. We are challenged by competing ideals and conflicting priorities—and our thinking is often clouded by sadness and fear and uncertainty. We yearn for security but often reel at the unknown and the unexpected. We strive for certainty, but everything except God is fleeting.

Perhaps this is why our Tradition includes this blessing every morning: 
Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech ha’olam, hamechin mitz’aday gaver.
We praise You, O Lord, our God, Ruler of All, Who makes the ground firm beneath our feet.
Sometimes, we give thanks for reality. Sometimes, we hope for a better reality.
May we be blessed with solid footing.

Wrestling and Transformation

December 13th: Vayishlach
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

Each weekday, the Union for Reform Judaism sends out a message entitled Ten Minutes of Torah, a consideration of some aspect of Judaism and Jewish life. The Monday feature always focuses on the weekly Torah portion, with a main commentary and then a secondary essay.
(These daily messages and subscriptions are available at ReformJudaism.org.)

For Vayishlach (Genesis 32.4 – 36.43), Rabbi Dan Moskovitz focuses on the changes that both brothers, Jacob and Esau, make in order for their relationship to work. As Jacob returns to Canaan after two decades in Syria, his brother Esau comes to greet him with 400 armed men.

As Rabbi Moskovitz puts it, Jacob must wrestle “with God and his own destiny. What does God want from him? How should he protect and enlarge the sacred relationship with God that he has inherited from his father? Must he vanquish Esau to prove his worthiness as a leader of the Jewish people? How should he apologize to someone he hurt so deeply and can he ever be forgiven?”

The famous wrestling match can be interpreted in several ways. Perhaps Jacob wrestles with an angel. Perhaps he wrestles with God. Perhaps he wrestles with Esau. Perhaps he wrestles with himself. After this struggle, however, he emerges a new man. Again, Rabbi Moskovitz: “He is not the young boy who bargained for his brother’s birthright over a bowl of soup; he is not the adolescent who stole his brother’s blessing with trickery and gall. He is now Yisrael; a man who knows his own flaws and limitations, a man who bears the scars and burdens of his past and allows them to inform his present perspective. Jacob is humble and pragmatic. He limps toward his brother, his hip still sore from the struggle of the night before, and with repentance and humility he asks his brother’s forgiveness.”

The result, according to the text, is rapprochement: “Esau ran to greet Jacob. He embraced him and, falling on his neck, he kissed him; and they wept.” (Genesis 33.4) Jacob transforms his arrogance to humility. Esau transforms his fury to love. In this transformation and maturity, their relationship can flourish.

 
In the second essay, Rabbi Joe Black makes an interesting application. Modern Judaism has also had to wrestle, and this wrestling has led to some interesting transformations. “Over the past 146 years, Reform Judaism in North America has wrestled with change. We have been on the forefront of civil rights, women’s equality, patrilineal descent, LGBTQ recognition and celebration, interfaith outreach, Jewish camping, Progressive Zionism, and a host of other causes…Our lay and professional leaders have never shied away from exploring and confronting painful issues—from within and without. While not always easily, we have grown and gained strength from our struggles.”

Among the struggles we have faced are the changing attitudes toward Jewish affiliation and Jewish participation in the modern world. Ever since the gates of the ghetto were opened, we Jews have been much more autonomous in structuring the Jewishness of our lives. This has resulted in a continually changing demographic reality for Jewish institutions. In order to command the attention of modern Jews, we must figure out what must be changed and what must remain the same. While ours is a tradition in which the forms and ideas of the past are a vital part of our identity, the history of Judaism has been one of adaptation and transformation.

Here are some questions with which we have struggled: Do we maintain the ancient sacrificial system, or do we adapt to a Temple-less reality by substituting prayers for the animal and grain sacrifices? Do we retain the sole authority of the Torah, or do we enhance it with the Oral Torah: the Talmud? Do we insist only on the Torah’s holy days, or do we add new holy days—like Purim, Chanukah, Tisha B’Av, Yom Hashoah, or Yom Ha’atzma’ut—when new situations call for religious observance?  Do we keep the old words of the traditional prayer book, or do we add our Matriarchs’ names to the Amidah, expressing our respect for Jewish women of every generation? Do we make other changes to our prayer books—enhancing our spiritual reach and expressing, as the Psalmist puts it, “a new song unto the Lord?”

Sometimes, the changes work, and sometimes they do not. Back in the 1800’s, some congregations tried to do away with B’rit Milah (circumcision). Others tried to discontinue Bar Mitzvah. Some tried to shift our Sabbath worship to Sunday—so as to better accommodate American life.  Though each of these changes was based on logic and sound reasoning, they did not resonate with our Jewish sensibilities, and they were ultimately abandoned. Other changes, on the other hand, have endured.

The task for our congregations and for each individual Jew is to work on our Jewishness—to fashion a functional relationship between Heaven and Earth and to transform both.

A closing thought from our prayer book:
“We Jews who are called The Children of Israel should always remember how we got the name. It was the name given to our grandfather Jacob—Jacob who wrestled the angel, Jacob who would not let go. Israel they called him for he was a wrestler. Israel they call us for we are wrestlers, too. We wrestle with God as we search for wisdom. We wrestle with people as we struggle for justice. And, we wrestle with ourselves as we make ourselves better and more holy. Yes, we Jews are the Children of Israel, the children and grandchildren of a man who wrestled an angel.”

Lessons From Mother Leah

December 6th: Vayetze
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
The “soap-opera” of our founding families gets pretty intense this week and can teach us a number of lessons.

First, the story shows us how one misbehaving person can cause trouble for many others. When Jacob—on the run from his brother Esau—arrives at his cousins’ home in Syria, he first meets his cousin Rachel. Then, he meets her father Laban whom the Rabbis know will soon be notorious. Thus they see warning signs in the simplest of gestures. “On hearing the news of his sister’s son Jacob, Laban ran to greet him; he embraced him and kissed him, and took him into his house.” (Genesis 29.13)  The Rabbis explain that this is no regular greeting. Laban’s hugging is to inspect Jacob’s clothes for jewels and other gifts. They even suggest that his kiss involves sticking his tongue inside Jacob’s mouth to see if any jewels are hidden there. Apparently, Laban remembers the many gifts Abraham’s servant brought when he came to find a wife for Isaac (Rebekah). He figures that the Canaan family is rich, and he is only hospitable because he wants some of their money.

Jacob and Rachel fall in love with each other, and Jacob works for seven years to pay the bride price. However, the wedding is not what they expect. “Laban gathered all the people of the place and made a feast. When evening came, he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob; and he cohabited with her…When morning came, there was Leah!” (Genesis 29.23-25)

Jacob’s objection focuses on his disappointment—but not Leah’s! “What is this you have done to me? I was in your service for Rachel! Why did you deceive me?!”  Laban explains, “It is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older. Wait until the bridal week of this one is over and we will give you that one too, provided you serve me another seven years.” (Genesis 29.25-27)

We can sense Jacob’s disappointment, frustration, and sense of betrayal, but what about Leah’s? She does not even get a week of real love. Thinking only of Rachel, “Jacob waited out the bridal week of the one…” Though Jacob and Rachel marry, their family life—and Leah’s!—is fraught with tension. Thus does Laban’s “bait and switch” put both of his daughters—and his son-in-law and servants and grandchildren—into a very unpleasant and difficult situation. There are lots of ways this story could progress, but Laban’s dishonesty and greediness bring misery and life-long dissatisfaction to a whole community.

