Open Minded Torah

Open Minded Torah 2.0

2011-01-24T11:43:00.002+02:00

Blogspot was very good to me, but sometimes you have to move on...

Which is to announce the new Open Minded Torah site: www.openmindedtorah.com

Look there for the latest on my new book, upcoming book tours, and my inaugural blog post: soon!

OMT Talks About Inspiration

2011-01-16T15:28:00.002+02:00

Find out the real story behind the writing of Open Minded Torah here: it turns out I'm not just an unsentimental rationalist.

Open Minded Torah: Unplugged

2011-01-03T06:59:00.002+02:00

Soon to be in a theatre near you; in the meantime, click here.

'This is Israel!': Service Economy in the Jewish State

2010-12-21T04:04:00.011+02:00

Not that the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem has ever been a pleasant experience (though better than the disco slum of Tel Aviv), but it is a place that I have managed over the years: security, more security, escalators, and then to that special part of the world which I call Waiting for the 400 bus - the frequent bus to the ultra-orthodox Bnai Brak that stops at Bar Ilan University where I work. Some people say that Atlantic City was created so that the large orthodox population in Lakewood would have available transportation; though perhaps I should not continue that thought, comparing Atlantic City with Bnai Brak (no boardwalk in the latter).

Anyway, as it turns out the bus that has been leaving from platform 22 - since the 'new' Central Bus Station opened about ten years ago - is now leaving from platform 4. And, oh wait: the times of the buses are not now on the hour, twenty-minutes-after, and twenty-minutes to, but on the half hour, ten-minutes-to, and ten-minute- after (write this down, fellow travelers). How did I know all of this? There was a sign - written in magic marker and pasted up with scotch-tape (apparently they did not have time to contact my ten year old daughter Channa to make a really nice one). It was, however, just the right size to be overlooked by one of my colleagues, who presented her ticket to the driver of the bus on platform 22, and was promptly yelled at for being on the wrong bus. Good thing he told her. She might have ended up in Afula. Or somewhere.

I was debating about sharing my complaints with the driver of the bus which I did finally find (which left a half hour late anyway), but after discussions with one of the other confused passengers, we found ourselves uttering, like I do too often: 'this is Israel!'

Right. This is Israel. So there's no point mentioning that in a city like London or New York ('achi, this is not London or New York; this is Israel'), there would have been signs of service shifts for the month prior, and maybe apologies for the inconvenience. Those cities also manage public transportation systems with transportation authorities watching out for the public interest. Egged takes care of 55% of the routes in the country - is that a monopoly? - but as far as I know there is no public body that monitors their service.

So put up a sign on the day, and then watch the frenetic dash of the passengers through the bus station; witness their confrontation with the sometimes surly (and certainly harassed) bus drivers; and then the resigned shrug of the shoulders when everyone shows up at work an hour late: 'This is Israel.'

But does it have to be this way?

Galley Proofs for Open Minded Torah Have Arrived!

2010-12-19T21:56:00.000+02:00

Judaism and the Art of Conversation

2010-12-15T18:31:00.006+02:00

Torah u'madda!

The phrase itself - a slogan for some and a signal-danger for others - has become a way of taking a stand, but in the process ending a conversation on what may be the most critical issue facing contemporary Jews. I can already see eyes rolling, and hear the accompanying 'he's an academic, he would say so!' But I'm not just talking about syllabi for high school students or whether a 15 year old should read Catcher in the Rye. But arguments about Torah u'madda where they do happen - and sometimes with a good deal of vehemence - are really about the question how do we relate to the culture in which we live. Since November, I have been a Fellow of the Atid Institute in Jerusalem, and I have been having conversations with Rabbi Jeffrey Saks on the importance of moving past the polemics and posturing that usually attaches to the issue. Torah u'madda as a both a term and a phenomena is probably a symptom of living with the conflicts of modernity - Maimonides did not do 'Torah u'madda,' he just read Aristotle - showing that we are conflicted, bifurcated. So that term, Saks suggests, may have to be pushed aside before new attitudes and approaches can be developed.

So I come back to David Hazony and his citation of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai who studied 'constellations and calculations, the sayings of launderers and the saying of foxkeepers, the conversation of demons and the conversation of palm-trees, the conversation of the ministering angels, the great things and the little things.' Virgil in his eclogues was reluctant to compare great things with small, but Rabbi Yohanan is unapologetic about his course of study, and bringing the two together. He not only studies Torah, and science - constellations and calculations, but he is also alive to the mysteries of nature - the whispers among the palm trees - as well as those beyond nature, the conversation of ministering angels. There are all sorts of conversations going on in the universe, and Rabbi Yohanan wants to participate in them. We can imagine him even straining to overhear the launderers at their washing pools, and paying attention to the foxkeepers as they work their trade. Rabbi Yohanan may be the inspiration for another sage, Ben Zoma, who to the question 'who is wise?' answers: 'the one who learns from all people.' We don't have to attribute a utilitarian agenda to Rabbi Yohanan - imagining him getting laundry tips or instructions for how to trap animals. He was fascinated by their conversations, their worlds, and wanted to listen and learn. Of Rabbi Yohanan, the Talmud says, 'he never engaged in frivolous conversations.' No matter what the subject, he was always engaged.

In a conversation with one of my most gifted graduate students, I learned of an essay by a Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who calls this 'listening' a religious act, part of an open-ended discussion that goes on through the generations. Before the trauma of the modern - when 'Torah u'madda' became a position paper, a defense mechanism in the battles about Jewish identity - it was just this listening that mattered. For the philosopher Levinas, God's Revelation to his people happens in History (with that big capital H), meaning not just the moment of the original revelation on Mount Sinai, but to each individual in her own historical time and place. Levinas does not mean that God speaks to individuals - that's the farthest thing from his mind - but that God speaks to individuals in the historical moment in which they live. In a wonderful phrasing, Levinas writes that a 'personal God' is not just a theological principle, but rather, it is the belief that God relates to persons, and such persons, Levinas affirms, must live in particular times and places. God does not only sustain me with a livelihood and bless me with the ability to learn His Torah, but he puts me in a specific time and place where I do such things. Levinas cites Exodus: 'The poles shall remain in the rings of the Ark; they shall not be taken from it.’ So, Levinas writes,' the Torah carried by the Ark is always ready to be moved. It is not attached to a point in space and time, but is continuously transportable and ready to be transported.'

Torah comes to me in history - where I am now, the place where I was born. My history is not some kind of blemish that I must cover, or an error that I have to correct. God, as John Milton writes, is the 'Author of all Things,' including the history in which I find myself. I develop myself - like Rabbi Yohanan - through entering conversation. 'Be part of the conversation!' - so one of my teachers used to tell us in graduate school. Rabbi Yohanan, however, says 'be part of the conversations' - in the plural. Listen, and learn to speak.

But Rabbi Yohanan does not provide a normative teaching: if we were the wrong kind of students, the students who instead of really wanting to learn wanted to become like someone who seems to know something, we'd enroll in fox-catching courses or hang around in laundromats. Rabbi Yohanan's message is more simple: be present to what's around you. The Torah was not given in a vacuum, the person who you are, your background, your education, are part of your kabbalat haTorah, your receiving of the Torah.

Of course, we can't participate in every conversation. Part of education means attuning to the conversations that matter, otherwise we might spend all day updating facebook statuses or checking twitter accounts. The attitude of discerning openness is not an easy thing, but maybe that's what we should talk about instead of using a slogan from the past laden with meanings that just makes everyone defensive. 'I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,' writes Milton in Areopagitica. Judaism has always been an impetus to action, a knowledge leading to practice. So perhaps, like Milton, we should focus on the importance of education as engagement, listening and talking. Something difficult enough - especially in an era when many of us are no longer proficient in the fine art of conversation.

The Ten Commandments: I did not know that!

2010-12-13T21:34:00.003+02:00

Well, I didn't think I could learn anything new about the Ten Commandments, but have been reading David Hazony's new The Ten Commandments, and looks like I was wrong. What's interesting - so far - about Hazony's book is that it goes in so many unexpected directions. So a chapter on the sabbath turns into a meditation on self-realization; 'Honor thy Father and Mother' a discussion of the nature of wisdom; and 'Thou Shalt not Murder' a set of reflections on permissible physical pleasures (apparently there are a lot of them) and the 'meaning of life.' What makes Hazony's approach so interesting is that what may look at first like digressions from the matter at hand leads - somehow, and in different ways each time - to the essence of each commandment.

One of the ways to the redeeming of the self - I'm currently reading Hazony's take on the sabbath - is Torah study. Where there has been so much discussion about Torah u'madda in the past generation - analysis, defense, advocacy of the importance of the relationship between Torah and secular wisdom - I found Hazony's approach disarmingly refreshing. We find the 'deepest truths' of ourselves through study; that study, in Hazony's read, can be wide-ranging. For him, one of the models is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai who spent his sabbath afternoons studying texts that included 'constellations and calculations, the sayings of launderers and the saying of foxkeepers, the conversation of demons and the conversation of palm-trees, the conversation of the ministering angels, the great things and the little things.'

Great things and little things! Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai does not have a special syllabus. But rather he is engaged in the world, making himself present to the people and the world in which he lives. You can, it seems, learn a lot from the conversations of launderers (sometimes I feel the same about conversations with Jerusalem taxi drivers). As Hazony puts it, we free our spirits on the sabbath 'reading literature, walking through the woods alone with our thoughts, studying philosophy, meditating, analyzing poetry with a friend, attending a moving and enlightening lecture, or spending time with people we consider wise.' This is all a very far cry from the defensive rejection or polemical advocacy of Torah u'madda. That is, this is not Torah u'madda as an agenda or a stance, but a life lived. Put another way, it entails nurturing a discerning openness to the world, as well as a commitment to cultivating ourselves in relationship to the wisdom - we find it in strange places sometimes admittedly - of others. I think Hazony is on to something here.

I am looking forward to reading more.

From Hanuka to the Tenth of Teves: Tragedy of Translation

2010-12-06T18:53:00.002+02:00

Open Minded Poetry

2010-11-28T10:11:00.002+02:00

And now...

Christoper Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Lover'

The New Medievalism

2010-11-23T13:05:00.003+02:00

When Thomas Browne in his idiosyncratic and bizarre Religio Medici asks that burning and old age philosophical question, 'how many eyes does a snail have?,' he does not heed the advice of what a philosophical contemporary Francis Bacon might suggest, 'Get a microscope and look!' Rather, he begins, 'Aristotle says...'; and then continues, 'Galen says...' Rather than just looking himself, he consults the ancient and medieval philosophers: what do they say?

Browne may be one of those thinkers, as Bacon says, 'interested in words not things,' inherited traditions of interpretation and not the world itself. Bacon thought that medieval philosophers were so engrossed in the picture of the world and the patterns that they believed it to have, that they failed to see the world as it is. Though we may understand - in our own post-Baconian world - that there is no such thing as the world 'as it is,' without perspective (or even traditions of interpretation). But we can understand Bacon's frustrations: 'look at the snail; will you?!?'

But what would we do? Are we closer to Browne or Bacon? A student stated the obvious: 'what would we do? we'd google it.'

As twitter and facebook become the prisms through which we see the world - newspapers I have been told only exist now to be cited on twitter - we have less in contact with a reality which is not virtual. Does this make us - post-modern as we think we are - akin not to Renaissance men such as Bacon, but closer to Thomas Browne and the medieval mindset he represents?

Are we inhabiting, despite our pretensions to the contrary, the New Medievalism? And are there some things - not only snails - at which we should be looking more closely? What are we missing?

Stanley Fish Meets His Match - well, maybe not...

2010-10-10T17:19:00.003+02:00

Table of Contents for Open Minded Torah

2010-08-02T16:26:00.006+03:00

Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love

Prologue: Velvel, Govorovo, Poland, 1944

I. Desire and Self

Making Exceptions

Do it Again Denzel: Fantasy and Second Chances

Caught in the Act: Torah and Desire

Swaying Towards Perfection: Torah, Worldliness and Perversion

The Big Game: Baseball, John Milton and Making Choices

Just Dreamin’: The Sages and the Interpretation of Dreams

Isaac’s Bad Rap

Identity is Out

Writing an Inspirational Story

Eros and Translation

Of Rabbis and Rotting Meat

Jacob’s Scar: Wounding and Identity

Cheeseburger: Torah, Swine and Desire

Torah and the Pleasure Principle

II. Community and Dispute

Oedipus in a Kippa

Open Minded Torah I: Judaism and Fundamentalism

Irony Uber Alles: An Episcopal Passover

The Dangers of Magic: Of Parenting and Idolatry

From Sinai to the Uzi: New and Old Zionisms

The Poetry of the World: God’s Place

Stepping Up

Open Minded Torah II: Judaism and Postmodernism

Lost and Found

Prayer and the People: A New Siddur

A Religion for Adults?

Modernity is Hell: Korach and Hobbes

Don’t Take Away My Mitzva!

Of Fundamentalists, Rabbis and Irony

Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem

Open Minded Torah III: Between Fundamentalism and Postmodernism

III. Time and Memory

Carpe Diem, Dude

The Antidote for Religion: Fear of God

Speech in Exile and the Voice of the Shofar

Back to the Future: Yom Kippur and Creative Repentance

Shades of Faith: My Sukka is Not Insured by AIG

A Special Conversation: Freud, the Maharal and Shabbos

Lighting Up: The Beauty of Hanuka

Whose Letter is it Anyway: Esther, Aristotle and the Art of Letter Writing

Cosmic Consciousness: The Beatles, Passover and the Power of Storytelling

Why I Gave Up Biblical Criticism and Just Learned to Love

Trauma’s Legacy: On Israel’s Memorial Day

Faceless: the Ninth of Av

Epilogue, Shmuel, Jerusalem, 2011

Exclamation Point! Semi-Colon!

2010-07-13T08:00:00.000+03:00

I was just reading over a chapter of Open Minded Torah, getting it ready for publication. There was something really annoying about the chapter - which I realized, after a while, was the presence of so many exclamation marks! Elmore Leanord in giving advice for writers advises that 'you are allowed only two or three exclamation marks for every 100,000 words of prose.' My piece was only 1500 words, and I had already used seven! I was way over the limit!

So what's wrong with exclamation marks?

They are the punctuation equivalent of the kinds of actions to which we might respond, quoting Hamlet, 'the Lady doth protest too much.' Someone writing with exclamation points in the earnestness of his strivings (and his desire to convince others) is hiding something, probably his own lack of convictions. Too many question marks can be mopey and cynical; too many exclamation points strident and overbearing. Exclamation points may be the enthusiastic cover story for beliefs that are insufficiently convincing - most of all to the one setting them forth.

So, yes, I revised the chapter.

What is your favorite form of punctuation? The mystic will like the ellipsis... The philosopher - the hyphen. My preference is for the semi-colon; and no, to the nay-sayers, it is not merely an exalted comma! Oops, am I being defensive about my punctuation preferences?

The Torah has no punctuation, but if it did, I'm sure that God would also have a preference for the semi-colon. The semi-colon is the punctuation for what Erich Auerbach called the style of 'parataxis' - the placing together of clauses without subordinating them. The juxtaposition of sentences and ideas, without subordination 'acknowledges the multiplicity of meaning and the demand for interpretation.' There is the space in between - the space guarded over by the semi-colon. The semi-colon is the punctuation that says 'darshaini' - interpret me. The semi-colon is the opening to midrash and creativity.

It's the most inviting and fertile form of punctuation; at least, that is what I think.

Faceless: the Ninth of Av

2010-07-12T14:00:00.000+03:00

‘And I will dwell upon you’ - so God says to the people of Israel, and He dwells among them, first in the sanctuary in the desert and then in the center of Jewish worship the Temple in Jerusalem. The ninth day of the month of Av commemorates the destruction of the Temple, the day to which future Jewish tragedies are linked –exile, pogrom and holocaust. ‘I will hide my face from them,’ and so God – Jews know this too well – withdraws his presence when He turns His face from His people. Not only is the face of God absent, Primo Levi writes out of Auschwitz, but also the human face. ‘I do not know who my neighbor is. I am not even sure that it is always the same person because I have never seen his face.’ Auschwitz - churban and destruction – is the faceless world without the presence of God or man.