Can a family or organization protect itself against such a problematic person? Perhaps, but it takes an awareness of the person’s inappropriate tendencies and enough moral strength to resist. Part of politeness involves flexibility—accommodating ourselves to another’s preferences. This usually works fine, but some people do not temper their preferences or think of those whom they push or inconvenience. Or, they may regard other people’s politeness as a weakness to be exploited. Resisting such pushiness requires principled firmness—and a willingness to risk anger and pushback. We do not have to acquiesce. We have a right to our own principles and standards—and the safety and functionality of our families or organizations. Sometimes, radical acceptance and affability is less a virtue than an opening for violation.

A second lesson regards the way people can adapt to less than ideal situations. Though Leah is not loved and treasured the way she should be loved and treasured, she seems to make a life for herself in this polygamous household. All we know from the Torah is that she participates in the marital dynamic and gives birth to six sons and a daughter. We do not know much about her actual relationships—with her sister, children, and husband, but one can imagine her functioning within the limitations of her life and seeking the various satisfactions that life can bring.

 (For a possible glimpse inside Leah’s family life, consider the extended modern Midrash, The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant.)

So often, we focus on the crisis or disappointment or injury that “ruins” one’s life. There should be no doubt that terrible things happen and cause future difficulties, but the story does not necessarily end with the trauma. In so many cases and with God’s help, the human spirit can be resilient and learn to live within limitations. An example I always remember is that of a member in a congregation I served many years ago. This particular gentleman had a progressive intestinal problem that required surgery every few years to remove more and more of his insides. From his mid-twenties, he had needed various bags attached to his bowels to accommodate his body’s waste. Despite this extremely challenging medical and personal situation—one which most agree “ruined” his life, he was able to have a career, to marry, to have a full physical and sexual life, fathering and raising three fine children. He was also active in civic organizations and the synagogue---leading services when I was out of town. Among other things, he spoke about his difficulties and abilities publicly, speaking of the possibilities nonetheless present in a really difficult situation. No one should doubt the difficulty of his life, but all should rejoice that he was able to find much joy and accomplishment in the midst of his limitations.

There are those traumas which cannot be overcome. There are injuries that do not heal. The good fortune of some who can and have recovered does not minimize the real pain and difficulty that others face. However, in the infinite possibilities of life, there are joys that are possible—and they can be sought. Our Mother Leah reminds us of this ever-present possibility: despite unfairness and disappointments, there are blessings. May her example help us to find them.

Keeping the Faith

November 29th: Toldot
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

Of the three Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), Isaac is the least exciting. Whereas Abraham starts a new religion, argues with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and passes the test of the Binding of Isaac, and whereas Jacob talks his brother out of the birthright, talks his father out of the better blessing, sees God at the top of the Ladder to Heaven, wrestles an angel, and fathers the Twelve Tribes of Israel, Isaac garners far fewer “headlines.” He is born, is loved by his parents, is almost sacrificed by his father, gets married, prefers his manlier son to the homebody, and gets fooled by his wife and younger son when it comes to giving out blessings.

This last confusion is only possible because “his eyes were too dim to see,” (Genesis 27.1) a condition the Midrash attributes to his almost-death up on Mount Moriah. While God knows all along that this is just a test of Abraham’s loyalty—that God will not let Abraham go through with the sacrifice, the angels are not aware of God’s plan. When they see Abraham lift up the slaughtering knife over Isaac’s throat, they burst into sobs, and their tears flood into Isaac’s eyes—rendering him visually impaired.

One could summarize Isaac’s life and career with the words weakness, passivity, and victim-hood, but I think that there is much more to his long and complex life. There is more to life than just the headlines.

One commentary suggests that Isaac is not a victim of his father’s zealotry—that he volunteers to be sacrificed. If, as one Midrash puts it, Sarah has a prophetic vision of Abraham putting the knife on Isaac’s throat and dies at the moment of the almost sacrifice, then that would make Isaac thirty-seven years old—old enough to wrestle his elderly father and thwart God’s instruction. According to this Midrash, Isaac has as much piety and faith as his father, and should be seen as a willing and faithful participant.

Another commentary suggests that Isaac is not fooled by Rebekah’s and Jacob’s subterfuge. Think about the absurdity of their tactics. No matter how hairy Esau is, it is hard to believe that he is hairy as a goat. Moreover, Isaac recognizes Jacob’s voice and detects Jacob’s piety in his explanation of how he gets the meat so quickly—“Because the Lord your God granted me good fortune” (Genesis 27.20). Then, note the fact that God goes along with Isaac’s blessing—giving Jacob the spiritual leadership. God does not have to acquiesce to Isaac’s words—especially if Isaac speaks them by mistake. The fact that God and Isaac agree that Jacob is to be the new Patriarch suggests that Isaac is not fooled—is not a victim, but rather is involved in the plot to ease a volatile Esau out of any spiritual leadership expectations.

There is a passage in this week’s Torah portion that speaks of Isaac’s particular role in God’s long-term Jewish plan: “There was a famine in the land—aside from the previous famine that had occurred in the days of Abraham—and Isaac went to Abimelech, king of the Philistines, in Gerar.” Why did Isaac stay so close—less than a day’s walk from the family homestead in Beersheba? “The Lord had appeared to him and said, ‘Do not go down to Egypt; stay in the land which I point out to you. Reside in this land, and I will be with you and bless you; I will assign all these lands to you and to your heirs, fulfilling the oath that I swore to your father Abraham. I will make your heirs as numerous as the stars of heaven, and assign to your heirs all these lands, so that all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your heirs—inasmuch as Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge: My commandments, My laws, and My teachings.’ So Isaac stayed in Gerar.” (Genesis 26.1-6)

Life gives different people different roles, and, while some are called to move and be revolutionaries, others are called to stay and maintain. God wants Isaac to stay and keep the new religion going, and Isaac does this successfully. He too is a servant of the Most High.

In explaining his Developmental View of Jewish History, Ellis Rivkin notes that each generation must decide on its response to its inherited religious tradition. Most of the time throughout Jewish History, the response has been repetition or continuation. Sometimes, important changes in reality led to variations on the theme—small changes that kept the tradition going. Sometimes, however, the nature of reality changed so drastically that a seismic change became necessary—one Rivkin terms a mutation or quantum leap. Such changes are relatively few in our history, and Abraham’s call and mission can be termed the first. Then, there was the shift away from Prophecy after we returned to Judea from the Babylonian Exile (circa 500 BCE). A few centuries later, there was the discovery of the Oral Torah as Rabbinic Judaism responded to Hellenism (circa 165 BCE). And, there was the modern development of individual autonomy that led to progressive forms of Judaism: Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist.

Though these movements are prone to continuing development, not everyone is called upon to be a revolutionary and change the religious world. There is much value—as there has been throughout most of Jewish History—in maintaining the faith and practicing it, allowing the contributions of the ancestors to guide us and inspire us and help us in our relationship with God.

While there are certainly moments when action is necessary and when things need changing, the urge to improve things can often devolve into self-indulgence and attempts to make the world revolve around us. This is where humility can be helpful, and this is where we can study the value of modest continuity and faithfulness. Isaac may not have gotten the headlines that his father and son garnered, but his is an example of consistent and persistent holiness that is also worthy of our attention.

Even Patriarchs Need Religious School!

November 22nd: Hayeh Sarah
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

This week’s portion, entitled The Life of Sarah, is really about her death and its aftermath. It begins, “The life of Sarah—the span of Sarah’s life—came to one hundred and twenty-seven years. Sarah died in Kiriat-Arba—now Hebron—in the land of Canaan; and Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her.”

The ancient Sages notice that this story of her death comes just after the story of the Binding of Isaac, and they speculate a connection. Unaware of Abraham’s intentions on Mount Moriah, Sarah suddenly has a moment of prophetic vision and sees her husband holding a slaughtering knife over their son’s throat. Shocked beyond comprehension, she drops dead—not knowing that God is just testing Abraham and that Isaac will be saved.

If this Midrash is true—that Sarah has no idea what Abraham is planning, then what does Sarah think is going to be the purpose of the Father-Son excursion? The Sages imagine her asking Abraham about his plans and receiving the following answer: “I am taking our son to a place of religious education.” From Sarah’s point of view, this is great news, and she readily agrees.

And, for what it’s worth, there is an indication that Abraham is telling the truth. Note the end of Akedat Yitzchak, after God stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, and after Abraham sacrifices a ram in Isaac’s stead: “Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they departed together for Beersheba; and Abraham stayed in Beersheba.” (Genesis 22.19) Despite the fact that Isaac is saved, there is no mention of Isaac joining his father and the servants for the return trip. Where is he? The Sages suggest that Abraham leaves Isaac there at Mount Moriah/Jerusalem—at the Academy of Shem and Eber. It is the yeshiva where the ancients study God’s ways.

As in all Midrashic speculation, this suggestion is based on a few koshi’s, anomalies in the Torah’s text. The story of Shem and Eber’s ancient yeshiva begins with the koshi of Genesis 11’s incredibly long life-spans—with people living for hundreds and hundreds of years. If such longevity is true, then some of these pre-Abrahamic people are alive long enough to know their great-great-great-great-etc. grandchildren. In particular, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob could know 600 year old Shem, the son of Noah, and 400 year old Eber, his great-grandson!

Then, there is a mysterious passage in Genesis 14, where Abraham goes to a place called Salem and gives a tenth of his war proceeds to a priest of God Most High named Melchizedek. There is no further explanation of who he is or what he is doing operating a place of worship. But, putting these two anomalies together, the Rabbis identify this Melchizedek as none other than Shem, the son of Noah, and the place of worship is identified as an ancient religious center where people worship and learn Torah. The fact that the place is called Salem—which sounds a lot like Jerusalem—seals the deal. It is obvious that Jerusalem is a religious center long before King David, and that this is the place where Abraham brings Isaac for the test and for religious education. 

As with all Midrashic speculation, the koshi's’ “answer” is only an entrée to the moral lesson—in this case the importance of education. Learning is so important that even the greatest of our ancestors need it too. How else, the Sages ask, could someone grow up to be a Patriarch? They need to study God’s ways somewhere, and the anomaly of Shem and Eber’s long life spans AND the mystery of a priest of God Most High (El Elyon) in Salem are used to teach us that all generations need a Torah education.

While the Torah speaks more of Abraham and less of Sarah, we all know the importance of women and mothers in families AND the role they play in educating their children to be moral and curious and hard-working. Notice the way the Rabbis focus on Sarah’s permission in the Midrash: without it, Abraham cannot take Isaac—regardless of God’s command. It stands to reason that Sarah has a lot to do with Isaac’s development as a pious and righteous man—a man who can become a Patriarch. And, we have a Scriptural clue of how precious Sarah is to Isaac. Toward the end of this week’s portion, after Rebekah has been chosen by Abraham’s servant to be Isaac’s wife, and after Rebekah has agreed to the marriage, the servant brings her back to Canaan where she meets her future husband. “Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife. Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.” (Genesis 24.67) Imagine the devotion of a son who keeps his deceased mother’s tent intact—despite the fact that they are semi-nomadic shepherds who move around following their flocks to pasture land. It seems that he has her tent moved and reassembled every time they make camp—as a sign of how important she is in his life.

Insecurity Then and Now

November 15th: Va’yera
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

There is a lot of excitement in this week’s Torah portion. God and two angels visit Abraham and Sarah and announce that a baby will be born to them in the next year—even though both are far beyond their fertile years. God discusses the situation in Sodom and Gomorrah with Abraham, sends two angels to investigate the wicked cities, and destroys them both with fire and brimstone, but saves the only righteous people there, Lot and his family. In the aftermath, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt (God told her not to look back!), and Lot’s daughters trick him into impregnating them—thinking that they are the only humans left. Then Sarah gets pregnant and gives birth to a son in her old age. She also decides that Abraham’s mistress Hagar and her son have no place in the camp, and she insists that Abraham send them away. God agrees, and Abraham experiences great pain expelling Hagar and their son Ishmael. Then, things get worse, God calls upon Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and faith is put to the test. It is a very busy and theologically significant portion.

Tucked into the middle of all this drama is an obscure story—a strange incident that happens more than once in the Patriarchal period. Abraham and Sarah travel to a new place and, in the interest of security, they tell a lie: that Abraham and Sarah are not husband and wife, but rather brother and sister. It happens this week when they travel to Gerar—a city close to Beer Sheva in the Negev, and it happens in last week’s portion when they travel to Egypt.

In both cases, the beautiful Sarah is taken into the Pharaoh’s or King’s harem as a wife, but, in both cases, there is no sexual contact.  God takes care of that. In last week’s portion (Genesis 12), God afflicts Pharaoh and his household “with mighty plagues on account of Sarah.” The Torah does not specify the plague, but the Rabbis suggest that it was universal impotence.

In this week’s case, with Abimelech of Gerar, God comes to Abimelech in a dream: “You are to die because of the woman that you have taken, for she is a married woman.” Abimelech answers God with, “O Lord, will you slay people even though they are innocent? Abraham himself told me that she is his sister, and she told me that he is her brother. When I took her into my house as a wife, my heart was blameless and my hands were clean.” God then answers him, as the dream continues: “I knew that you did this with a blameless heart, and so I kept you from sinning against Me. That was why I did not let you touch her. Therefore, restore the man’s wife—since he is a prophet, he will intercede for you—to save your life. If you fail to restore her, know that you shall die, you and all that are yours.” (Genesis 20.3-7)

(For what it’s worth, Isaac does essentially the same thing when he grows up and marries Rebekah. In Genesis 26, they journey to Gerar, and they tell King Abimelech—perhaps the same Abimelech as in the Abraham story; perhaps another king with the same name—that Rebekah is Isaac’s sister. In this case, God does not have to intervene: Abimelech happens to see Isaac and Rebekah fondling each other, and he figures out that something is fishy.)

The question for us is: Why would our ancient forefathers say that their wives are their sisters?

In all three cases, we have a similar explanation. Abraham and Isaac are afraid of the strangers among whom they are living, and they worry that the locals will kill them so they can marry their widows. Calling a wife a sister is thus a survival strategy in a hostile place—a plan based on an intense feeling of insecurity. It teaches us how tenuous our ancestors’ travels and travails were. Though we may look at them as giants of faith who never hesitated or faltered, theirs were lives of challenge and risk. They followed God’s mission because they were convinced of its importance, but they faced the same uncertainties and fears that we do. Life is not a sure thing, but with faith and resourcefulness, we do our best to rise to the occasions that greet us. May we search for faith and fortitude, and may God bless us and protect us.