The first Temple, built in the merit of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was destroyed on the ninth of Av because of the sins of the people of Israel, illicit relationships, idolatry and murder. Abraham’s hesed, the outward excess of generosity, turns into vulgar indulgence; Isaac’s subjugation of his will to God, bound on the altar by his father, turns to idolatrous ritual; the peace established by Jacob, through the tribes of Israel, transforms into murder. When the attributes of the patriarchs that had distinguished the Jewish inheritance are overturned – and turned into their opposite – says the Maharal, the first Temple falls. The temple is rebuilt, not because of the merits of the patriarchs – the first and second Temples are different – but because of the unity of the people of Israel. In the Purim story, Esther calls a day of fasting for the Jewish people: ‘go and gather all the Jews of Shushan.’ As a result of their heeding her call for unity – the story of Esther takes during the Babylonian exile – the Temple is rebuilt. As the Maharal writes, the sustenance for the first Temple came from Above, the relationship that God initiates with the patriarchs. That of the second Temple came from below, from the people of Israel. But when the Roman general Titus destroyed the Temple hundreds of years later, also on the ninth of Av, the sages say that the people of Israel were engaged in Temple service, studying Torah, and performing acts of kindness – what Simon the Just later calls the ‘three pillars upon which the world stands.’ So what went wrong? There may have been scrupulous observance to the Torah, and even shows of care for others, but beneath it all, there was sinat chinam, baseless hatred. And so the second Temple fell.

'You shall not harbor hatred for your neighbor in your heart.’ So God commands the people of Israel in Leviticus. There is another command which must be fulfilled with all ‘your heart’ – ‘b’lavavcha.’ In the first verse of the ‘Sh’ma’ God commands a love of Him with all one’s heart – the doubling of the letter bet in the Hebrew word for heart means, the sages say, that one must love God with both good and bad inclinations. So in practice, I love God with the energies which I am happy to publicly own, and those about which I am less inclined to acknowledge. I love God even with the self which may seem a stranger to the self I proclaim to myself and others. One of the sixteenth-century sages of Safed, the Alshich, applies the words of the sages about love of God to the command to refrain from hating one’s neighbor – since both commands are incumbent on the heart. Just as I love God with both good and bad inclinations, I also hate with good and bad inclinations. To hate with my bad inclination is, paradoxically, ‘better.’ For after having been wronged or injured, and turning towards another with hatred, I may, in a moment of calm, come to my senses and experience regret. ‘It was a bad moment; I had a bad day: the part of me that hates is not the part of me that I want to be.’ And out of regret, repentance sometimes follows. But I can also hate with my yetzer tov, my good inclination, or with that part of my personality which I see as upright, and even moral. But from such hatred, repentance rarely follows. For as I hate the other, I tell myself that I am justified in my hatred. The hatred in fact is my duty, a sign of my moral rectitude. And if anyone questions me – I try my hardest not to condescend to them as I explain to them – ‘how could I do otherwise? how could anyone? don’t you know that it is a mitzva to hate?’ ‘We are obligated to hate evil!’ – I may even show you a verse in the Torah, as I prove that hatred is my religious obligation. But devotion to hatred or the strident adherence to any position, the psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes, usually has another function: to keep me ‘in the dark about who I am.’ My unconscious, the part of me that feels ambivalent about my own choices and actions, causing me to lash out at others, acts out not through my ‘evil inclination,’ but through my so-called ‘good inclination.’

This may explain why in our generation, we do not fulfill the mitzva of hating evil in our fellows. Not just because it is hard to distinguish good and evil – as Milton wrote, ‘good and evil grow up together almost inseparably’ – but also because our ‘good inclination’ is suspect. One of the great sages of the twentieth century, the Chafetz Chaim says, ‘if you are looking around for mitzvot to perform – hatred is not among them – you will have to find another.’ Not only is the hatred projected outwards likely doing psychic work for me about which I am not fully aware, masking my ambivalence about myself, but it is also a hatred from which I will never recover. I repent of what I acknowledge I did wrong. But I cannot repent of something which I consider to be a mitzva.

Already at the time of the second Temple, the people of Israel were doing hesed, performing acts of kindness with the wrong kind of ‘good inclination.’ They put a good face on things – the Temple service was flourishing, the houses of study were full, and the hesed organizations were thriving. But through these acts of kindness, their ‘good inclination,’ they showed what they were really about. ‘We are the genuinely God-fearing,’ each group boasted. And: ‘the way they serve God is not to my liking.’ ‘I don’t like the shul where he prays’; and ‘I don’t care for how she dresses.’ ‘They may look like Jews, but they are not,’ so each group claimed of the other. Acts of kindness directed only at a select group, and excluding others, did not serve as a way to come together, but to divide. Kindness becomes a way of expressing exclusivity; hesed, paradoxically, the way to show hatred for others. This baseless hatred is not just an external cause for the destruction of the Temple. Without the unity of the people of Israel, the Temple had, writes the Maharal, nothing to sustain its continued existence. The Jews may have been doing mitzvot, but they did not make themselves present to others in doing those mitzvot. Just the opposite: the performance of the mitzvot – hesed as a form of hatred – allowed them to be absent to others, because absent to themselves.

The sages say: ‘Any one who has da’at or ‘knowledge,’ it as if the Temple is rebuilt in his days.’Man is like the Temple in the way that he brings together different worlds. Betzalel, who constructed the sanctuary in the wilderness through his da’at, the power to connect, brought the Torah and the divine presence or shechina, down to earth. So the individual brings together upper and lower worlds. The sages link knowledge and the face. For the individuality of a person is seen in his face; it is the place where neshama and guf, soul and body, upper and lower worlds come together. The sage Shammai’s injunction, ‘always show a good countenance, panim yafot,’ or literally ‘a beautiful face’ is not just a call for good manners. The beautiful face, the face that glows or shines, is like the Temple, which is called hod or beauty, where the physical yields to the spiritual, where God’s presence rests. The Second Temple was built in the merit of the people of Israel, in their making themselves present one to another. A person who has da’at, who is present to himself and present to others – his hesed is not a form of division but of connecting – participates in the Temple’s rebuilding. He joins higher and lower worlds in himself.

When God’s face is absent on the ninth of Av, it is not just a seeming absence; on that day we experience it as such. On other days – holidays and fast days like the ninth of Av all provide different lenses on experience – we may speak about happy endings and redemption, but on the ninth of Av evil is palpably, irredeemably real. And in the face of destruction, and trauma, man’s face is also absent. So Primo Levi writes of the camps: ‘I could not see his face.’ Absent in Auschwitz, absent in the traumas that make us unable to show ourselves or be seen. Though the Temple was rebuilt, it lacked, the sages of Babylonia say, the divine presence, the holy spirit, and ark of the covenant, all aspects of the divine connection to man. The sages of Palestine, however, say there was a divine presence, even in the Second Temple. True, they acknowledge, the divine presence that comes from Above was gone. But the Second Temple was built because of a different kind of divine presence, one with origins from below, from the people of Israel. Someone with da’at, who is able to join upper and lower worlds, who brings the Torah down to earth through his actions, is like one who builds the Temple. He makes himself present to himself, and others. Though there is no compensating for the sufferings of destruction, exile and holocaust, there is the possibility of repair – through bringing the shechina down to earth, by letting it be seen in the human face.

'Miami Thrice' and King James

2010-07-11T18:25:00.007+03:00

No, I do not live in a cave. I followed the adventures - through New York Times headlines - of Lebron, and watched with everyone else as he did what in retrospect seems obvious, signing with Dwayne and Chris and (here's the significant and) Pat Riley.

But I still, over the last few days, have been guilty of a cognitive disconnect. I kept on seeing tweets, about 'hating King James,' and I'm thinking to myself: why the sudden animus for the King James Bible? Maybe, I found myself thinking, public culture is not in such a sorry state. True, I myself prefer King James, especially to the polemical and fussy Geneva Bible, but hey: I'm open minded. In any event, feeling myself not so irrelevant to discussions of the day: first one of the World Cup organizers refers to Donne's Meditation 17 - 'no, man is an island' - and now the greatest English Bible translation trending on twitter.

But then I realized: oh, that King James.

A twitter-quaintance - is that a word? - noted how 'all of the yeshiva guys' he knew were in the parsha of King James, but this time, the right one, or the wrong one, depending on your perspective.

So why does the 'Torah only' world tolerate a love of basketball, but not King James (the real one), Aristotle, and Shakespeare? Talk about the King James Bible translation to yeshiva guys, and after a long blank stare, they will probably wonder if Art Scroll got a new donor. I'll quote Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein: why do people think it is 'perfectly legitimate to labor long and engrossing hours in order to eat lamp chops, drive a Volvo, or vacation in St. Moritz, but illicit to devote those hours instead to exploring, with Plato and Goethe, new vistas and experience?'

Yes, Rav Aharon's references are dated (a Volvo!), but why do so some of us tolerate Torah and entertainment, and not pursue Torah u'madda? or pay lip service to the latter while pursuing the former?

First the Blog, Now the Book: Can you Judge a Book by its Cover?

2010-07-02T18:56:00.000+03:00

Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love

2010-06-27T11:39:00.003+03:00

Yes, that is the now official title - coming in the spring of 2011 to a book store near you.

And for an OMT interview, as well as chulent recipes and lots of other interesting stuff, check Ilana Davita here.

Faceless

2010-06-04T13:04:00.002+03:00

'And I will dwell upon you' - so God says to the people of Israel, and He dwells among them, first in the sanctuary in the desert and then in the center of Jewish worship the Temple in Jerusalem. The ninth day of the month of Av commemorates the destruction of the Temple, the day to which future Jewish tragedies are linked - exile, pogrom and holocaust. 'I will hide my face from them' - and so God - Jews know this too well - withdraws his presence when he turns his face from his people. Not only is the face of God absent, Primo Levi writes out of Aushwitz, but also the human face. 'I do not know who my neighbor is. I am not even sure that it is always the same person because I have never seen his face.' Auschwitz is the faceless world without the presence of God or man.

The first Temple, built in the merit of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was destroyed on the ninth of Av because of the sins of the people of Israel: illicit relationships, idolatry and murder. Abraham's hesed - the outward excess of generosity - turns into vulgar indulgence; Isaac's subjugation of his will to God - bound on the altar by his father - turns to idolatrous ritual; the peace established by Jacob - through the tribes of Israel - transforms into murder. When the attributes of the patriarchs that had distinguished the Jewish inheritance are overturned - and turned into their opposite - says the Maharal of Prague, the first Temple falls. The temple is rebuilt, not because of the merits of the patriarchs - the first and second Temples are different - but because of the people of the unity of the people of Israel. In the Purim story, Esther calls a day of fasting for the Jewish people: 'go and gather all the Jews of Shushan.' As a result of their heeding her call for unity - the story of Esther takes during the Babylonian exile - the second Temple is built. As the Maharal writes, the sustenance for the first Temple came from above - the relationship that God initiates with the patriarchs; while that of the second Temple came from below, from the people of Israel. But when the Roman general Titus destroyed the Temple hundreds of years later, also on the ninth of Av, the sages say that the people of Israel were Temple service, studying Torah, and performing acts of kindness - what Simon the Just later calls the 'three pillars upon which the world stands.' So what went wrong? On the surface it seemed like great times of the people of Israel: there was scrupulous observance to the Torah, and even shows of care for others - acts of kindness - but beneath it all, baseless hatred. And so the second Temple fell.

'You shall not harbor hatred for your neighbor in your heart' - b'lavavcha. So God commands the people of Israel in Leviticus. There is another command which must be fulfilled with all 'your heart': when God commands me to love Him with all my heart - the doubling of the letter bet in the Hebrew word for heart means, the sages say that I must love God with both my good and bad inclinations, with the energies which I am happy to publicly own, and those about which I am less inclined to acknowledge. I need to love God even with the self which at times may seem a stranger to the self I proclaim to myself and others. One of the sixteenth century sages of Safed, the Alshich, applies the words of the sages about love of God to the command to refrain from hating one's neighbor. Just as I can love God with both good and bad inclinations, I also hate with good and bad inclinations. To hate with my bad inclination is, paradoxically, 'better' - for after my perception of having been wronged or injured, and turning towards another with hatred, I may, in a moment of calm, come to my senses and experience regret. 'It was a bad moment; I had a bad day: the part of me that hates is not the part of me that I embrace.' Out of regret comes repentance. But I can also hate with my yetzer tov - my good inclination, or rather with that part of my personality which I see as upright, and even moral. But from such hatred, repentance rarely follows. For as I'm hating the other, I tell myself that I am justified in my hatred - the hatred in fact is my duty, a sign of my moral rectitude. And if anyone questions me - I will do my best not to condescend to them as I explain to them - 'how could I do otherwise? how could anyone? don't you know that it's a mitzva to hate?' 'We are obligated to hate evil!' - and I may even show you a verse in the Torah, as I prove that hatred is my religious obligation. But devotion to hatred of this kind that, or the strident adherence to any position, Jonathan Lear writes, is one way I may keep myself 'in the dark about who I am.' My unconscious - the part of me that feels ambivalent about my own choices and actions, causing me to lash out at others - acts out not through my 'evil inclination,' but through my so-called 'good inclination.' This may explain why in our generation, we do not fulfill the mitzva of hating evil in our fellows. Not just because it's hard to distinguish good and evil - as Milton wrote, 'good and evil grow up together almost inseparably' - but also because our 'good inclination' is suspect. So one of the great sages of the twentieth century, the Chafetz Chaim says, if you are looking around for mitzvot to perform - hatred is not among them - you will have to find another. Not only is the hatred projected outwards likely doing psychic work for me about which I am not fully aware, but it is also a hatred from which I will never recover. I repent of what I acknowledge I did wrong. It is hard - if not impossible - to repent of something which I consider to be a mitzva.

Already at the time of the second Temple, the people of Israel were doing hesed, performing acts of kindness with the wrong kind of 'good inclination.' They put a good face on things - the Temple service was flourishing, the houses of study were full, and the hesed organizations - groups devoted to charity - were thriving. But through these acts of kindness - their 'good inclination' - they showed what they were really about. For their acts of hesed were selective: 'We are the the genuinely God-fearing' - each group boasted. And: 'the way they serve God is not to my liking.' 'I don't like the shul where he prays'; and 'I don't care for how she dresses.' 'They may look like Jews, but they are not' - so each group claimed of the other. Acts of kindness did not serve as a way to come together, but to divide. Kindness becomes a way of expressing exclusivity; hesed, paradoxically, the way to show hatred for others. The baseless hatred is not just an external cause for the destruction of the Temple; without the unity of the people of Israel, the Temple had, writes the Maharal, no further reason to exist. The Jews may have been doing mitzvot; but they did not make themselves present to others in doing those mitzvot. Just the opposite: the performance of the mitzvot - hesed as a form of hatred - allowed them to be absent to others, because absent to themselves.

The sages say: 'Any one who has da'at - knowledge - it as if the Temple is rebuilt in his days.' Man is like the Temple in the way that he brings together different worlds. Like Betzalel who constructed the sanctuary in the wilderness uses his da'at - his power to connect - to bring the Torah and the divine presence or shechina - down to earth. The sages bring together my knowledge or my sensibility - another word for 'da'at' - with my face. For I show my individuality in my face; it is the place where neshama and guf - soul and body - upper and lower worlds come together. The sage Shammai's injunction - 'always show a good countenance, panim yafot, or literally a beautiful face' is not just a call for good manners. The beautiful face, the face that glows or shines, is like the Temple - which is called hod or beauty - where the physical yields to the spiritual, where God's presence rests. The second Temple was built in the merit of the people of Israel, in their making themselves present one to another. A person who has da'at who is present to himself and present to others participates in the Temple's rebuilding; he joins higher and lower worlds in himself.

When God's face is absent on the ninth of Av, it is not just a seeming absence; on that day we experience it as such. On other days - holidays and fast days like the ninth of Av all provide different lenses on experience - we may speak about happy endings and redemption, but on the 9th of Av evil is palpably, irredeemably real. And in the face of destruction - and trauma - man's face is also absent: 'I could not see his face.' Absent in Auschwitz, absent in the traumas that make us unable to show ourselves or be seen. Though the Temple was rebuilt, it lacked, the sages of Babylonia say, the divine presence, the holy spirit, and ark of the covenant - all aspects of the divine connection to man. The sages of Palestine, however say that there was, in fact, a divine presence even in the second Temple. They acknowledge that the divine presence that comes from above was gone, but that the second Temple was built because of a different kind of divine presence, one with origins from below. Someone with da'at, who is able to join upper and lower worlds, who brings the Torah down to earth through his actions, is like one who builds the Temple. He is present to himself, and others. Though there is no compensating for the sufferings of destruction, exile and holocaust, there is the possibility of repair, through bringing the shechina down to earth, by letting it show itself in the human face.