There is one additional and curious detail. In the second incident, the one with Abraham and Sarah and Abimelech of Gerar, Abraham offers another explanation. When confronted by a visibly shaken and betrayed Abimelech, Abraham explains: “I thought that surely there is no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife. And besides, she is in truth my sister, my father’s daughter though not my mother’s; and she became my wife. So, when God made me wander from my father’s house, I said to her, ‘Let this be the kindness that you shall do me: whatever place we come to, say there of me, He is my brother.’” (Genesis 20.11-13)

It could be that the laws of consanguinity were different in those days—though the contemporaneous story of Lot and his daughters decries incest and uses it as an insult to the Moabites and the Ammonites. Was the case of Abraham and Sarah just an exception? Or, could it explain why, after so many years of marriage, they had no children? Could their “marriage” have been less than a full marriage—as were some of the polygamous marriages of the early Mormons? Some wives were sexual partners, but others were simply members of the household. And, since I am speculating, could the arrival of Isaac be physically possible only after Abram’s and Sarai’s conversion and their marriage becomes complete? Whatever the real explanation, we are left scratching our heads.

Interruptions?

November 8th: Lech Lecha
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

Recently, a friend and I were re-negotiating a lunch meeting. It had been on our schedules for quite a while, but, as we commiserated together, “Life sometimes gets in the way.” It was not an atypical conversation, but, afterwards, the philosopher in me wondered whether it was life that got in the way—or our original plans. We make our plans not knowing what interesting and challenging situations may arise and necessitate logistical adjustments.

Think about Moses, for instance. While we look at his encounter with God at the Burning Bush as the start of real significance, how does he regard it? He is eighty years old, set in his career as a shepherd in his wife’s family business. He is comfortable in his home and society and all the joys of tribal life among the Midianites. Though his immigration from Egypt and immersion into the Midianite culture takes only a single paragraph in the Torah, he has been there for more than forty years. He is at home in Midian—so much so that he thinks of Egypt as the strange land.

So, when God interrupts this comfortable life and sends him off on the hardest errand of his life—one that will literally consume his life, Moses has got to feel disrupted.

The same could be said for Abram, whose story begins in this week’s portion. He is seventy-five years old, an immigrant from Ur of the Chaldees (at the mouth of the Tigres and Euphrates River system), and has been settled with his family in Haran, Syria, for many, many years. All of a sudden and out of nowhere, God appears to him and interrupts his life: “The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you;
I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.’” (Genesis 12.1-3)

To us, it sounds like an incredible opportunity—the beginning of true meaningfulness, but, to Abram and Sarai, it is totally unexpected and a disruption in their lives. We are not privy to their conversations about such a radically life-changing move, but move they do, and the rest is history.

My point here is that the unexpected call—this detour—turns out to reveal their lives’ true and elevating purposes. Is God’s call what gets in their way, or is it their other pre-existing plans? Is their true purpose what they have on their calendars, or is it the holiness and destiny which they have not hitherto expected?

Planning is important—for all sorts of reasons, but many are the opportunities that arise unexpectedly and which might give our lives much more meaning than what they interrupt.

Let me share with you one of my favorite stories, Stranger on a Bus, from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s book, Invisible Lines of Connection (Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, Vermont, 1996). It is a true story, and it shows how a random encounter and an unplanned opportunity literally save a life.

“A light snow was falling and the streets were crowded with people. It was Munich in Nazi Germany. One of my rabbinic students, Shifra Penzias, told me that her great-aunt, Sussie, had been riding a city bus home from work when SS storm troopers suddenly stopped the coach and began examining the identification papers of the passengers. Most were annoyed but a few were terrified. Jews were being told to leave the bus and get into a truck around the corner.

My student’s great-aunt watched from her seat in the rear as the soldiers systematically worked their way down the aisle. She began to tremble, tears streaming down her face. When the man next to her noticed that she was crying, he politely asked her why.
‘I don’t have the papers you have. I am a Jew. They’re going to take me.’

The man exploded with disgust. He began to curse and scream at her. ‘You stupid bitch,’ he roared. ‘I can’t stand being near you!’

The SS men asked what all the yelling was about.
‘Damn her,’ the man shouted angrily. ‘My wife has forgotten her papers again! I’m so fed up. She always does this!’
 The soldiers laughed and moved on.

My student said that her great-aunt never saw the man again. She never even knew his name.

Rabbi Kushner continues:
”You are going about your business when you stumble onto something that has your name on it. Or, to be more accurate, a task with your name on it finds you. Its execution requires inconvenience, self-sacrifice, even risk. You step forward and encounter your destiny. This does not mean you must do everything that lands on your doorstep, or that you should assume every risk or make every self-sacrifice. But it does mean that you must tell yourself the truth about where you have been placed and why.

You do not exercise your freedom by doing what you want. Self-indulgence is not an exercise of freedom. But when you accept the task that destiny seems to have set before you, you become free. Perhaps the only exercise of real freedom comes from doing what you were meant to do all along.

If everything is connected to everything else, then everyone is ultimately responsible for everything. We can blame nothing on anyone else. The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.

Even on a bus in Munich.”

Now back to my friend postponing our lunch meeting. Who knows what sacred errand called her at the time we had set? Was it an interruption, or was it an opening between heaven and earth? I’m glad she was available.

God Reconsiders

November 1st: No’ach
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

The story of a Great Flood is found in many ancient cultures, and there are all kinds of theories for this common theme. Could there have been an actual great flood like the Bible describes? Could this tale be referencing a pre-historic flood that filled in the Black Sea or the Mediterranean Sea? Or, could this be a psychologically fear-driven story, based on flash flooding in the dry river beds many ancients inhabited?

Whatever the common concern or memory, the difference between the Jewish version—in Genesis 6-9—and the other ancient versions is the moral component. Whereas the Babylonian story of Ut’napish’tim (in the Gilgamesh Epic) presents the “problem” as humanity’s noise, the Bible speaks of God’s consternation at human immorality. “The Lord saw how great was human wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by their minds was nothing but evil all the time. And the Lord regretted the creation of humans on earth, and God’s heart was saddened. The Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the humans whom I created—humans together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.’ But Noah found favor with the Lord.” (Genesis 6.5-8)

Why Noah? The Torah gives a nuanced answer. “Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age; Noah walked with God.” (Genesis 6.9)  “Righteous” and “walked with God,” sound like good character traits, but the middle phrase, “blameless in his age,” provides two interesting evaluative possibilities. On the one hand, it suggests that Noah might not have been that good. His comparative righteousness was only better than the truly terrible morality of that evil generation. On the other hand, it might be a sign of great moral strength. Given that his peer group was horrible, it must have taken incredible moral resolve to be righteous in such a cauldron of wickedness.

In any event, Noah is good enough for God to save, and Noah becomes the ancestor of humanity’s second chance. The next question revolves around God’s intentions in regard to this second chance—and whether there is a possibility for a third or fourth chance, too.