Would You Buy This Book?

2010-05-25T14:59:00.003+03:00

In essays as likely to turn to baseball, Denzel Washington, and the NASDAQ as to Macbeth, quantum physics and psychoanalysis, William Kolbrener provides powerful –and often surprising – insights into how open mindedness allows for authentic Jewish commitment in an age otherwise defined by fundamentalism and unbelief.

Open Minded Torah presents – on topics ranging from parenting a son with Down syndrome to Biblical criticism to Talmudic interpretation of dreams – a perspective on Torah which emphasizes skepticism, creativity and the need to embrace difference. Through a personal synthesis of Western and Jewish learning, popular culture and philosophy, Kolbrener offers a compelling new vision where being open minded allows for a non-dogmatic and committed Jewish life. Informed by Kolbrener’s considerable erudition, but always accessible, the essays of Open Minded Torah show that skepticism informs belief, commitment grounds creativity, and non-defensive receptivity makes individual autonomy possible.

For every person, it is said, there is a corresponding letter in the Torah: this innovative collection shows Kolbrener writing his letter, and providing the inspiration for others to write their own.

The Summer Game: Baseball and the Jews

2010-05-24T17:54:00.002+03:00

“What is it with you and baseball?” my wife asked recently after I emerged late for breakfast from my basement office. “It’s a Jewish sport,” I told her. Not because there may be a disproportionate number of baseball players in that classic volume, Jews in Sport. There is rather something about the sensibility of the game that makes for the connection between baseball and the Jews.

Bartlett Giamatti, the former Yale professor of comparative literature and Baseball Commissioner, had written of the Greek not Jewish nature of the game. The goal to “come home” places baseball in the epic traditions of the West, beginning with the heroic Odysseus whose desire to return home to his native Ithaka is at the primordial roots of the game. Perhaps, I considered, since Odysseus is really the Greek version of the Jewish b’aal tshuva—the one who returns—there is a hybrid Hebraic and Hellenic provenance to the Great American Game. But Giamatti’s meditations are too abstruse and allegorical, somehow missing the point. Baseball, rather, is a game of stories, complicated, intertwining, entangled—which is what makes baseball the Jewish sport.

There is not only the story told by the standings, the win and loss columns, or the rivalry between teams etched in baseball’s collective memory; there are the unfolding stories of individual players. Unlike the synchronized beauty of pro football’s violence, these stories can be watched as they develop in the luxuriating slowness of the 162 game season. After a few games, just a highlight can alert to the latest nuances of the story-lines; for the true initiates even a box score is redolent with cues to their progress (there were once, after all—hard to imagine for our image-centered generation—fans who followed the whole season through box scores).
It’s not only the narratives that evolve over the course of the season. The games of the “endless summer” provide, if watched carefully, cerebral stories of the moment. I remember the magical season of 1986 of the Mets’ World Series victory when I first tuned into the broadcaster, Tim McCarver, with his elaborate explanations of the permutations that make up the confrontation between pitcher and batter. And so the position players factor in dozens of variables, for every pitch, every batter, every developing scenario. There are those that compile baseball’s ever-growing number of statistics. But the numbers, of course, tell a story.

Before Odysseus even thought of leaving his hometown, Jews were telling stories. From the first Passover seder in the desert, the year after the Exodus from Egypt, we have been following the divine command to recount the formative moments of our creation as a people—connecting the present to the past through story-telling. How strange, if you think of it, a mitzva, a divine command, to narrate! But not only that, we are always already enmeshed in a life-long cycle of story telling: the weekly Torah and Haftorah portions that tell the stories of Jewish history. Or the sabbath itself—the prayers and meals of which implicate every Jew in the story of the longest duration which stretches back from the present to divine creation. Or the cycle of holidays in which we find ourselves part of the stories that have already been told, and are not only told but re-enacted, with words and through actions—with each reading of the megillah at Purim time, with each lighting of the candles on Chanuka, with each blintz on Shavuot.
From the very first seder in the desert, there were already variations and embellishments. As the Passover hagadda enjoins, the person who adds to the narrative of the Exodus is to be praised—enriching himself and others through the telling of tales. The stories that unravel over time are experienced and told differently in every home: that the famous four children of the seder each recquire a different approach becomes a lesson for parents for all generations to tell the stories so that that their own children can hear them best. And since, as the sages say, there are “seventy faces of the Torah,” there will be an endless multiplicity and variation, ever-unfolding opportunities for narration. Jews are probably not, as the old saying goes, people of the Book, but rather people of the telling—the telling and living of stories.

OMT Classic: Thoughts for Shavuos: Why I Gave Up Biblical Criticism and Just Started Loving...

2010-05-17T11:00:00.000+03:00

My title is a bit misleading. For to tell the truth, I never was much for the Biblical criticism--that academic discipline founded in the nineteenth century, promising to tell the truth about Biblical authorship. There's been a lot of talk about Biblical criticism recently, with a new book claiming once and for all to provide a vision of the Bible "as it really was." The assumptions upon which Biblical criticism are based is that the methods of the sciences can be brought into the humanities, and that if we just occupy the right perspective, we can sift through all of the facts and evidence and have an objective picture of things. I'm a scholar, and I love evidence as much as the next guy, but I've never been compelled by the readings of Biblical scholars with their alphabet soup of authors--J, D, P--which in my view is just their way of not facing the complexities of a Biblical text with which they don't truly engage or understand. I certainly wouldn't want a Biblical scholar to help me read Milton's Paradise Lost; where Milton argues through paradox, they would just see contradiction and evidence for multiple authorship. Now is probably not the time to go into the way in which enlightenment beliefs in reason are also faith-based practices (Stanley Fish has written brilliantly on this as a columnist in the New York Times). Nor is it the time to cite those scholars in various academic fields (in both the humanities and sciences) who have called into question the whole conception of objective neutrality upon which the Biblical Criticism is founded.

When my wife and I began our paths to Torah, I remember someone (I think it was my father-in-law) saying that if G-d wanted to give a handbook to humanity, he would have given it in binary code. To him, this would have been a form of revelation that could be objectively understood, a crystal clear revelation requiring no interpretation at all. But the Torah in it's very first verse asserts itself not as an objective knowledge, but one that is based upon relationship--the relationship between G-d and His people, Israel. As Rashi explains the בראשית--"In the Beginning"--of the first verse is a contraction of ב-שביל ראשית b'shvil reshis, 'on behalf of the first.' And 'the first,' as Rashi shows from other passages in the Holy Writings refers to Torah and Israel. The world was created for the sake of the divine revelation through Torah and for Israel, the nation through which the divine revelation comes into the world. Torah and Israel are together the purpose of creation; without one, the other could not exist.

G-d did not choose Israel to be an objective observer, but he founded a relationship with Israel based upon love. "With an abundant love you have loved us"--so begins the second of the two blessings which precede the recitation of the Sh'mah in the morning. And in the evening blessings preceding the Sh'mah: "With an eternal love, you have loved us"--a love expressed through G-d's bestowing of "Torah--and mitzvot, decrees and law" to His people Israel. Torah and love are thus linked together. The morning blessing continues with an entreaty "to instill in our hearts to understand, to elucidate, to listen, learn, teach, safeguard, perform and fulfill all the words of Your Torah's teaching with love." That we ask that G-d grant understanding to our hearts (and not, for example, to our minds) emphasizes again that Torah founds a relationship based upon love. So the morning blessing concludes with the praise of G-d who brings Israel close to Him so that they can "praise his unity with love," and the benediction of "G-d who chooses Israel with love." A reciprocal relationship of love: the numerical value (or gematria) of the word אהבה is equivalent to that of אחד--love is based upon unifying. In this sense, the act of receiving the Torah is an act of union or love.

Our sages refer to the giving of the Torah as yom chasanatu, the day of our chuppah or marriage. The blessing from the marriage ceremony includes five קולות or sounds--the 'sound of joy and of gladness,' the 'sound of joyful wedding celebrations,' and the 'sound of youthful feasting and singing'--which correspond, the Talmud tell us, to the five 'sounds' that accompanied the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. That the sages compare the giving of the Torah to marriage is not merely a poetic embellishment; it expresses a deep philosophical truth. G-d chooses Israel with love, and we respond with acts of love. There is no external perspective, no possibility of disengagement, but rather learning Torah is an act of love. The Sh'mah begins: "And you shall love the Lord your G-d..." How, our sages ask, do we follow the injunction to love the G-d? For the answer, they turn to the continuation of the verse, "let these words which I command you today be your hearts." It is through 'these words'--learning Torah--that I express my love for G-d.

But even more than this, as Rav Yitzchok Hutner writes, the continuation of the verse in the Sh'mah further refines the definition of learning Torah: "Let these words...be upon your hearts, and you shall teach them to your children." The act of Torah study is only fully realized through teaching. Torah study then is an act of love which connects me to G-d, but is consummated in the teaching of children and students. There's a vertical relationship, a double connection, where with love I strive upwards to the divine, and complete that act of love through a corresponding downward movement--bringing Torah into the world through teaching the next generation. My love of G-d, realized through Torah study, reaches its perfection with the love expressed in "you shall teach your children." A double movement of connection and love.

In this dynamic, there is no external place of objectivity. As Jonathan Lear, the Chicago classicist and psychoanalyst, writes the position of objectivity and the so-called "neutral perspective" is just a myth, and attempting to occupy it leads to "developmental failure and pathology." We've all been there, even if not as Miltonists or Biblical critics--who forestall genuine engagement with texts through their flat and preachy readings. We've more likely occupied that perspective in bad moments as spouses, or equally bad moments as parents where we flee to a place of disengaged complacency and crabbiness (or self-righteousness) instead of engaging with those whom we love. So this Sunday night--z'man matan Toraseinu, the time of the giving of our Torah--we should give up that very contemporary and Western desire for objectivity and cool disengagement, and start loving a little--by renewing our efforts to connect, to make the Torah our own.

Trauma's Legacy: Thoughts on Israel Independence Day

2010-04-18T13:00:00.002+03:00

I took some time yesterday to go to Mount Herzl, the military cemetery in Jerusalem not far from my house. Yesterday marked the official state holiday, Yom Ha'zicharon or Memorial Day, instituted by the Knesset in 1948 followed by Yom Ha'tzma'ut, Israel Independence Day, commemorating the establishment of the State. The days have been called Israel's 'new High Holidays' - which is true in as much that they have become the days central to Jewish identity in the modern Jewish state. In the Israeli imagination, it's from the depths of despair to triumph - so Memorial day is followed by Independence day.

I have hesitations about the story implied in these two days, and especially their proximity to one another. But I took my daughter, Avital, to Mount Herzl anyway as a way of acknowledging - ha'karat ha'tov - the service and sacrifice on behalf of the State of Israel, and the people of Israel. It was moving and strange in that uniquely Israeli way - chaotic and public, at the same time intimate and dignified. Bottles of water piled in huge boxes offered by eager high school students. More young people in blue jackets behind tables with piles of flowers, some standing closer to the entrances, looking as if they wanted to hawk their wares, but freely dispensing flowers to the thousands piling in to the cemetery. Avital took a bunch - we would find, I told her, an unvisited grave upon which to place the flowers. We looked; but we didn't find one.

On Yom Ha'tzma'ut, Israelis gather for a family barbeque or mangal. As my friend Allen Hoffman, the novelist, told me yesterday, the question of whether one says Hallel - psalms of praise recited on Jewish holidays - on Independence Day is secondary: what is important, he quipped, is the mangal. In each of the tiers of the cemetery which my daughter and I visited, we found families gathered. Among them, the religious border policeman in his late sixties, in full uniform, who had brought tiny collapsable chairs, and his children and grandchildren - it looked like they had been there for decades. And in the middle of the family circle - the scene was repeated again and again -instead of the mangal, a gravestone, stoking not coals, but what seemed like an ancient grief. There were those whose loss was fresh, but the overall impression - a true one -was of a nation that has been grieving for a long time.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik distinguishes between moods and emotions - the former he writes are 'homogenous and singular,' while the latter are complicated, consisting of many different elements. The poet, T.S. Eliot writes in a similar vein, understands that 'implicit in the expression of every experience are other kinds of experience which are possible.' So Rabbi Soloveitchik writes that the Jew should pursue a complex life of emotion and not the singularity and satisfaction offered by the mood - the quick and reactive response which ends up as 'degrading.' The Torah cultivates emotions and not moods. When experiencing the plenty of G-d's benificence, the Jew in his pilgrimmage to Jerusalem is commanded in Deuteronomy to remember the poor. Amdist his own wealth and pleasures, he remembers the other - consciousness of plenty is balanced by the knowledge of poverty and need. When experiencing the mourning of the loss of God's presence in the Temple - the chorban beit ha'mikdash - on the ninth of Av, the Jew does not say penitential prayers of supplication, for the day is a mo'ed, a holiday, to also anticipate the coming of the mashiach, the messiah. Holidays on the Jewish liturgical calendar incorporate the opposite of the dominant emotion of the day: experience of abundance brings about acknowledgment of need; the absence of the divine presence is accompanied by hope for the fullness of divine presence at the end of days.

In America, Memorial Day marks the beginning of the beach season in May; or if you are religiously observant, the day where in some shuls you get to wear your white straw hat - with Independence Day following later on the Fourth of July. The sense of collective loss and national triumph is muted both by the passage of years, as well as the interval between the two holidays. One might have thought that in Israel the proximity of the holidays would lead to a heightened consciousness that even in national victory - I won't say salvation - the memory of suffering and vulnerability would be present, that the consecutive holidays would nurture a sensibility informed by emotions and not moods. But the two days - each representing a singularity of one mood despair on Memorial Day to the triumph of Independence Day - may preclude the sensitivity to complexity cultivated by Jewish holidays.

Trauma can have different effects - it can lead to the fostering of moods, or the cultivation of the complexity of emotions. 'Remember you were a slave in Egypt' is the Torah's instruction to transform the trauma of slavery into a more refined consciousness - one which includes self-knowledge and knowledge of the other. Trauma, the Torah tells us, cannot be ignored. Addressed, trauma can lead to an acknowledged vulnerability refined into a receptivity. But trauma can have another effect - the sense of a suffering and self-righteousness that justifies conquest and triumphalism. In this different kind of acknowledgment of trauma, my suffering justifies my triumph. My trauma and suffering become the license for a self-protection that turns into arrogance, redressing my pain as a way of asserting an (impossible) invulnerability. The stories that I tell - narratives of what the Torah calls cochi v'etzem yadi, of 'my strength and my power' - are asserted with an unambivalent certainty. I am not referring to politics, certainly not geo-politics, but to something more important - the constitution of the Israeli, or Jewish, soul.

What, I thought as we left the cemetery, if the placing together of the holidays - in a story of national and nationalist victory - does not lead to receptivity, but to an arrogant and self-justifying triumphalism? What if in our pursuit of the nationalism of other nations, in our pursuit of being Israelis first and not Jews, we lose the awareness of the stranger - in ourselves and others - which marks us off as a people? What if overtaken by feelings and taken by the mood of nationalist triumph, we fail to refine trauma into sensitivity, and allow all of those generations of suffering - and the pain felt at Mount Herzl - to be squandered?

Afikoman as Metaphysical Conceit: Paradox of Pesach

2010-03-29T08:00:00.006+03:00

You tell the wise child when she asks about the laws of the holiday - we don't have dessert, 'ain maftirin, afikoman,' we don't have an afikoman after the meal. No dessert! Yet, the sages use the Greek term - afikoman - for what we do eat at the end of the meal. So what does it mean that we don't have dessert - 'afikoman' - when in fact we do eat the afikoman?

Afikoman can also mean,' bring me the dessert.' After the wine drinking and symposium partying, the Greek revelers would have dessert - bring it on! - and then look for other parties: the after-party, the after-after-party. For the Greeks and later the Romans, it's 'Carpe Diem, baby!' Enjoy the present moment. But the sages say, no afikoman. No after-party tonite, sorry. Have the taste of the matzahs in your mouth for the rest of the night - just like our ancestors had the taste of the paschal sacrafice. So, no afikoman - no dessert.