After Noah and his family and all the animals come off the Ark, God speaks the following: “I now establish My covenant with you and your offspring to come, and with every living thing that is with you—birds, cattle, and every wild beast as well—all that have come out of the Ark, every living thing on earth. I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

In all the years of reading this passage, my only reaction was relief: God was/is reassuring humanity that such a flood will never come again. I never wondered why God made this promise until Bat Mitzvah student Ellie Kaufman asked about God’s motivation. I asked her what she thought, and her answer is quite astounding. She compares the situation to an artist who works very hard on a painting but who makes a mistake at the end and destroys the painting. Afterwards, the artist reconsiders and regrets destroying his/her work—and wonders if there might have been a way to fix the mistake.

As Ellie understands it, God makes the Rainbow Covenant with Noah and the future of humanity because God has figured out a different and better way to deal with human misbehavior. From now on, God will develop a system of repentance and atonement—of Teshuvah—and thus work for human improvement.

As evidence, Ellie brings up the example from our Yom Kippur Haftarah of the story of Jonah. God loves the people of Nineveh even though they are wicked and is willing to accept their repentance. Jonah is disappointed because he wants to see a bloodbath, but God explains:  “Should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?!” (Jonah 4.11)

 And so, I thank Ellie for seeing God’s promise in a different way and for teaching us all about how God—and we!—can learn and improve.

In these early years of the Creation, God learns that human goodness is not automatic. It must be learned and often re-learned. But, even with our inadequacies, God loves us and wants desperately for us to improve. Thus does the rainbow serve as a double reminder—reminding God not to send another flood, and reminding us that we can do better.

.בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ, אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶך הָעוֹלָם, זוֹכֵר הַבְּרִת
Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech ha’olam, zocher hab’rit.
We praise You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the world, who remembers the Covenant
(with Noah).  

"Adam Kad'mon" and You and Me

October 25th: Beraysheet
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich

One of the most important techniques in the Jewish art of Torah study is to find “problems” in the text. The Hebrew word koshi refers to any problematic passage or word. It can be something unexplained or something that is contradicted elsewhere in the text—any difficulty or anomaly. Finding a koshi is not considered an attack on the Torah, but rather perceiving an invitation for deeper understanding. Midrash is that kind of Jewish literature which seeks to answer or solve koshi’s, “solving” the problem with a story that also teaches a moral lesson.

A case in point comes with a comparison of the first two chapters of Genesis. In Chapter One, we have the six days of creation narrative. Beginning with, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth—the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and the spirit of God hovering over the water, God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” we have a step by step description of Ma’aseh V’raysheet, the Creative Process.

On the sixth day, we have the creation of all the land animals and the creation of the human being. “God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creature: cattle, creeping things, and wild beasts of every kind and cattle of every kind, and all kinds of creeping things of the earth.’ And God saw that this was good. And God said, ‘Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.’ And God created the human in God’s image, in the image of God was the human created; male and female did God create them.” (Genesis 1.24-27) Everything seems complete, and God celebrates the first Shabbat.

However, in Chapter Two, we seem to be in a world where none of this creating has taken place. “This is the story of heaven and earth when they were created: When the Lord God made earth and heaven—when no shrub of the field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil, but a flow would well up from the ground and water the whole surface of the earth, the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. God blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” (Genesis 2.4-7)

In this version, the plants and animals are created after man, and the human is only male—with the female being created from the man’s rib. Since none of the animals were fitting companions for the man, “the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man; and, while he slept, God took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. And the Lord God fashioned the rib taken from the man into a woman; and God brought her to the man.” (Genesis 2.21-22)

What happened to the man and woman—and animals—in Chapter One? Why do we have dueling creation stories? This discrepancy is a koshi of the first order.

Some suggest that Chapter One represents God’s planning process. Just like a builder comes up with an idea and sketches it out on a drawing board, God has to figure out how everything would come to be and fit together. Among other things, God has to invent physics, chemistry, emotions, philosophy, intelligence, etc. There is a lot to think about, and, even if the Infinite God can do this very quickly, it still requires a planning phase. The plan is formulated in Chapter One, and, in Chapter Two, it is brought to fruition.

One of the advantages of this interpretation is that obviates the whole issue of the time involved—and the discrepancies between science and the Biblical account. If the six “days” represent God’s thinking and designing, then the billions of years that science teaches are not an issue. The actual execution of the plan, in Genesis Two, is not described in specific time periods.

Another advantage is that the Planning-in-Chapter-One-and-Physically-Doing-Creation-in- Chapter-Two interpretation offers the Kabbalists a better understanding of the concept B’tzelem Elohim—that we humans are created in the image of God. Jewish mysticism teaches that the first chapter’s Adam is the prototype for humanity, a “model” that comes in both male and female. It is created as the perfect human being—the one that embodies the best of godly qualities. When it comes to forming the actual human beings who walk the earth, these productions are based on the prototype but are not as perfect. Perfection is a drawing board notion, while the practical world and the complexities of life result in a lessening of human perfection and godliness. Nonetheless, the perfection still exists in our design, and we are urged to work on ourselves, getting better and better, as we approach the ideal of Adam Kadmon.  

This is the hope of humanity, and it is the goal of practical Kabbalah. When a person comes to consult a Kabbalist and ask for help in improving, the technique is to ascertain those attributes of Adam Kadmon where the penitent is falling short and then to prescribe a spiritual and behavioral remedy (tikkun) to help the penitent actualize the godliness that dwells within. It is there, in our design. Our task is to bring forth the Divine that we were designed to be.

The Clothes of God

October 18th: Sukkot
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
For our Torah Commentary at this season, we shall be publishing Rabbi Ostrich’s Yom Tov sermons. This is from Yom Kippur: The Clothes of God.

On Rosh Hashanah, I began with the question: What are we doing here? And I ask it again. What are we doing here this evening? Are here to petition the Almighty? Are we here to come to grips with our Jewish Identities? Are we here out of a vague sense of familial or ancestral obligation? Or, are we here out of a perennial and traditional curiosity—to ponder and feel in Jewish ways during these moments of High Holiness.

While we can get specific and philosophical, I also find it helpful to be rather expansive in categorizing this communal encounter. Indeed, I find it helpful to consider the words of a non-Jewish thinker in his description of religion and God—and therefore these gatherings.

The philosopher William James defined Religion as the human response to an undifferentiated sense of reality—to what he called the More: an undefinable, non-empirical feeling of a Presence. People of religion gather to contemplate and approach this Presence, and we Jews have developed a whole tradition full of insights and techniques, achieving some real profundity.

Among the approaches to the ineffable Presence we call God is the prayer we chant during this season, Un’taneh Tokef. In it, we speak of God judging everyone, both the hosts of heaven and those who dwell on earth. “As the shepherd seeks out the flock, and makes the sheep pass under the staff, so do You muster and number and consider every soul, setting the bounds of every creature’s life, and decreeing its destiny.” It is a problematic passage—one that is often discussed, and yet there is some truth to the reality it approaches. We believe that our decisions make a difference, but we also find that other factors—factors we do not control—impact our lives in significant ways. Thus do our Yom Kippur prayers go in two directions. We pray to ourselves that we will make good choices, and we pray that the Greatest of Powers ease our way and make our challenges manageable.

Among our prayers for protection, we have Hashkivaynu. Coming after Mi Chamocha and before the Amidah, on pages 32-33 of our Machzor, we just prayed these words:  
“Shield us, we pray, against enemies, disease, war, famine, and sorrow, and strengthen us against the evil forces that abound on every side; give us refuge in the shadow of Your wings.”