But... the last part of the meal is tzafon - which means literally 'hidden.' Bring out the hidden - bring the afikoman. Pay off the kids who hid the broken piece of the middle matzah - and bring it to the table - let every one have a piece - and end the seder with the taste of the afikoman. Another Jewish paradox: do not have an afikoman after the meal, but, bring the afikoman.

One has to know how the seder is based on Greek antecedents to know how the seder is NOT Greek. Bring the afikoman - not of more wine and revelry, but bring out the hidden essence of Pesach. The matzah we eat during the meal recalls our redemption from Egypt; the hidden matzah of the afikoman - 'bring the dessert which is not a dessert' - foretells, our tradition tells us, a future redemption. We end the seder not with Greek partying - but with the taste of past and future - in the present. 'We don't end the meal with an afikoman'; 'bring the afikoman!'

James Kugel Redux - Reply

2010-03-16T11:14:00.004+02:00

In my review of How to Read the Bible, I did not suggest that Kugel is too ‘biased,’ as some commenters have suggested on a blog devoted to the subject have suggested nor did I, as Gil Student, in apparent agreement with my argument, suggest that Kugel is ‘subjective.’ I did express in a comment of my own a sense of disappointment in understandings of interpretation that rely upon the subject-object distinction. It is a nineteenth century philosophical distinction - wielded in various contexts, usually now as a form of polemic (which predictably happened following Gil’s Student's comments) - which has nothing to do with traditions of Jewish interpretation, nor conceptions of interpretation that go back to Newton, Milton and Aristotle. I went on to cite the analyst Jonathan Lear - that any knowledge entails a form of love - in order to argue that all forms of knowledge entail some form of union - and that there is no erasure of subjectivity, nor pure Truth or objectivity. Despite Kugel's dismissal of my claims - and the assertion that he acknowledges the importance of interpretation - he does, as my full review reveals, persistently write about the so-called objectivity of modern scholars, and their ability to deliver the Real Truth.

Have no doubt about it: the heroes of How to Read the Bible are the modern biblical scholars who supposedly ‘read the Bible scientifically’ and ‘without any presuppositions’ and conclude that the Torah is just a scramble of different human traditions and interpretive accretions. It is true, as Kugel writes, that I did not address him on some of his areas of scholarly expertise – in which I admittedly have limited expertise. But I do address him on methodological assumptions about hermeneutics – theories of interpretation – to which he offers no response. How to Read the Bible as the title announces is not only about the Bible, but about interpretation. My review took issue with Kugel’s methodological assumptions about interpretation (and assumptions about objectivity which come from it) – which, as I wrote, arose in the nineteenth century and have since been discredited by scholars working in a large variety of disciplines (and not by post-modernists with which he blithely groups me). The assumption that ancient interpreters ‘play fast and loose’ with the ‘face value’ of the Bible, and that modern scholars tell us like it really was, leads to Kugel’s clear advocacy of the conclusions of the latter, and the ‘great secret’ which they reveal. For, as Kugel writes, they understood Scripture to be on ‘the level of any ordinary human composition – in fact arguing that it was in some cases even worse: sloppy, inconsistent, sometimes cynical, and more than occasionally deceitful.’ This conclusion is based upon flawed methodological assumptions, and it is to these flaws that my review attempts to draw attention.

James Kugel and Me on How to Read the Bible

2010-03-13T20:04:00.007+02:00

OMT gets dissed as a bush-league post-modernist Miltonist by noted author James Kugel - who responds to my review of his How to Read the Bible. Read his comments on my review below or here, but first an abstract of my review - which can be read in full in number 100.1 of the journal JQR. The review is available through JSTOR, or you can send a request for an offprint to me.

Here's the abstract of my review:

In How to Read the Bible, James Kugel employs the many resources at his disposal - among them archaeology, anthropology and linguistic - to reveal a Bible, at once thought unified, to be rather “contradictory and incoherent.” The story which takes center stage in the book is the contrast between the reading habits of “ancient interpreters” and “modern scholars,” – and of how “people went from one way of reading the Bible” to “reading it in another.”

The heroes of Kugel’s account, modern scholars, he explains, “understand the Bible afresh”; reading it “scientifically” and “without any presuppositions,” they embark upon a “cold, objective search for the truth about the text.” They write about the text’s “real meaning,” its “original meaning,” or the Bible at “face value.” Ancient interpreters “had a stake in what the text would end up saying,” while modern biblical scholars oblige by telling us what “really happened”; where “Biblical texts really come from”; and what these texts “really mean.”

Claiming allegiance to both sets of traditions, Kugel fashions himself as the one who delivers “reality” - that is, “the real Bible,” summoned by his own “unbiased interpretation.” For Kugel, there are two Bibles: the real biblical texts and the “Interpreted Bible”: they “make up side by side, two completely different books.” Modern biblical scholars are said to deliver the former; traditionalists, liberal theologians and literary critics offer instead the debris of “human dogmas” and “interpretations.” Kugel ends up delivering what Thomas Nagel calls a “voice from nowhere” – the ostensible perspective of objectivity and so-called unbiased interpretation. How to Read the Bible thus fulfills the dream of the nineteenth century, in having finally revealed what von Ranke calls “Wie es eigentlich gewesen,” the world—in Kugel’s case, the Bible—as it really was.

Kugel’s hypothetical “unInterpreted Bible” is also a fantasy – the fantasy of modern biblical scholars. Not just from a post-modernist sensibility (which Kugel rightfully dismisses), but, from a perspective which ranges from Aristotle to Kuhn, from Milton to Wittgenstein, that understands that perceptions are never innocent of assumptions, and traditions of interpretation are always the vehicles for encountering texts. The mostly etiological (that is causal) interpretations of Kugel’s modern scholars may be elegant, clever and ordered, but such interpretations leave the Bible as simplistic, even simpleminded. Kugel claims that the ancient interpreters ignore the “plain sense” of Scripture and supply the “final and definitive interpretation,” but it’s really the explanations he advocates that provide final and definitive interpretations of the biblical text. In Kugel’s reading, it is predictably the heroic modern biblical scholar, from his (ostensibly) Archimedean vantage point, who provides the causal link that renders everything coherent and final.

Foregoing the objectivity which turns the Bible into a sloppy collection of unrelated fragments may not mean, as Kugel says of traditional interpreters ‘crouching’ in front of the Biblical text, but rather trying to occupy the traditions of those ancient interpreters which allow us to attend to a work that transcends our (sometimes overly narrow scholarly) expectations of what texts should be.

Here's Kugel:

William Kolbrener’s “How to Read How to Read the Bible” presents a pretty good summary of some of my ideas, but he certainly errs in saying (p. 188) that while I “gesture to the role of assumptions in interpretation (p. 135), the mantra of ‘the real Bible,’ repeated throughout How to Read the Bible, betrays a faith in a somehow unmediated text.” I gesture? It is the role of assumptions in interpretation that is the true mantra of my book, chanted in every chapter. But if he is implying that I am not sufficiently interested in the interpretive assumptions of modern biblical scholars, I should point out that the Bible is a rather different from Paradise Lost, to which Kolbrener compares it. Much of the Hebrew Bible was written twenty centuries or more before Milton, in a society and literary environment very different from our own, and in a language still imperfectly understood. What is more, many biblical texts purport to recount historical events, and almost all of them presume a knowledge of specific historical and cultural details proper to biblical times. All these things have been immeasurably illuminated by the last six or seven generations of scholars working in various fields connected to the Bible. What I find lacking in Kolbrener’s article is any appreciation of this circumstance or, indeed, any real acquaintance with modern scholarship apart from the things that I have to say about it – and sometimes not even with those. He doesn’t seem to think that archaeological evidence, Assyriology, Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern history, and comparative Semitics need to play any decisive role in our attempt to understand the meaning of biblical texts. But it is precisely these things that must mediate any serious, critical engagement with the Bible today.

Kolbrener apparently believes that they can be dismissed with a postmodernist wave of the hand: they’re all just one possible way of reading. This may fly with Milton scholars, but I don’t think biblical studies are quite there yet. In short: I would like to be kinder, but I’m afraid this is one game he shouldn’t have suited up for.

Oedipus in a Kippa

2010-01-21T08:00:00.003+02:00

At the beginning of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex, a chorus of elder priests surrounds the oracle at Delphi. They mourn the terrible plagues that have befallen their city, Thebes, lamenting that the gods have abandoned them. Oedipus, who had already saved the city once, and is lauded by the elders as ‘chief of men’ appears, commanding the devout priests: ‘don’t pray to the gods; pray to me. I will grant your prayers!’ Jocasta, his wife (and, as we know too well, his mother), is distraught, skeptical, mocking the oracles of the gods and their supposed involvement in human affairs - ‘come off it Oedipus!’ Oedipus by contrast proclaims his knowledge of divine will, and his ability to enact it: ‘I am Apollo’s champion!’ I know what the gods want; and I will be the one to perform their will!

Imagine an Israeli production of Oedipus - with the chorus as ultraorthodox, the skeptical and secular Jocasta (in a pants suit), and Oedipus wearing a knit kippa. In Sophocles terrifying vision, you can’t know - even when the gods seem to be talking to you, revealing their will. This is what the psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear, calls ‘the other Oedipus complex’: the belief in the certainty of your knowledge, that you always already know – not only the present, but the future as well. The chorus, who always proclaim their lack of knowledge and powerlessness, are part of a traditional culture that both Oedipus and Jocasta want to push aside. In the end, they are vindicated, but only in the catastrophic defeat of Thebes. The gods do prevail, but not in the way anyone had imagined. Perhaps this is what Aristotle means when he writes of Oedipus’s tragic flaw: he is a victim of his certainty – his belief in his knowledge of the gods, and that he is the one to bring about their will.

The modern public sphere in Israel is filled with versions of the knowing Oedipus –ultraorthodox, national religious, and even secular – all proclaiming their programs for redemption - as they scramble to define the public sphere, and bring the Jewish people to their ‘promised end.’ Even with the shock of the Lebanon War and Gaza, the national religious version of Oedipus still claims to know the divine will, and to be able to enact it – the inheritance of the Six Day War when Israel really did seem to be the divine hand. But the natural religious are not the only ones with their messianic agenda. The secular have their own vision of the public sphere with its own end, if not any more the Zionist state, then at least a state informed by the progressive and liberating forces of enlightenment. And the ultraorthodox – whose skepticism still makes them demur from some of these grandiose visions – have betrayed those skeptical principles by mixing politics and religion as they attempt to fashion the public sphere in their own image. All of these are maximalist, strong and exclusionary visions, betraying another Oedipal fantasy: ' I must rule!'

Perhaps it’s time to forgo this other Oedipus complex, and strive for a public culture stripped of the competing extremist dreams that currently define our lives. Of course, it’s a proposal in which everyone loses something, but may be one, in the end, where everyone wins. Ultraorthodox skepticism about the state means acknowledging Israel as a modern nation state – where one has obligations as well as rights. The national religious give up on their vision of the immediate realization of the divine promise of redemption. While the secular forgo their sometimes exclusionary and intolerant vision of progressive enlightenment. By comparison to the dreams of redemption, the benefits are admittedly more minimal: national religious gain a more inclusive sense of community – of secular and even ultraorthodox – who see themselves as fulfilling a more modest version of the zionist dream (note small case z). The secular gain a public sphere based on principles of genuine inclusion and a universalism generally open to difference. The ultraorthodox gain membership into a State that has divested itself of its messianic aspirations, and the possibility for economic mobility which such membership entails.

What we all gain is a non-coercive public space – for self-reflection and conversation, which in the process may lead us to realize that we have more in common then we had thought. The elders in Sophocles’ play are devoted citizens of Thebes; while Jocasta – the seeming skeptic – sneaks away to pray to the gods. So we might discover that the ultraorthodox – think of the nachal charedi – value the State and citizenship; and as a Haaretz poll recently shows, God’s promise to Abraham has a deep pull on Israel’s secular. When not pursuing the strident vision of exclusive visions, we may find ourselves open to those aspirations which we have secretly harbored, making it easier to identify with those we thought to have despised.

The immature dreams - fantasies perhaps - are discarded, but an admittedly more minimalist and inclusive set of possibilities emerges. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam writes, ‘enough isn't everything, but enough is enough.’ Maybe it's time we all begin to settle with enough.

Open Minded Torah Goes Retro

2010-01-19T21:22:00.003+02:00

From Papyrus to Script; from Script to Print; from Print to Electronic.

Despite this normal course of progress, OMT will be reversing the trend: Open Minded Torah will be published (as a book!) by Continuum in 2011!

Watch here for further developments and updates, and a new look to OMT!

Jerusalem Hanuka Event: Hod Hanuka at Barbur

2009-12-09T11:34:00.001+02:00

Fanatics in Israel

2009-11-23T15:03:00.004+02:00

After a considerable hiatus, OMT weighs in on 'Who are Israel's ultraorthodox Jews?'

Imagine an extra-terrestrial – or someone from Oslo or maybe Kansas City – who googles ‘ultra-orthodox’ and happens upon Avirama Golan’s ‘Who are Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews?’ What would he find? Golan starts by expressing dismay – ‘woe unto us,’ she laments – at the differences of the skullcap-wearers who continue to ‘divide and subdivide.’ True, Golan admits, one can’t generalize – but in this taxonomy, the ultra-orthodox largely consist of lunatic preachers, arsonists, vandals, fanatic messianists and missionaries, murderers, and impoverished psychotics; the few lawyers and the staff at the Glatt Kosher restaurant in Petach Tikvah come as afterthoughts, negligible exceptions.

Golan may be convincing – to the outsider – as she dons the mask of rationality, speaking for the ‘distress’ of the ‘moderate’ Israeli majority. In the name of analyzing the secular-religious divide, she blames the now-defunct Shinui for dubbing the ultra-orthodox ‘parasites’; yet herself implies a comparison between the ‘ultra-orthodox’ and dividing, multiplying and mutating cells. Admitting that ‘it’s impossible to define the word “Haredi,”’ she goes on to provide the dizzying list of ultra-orthodox proclivities, and concludes by condemning the government for having ‘abandoned its citizens to extremist.’ That this kind of supposedly enlightened form of anti-semitism has many parallels and precedents – among Jews, as well as non-Jews (the Nazis were experts at taxonomies of Jewish ‘perversities’) – does not make it any less venomous and misleading. No, Norway, it is not like this! But typical as it may be, Golan’s portrait of the world she calls ultra-orthodox, may show her, with much in common with the extremists she condemns.

In Israel, extremist right and left exist in dangerous co-dependency: both sustain a divisive vision of the world which allows for the perpetuation of their parallel one-sided hatreds. Like the camera-man who visits Kiykar Shabbat in Jerusalem on the Independence Day and the thuggish delinquents who happily accommodate with vulgar displays of disrespect, Israel has turned into a predictable play of hatred – and it’s the rest of us who lose out. Most Israelis don’t identify with the fanatical displays of religious zealotry, nor with Golan’s thinly veiled anti-semitism and close-mindedness. Yet while the rest of us strive for a culture which accommodates our sense of complexity – and the richness and diversity of our shared tradition – it’s the divisive rhetoric of fanatics on left and right which prevails. But there is a growing sense among Israelis that the sociological categories and languages of enmity that sustain fanatics of every color have run their course, and that we need new ways of talking, thinking, and acting – reflecting the diversity of life and culture outside of newspaper headlines and billboards in Mea Shearim.

John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet and sometimes Hebraist, writes, ‘no man is an island.’ Donne does not merely assert that individuals are connected, but that his own individuality is dependent upon others: ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’ With Donne in mind, perhaps it is time to assert more strongly what many of us already know, but what left and right-wing extremists continue to deny – that we don’t fit into their categories; and are connected, depending upon each other for our various identities. To deny that connectedness, to disenfranchise through sociological dissection and divisiveness diminishes. As Donne writes: ‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.’

Kinnos Confessios: A Tisha B'Av story

2009-07-30T22:33:00.002+03:00

Openminded meditations spurred on by a visit to Yad V'shem on the Ninth of Av.

Turning Hatred into a Mitzvah: Thoughts for the Nine Days

2009-07-20T13:00:00.000+03:00

OMT conquers yet another one of the new technologies.

More Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem

2009-07-17T09:20:00.011+03:00

This year we had three children changing schools - these periods of transition cause us alot of anxieity, as I imagine they do for any chozer b'tshuva, that is, any one who has come back to Judaism. It's a time when - you imagine - the world which you've entered is judging you. And you wonder whether you're living up to their standards and expectations.

One of my sons had a particularly rough time in his last school - a combination of bad circumstances and mismatched personalities. I spent three years playing defense - trying to maintain the status quo until the next stage. Given the unhappy - but ultimately stable marriage - we decided to find a new place on our own, a yeshiva a bit unconventional and off the beaten track (such is our family).

To my surprise, a few days later, I received a call from my son's Rosh Yeshiva. This was a different voice on the phone - not the bearer of bad news, of imminent catastrophe, of predictions of a dour future. But rather, he was now telling me that my son had chosen the wrong yeshiva (a place, as he described it, for hefker boys - boys on the street): my son, he explained was much 'too stark' - serious and disciplined - for a yeshiva like that.

'Hmmm,' I thought. For the past several years, the Rosh Yeshiva had been hard-pressed to find a single encouraging word to say about him, and now - all of a sudden - he was 'stark?' He went on to recommend three other places - all of which I knew about, and two of which a person who knows my family, my son, and the institutions in question said, 'they are absolutely lo matim' - not suitable.

So how to explain? Though King Solomon says that a child should be educated according to his own path - and that each path is necessarily different and individual, the Rosh Yeshiva - so it seems to me - was more interested in the reputation of his yeshiva than the educational well-being of my son. It's not that all of a sudden my son had transformed in his eyes, but rather, he did not want alumni of his yeshiva going to the unconventional place we had chosen (and which turns out, by the way, not to be as he had described it). But money is tight, choices multiply; pressures abound: the Rosh Yeshiva was simply playing defense.

So the needs of the individual - what the Torah so much emphasizes are sacrificed. Sound familiar?

No one needs to be told of the riots in Jerusalem - brought on by the arrest of a dysfunctional woman, taken into custody by Jerusalem authorities for child abuse, likely for starving her child. So while we always maintain our skepticism about the press and the State - though it seems to me some turn on their skepticism selectively - the fate of the child is ignored, as the right-wing forces in the charedi world use the opportunity to stoke the flames of the culture wars. The parking lot has not worked to get our children into the streets; but perhaps the story of the abused charedi woman (note, the child is not under discussion) will.

Garbage bins have been burned (why burn your own garbage cans?), municipal employees attacked, police wounded. And while all the fires burn, there is not a peep - I keep on waiting - a voice of condemnation from the rational charedi leaders. But nothing. To say that there are no such authorities - as I imagine I hear some of my readers - would be false. I studied with them! and the people with whom they studied! It's their silence which is inexplicable.

Or perhaps they are also - just playing defense. Faced with the culture wars that they have not so much lost but rather mishandled or misunderstood, their defensiveness renders them silent. Or worse. In the library, yesterday, I spoke to a few of the library charedim (such I think of them, and count myself among them), and even they complained that the 'mayor is an idiot,' that 'the press is to blame,' that the municipality was guilty of 'collective punishment.' And on and on... I thought of BBC reports over the past years about Serbia - in which the citizens of a country which has committed the most egregious crimes could only think of the injuries they had suffered: 'we are the victims!'

We are not Serbians (or Palestinians) who also always sing the mantra of 'collective punishment.' We have the book, A Guide for Non-Defensive Jewish Living - it's otherwise known as the Torah; perhaps we might try to start living by it. So this is not the time for recrimination (the flip-side of defensiveness), but rather an opportunity for acknowledgement: the leaders in the charedi world have to speak up. Not only privately - 'my son would never go to such a protest,' a friend related - but in public, so everyone knows. And not only for the sake of our reputation among the eyes of others (that too), but first and foremost for ourselves. Perhaps, if one child saw a poster on the streets of Jerusalem with the name of one of the rabbis whom he holds in esteem, condemning the destruction of property and injury of person, than one less policeman - or one less child! - might be injured.

The charedi stance of claiming to speak only to its own audience -' and you see, our children don't go!' - is not only disengenous, but false. Charedim are happy to use the means of mass communication when it suits them. The embrace of billboards, newspapers and other mass forms of dissemination not only makes the current silence now more thunderous, but, even worse, has had the effect in some parts of the community of undermining one of the mitzvos upon which the Torah is built. Aseh l'cha Rav - make for yourself a Rav - presupposes a personal relationship with a rabbi, or a teacher, or a righteous person. Not a billboard or a newspaper.

In the name of a perverted form of da'as Torah - the right and single and only Torah perspective - the processes of mesora, of creative inheritance, are are thrown by the way side. Here is the irony: modern forms of communication (though certainly, I admit, not the most up to date) are employed by the right-wing fringes in their all-or-nothing fight against modernity. And without a tempered - and public - voice of a Jewish world committed to Torah, the ideological distortion of Torah will prevail. So eliciting that part of us - we are all potential fundamentalists, Freud wrote - which craving only authority, renounces the and freedom upon which mesora is also based.

It's in the culture of billboards and newspapers - where single voices of Torah manufactured by the courtyards - chatzerot - of poster makers and newspaper editors - squelch out any voice of difference of multiplicity. It's in this environment, that charedi boys fill the streets on hot July afternoons - hurling rocks and bottles. And it's in this envirnoment, that school principals - also on the defensive - think more about institutional reputations than the children under their charge.

Steppin' Up

2009-07-14T12:16:00.008+03:00

When the people of Israel need a new leader, G-d turns to Moses and says: 'Take Joshua bin Nun.' The word take or קח - kach - does not mean, as we might understand, a physical action. But, as Rashi explains 'a taking' with and through words. There is no forceful recruitment; Moses is to convince Joshua. This is a lesson for spouses, parents and teachers - when we want to effect change we do so not with force, but whatever 'taking' there is to be done is with language. Discourse, not force, but also a discourse - not 'you'd better!' - of rationality.

Sometimes a single world, like 'kach,' in the Torah clues us in on a dramatic situation. With Moses and Joshua, there must have been a conversation. It's easy to imagine that Joshua did not want the leadership thrust upon him - 'I'm sitting and learning well; leave me alone!' So Moses - all of this in the word קח - has to convince his reluctant charge to take on the mantle of leadership.

In the Haftorah from the book of Jeremiah, there is a similar conversation recorded - this time between G-d and the author of the work that bears his name: 'Before you were born, I sanctified you, and chose you to be a prophet to the nations.' To which the prophet-to-be responds: 'Nothing doing G-d; I'm "young," a child. Go find someone else.' And G-d responds in turn, 'don't tell me about your "youth"; it's time to step up.'

Pinchos provides the counter image to Joshua and Jeremiah: he is also youthful. But the generation of the desert has reached a crossroads. Though Bilam was not able to curse Israel, Balak, the leader of the Midianites, has one more strategy: entice them with the women of Midian (including his own daughter!). The way the chassidic Ishbitzer's Mei Ha'Shloach reads the story, Zimri, a prince, is a tzaddik, a righteous person. But he is overwhelmed by desire for the Midianite princess Cuzbi - and loses himself. Notwithstanding his righteousness and his scrupulous attempts to guard himself from temptation, he is overwhelmed and succumbs. Through a magnetic attraction which he mistakes for love, Zimri gives into a desire that overcomes his ability to see and choose. He has a legal status of someone in onus; he is under duress. Or in more contemporary terms - I wonder whether the Ishbitzer would agree - he is subject to psychic energies he cannot master. He thought she was his beschert, writes the Ishbitzer, but in actuality she is activating a lustful desire which he cannot withstand. He hears the soundtrack from Love Story - but there's a different kind of music playing.

In this scenario, as the sages recount it, even Moses is unable to act, as Zimri taunts him: 'you also were involved with a foreign woman; your Tzipporah is also a Midianite, a convert.' And the further barb: 'So spare me your hypocrisy!' When the people of Israel look to their leader for guidance, he is forgetful - he does not know the law! Whatever small pangs of guilt made Moses silent and forgetful with guilt (there must have been something to Zimri's attribution), the people of Israel are left abandoned to tears. Overwhelmed by emotions - a mixture of desire, guilt and fear - the people of Israel are vulnerable to the relentless temptations of the Midianite King.

At that moment, the whole generation is dysfunctional - yet Pinchos sees, and acts. Pinchos steps up.

Though we are not called by G-d, sometimes we have a sense of a mission that calls us - of the need to step up. But like the prophets, we find our reasons to avoid it. And they are always good reasons - or seem so. 'I'm not ready.' 'I'm too young!' Or there are other kinds of avoidance (of these there are is never a shortage): The poet John Milton felt washed up at twenty-three, verging on despair, and giving up. But feeling belated, as Milton did, or too young, are equivalent ways of cheering ourselves up - subconsciously justifying inactivity.

'There must be someone else!' - the youthful prophets protest. To Joshua and Jeremiah, G-d says: 'there are certainly ambitious men who will step into your shoes; but I want you!' We are not prophets, but sometimes the clarity of a vision - for change, for tikkun - may call us. We will likely not be called upon our nation, but maybe by our families, our schools, our workplaces. For we will be privy to a vision which no one else sees, or is dissuaded from seeing, or is simply afraid to see.

So when, those around us are under duress - because of fear or guilt or whatever - we should not give up to the weaker part of ourselves, or ambitious men. We have to step up.

Internet Filters - To Be or Not to Be?

2009-07-09T16:35:00.007+03:00

Your child returns from school or yeshiva one night with a surprise: a new computer.

So that's what happened to me: my sixteen year old came back the other night with a new MSI netbook (had he consulted me he would have bought the Asus). Such computers are designed for internet access, but strangely this one didn't pick up the wireless connection from the several routers in my building. (If you think charedim don't use the internet, take a netbook in your car, and drive through a charedi neighborhood, and see how many signals you pick up!). Since sixteen year olds know everything, he didn't acknowledge that he didn't know how to fix it - so we speculated that it must broken. Since the settings were all in Hebrew, I didn't know either.

It suited my purposes - I bided my time. Planned, travelled to, and return from London - 'I'm busy; I'll get to it! I will!' To be sure, upon my return, he wanted it to work. So I finally did the legwork - went to my personal computer guru in the library who did the equivalent of flicking a switch - pressed the fn key together with f9 - and, what do you know?: it wasn't broken after all.

Now many of my charedi friends - I use the term even though I dislike the sociological designation - may be sitting with jaws dropped in disbelief: 'why did you fix it?', or perhaps even more incredulously: 'you didn't take it away from him?!' Other charedim - in different neighborhoods, and probably not my friends - might exclaim more forcefully, as once appeared on the billboards in Jerusalem and B'nei Brak: 'the internet is a cancer!; you let a cancer in the house?'

I didn't think in those terms - though it did pass through my mind that I had the equivalent of a loaded weapon in my hands, and there was my son calling, asking about his computer - 'I need it abba!' 'Now!' So what to do?

So I installed an internet flilter. In the process of doing so, in front of the Arnon Windows at the National library, some of my modern orthodox and secular friends - those horrible designations again - wondered: 'what are you doing?' The same incredulity, but from a different place: 'we live in the world, and your son has to learn how to make choices.' And: 'adulthood is about facing challenges, and yet restraining from those things we know to be wrong.' They might have easily as quoted Milton's Areopagitica:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

So if trial is by what is contrary - give him the computer and let him learn to choose: 'Reason,' as Milton says, 'is but choice.'

Part of me agreed. A therapist friend told me of a clinical situation where a client with an internet addiction advised - 'every time you have thoughts of the internet, have a container of hot sauce handy, and dip into it and stick some in your mouth.' Pavlov for humans!

In another case, the therapist advised the client to make out a check for one thousand shekels to a good, but not great cause - let's say 'save the whales' - and to leave it signed in the therapist's drawer. If the client were to go back to his addiction, the therapist explained, he would dutifully submit the check to the charity. But as it turned out, the client didn't play the game - he just didn't tell the truth: 'Ani lo freier, he is reported to have said; 'I'm not a sucker.' In the continuation of the story, the therapist now clearly playing the role as big brother - the authority figure - sent his expert to put the appropriate filters on the computer. But notwithstanding, the client's desire - on some level, after all he chose to see the therapist - to beat his addiction, he found an equally competent expert, on some other pretext or other, to have the filter removed.

This is certainly not a model of psychic wholeness - where an external authority is battled (and usually outsmarted) by the irrepressible and always resilient powers of desire. Reason is choice. Not the threat of external punishment, or the presence of external controls - which ultimately attest to a psyche at war. So back to Milton: we don't after all take filters into daily life - we have to rely upon our ability to choose.

So why did I go with the filter? Because, though I know my son wants to be on the internet for the right reasons (e-mailing his grandparents, googling the six day war and cars), he may - unwittingly - become immersed in the wrong things. Were that to happen then the ability to choose - something of underestimated difficulty - may never develop. As a fellow blogger put it: 'we are always trying to calibrate external restraints to our child's ability to choose.' So to be sure, the filter - the external restraint - can't be the endgame or goal. But it might create enough space - in the meantime - for a curious and developing young person to learn how to choose as he becomes an adult.

What would you do?

Jerusalem Snapshot: The Unexpected

2009-06-21T21:46:00.010+03:00

I had a late evening yesterday - so decided to take a taxi back home.

As the cab pulled to the curb, I felt two ten shekel pieces and one five in my pocket - 'twenty-five shekels?' The driver made a face: 'it's at least 35.' 'Let's do the meter,' I responded. Best way not to be a freier, loosely translated as sucker - go with the meter.

'Anyway,' the cab driver confided, 'I've been riding around for an hour for this fare.' Whatever ambivalence I felt about my failed attempt at a deal abated - 'good I thought, let him at least have a decent start to his day' (the fare, in the end, was 29 NIS).

I never went to a proper ulpan to learn Hebrew - so I have an abiding sense of gratitude to Jerusalem cabdrivers whom I credit with my Hebrew. I learned French - oddly enough - not from the French teacher in Avignon during the summer of 1982 who taught Sartre's Huis Clos, but from the 12 year old girl with Down's Syndrome, of the family with whom I was staying.

So after the initial snarling, the driver turned more cordial: my 'ma shlom'cha' - how are you? - broke the ice. Since I'm travelling to London in a couple of days - and early in the morning - I thought I might ask him to drive me to the airport. The cost is about 225 NIS which is a big fare in a bad economy. His car, a mercedes, was clean and safe - so I was considering it.

We waited on line for the light to turn into my neighborhood - Bayit Vegan. There's a separate traffic light for the straight-ahead traffic, and another for the left-turn lane. We were behind a motorcycle: when the straight-ahead light changed, the motorcyle started forward; though the left-turn signal was still red. Because of the construction for the long-awaited light-rail on Hertzl, it's a long wide turn. My driver turned to me and said with alarm - 'he's passing the light!' He even honked twice; but the motorcyclist did not hear, or did not heed his warning. The motorcycle proceeded slowly, but determinedly along the arc of the turn; I saw the oncoming traffic. The cars coming down from the other side of Hertzl were accelerating. We both looked, watching for the unfolding of the inevitable: the loud crunch of the impact sent the motorcyclist flying into the air - the motorcycle was shattered to pieces. I gasped.

'Ata roeh?' 'You see?,' said my driver. I'm sure he was equally horrified, but he gave the appearence of calm. 'She killed him' - he said of the driver of the Mazda that had smashed into him. A crowd gathered. Miraculously, the man was stirrng. That was my first thought - he's alive.

Then I saw the woman standing by the side of her car. 'We should stop,' I said - 'he ran the light; it; it wasn't her fault!' 'No, it wasn't,' he agreed.' So let's stop,' I said - 'we have to tell the police what we saw.'

I was imagining the horror of the woman who struck the man. She had done nothing wrong, and suddenly out of nowhere, this.

'I have seen dozens of accidents,' my driver said. 'If you call - leave it,' he advised - 'you'll be dragged in for hearing. It's a tircha - a tremendous pain.'

I arrived home, called the police to tell my story. It turns out - my daughters were returning from the Jerusalem forest from the pool about an hour later - and the police were still there. The motorcyclyist had - miraculously - survived the crash, but the consensus was that the woman had run the light - after all, 'look what she had done!'

I called the police again - 'are you writing this down? Will you please tell the women who was driving the car that I saw?' I thought of course of the injured man, but also the loneliness of the woman not knowing, perhaps thinking that it was her fault, the suffering of the burden imposed on her by circumstances she had never considered. And then imagined what her her husband might be saying to her - no matter the strength of her convictions.

I don't know what lesson to learn from this, but I decided - sometimes one has an unexpected insight into the soul of someone, even a stranger - to find a different driver to take me to the airport.

OMT and the New Technologies

2009-06-19T15:03:00.005+03:00

Yesterday, a graduate student of mine committed the horrendous (and unforgivable) faux-pas of asking whether I had written my dissertation on a typewriter. I answered: 'yes, and I wrote my undergraduate thesis on papyrus; you can see it - with the Magna Carta - at the British Museum.' Truth be told, I wrote my thesis on a portable (so-called) Leading Edge which weighed-in at twenty pounds, and had a memory - someone correct me if I'm wrong - of 20mb.

So I thought this would be an appropriate time to once again announce OMT's presence on twitter, and the latest development, my own facebook page.

Discussions of the virtues of the new technologies are, I've already gathered, symptomatic, of ignorance of their potential.

So I'm all in - hope to see you there!

(I had hoped to have a couple of nice clean facebook and twitter 'buttons' available here; but... I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet.)

Seeing is Believing? Think Again!

2009-06-11T20:55:00.010+03:00

The twelve spies make their way to Eretz Canaan. G-d didn't say 'check out the land and see if you want it,' but when the people came to Him, He said, 'I'm not commanding you to survey the Land first, but if you want - go for it.'

So they did, twelve of them. Before they went on their mission, Moses who know something was awry, turned to his young charge, formerly Hoseah, and gives him a special blessing, as well as a new name, Joshua. G-d had an extra letter yud in his alphabetical storehouse - he had taken it from Sarah, formerly Sarai; so, through Moses, he gave it to Joshua. Joshua was then hooked up to the tradition - it became part of him. While Caleb, with no such protexia, makes a short side trip of his own, to Hebron. He went to the site of the tomb of the patriarchs - where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are buried. As our sages explain, Caleb did not simply have an extra day on his tour - he went to pray. But why at Hebron? and how did that save him from the bad council of the spies?

Hebron is described as seven years older than Egypt's capitol, Tzo'an. But our sages point out that the city that Ham built for his youngest son Canaan could not have been built before the city he built for his eldest, Mitzrayim or Egypt. So Hebron took precedence over Tzo'an not - as the simple meaning of the verse suggests - because it was older, but because it was more praiseworthy. It was not seven years older, but seven times better.

Obama lingered at the pyramids recently; he couldn' t get enough of Paris. It's unlikely - this is not a political statement - that he'd spend much time in Hebron. Our sages tell us there is no place in Israel more barren and rocky than Hebron - for that reason it was set aside as a cemetery. The ugliest terrain in the Land of Israel - why, again, did the tour bus stop here? Tzo'an, by contrast, is the choicest real estate in Egypt - not only the center of commerce and government, but like G-d's garden, a hybrid of Manhattan and East Hampton. And yet, Hebron was considered better.

So the two, Joshua blessed by Moses, and Caleb on his way from Hebron, join the rest of the spies. The latter bring a dire report. 'True, there are giant grape clusters, and true the land flows with milk and honey - but the cities are fortified, and the land occupied by giants!' Not only that, they related, 'the land consumes its inhabitants; the giants were busy burying their dead!' With all of this, the spies conclude: 'We are not able to go up against the nation, for they are more powerful than we are.'

Yet Caleb and Joshua have a different report - didn't they see the dangers that so rattled the spies?

While empiricists from Francis Bacon to Katie Courik tell us that seeing is believing, the story of the spies tells us that the reverse is true. The spies, our sages tell us, from the moment they went out on their mission had their plan in mind - and so everything that they see reinforces their already foregone conclusion - 'better to have died in Egypt; we are not going to the Promised Land.'

Yet Caleb and Joshua see differently - their sight is informed by their connection to their past. Joshua's connection is intrinsic - his name has changed. Caleb, without such benefit, goes to Hebron - which becomes his school for seeing. The place which is the most rocky and most barren - to the naked eye - is the richest. So Caleb learns a kind of vision, not tied to externals, but rather rooted in faith and the history of the patriarchs. Both Caleb and Joshua see things not with the eyes of the empiricist - 'seeing is believing,' but rather their belief allows what them to see. G-d promised the Land to the people of Israel. So Caleb and Joshua bring their own report to the people of Israel: 'The land is very very good.'

It comes down to vision - and how we see the world reflects on how we see ourselves. The spies see giants burying their dead as part of the movie, 'Canaan, Resident Evil'; Joshua and Caleb look at the same event as the continuation of the movie that began in Egypt: 'Chasdie Hashem, G-d's Beneficent Acts.' Yes, G-d had wrought plague on the giants, but not to show a land that ate its inhabitants, but to distract the giants from noticing the intrusive presence of the spies.

So it's not only Caleb and Joshua whose self-conception affects their vision. 'We were like grasshoppers in our eyes,' the spies say, and so 'we appeared in the eyes of the inhabitants of the Land.' Caleb and Joshua saw themselves as descendants of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs - they felt they deserved the Land, not on the basis of their own merits, but on the basis of the traditions of their forefathers. 'Even if G-d tells us to build ladders to go up to the Heavens - we will succeed at whatever He says.' Such is the power of those who see themselves as fulfilling the will of G-d.

But the spies were more realistic, not only about the world, but about themselves. 'Come off it,' they thought to themselves - 'are we really that different from the seven nations who inhabit the Land? What gives us the right?' Their realism extended to themselves - 'we are a people like any other people. Can we claim to be morally superior? are we better than the nations?' And so the verse 'they were grasshoppers in their own eyes, and thus became grasshoppers in the eyes of the inhabitants' should be understood in terms of cause and effect: Because they were diminished in their own eyes, they were diminished in the eyes of the seven nations.

But more than that - how they saw themselves diminished G-d. When the spies say of the inhabitants of the Land - 'they are more powerful than we are!' (mimen'u in the original), they also express another thought, 'they are more powerful than Him' (mimen'o, spelled the same with just a change in the vowel). G-d's power - of course - is never be diminished, but because of their image of themselves, they diminished G-d's power in relation to them. 'If you want to conduct yourself according to the laws that govern the nations of the world, go ahead,' G-d challenges them. 'I will act accordingly.' And so the people of Israel become grasshoppers to the nations, and though Caleb had said with confidence, 'they are our bread,' it is the nations who feast on the people of Israel.

If only the people had listened to Caleb who had taken his degree in the Hebron school of seeing. Is it possible that without a similar education (for we can't hope for letters from the divine), we may also diminish G-d and His powers in relationship to us - because of our realistic, but all too diminished, sense of ourselves?

Grape Soda and Cheese Doodles: Israel, Boredom and the 'Desire for Desire'

2009-06-09T15:23:00.014+03:00

Tolstoy describes the desire for desire as boredom.

The people of Israel - instigated by the mixed multitude who left Egypt with them - feel a 'desire for desire.' They want what they can't have - so they nostalgically long for the melons and onions and leeks which they had freely in Egypt.

But, as our sages say, the people of Israel had nothing free in Egypt. The Egyptians held back straw for their building; they certainly didn't dispense cucumbers and watermelons for nothing! Rather, such pleasures, as our sages say, were free - free of mitzvot. So the people of Israel thought: 'those were the days' - hence their nostalgic yearning for unadulterated pleasure, the pleasures without obligation, the pleasures of slavery. Tyrants, as John Milton wrote in one of his polemical works against King Charles I, gladly suffer license and luxury; it's free men they detest. So perhaps Pharoah willingly gave out fish and meat and other delicacies - to better keep the people of Israel in thrall. This is not unlike impoverished neighborhoods around the world - where there may be a shortage of money and work - but never a shortage of grape soda and cheese doodles.

This form of being in the world the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips likens to perversion - which he identifies as a certainty about what it takes to bring pleasure - such a person 'has no doubt about what will satisfy and fulfill him,' and he frantically searches for the pleasures he imagines. The desire for desire is thus rooted in the past and turns the present into its image, and, not surprisingly, projects a similar future. So that which promises the greatest excitement actually deadens us to the possibilities of the new. Masquerading as excitement, the 'desire for desire' provides the cover story for inaction and boredom - the pleasure of slavish repetition, rather than the genuine pleasures that make creative engagement possible. No accident that the 'desire for desire' leads to the craving of those fruits and vegetables - melons, onions and cucumbers - that are rooted to the ground. The manna that flowed forth from the heavens could be prepared in a multitude of ways, but the people preferred the rooted - and effortless - inertness of pursuing desires that led them back to their own physicality.

Mitzvot - which contains the word tzevet, to join - hold out the promise of something else, the possibility of joining with the divine. The excitement of desiring desire provides ersatz pleasures, but in its narcissism can never transform into love.

For love requires not only cultivating a feeling, but relationship - and back to Milton - service:

... freely we serve.
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall...

Service and love come together. Though neither are possible when boredom leads to pursuing a nostalgic desire for a desire we may have once had - when we were still slaves.

Our Ancestors were not Fools!

2009-06-09T13:27:00.006+03:00

Would you buy a used car from this man?
Two of my old teachers are in the news - Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton.

Fish taught me Milton at Columbia - but he was and remains a pragmatist skeptic. Eagleton taught me literary theory at Oxford - a Marxist skeptic.

So surprise, when in Fish's review of Eagleton's new book, the two take aim at the intellectual pretensions of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens - the apologists for the new atheism (they even had an ad campaign on London buses; that's Dawkins above).

So the Marxist and the Skeptic both argue that the triumph of modern thinking - liberalism and technology - still leaves a place for religion. 'Saying that the emergence of the telescope and the microscope outmodes religion is like saying,' Fish paraphrases Eagleton, that 'thanks to the toaster oven we can forget about Chekhov, or Milton, or Proust...' (you can fill in the blank).

Both Fish and Eagleton challenge the image of the religious thinker in the thought of Dawkins and Hitchens (or your favorite local atheist rabble rouser) - of someone who has acquiesced to a simple fundamentalism and, as friends used to say to me, has 'taken the easy way out.' Sure, there are those within religious communities who present such an image of self-righteous complacency - in my circles it's known as frumkeit. But more accurate is the the religious personality portrayed by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Though there were those - even in the forties - who saw religion as 'tranquil and neatly ordered, tender and delicate, an enchanted stream for embittered souls,' R. Soloveithchik portrays a religious personality obsessed, and sometimes even tormented, by questions.

Questions that as Eagleton writes, in a 'society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire and consumerist economics' are not likely to be thought - let alone raised. Theology may not always answer our questions, but it allows - with a lifetime of thought - for their refinement.

I have to confess when I first returned to Jewish observance, I was embarrassed to tell my old teachers. But now with the Skeptic and the Marxist out of the closet - it makes it a whole lot easier. Maybe things are changing.

Finally, Eagleton has his own confession - he wrote his book, he writes, in defense of his own forbearers - 'against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.' My ancestors, Eagleton now acknowledges, were not fools.

Perhaps this is something - all the more so one would think - for Jews to consider as well?

Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem: the Prequel

2009-06-01T22:35:00.006+03:00

Just wanted to say thanks for all the supportive comments and advice on our adventures in education in Jerusalem with our son, Shmuel.

I'm also reposting here an article I wrote for the magazine of the Orthodox Union, Jewish Action a few years ago. I see that I've come along way myself - perhaps others in our community will follow!

Pulled Up Short by Shmuel

My son, Shmuel, was born four years ago on the tenth of Cheshvan. My wife woke me at 3 A.M.; we were at the hospital a bit after 3:30. Not her first delivery, the labor was quick: by 5:45, she gave birth. So efficient she was, I thought, that there would be time to make it to my regular 7 A.M. minyan in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood of Jerusalem. Our newborn would fit into my schedule—everything according to expectations; everything as planned. I accompanied the baby to the post-delivery room. The doctor, flanked by two nurses, labored over the baby with unexpected focus and intensity. Finally, the doctor emerged: our newborn, he suspected (really, he knew), had Down’s syndrome.

A close friend of ours, a nurse at Shaarei Tzedek (where more babies with Down’s syndrome are born than any place in the world) whispered to my wife, moments after we received the news, that she would be happy to take the baby and foster him—even before my wife would be released from the hospital. The doctors and hospital staff, who, in the past, had been unswerving in their aversion to early discharge, happily acquiesced to my wife’s request to go home after only one day, relieved that we would, in fact, be taking the baby home. Friends visited: two of them conducted a dispute, in my presence, about whether a father of a child with Down’s syndrome should be wished a congratulatory mazal tov (the answer is yes). A rabbinical authority in my neighborhood averred upon hearing the news that the event could only be looked at as a manifestation of unadulterated din, Divine judgment; someone else recounted the story of a father of a similar child who had proclaimed at the Brit Milah of his son that the birth of such a child was a manifestation of pure rachamim, Divine mercy. A neighbor advised that we really should foster the child: raising such a child—though, of course, “a blessing!”—would be too large a burden, not to mention a source of embarrassment to our family. Amidst all of this, the languages of advice, explanation and consolation—and I had hardly noticed—there was an infant, nursing in my wife’s steadfast arms.

The irony, unappreciated then, and for many months, even years after, was that I had devoted much of my personal and professional energies to understanding conceptions of diversity and difference, first in relation to the works of the Western literary tradition, and then, on a different path, in relation to Torah and the teachings of Chazal. Throughout my career as a professor of English literature, I have been compelled by literary and theoretical meditations on difference; when I entered the realm of the beit midrash, I discovered the ways in which Chazal affirm a notion of Divine truth—emet—with a multiplicity of different faces. When I was confronted, however with a “child of difference,” not the difference espoused enthusiastically around large oak tables by my teachers in graduate school at Columbia, or even that discussed between the four walls of the beit midrash, I was unprepared. All of my adventures in the pursuit of understanding difference, diversity and pluralism in the arcane and academic languages of epistemology and literary hermeneutics, and even in the realm of limud, had insufficiently prepared me for Shmuel.

When the world, as Deborah Kerdeman writes, “departs from our expectations and desires,” and thus “refuses to be appropriated by us or subjected to our categories, we are “pulled up short.” That is, suddenly, we encounter a reality that our categories fail to fully assimilate: it is an experience associated with “loss” or failure—the inability of our cognitive equipment to provide a map adequate to “what happens.” I had been “pulled up short” by the birth of my son Shmuel, or, more accurately, pulled up short by the initially shattering experience of having an atypical child, a child with Down’s syndrome.

To be sure, the label “atypical,” or the exceptional, has useful diagnostic functions. But the question, I wondered, was in what sense, if any, is there a conception of typicality in the Torah? That is, does the Torah proscribe a notion of typicality, and how does it accommodate conceptions of difference? If the Biblical notion of tzelem Elokim (man created in the image of God) affirms a similarity between man and the Divine, with all men created in His image, Chazal in Sanhedrin (37a) come to qualify that assertion of similarity with an emphasis on difference: Though it is comforting at times to hear Shmuel referred to as a “tzaddik,” and that he is incapable of transgression, such labels deprive children of the very possibility of entering into the community of mitzvah observance.“When a man mints coins with one ‘stamp,’ all [of the coins] are similar to one other, but when the King of Kings mints each man from the ‘stamp’ of Adam Harishon, each one of them is different; therefore it is incumbent upon each person to say, ‘For me the world was created.’” Created from the stamp of the First Man, and traceable to that original source in his similarity, each man also evidences an ineluctable difference. It is this difference which affords him with the experience of both opportunity and responsibility: “For me the world was created.” For it is the image of God which guarantees that all manifestations of difference are linked back first to Adam Harishon, and then to the Divine. As Dr. Rahamim Melamed-Cohen observes in his remarkable book about the exceptional child in the Jewish tradition, there are blessings recited upon seeing difference or exceptionality in the Divine creation, but only the blessing over human exceptionality includes the shem Hashem, the Divine name. Only in those human differences, though sometimes confounding our expectations and “pulling us up short,” does the Divine image dwell.