There is also this traditional Bedtime Prayer:
“Behold the couch of Solomon, with sixty mighty ones of Israel surrounding. Gripping the sword, skilled in warfare, they protect us from fear in the night...In the Name of the Lord God of Israel, may the angels protect me. May Michael be at my right, Gabriel at my left. May Uriel be before me, Raphael behind me, and above my head the Presence of God.”

Of course, ours is not the only religious tradition in which God is invoked for protection. Among the more interesting prayers that I have found is an extended metaphor in Christianity for what is called The Armor of God. In Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, our Christian friends pray:
“Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil...gird your loins with truth; cover your chest with the breastplate of righteousness; Your feet shall be shod with the gospel of peace; your shield shall be faith with which you can stop all the fiery darts of the wicked. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the word of God.”

When a Christian friend introduced me to this passage, he explained it in terms of his faith persuading/invoking God to protect him with holy armor.

However, as I reflected on this Christian passage, it occurred to me that there is another way to read it. While there are certain kinds of clothing that protect us—in this case the Armor of God, there is also clothing that affects our movement or our moods. Take flip-flops, for instance: one walks in them differently than in regular shoes. The same could be said for high heels, work boots, or orthopedic shoes. Or, take fancy clothes or a military or work uniform: we feel differently when we wear them.

So, in addition to whatever protection Christian faith might afford my friend, could it not also be possible that the clothes of faith affect his behavior? When one is wearing the truth on one’s body, there should be a tendency to behave truthfully and in line with true values. When one is wearing peaceful boots, there should be a tendency to walk in peaceful ways. The same can be said for the helmet of salvation and the sword of God’s word. When wearing or wielding these, there should be the tendency to behave in godly ways.

I do not know if this is a particularly Jewish way of reading the Ephesians passage, but it is certainly in line with the spiritual interpretations of our own Jewish ritual clothing. Though some may regard Kippah, Tallit, and Tefillin as mere customs, the fact is that Tradition has imbued them with attitudinal expectations.

In the case of the Kippah or Yarmulke, the original purpose is reverence—that covering one’s head caps one’s ego both psychologically and emotionally, reminding us that there is a reality greater than we. There is also the sense of sacred identification—that wearing the Yarmulke represents to the world that we are Jewish, members of a sacred community and dedicated to its values. This kind of awareness should affect our attitudes and behavior.

In the case of Tefillin—when we bind God’s words “as a sign on our arms,” the prayers draw a very strong connection between ritual ornamentation and our behavior. As one wraps the leather strap around one’s finger, Tradition prescribes a vow from the Prophet Hosea (2.21):
“I will espouse you forever: I will espouse you with righteousness and justice, and with goodness and mercy. I will espouse you with faithfulness, and you shall be devoted to the Lord.”

A Kabbalistic interpretation sees the wrapping of the leather strap on one’s arm as tying ourselves and God together—of d’vekut, cleaving to God. The words one says while wrapping can also lead to insights. Tradition prescribes the verse from Psalm 145—which we may know best from Ashray:  “You open Your hand to satisfy the will of every creature.” Some see these words as a prayer asking that God’s Hand be opened generously to give us lots of blessings. Rabbi Shefa Gold, however, sees it as more of a reciprocal process. When she prays, she likes to translate it spiritually as “You open Your hand; I open my heart to this abundance.” The Tefillin can inspire us to be receptive to the blessings God gives and to learn satisfaction and appreciation.

When one puts the leather Tefillin box on one’s forehead—“between one’s eyes,” it can be seen as a dedication of both thinking and vision to godly values. It always reminds me of a phrase from a Reform Religious School curriculum in the 1980s, To See the World Through Jewish Eyes. When we mediate our vision and mental functioning with holiness, we are drawn to seeing the world and thinking about it the way God does.

The Tallit, which is traditionally worn at morning services but which is also part of our special Kol Nidre holiness, is even more direct in speaking of the effect of godly clothing. The meditation prayed before putting on the Tallit, from Psalm 104, speaks metaphorically about robing ourselves in God’s glory and sensibilities:
“Bless the Lord, O my soul: O Lord, my God, You are exceedingly great:
You are clothed in glory and majesty, Wrapped in a robe of light;
You spread out the heavens like a curtain.”
Wrapping ourselves in the Tallit is seen as wrapping ourselves in the mitzvot—dedicating ourselves to the mitzvah life and to exemplifying godliness in our behavior. Wrapped in godliness, we can represent God—actually, present God in the world.

Covering our heads with reverence, wrapping our arms with appreciation and commitment, influencing our vision and our thinking, and wrapping ourselves in holy possibilities is like putting on a uniform of our highest and most holy aspirations. Whether we wear these clothes of God literally or spiritually, let us wear them with true kavannah, with a sense that our attitudes and behaviors matter, that we have holy potential and are resolved to bring it forth in our lives.

 May our meditations and prayers on this most holy of days open our hearts and our eyes to the significance of our roles in the world. May we bring holiness and goodness and lovingkindness and mercy. May we be devoted to the Lord and be God’s channels of light and blessing in the world.

Our Jewish Stories

October 7th-12th: Yom Kippur
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
For our Torah Commentary at this season, we shall be publishing Rabbi Ostrich’s Yom Tov sermons. This is from Rosh Hashanah Morning: Our Jewish Stories

 לשנה טובה תכתבו

May you be written for a good year in the Book of Life. The Book of Life: an ancient metaphor for the judgment that occurs on the awesome Yom HaDin, Day of Judgment. As we read in our Machzor:
“This is the Day of Judgment! Even the hosts of heaven are judged, as all who dwell on earth stand arrayed before You. As the shepherd seeks out the flock, and makes the sheep pass under the staff, so do You muster and number and consider every soul, setting the bounds of every creature’s life, and decreeing its destiny. 

About 1000 years ago, Bachya ibn Pakuda approached this idea from a slightly different angle when he said, “Days are like scrolls: write on them only what you want remembered.” Thus does our Tradition tread a double path, teaching that our fates are a combination of what God writes and what we write. We are active participants in our own stories. And, since the communal or tribal aspect of Judaism is certainly at play, we are also active participants in the Jewish story.

Much of our ambivalence about Judaism and Jewish Identity—which we all have to various degrees—involves the way we feel a part of some Jewish stories and not a part of others. This is on our minds every time we study a Jewish story. Do we see ourselves as part of the story? How does it reflect our Jewish Identities?

One often hears the Torah characterized as The Law, but this is only a partial description. While there are legal aspects, the meta-message of the Torah and the Bible is a dialectic—a conversation—between Heaven and Earth. God offers a Heavenly vision, but the translation to Earthly reality is never exact, and there are lots different experiences and opinions about how to get God’s mission accomplished. As Israeli thinker Micah Goodman puts it: the Bible is a continuing critique of the Jewish people, both encouraging Jewish religion and criticizing Jewish religion.

To see this dialectic—this “coaching”—at play, let us consider two stories, one well-known and one rather obscure.

The well-known story is from Deuteronomy 5, where Moses is reviewing the history of the Israelites in a series of farewell lectures. When he gets to the Revelation at Mount Sinai, rather than simply repeat God’s words, he gives an interpretation. In other words, the Exodus version of the Ten Commandments is slightly different from Deuteronomy’s interpretive version. The Sabbath commandment is a good example. In Exodus God says:
“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God: you shall not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For, in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and God rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

However, when Moses reviews it, he begins: “Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

God in Exodus says זכור / Remember; Moses in Deuteronomy says שמור / Observe. Whatever sermonic reasoning we or the Tradition could imagine for this change, the fact is that Moses seems to be interpreting rather than repeating. He is taking part in the conversation between Heaven and Earth.

Then, when Moses gives the reason for the Sabbath Day, he does not repeats God’s “For, in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and God rested on the seventh day...”
Instead, Moses explains the purpose as follows: “So that your male and female servant may rest as you do. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”
Tying Shabbat to the Israelites’ experience of oppression in Egypt, Moses looks back on his and his people’s experience and says, “I was liberated; I can liberate others. God is a liberator; if I want to be like God, then I need to be a liberator, too.” He responds to his blessings with moral resolve—with what we call today a commitment to Tikkun Olam.

Contrast this to the story of King Josiah who reigned over Judah back in the 600s BCE. We’ll be reading his story not from the Book of Second Kings, but from the Book of Second Chronicles. Though the Biblical Books of Kings and Chronicles cover the same historical period, they were written by different factions with different views of Jewish history. While Josiah is nothing but praiseworthy in Kings, he comes in for some subtle criticism in Chronicles.

The biggest event in King Josiah’s life was a renovation of the Temple around 622 BCE and an ancient scroll that was “found” in an old storeroom. The “ancient scroll” initiated a number of religious reforms—among them a wholesale purging of regional worship sites and a different way of observing Passover. According to the scroll, Passover had not been observed properly for a long time, but Josiah followed the instructions in the scroll and had a spectacular Passover. We read from Second Chronicles 35.16: “The entire service of the Lord was arranged well that day, keeping the Passover and making the burnt offerings on the altar of the Lord, according to the command of King Josiah. All the Israelites present kept the Passover at that time, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days. Since the time of the Prophet Samuel, no Passover like that one had ever been kept in Israel; none of the kings of Israel had kept a Passover like the one kept by Josiah and the priests and the Levites and all Judah and Israel there present and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. That Passover was kept in the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah.”

This all sounds wonderful, but, after this spiritual highpoint, with Josiah and his people feeling especially close to God, his confidence and religious fervor leads to a disaster. The text continues:
“After all this furbishing of the Temple by Josiah, King Necho of Egypt came up to fight at Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Josiah went out against him.”

At this point in Jewish history, roughly 620 BCE, the tiny kingdom of Judah was right in the middle of two enormous and fighting empires, the Egyptians to the south and west, and the Mesopotamians to the north and east. The other little Jewish kingdom, Israel, had been destroyed by Mesopotamia some 70 years before, and the position of Josiah’s Judah was quite precarious. Why did Josiah get involved in this battle of the titans? Let’s continue with the text:
“(The Egyptian king Necho) sent messengers to Josiah, saying, ‘What have I to do with you, King of Judah? I do not march against you this day but against the kingdom that wars with me, and it is God’s will that I hurry. Refrain, then, from interfering with God who is with me, that He not destroy you.’ But Josiah would not let him alone; instead he donned his armor to fight against him, heedless of Necho’s words from the mouth of God; and he came to fight in the plain of Megiddo. Archers shot King Josiah, and the king said to his servants, ‘Get me away from here, for I am badly wounded.’ His servants carried him out of his chariot and put him in the wagon of his second-in-command, and conveyed him to Jerusalem. There he died, and was buried in the grave of his fathers, and all Judah and Jerusalem went into mourning over Josiah...”
What possessed Josiah to make such a risky move? How could he possibly stand against Egypt? How much help could he have been to the giant empire of Mesopotamia? What was he thinking?

Realizing that the Bible is not just a history book and is not just a set of laws, realizing that the Bible is a critique of the Jewish people, both encouraging and criticizing our Jewish religion, we should also ask the following question: Why does the Book of Chronicles put these two stories—the story of the properly observed Passover and the story of Josiah’s poorly conceived and ultimately disastrous military campaign—next to each other?

The Israeli thinker I mentioned before, Micah Goodman, suggests that the Bible puts them together to connect the exhilaration Josiah felt at Passover with his absurd military confidence? Whereas Moses considered the Passover story and responded: “I was liberated; I can liberate others;” Josiah filled himself with the Passover story and said: “I was saved by God from Egypt; I’ll be saved by God no matter what I do.” He thought he was pursuing a holy course and doing God’s work, but it was his ego rather than God’s will—and he was not saved. Chronicles is trying to teach us a lesson.

Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, taught that Torah is a great power; it accentuates our qualities. When he said, “Torah makes what we already are greater,” he meant that Torah can make our good qualities better and our bad qualities worse. In Josiah’s case, observance intensified his feelings of righteousness, and he felt invincible. Was this the only conclusion possible from his observance and closeness to God?

An antidote to self-righteousness or religious fervor comes in the Midrash where we learn “Common sense was created before the Torah,” which is interpreted as “Common sense takes precedence over the Torah.” (Leviticus Rabba 9.3)  In other words, knowing how intoxicating religion can be, our Tradition warns us that a sense of closeness to God is no reason to go running into disaster.

Earlier I used the word ambivalence and suggested that all of us experience some level of ambivalence about our Jewish Identities—about how we fit into the Jewish story. The point of this comparison between Moses and Josiah—and the fact that it is included in the Bible and in the Rabbinic literature—is to show how loyalty to the Jewish story or process does not mean unthinking and unwavering acceptance of every word of Torah. Indeed, the Torah and the Bible themselves discuss how to regard our sacred stories—offering both criticism and encouragement as we work on our individual and tribal narratives.

לשנה טובה תכתבו

May you write good years for yourselves, for our community, and for our people.

Yiddish Kopf / Nefesh Yehudi

October 4th: High Holy Days
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
For our Torah Commentary at this season, we shall be publishing Rabbi Ostrich’s Yom Tov sermons. This is from Erev Rosh Hashanah: Yiddishe Kupf/Nefesh Yehudi

What are we doing here? What are we doing here? I suspect, at one time or another, each of us has asked that question—to our parents, our teachers, ourselves. When we go to High Holy Day services, what are we supposed to be doing?

I remember a delightful story by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner in which he focuses on the wool pants he and his brother had to wear to Temple in the late 1950s. The story resonated with me because I remember the wool pants of that era and, like Rabbi Kushner, remember the fact that these standards of proper attire made little boys feel like thousands of needles were poking their legs. The result was squirming and flattened-out creases and irritable mothers and aunts.

The pants were important at the Kushner family’s temple in Detroit—in the sanctuary they called The Big Room—because, as he puts it, “Every year we would go to temple where my brother and I would be inspected by every Jew in Michigan, all of whom seemed to know my parents and cared that my wool pants were neatly creased.”

As an adolescent, young Larry felt cynical about the whole scene. “All anybody seems to care about here is how they’re dressed. This isn’t religion; it’s a fashion parade. Why does everyone only care how they look?”

Then, with a few more years’ observation, he began to see things a little differently. He writes, “There is a religious power of simply being seen and looking good in the ‘Big Room.’ It is a way of appearing before God who we suspect is not beneath looking through the eyes of the community. Being seen by the congregation is like being seen by God. All those souls, together in that sanctuary, make something religious happen.”