Notwithstanding the pervasive attitude of a contemporary Western culture that aggressively advertises its commitment to multiplicity, diversity and pluralism, such a culture does not really encourage the encounter with genuine difference. As a recent New York Times article observed, more and more prospective parents in the United States choose to terminate pregnancies rather than face the prospect of nurturing a difference that has a human face. The faces of those who are born also sometimes remain invisible—not because their faces lack the ability to make an impression, but rather because the cognitive lenses available fail to afford the refinement of vision that allows such children to be seen. We view the world through a set of categories and expectations; and what doesn’t fall within those categories does not register on our cognitive screens. Vision may be a biological mechanism, but what we, in fact, see is also a function of our perceptual habits and prejudices.

In the days after Shmuel’s birth, after the genetic tests confirmed what the doctors all knew, I found myself consistently trying to place Shmuel within categories: knowing that he surely wasn’t typical, I found myself relying upon the categories supplied by my well-meaning friends: he was “special”; he was “atypical”; he was a manifestation of pure din, of pure rachamim. It took me several years to realize that he may be some aspects of all of these things, but first and foremost, he was Shmuel.

Immediately after the birth, we were especially susceptible to what I now see as the not-so-well conceived advice of others: my wife and I had decided to conceal Shmuel’s “condition” from our children. Within about an hour of our return home from the hospital, my oldest daughter, Elisheva, then thirteen, inquired quietly and matter of factly, “Does he have Down’s syndrome?” When we answered in the affirmative (we were both relieved that the charade had ended so quickly), Elisheva disappeared mysteriously from the house, only to return fifteen minutes later to pick up Shmuel and smother him in kisses. Our second oldest daughter, Avital, then eight, wanted to know: “What is Down’s syndrome anyway?” After explaining what I then understood about the syndrome (which was very little), looking only half satisfied, Avital asked with quiet innocence, “Do I have Down’s syndrome?” As parents we may try to model behavior for our children, but the innocence of seeing without judgment of the latter incident, and the effort to see against habitual categories of the first, provided me with a model for beginning to see Shmuel.

It was at about this time that I came upon a famous story recounted in the Talmud (Ta’anit 20b): the tanna, Rabbi Elazar ben Shimon, upon returning from his teacher’s house, was “rejoicing greatly” and feeling “proud,” since he had “learned much Torah.” As the story continues, Rabbi Elazar “chances upon a man,” described as “exceedingly ugly.” When greeted by the “ugly man,” Rabbi Elazar responds: “Empty One! Are all the people of your city perhaps as ugly as you?” To this, the man replies: “I do not know, but go and tell the Craftsman who made me, ‘How ugly is that vessel that you made!’” Having realized his transgression, Rabbi Elazar dismounts from his donkey, prostrates himself, and says, “I have spoken out of turn to you; forgive me!” Not until implored by the people of a nearby city does the man agree to forgive Rabbi Elazar—provided, the former stipulates, that “he does not make a habit of doing this.” Rabbi Elazar had been guilty of a visual transgression linked to habit—seeing the outer shell of the man, instead of his inner essence (thus the “ugly man” invokes the Craftsman that made him, implicitly arguing for his own connection, despite appearances, to tzelem Elokim). According to some, the ugly man is none other than Elijah the Prophet, who had come to make sure that Rabbi Elazar would not become “habituated to such behavior.” There are different kinds of bad habits, some of the visual variety: from the framing gesture of the aggadic story, it seems that Rabbi Elazar’s attitude, his contentedness and “pride” in his learning, had contributed to that perceptual error.

So Rabbi Elazar runs to the nearest house of study and expounds: “A person should always be soft like a reed and not hard like a cedar.” He goes on to elaborate the legal consequences of the homily: “For this reason, the reed merited to have quills drawn from it to write Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzot.” A person should demonstrate the softness and flexibility of the reed; to be sure, the Torah provides the categories through which to understand the world, but those categories must themselves be applied with sensitivity, and not “arrogance.” When one is hard—or inflexible—like a cedar, the story implies, there is a possibility of perceptual transgression like that committed by Rabbi Elazar. Habitual ways of seeing—the wielding of inflexible categories—can lead to arrogance and insulate one from the genuine encounter with difference. The Torah, which can be written with a reed, contains the implicit injunction (this is the reason Rabbi Elazar runs to give a derash) that all of our categories, even those which come as the result of much study, must be applied with flexibility.

So I had realized with Shmuel: it was easy to go through life without seeing children who are different—through relegating them, with the simplifying glance of habit, to the categories of the atypical. When Shmuel was born, I didn’t see the child, but the diagnostic category, and Shmuel’s own inability (as it were) to fulfill my expectations.

Another, perhaps more insidious way of such perceptual avoidance, is through the very label “special.” Though it is comforting at times to hear Shmuel referred to as a “tzaddik,” and that he is incapable of transgression, such labels deprive children of the very possibility of entering into the community of mitzvah observance, and thus deny them the possibility of their particular chelek, portion, in Torah. This chelek may be circumscribed, though there may be the possibility that even children like our Shmuel will also be able to say: “The world was created for me.”

The phrase “children like Shmuel” may be a more expansive category than I had thought on the day of his birth. Since then, my family and I have been exposed to the exceptionality of difference, not just as a theoretical construct or as a literary notion, but as part of the texture of everyday life. But more than that, because our own Shmuel so clearly manifests his difference, we have been confided with many other stories of exceptionality from neighbors, friends and colleagues. It turns out that the children who wear the badge of typicality, who seem to fulfill everyone’s expectations, may have their own secret—not failings, but differences. The matmid who lives in the corner building may have dyslexia, the “Queen of the Class” may have a learning disability. That such revelations come hesitatingly may be a function of a general cultural denial of difference that has made inroads into our own communities. Yet if we are fearful of revealing our imperfections or are reluctant to acknowledge the differences of others, it is not out of fidelity to the demands of Torah.

Quite the contrary, there is a way of seeing that is part of our inheritance of our forefather Yaakov: Unlike his brother Esav who hurries off to Mount Seir to receive his full reward in his experience of the perfection of this world, Yaakov “leads on softly”—accommodating the pace and needs of his “nursing” cattle and “tender” children (Bereishit 33:13). Yaakov slows down to tend to the needs of others, acknowledging, unlike Esav, imperfection as part of the nature of this world. We are mistaken to believe that children with Down’s syndrome or other disabilities are the only ones who are “tender.” Viewing my children (not just Shmuel, but his brothers and sisters as well) through the unthinking application of fixed categories risks missing the distinctive manifestation of tzelem Elokim which each of them—not just the diagnostically “special”—represents. When Shmuel was born, I didn’t see the child, but the diagnostic category, and Shmuel’s own inability to fulfill my expectations.This is not to deny that there is a continuum of exceptionality, but Shmuel, like almost all children, confounds categories; indeed, the most typical of children, if we look closely, will show themselves to be atypical.

Calibrating our perceptual mechanisms so that we can see the “tender” among us is not, however, a one-time affair. Recently, after a shiur I gave, a distraught father of a newly born “special” child asked me: “How are you so at peace with your Shmuel?” In explaining my “transformation,” I may have mentioned the stories of Avital or Elisheva, or perhaps the image of Shmuel caressing his own younger brother in the hospital on the day of his birth, or perhaps the memory of Shmuel answering his first berachah with “Amen.” The very next Shabbat, however, walking through our neighborhood, my wife and I passed by a couple wheeling a large carriage, to which was attached a respirator—on which the father made painstaking adjustments. I turned to my wife and uttered, “How sad….” Her response was immediate, the rebuke barely camouflaged: “But don’t you see how much he loves his child?”

To the question, “But don’t you see?” very often, the answer is: “No.” Rabbi Elazar was chastened for a perceptual complacency born out of pride; in the face of the new father who had asked my advice, I had evidenced a similar self-contentment. To his question, I should have simply answered: There’s no magical transformation, no singular turning-point, no defining epiphany, but rather the ongoing challenge to be “soft like a reed”—to be flexible in vision.

Seeing the atypicality of Shmuel thus remains both a process and challenge—of acknowledging that difference is not just a theoretical ideal for the seminar room, nor just part of earnest discussions about epistemological pluralism or multiculturalism, or even a conception of limud confined to the walls of the beit midrash. But rather that difference has a face (like that of the man encountered by Rabbi Elazar), through which the image of the Divine “Craftsman,” if we would only learn how to look properly, can be seen.

John Milton and the Salute to Israel Day Parade

2009-05-31T21:01:00.006+03:00

Preparing for my Milton class tomorrow, I came across the story that today is the 'Salute to Israel Day Parade' in New York. Perhaps this made me focus on a passage in Milton's epic which I have often passed over.

As Milton's character Satan makes his way from the precincts of hell, he spies earth in the distance, and the opening of the 'Kingly Palace Gate' of heaven above:

Direct against which opn'd from beneath,
Just o're the blissful seat of Paradise,
A passage down to th' Earth, a passage wide,
Wider by farr then that of after-times
Over Mount Sion, and, though that were large,
Over the Promis'd Land to God so dear,
By which, to visit oft those happy Tribes,
On high behests his Angels to and fro
Pass'd frequent, and his eye with choice regard
From Paneas the fount of Jordans flood
To Beersaba, where the Holy Land
Borders on Ægypt and th' Arabian shoare;
So wide the op'ning seemd, where bounds were set
To darkness, such as bound the Ocean wave.

So Milton - three hundred years ago - provided his own salute to Israel. Though - to the best of my knowledge - he did not march today.

Twittered Torah?: Connecting on Shavuot

2009-05-28T13:00:00.004+03:00

We've had soundbyte Judasim - now it's twitter Judaism. The Torah in 140 characters - or less.

But on Shavuos it's not the 10 tweeks which we commemorate, but the ten commandments. And the paradoxes implicit in matan torah certainly defy the best of twitterers, tweekers and bloggers.

Z'man Matan Tora-teinu - so we refer to Shavuos in our liturgy. Here is the beginning of the paradox. On Shavuos we celebrate the giving of the Torah - so let our prayerbooks refer simply to z'man matan torah! Instead we speak of the giving of our Torah. On Mount Sinai, G-d betows a gift which already belongs to us! This is another way of expressing the truth implicit in the sages' reading of the first word of our Torah - b'reishit. Not only literally, 'in the beginning,' but on a deeper level, as the sages learn בשביל - on behalf of - רשית - the 'first.' G-d created the world on behalf of the 'first' - referred to by our prophets as both 'Israel' and 'Torah.' Beyond the simple meaning of the verse lies the insight that there is no Giver without a recipient. There is no Torah without Israel - no giving of the Torah without those suitable to receive it.

So what is Torah - is it a divine absolute truth? or something that comes into the world through our reception of it? Is such a question the place where the wars over Torah begin? where, on the one side, Jewish fundamentalists claim to have the absolute truth, while, on the other, progressive Jews claim that Torah is a function of perception and interpretation?

The Rabbis were not philosophers, so when they address such questions, they do so not through philosophical precepts, but through stories:

Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Avitar were learning the Book of Judges, arguing about the meaning of a word in a verse. Their argument unresolved, Rabbi Avitar takes a break and finds Elijah the Prophet by the coffee machine. 'So what is G-d doing now?,' Rabbi Avitar asks. 'Funny you should ask,' Elijah replies: 'he's very busy now, learning Torah - actually the dispute between Rabbi Avitar and Rabbi Yochanan.' 'And,' he continues, 'if you put your ear up to the walls of the Divine Study Hall, said the prophet, you will hear G-d learning: "So says my son Yochanan, so says my son Avitar."'

Like the verse about which the two sages were arguing, there are (at least) two ways to understand the story. In a version of a contemporary interpreter, the study hall of Rabbi Avitar and Rabbi Yochanan serves a Mount Sinai in miniature: 'just as G-d placed the words of Torah in the mouth of Moses, so when the two stages where learning, they did not say their own words, but rather the Words of the Living G-d.'

In this understanding, the giving of Torah on Sinai is the model, and the experience of the two sages derives from it. Just as G-d revealed himself to Moses, so he reveals himself to the two sages in the beit ha'midrash. The Nefesh Ha'chaim, however, presents a different - and seemingly more modern and radical - point of view: 'Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Avitar were engaged in the study of Torah, and therefore G-d repeated their words.' In the first account, God as Giver of Torah takes precedence; in the second, the sages of Israel as recipients of Torah come first. One version emphasizes God and Sinai in the past, the other the house of study - the here and now - where Torah is learned and multiplied.

But does the argument about the interpretation of the story have to mark the beginning of the wars over Torah and Judaism - the difference between the belief in Torah as an ancient eternal truth and a contemporary Torah as a product of interpretation? Not if the dispute between the latter readers of the story is understood as a version of the kind of dispute in which Rabbi Avitar and Rabbi Yochanan were themselves involved. Of this dispute, the Heavenly Voice proclaims, 'these and these are the words of the living G-d.' Both perspectives are true, or rather partial truths - which the story itself conveys. The truth of the Torah is absolute, divine, and also a matter of interpretation. Don't tell such things to philosophers or academic literary critics - who instead of entertaining paradox, reject what - to their minds is - contradiction. The giving of Torah begins with relationship and connection - between the Divine Giver and the people of Israel, who in their receiving of the Torah bring the Torah into the world. There is no Torah without the people of Israel!

Torah study - toiling in Torah for its own sake - produces a kind of connection, which, whether in the time of Rabbi Avitar, or our own, links the Torah’s interpreters back to Sinai. So the Nefesh Hachaim explains, 'At every moment that a person is cleaving to the words of the Torah in the appropriate fashion, the words rejoice as if they were given from Sinai.' Rejoicing words - utterances of the here and now - share in the joy felt in the Revelation of Sinai. Z'man Matan Tora-teinu - the giving of the Torah to which we already have a claim, which is already ours. So, as in the liturgy, what the kabbalists call, the Nosain and M'kabel, the Giver and Recipient come together, as past and present do as well, when we sit in the house of study on Shavuos night and hear - if we are learning Torah for it's own sake - the voice of Sinai resound.

Can't twitter that.

You can now follow openmindedtorah on twitter.

Fear and Loathing II: Ambivalent Principals/Ambivalent Principles

2009-05-28T08:56:00.005+03:00

Still shopping around for a cheder for our son, Shmuel.

Though I think our search may have ended - though not with success. We realized yesterday that our experience in the past - with the neighborhood school - was not just an isolated event, but endemic to a system in which there is simply no 'interest' to pursue mainstreaming as a value.

Yesterday, was the latest. Another principal, this time in a school outside our neighborhood. His argument was as follows: 'you are not from our community; we don't know you; you should go to the schools in your own neighborhood.'

As readers of OMT will know, we've already been to the schools in our neighborhood. So we told the principal - this time my wife was doing the talking - that we knew of his reputation for progressive education and openmindedness, so we were turning to him. 'It was an opportunity for his school.'

He could have turned us out of the room - he had provided his argument (reasonable, though not exactly courageous) - but he kept talking...and talking. And the more he talked, the more he became excited - gesticulating, standing over us, his voice getting progressively louder.

I could see it coming - first the tears in the corner of my wife's eye, and then - with that one more finger point in the face: the outburst of tears. No drama here; this was the real thing: 'Don't you know we've come to you because no other cheder will take our Shmuel?'

Exit stage left.

The principal - I thought (after trying to calm my wife) - had good principles; he just could not express them, at least not to us. As Hamlet says to his mother: 'The Lady doth protest too much, methinks.' All the principal's protesting - really uninstigated - was a defense against a voice within: the principal doth protest too much, methinks! His heart was telling him something his head did not want to hear - so he went on and on defending against his own inner voice. Too bad the outer voice was directed at us!

So there is ambivalence in our community - even among unprincipled principals.

Not much of a pragmatic consolation, but maybe the acknowledgment of such ambivalence - of our voices within - might mark the beginnings of change.

Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem: the Olam Ha'Sheker Excuse

2009-05-12T08:45:00.007+03:00

Spring time in Jerusalem, so yet once more, my wife and I embark on the path of finding a place for our son Shmuel with Down syndrome, this time in a cheder, a pre-kindergarden class in our neighborhood.

So earlier this week, we set up a meeting with the principal of a school around the block from our house. Not only was he cordial, but he had the look of someone who was genuinely interested in helping us with the education of our son. There had not been a child in his school with Down's syndrome for a generation, but listening carefully to our description of our son, his cordiality turned into what seemed like understanding. He invited us back the following day to meet with a rebbe and an administrator to discuss logistics - and how to integrate Shmuel and his 'syat' or 'shadow' into the classrom. The teacher of the class which the principal had in mind for Shmuel put it simply - 'my business is to teach children; and I'd do my best to teach Shmuel as any other child.' 'Though I am not a professor,' he continued with a wink, 'I do have thirty years of experience.'