I would, this evening, to explore the religious something that happens when we enter the synagogue, and I want to think about it in terms of two Jewish expressions which describe the result we are seeking to produce: a Yiddishe Kopf, a Jewish Head, and a Nefesh Yehudi, a Jewish Soul. Yiddishe Kopf is Yiddish and is generally a compliment about a person who has mental agility—as some would put it, a head on his/her shoulders. Whether in regard to Jewish learning or practical things like business, the term Yiddishe Kopf reflects our hope and belief that Jews are good thinkers. Nefesh Yehudi is Hebrew and is familiar to many of us from the words of Hatikvah, Israel’s National Anthem. Based on a poem by Naftali Herz Imber, the idea is that,  “So long as still within the inmost heart a Jewish spirit sings:“ there is an internal sensibility and spiritual truth present in Jewish people—a spiritual essence that yearns for fulfillment.

We are here, I submit, to develop and exercise our Yiddishe Kopfs and our N’fashot Yehudi. We are here, in this big room, to engage in Jewish tradition and to harvest the fruits of our ancient spiritual and ethical fields.

When anthropologists look at religious experience and try to identify the processes that make a ritual work, they have found two factors/steps in pretty much all religious rituals in all human cultures. The first is a separation from the regular. In order for the religious ritual to begin, the participants do something different from their regular activities. They might go to a different/special place, or wear different/special clothing, or use different/special terminology or language.

The second part of the process involves an aggregation of the individual into a greater community—what anthropologist Victor Turner calls communitas. The individual experiences a profound sense of union with something larger and more significant.

There are certainly more details in a ritual process—especially when we look at a tradition as old and vital and complex as our own, but these two factors seem to be present in all rituals, and I believe they are worthy of consideration. 

Think of how these steps work in Judaism. We come here, to a special place. We wear special clothing—yarmulkes, tallesim. Many of us make a point of wearing dress-up clothes—what some country folk used to call Sunday, Go-to-Meeting Clothes. We also use a special language. In our case, it is Hebrew—a language that is not only a language. Hebrew is, in the words of Rabbi Bahir Davis, a spirit language—expressing spiritual values above and beyond the actual meanings of the words.

Perhaps this is why so many of us feel the importance of praying in Hebrew even if we are not adept at it in vocabulary and grammar. There is something about using Hebrew in Jewish circles that makes us feel more Jewish, more connected to the God and Jewish Tradition.

Even in the most classical of Classical Reform Temples, where Hebrew was minimized dramatically, there was still some Hebrew—perhaps just the Bar’chu or Shema, or perhaps just Hebrew songs sung by a choir. Without some Hebrew, it just didn’t feel Jewish.

It is also interesting to me how, in the Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) community in Israel, their special prayer language is Ashkenazic Hebrew. These Israelis speak regular Sephardic Hebrew everyday—and in sermons and announcements, but they pray from the Siddur and chant from the Torah in the old-fashioned Hebrew of their Europeans ancestors. Separating from their regular, they are working for an extra measure of holiness.

The second ritual step, as we go through our rituals and prayers, is to find a sense of unity with something greater than ourselves. Spiritually, there is the sense of oneness with the One God, what the Kabbalah calls yichud. This yearning for communitas can be found in the second prayer after Bar’chu, the one right before Shema. There, on page 81 of the Machzor, you can read the passage at the bottom of the page: “You Who chose us, drawing us near to Your great Name in utter truth, so that we may give thanks to You and unite You in love.”

There is also the sense of universal Jewish unity we can feel when we know that, all over the state, and nation, and world, Jews are going through these communal rituals, all approaching God in our sacred ways, on our sacred days.

And, don’t forget about the sense of historical unity many of us feel in synagogue, as we join with all the generations of our people, from Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah and Rachel to our more recent ancestors—and going on to our descendants. We are all part of a sacred chain in which the ancients are our past, and are we and our descendants are their Jewish future.

I studied this analysis of religious ritual—from anthropologist Victor Turner—back when I was in college, and, over the years, I have always been struck at the way these dynamics are indeed at play. Not only does it explain many of our Jewish approaches, but it also helps me understand the religious mores of our non-Jewish friends and neighbors. An example is the curious vocabulary used by certain Christians in their religious circles—where everyone is called either Brother or Sister, where the word stewardship means dues, and where the word fellowship, a noun, is used as a verb. (“After the service, we’ll all gather in the social hall and fellowship...”) It also explains the insistence among some Evangelical Christians that the only proper Bible is the King James translation with its Elizabethan English. In these various ways, people of religion are separating from the regular, a first step in their prayerful attempts to unite with God or Christendom or their ancestors or all three.

I also find this analysis helpful in understanding the spiritual infrastructure of our ritual processes and the ways we strive for a Yiddishe Kopf and a Nefesh Yehudi. Both concepts express a separation from the regular and a joining of ourselves with a greater presence. Each term indicates an essential difference between the way Jews think and feel and the way others see the world. Moreover, when we speak of a Jewish mind or a Jewish spirit, there is the image of an ideal, archetypal, heavenly Jewishness to which we are all invited to aspire.

Religion can be seen as transactional. God demands certain things, and we either do them or don’t. This is certainly the way much of the Torah and Bible are written. However, over the generations, there has also been a discussion of the ancient texts which is much more a dialogue between sacred aspirations and human realities. As much as our sacred texts may be inspired by God, there is the sense—for more than the last 2000 years—that we are partners with God in figuring out how best to bring holiness into the world.

Our voice in the discussion is evidenced in the continuing interpretation called Talmud and Midrash—much of which is devoted to our communal goal of having Yiddishe Kopfs and N’fashot Yehudi. Given our long-term experience and our Tradition’s observations about life, what is the best Yiddishe thinking we can muster on the big and small questions of life? And, what is the Jewish spiritual truth to consider when we look at our tradition and apply it to our modern souls?

This discussion is complex and ongoing, and it holds many enduring questions. While it is part of our essential truth to focus on our Jewishness, is it not also part of our Torah to focus on our humanity and that of all humans—both Jews and non-Jews? While part of our essential truth calls for us to focus on the spiritual, is it not also part of our Torah to be utterly practical—to figure out how to be holy in the real world?

What are we doing here? We are engaging in our ancient and continuing effort to think and feel and aspire to bring Heaven’s blessings to this world.

Let me conclude with a piece from the French thinker Edmond Fleg who ponders the many co-existing goals of Judaism and finds great meaning in our sacred mission.
“I am a Jew because born of Israel and having lost it, I feel it revive within me more alive than I am myself.

I am a Jew because born of Israel and having found it again, I would have it live after me even more alive that it is within me.

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel requires no abdication of my mind.

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel asks every possible sacrifice of my soul.

I am a Jew because in all places where there are tears and suffering the Jew weeps.

I am a Jew because in every age when the cry of despair is heard the Jew hopes.

I am a Jew because the message of Israel is the most ancient and the most modern.

I am a Jew because Israel’s promise is a universal promise.

I am a Jew because for Israel the world is not finished; we will complete it.

I am a Jew because for Israel humans are not yet fully completed; we are creating ourselves.

I am a Jew because Israel places Humanity and our unity above nations and above Israel itself.

I am a Jew because above the Human, the image of the Divine Unity, Israel places the unity which is divine.”