As we were leaving - s'yata d'shmaya my wife said - another one of the rebbes, seeing Shmuel, stopped us, and mentioned that he had been a classmate of the boy with Down's syndrome from years back. To the questions which reflected the principal's main concerns - 'will he be disruptive?'; 'will he be accepted by the other boys?'; 'will he want to participate in class? - the rebbe answered with reassurance. As Tolstoy might put it, no two children are alike, and no two children with Down's syndrome are alike, but the rebbe only affirmed what we had told the principal - his classmate had been full of joy, eager to participate and imitiate, not at all disruptive. Shmuel's affability and good cheer - traits which prompt my wife to wonder what I would be like with an extra chromosome - and his cognitive high-functioning, we explained eagerly to the principal, are what brought us to mainstreaming and his neighborhood school in the first place.

A few days passed. I left some messages at the school, but my calls were not returned. When I finally reached the principal, he suggested I speak to someone else in the school -now a fourth person - who I was told would make the 'final decision.' It didn't sound good; so I pressed the principal instead.

'It's a very difficult decision...' His voice trailed off. 'Don't take this the wrong way Rav Kolbrener, and please don't be insulted....'

Calling me rabbi, I thought to myself, was a bad sign.

'It's a matter,' he hesitated, 'of considering the mossad.' It was now not just an elementary school, but an institute.

'What about the mossad?', I asked.

'Its reputation.'

I was silent.

'We have to think of what other parents will say when they see a child like Shmuel in the class with their normal children. How will we be able to justify it to them? They also have to be respected. It simply will not be good for the reputation of the school.'

I wasn't insulted, in fact I had heard versions of this before.

There was an undoubtable hint of frustration in his voice - likely I thought that those from whom he had sought advice had a different view of the 'mossad,' and were forcing him to do something against his better judgment. So I responded: 'we both know that what you are now advocating - acquiescing to close-mindeded and sanctioning fear of difference - is against our hashgafa, indeed I continued, any Torah perspective.' 'It's a chilul hashem,' I continued, 'a desecration of G-d's name, to send us away to schools outside of our community - to other schools, and other communities - when you yourself acknowledged that Shmuel could find a place in one of your classrooms.'

'And as far as ordinary children,' I went on, filling the silence, 'we are not children of Esau who find perfection in this world, but the b'nei Yisrael, children of Israel, of Jacob, who acknowledge that this world is a place of lack and imperfection.' 'I am a pragmatist,' I continued: 'if Shmuel is disruptive or can't be integrated into the class room, then we will take him out immediately, but if the experience of our home is true, if that of our building is true, of his nursery school are true, then Shmuel's presence will be a blessing for him, and for all who have the chance to be around him.'

'Rav Kolbrener' - again the wrong title - 'what you say is all emes l'emiso' - the undeniable truth, 'k'dosh k'doshim,' the holy of the holies, but, and I could almost see and feel his shoulders shrugging, 'we live in 'olam ha sheker - a world of lies.

Here it was - the olam ha'sheker excuse! I had heard people exclaim 'olam ha'sheker' as an expression of frustration; this was the first time I heard it as an explicit excuse. Using the olam ha'sheker excuse, not as a form of self-consolation, but justification for doing the wrong thing, turns Torah into something theoretical - 'we can't actually live by the words of Torah!' So Torah ceases to be a manual for life - a handbook for tikkun olam - the redemption of the world, but an ideal to which we aspire when not in conflict with our prejudices and fears. The principal couldn't help being honest: so he acknowledged that my words were true, even holy, but from the olam ha'sheker perspective, such truth and holiness don't have a place in the world. So Judaism transforms into a religion of ideals only. How often is such an excuse - even if not explicitly uttered - used as a means of justifying our laziness, self-interest or even corruption?

Traditions in the West in literature, philosophy and theology - from Homer to Plato to the apostle Paul - separate the ideal, take it out of the world. But Judaism - and this was one of the reasons that I started, years ago, to begin to split my time between the library and the beit midrash - transforms the real into the ideal, elevating the world. Judaism offers the promise of a learning which is not simply theoretical - those earnest discussions I used to have in the seminar room in graduate school - but a learning leading to action and tikkun olam.

Or perhaps this is naive? too idealistic?

Cheeseburger! - Of Torah, Swine and Desire

2009-05-05T18:30:00.003+03:00

I am tempted by the smell of cheeseburgers.

There, I said it.

I also sometimes pine after the taste of a spicy pork sandwich that I ate at a cafe on the Greek island of Samos - before I became religiously observant - in the summer of 1988.

Say something like this at a shabbos table, and witness the metamorphoses of otherwise self-possessed seminary girls, like Odysseus's men on Circe's island, transformed by facial contortions, gagging noises and squealing sounds of disgust: 'Ichh!!!'

Rabbi Elezar ben Azariah says, 'from where do we know that a person should not say "I am repulsed by pulled pork bbq sandwiches," or "I do not want to wear that Armani cashmere suit with linen lining?, but rather a person should say, 'I really want these things, but what can I do?, my Father in Heaven decrees that I must not?' Rabbi Elezar continues, 'from the verse: "And I will separate you from the nations of the world to be Mine."' God does not separate the people of Israel from the nations through magical decree or genetic fiat - the Torah provides the means through which the Jewish people can separate and distinguish themselves. As Rabbi Elezar reads the verse, 'you, the people of Israel - through adhering to the Torah - will separate yourselves for My Glory.'

The command to Israel to separate itself from the nations of the world comes at the end of the weekly portion Kedoshim which, Rashi explains, was taught to all of the people of Israel - men, women and children - because upon its principles all of the Torah depends. In a portion which begins by exacting 'you shall be holy' - explained as distancing oneself from illicit relationships - Rabbi Elezar insists that when it comes to observing chukim, G-d's heavenly decrees, or 'ordinances' as King James renders, He wants the people of Israel to be honest about their desires. Being scrupulous about G-d's decrees does not mean pretending to be something we are not.

'Do not walk in the ordinances of the nations of the world,' G-d commands, 'but rather you shall keep My ordinances.' In Onkelos's Aramaic translation, the 'chukim' of the nations are n'musot, manners or social forms. It's not just the people of Israel that abide by unquestioned decrees: all cultures - true in ancient Athens as well in my hometown in Long Island - abide by social forms, not necessarily rational, which are accepted unquestionably and from which one does not divert. In the time of the sages, it was participating in the culture of 'stadiums' and 'theaters' - what every one does, because ... that's just what you do. They are engraved for the nations - chukim - in the sense that they are engraved, accepted and unquestioned, social conventions. The people of Israel have their own chukim - also not subject to rational explanation. But they are the decrees of the divine. Separating from the nations means avoiding their particular practices, but also abiding by our chukim in a way that is distinctive. If I simply strive to get in line with accepted norms of social behavior - 'I hate pork!' - then I am turning G-d's will into etiquette advice.

Our service is difference. So Rabbi Elazar tells us: 'You should separate yourself from transgression.' Separation comes through an action, and chukim - more than any of the other of the Torah's laws - show our separateness. So we acknowledge to ourselves that left to our own, we might do otherwise. We are not embarrassed by our desires, treating them like pictures in an old photograph album to be hidden away from the children; they are part of our service. To say that my desires are already in line with the will of G-d may appear righteous - what people in my community call 'frum' - but ask Rabbi Elazar: it is not what G-d wants. To the contrary, if I refrain from b-l-t's and the latest fashion because I claim it's natural to me, then I am following the ways of the nations. Through acknowledging my desires and refraining in any event, I distance myself from transgression, enacting my separateness.

True, some things - especially given current epidemiological realities - may seem truly disgusting.

But if we claim to find things repulsive which G-d knows we really want, then we are - because of our over-zealous attempts at frumkeit - becoming more like the nations, and less like the chosen servants of G-d. G-d wants our separateness, but to fulfill the command, 'you shall be holy,' to be truly separate, we can't pretend a robotic observance, but we need - another paradox - to recognize our humanity even as we perform G-d's will.

'Swaying Towards Perfection' - Torah, Worldliness and Perversion

2009-05-03T09:50:00.002+03:00

Perversion, the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, involves 'an anxious narrowing of the mind when it comes to pleasure.' From his clinical experience, Phillips observes that what characterizes sexual perversion is 'a determined sense of knowing' about what one wants. 'The person in a perverse state of mind,' Philips writes, 'has no conscious doubt what will excite and satisfy him.' Knowing what one wants, and fixating on the fulfillment of a specified set of expectations - this is the sensibility of the perverse mind.

Don't close your browsers just yet! I understand that even my most generous readers will be wondering what Phillips' notion of perversion might have to do with Torah - no matter how open-minded. Counting the days from Passover to Shavuos, we do know what we want and expect - and there is no perversion here - matan Torah, the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. What could be wrong with the certainty of knowing what one wants?

Rabban Gamliel, the son of Rebbe Yehuda the Prince, says, 'the learning of Torah is pleasing when accompanied by derech eretz or worldliness - for toiling in both of them causes sin to be forgotten. The study of Torah which is unaccompanied by labor will come to naught and lead to sin.'

Man, the Maharal from Prague writes, is constituted by his body and his soul. Engaging with the physical world - worldliness and earning a livelihood - leads to the perfection of the body, while studying Torah leads to the perfection of the soul. For the temptations of the body for licentiousness and the temptations of the mind for idolatry, work and Torah provide the respective antidotes. But the former takes precedence. Not only - or even necessarily - working a 9 to 5 job, but engagement with the world is the necessary prerequisite for Torah. The character traits essential to derech eretz are not mentioned in the Torah, writes the Vilna Gaon, because it is assumed that without them, Torah is impossible!

Both kinds of engagmenent, the Maharal emphasizes, require toil or exertion - y'giah. Such toil holds out promise; it's opposite brings about stagnation. Every where the Torah mentions 'settling,' our sages tell us, there is eventually failure and disappointment. When the people of Israel settled in Shitim, they soon gave into licentiousness - 'and the people began to commit whoredom (nod to King James) with the daughters of Moab.' After Yaakov 'settled in the land of Canaan,' his favored son Joseph is sold into slavery. The people of Israel settle in Egypt, and soon after Jacob, here called Israel, 'approaches the end of his days.' For the sages, settling breeds stagnation which - in the prooftexts which they cite - leads to perversion, the selling off of the future, and eventually death.

Pursuing the perfection of body and soul through worldly engagement and Torah study protects one from chisaron and ha'eder - from the forces, to speak metaphorically, of privation and lack. The paradox is that when one rests, when one entertains the notion of having achieved perfection, then one becomes susceptible to the powers of negation and loss. But when one is 'm'tno'ai'a el ha'shlama' - moving towards, or more literally 'swaying towards perfection,' then one is immune to the sin that attends the belief that one has already arrived. Swaying towards a perfection never to be achieved in this world protects one from transgression. 'He who thinks we are to pitch our tent here,' the poet John Milton writes, 'that man shows himself to be very far short of the truth.'

Clinical perversion is the expectation of the fulfillment of vulgar expectations, of pitching my tent and hoping to never leave, knowing what I want - and hoping that my future will be just like my past. The perverse act, as Phillips writes, is one in which 'nothing must be discovered.' So while we know the direction in which when we're heading when we claim to have arrived, or to already be in the know, we are risking losing ourselves in the perversion that leads to loss of the future and death. It is the acknowledgment of lack - this is the paradox - that shows our perfection. The frantic certainty, by contrast, of a perspective achieved is a mark of our failure; it is the cover-story for our self-doubts about facing the demands of discovery.

The Torah provides a set of instructions for such discovery, an impetus and framework for our striving - the means through which immersing ourselves in the past we embrace the present and create a new future. The chiddush - the innovative interpretation - is an ideal not only in the learning of Torah, but in the way of life, in our worldliness as well. As Rabban Gamliel explains, one needs to toil - to be fully engaged - in both. But when as parents, teachers or members of a community we foreclose the possibility of that discovery with expectations that the future be merely a copy of the past - insisting that stereotypes are our models and cliches our ideals - then we are in danger of stagnating, perversely selling off the future, endangering ourselves with spiritual death.

This is not Torah, but its perversion.

Equestrian Pesach

2009-04-16T09:41:00.005+03:00

courtesy of orlophoto@yahoo.com

Cosmic Consciousness: The Beatles, Passover and the Redemptive Power of Storytelling

2009-04-07T12:15:00.003+03:00

What could bring the remaining Beatles - Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr - back together? Surprise: the David Lynch Foundation which advocates teaching Transcendental Meditation - 'every child,' the foundation website reads, 'should have one class period a day to dive within himself.' As part of the show at Radio City, after Ringo and Paul did a version of 'With a Little Help from My Friends,' the two performed a tune which Paul composed on a 1968 trip to an ashram in India - 'Cosmically Conscious.' So the two former Beatles sang - 'Come and be cosmically conscious, cosmically conscious with me.'

Passover is also a time of consciousnessness-raising, but when our thoughts turn to Pesach our thoughts are not wholly transcendental. In all of our festival commemorations, it is the exodus from Egypt which we remember - we don't remember G-d - this would be the transcendental version - who created heavens the earth, but rather G-d who took us out of Egypt. Our service avoids cosmic consciousness for a consciousness achieved through the collective experience of lived history. And we achieve that consciousness not through transcendental meditation, but through story-telling, the reading of the hagadda. 'And that you may tell in the ears of your children, and of your children's children, what things I have wrought in Egypt, and my signs which I have done among them; that you may know that I am the Lord.' As the Sfat Emes tell us 'story telling' - and 'you shall tell your children' - 'leads to consciousness or da'as.' Da'as represents the capacity that Betzalel, the master craftsman, employed in building the sanctuary in the desert, joining heaven to earth.

Perhaps, out of habit, we fail to notice the novelty of seder night when the Torah turns story-telling into a mitzva. Try this for a thought experiment: you're going to create a religion, and part of that religion will be the injunction to tell a story. If there's a eucharistic moment in Judaism, it's seder night, but achieved through story-telling. It's the kind of a thing that a literary critic might make up! Even more strangely, we read in the hagadda that even if 'we are all wise, all understanding, all experienced,' we would still have the obligation to recount the events of the exodus. Our sages tell us also that even a wise person - who finds himself alone on the night of the seder - is obligated to engage in the act of story-telling. He stays up half the night -by himself - repeating a story which he has known since childhood!

The Talmud tells us: 'in every generation, it is incumbent upon each person to see himself - lirot atzmo - as if he were leaving Egypt.' Maimonides - either he had a different version of the talmudic text or he was innovating - writes that each person is obligated to show himself - l'harot atzmo - as if he were leaving Egypt. Both versions - but in that of Maimonides especially - emphasize performing the exodus from Egypt, for oneself and others. The hagadda is a set of stage directions for that performance: drinking the four cups of wine, maror, matza, leaning while we eat and drink, derech cherus, our sages tell us, in the manner of free men and women. So interested are the sages in the experience of the seder that they provide actual recipes for that performance. Rabbi Yochanan says that the charoset is a commemmoration of the mortar; Rabbi Yochanan says it is in rememberance of the apple trees under which Jewish woman led their husbands despite their protestations about Egyptian oppression ('we can't have kids!,' their husbands protested, 'not now!'). Abaye goes on to provide the recipe - food can be philosophical - for our dialectical consciousness, both slavery and redemption. 'Make sure that you pound it to make it thick' - commemorating our hardship - and 'add lots of wine and apples to make it sweet' - recalling our eventual triumph. No transcendental meditation here; pass the apple peeler.

The seder is full of props for out performance - it's always fun to add your own (red dye for blood, marshmallows for hail are among my favorites) - but the primary means is speech. Aristotle may say that man is the rational animal, but our tradtion tell us that man is distinguished by his speech. 'And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.' A living soul - nefesh chaya - as our tradition tell us, man is the creature who speaks. Man, says the Maharal of Prague, is not a purely spiritual creature - he represents a hybrid between the spiritual and physical, between the dust from which he was created and the divine breath which inspirited him. Descartes, having ruined everything for Europeans with a philosophy separating mind and body, tried to make amends by suggesting that the despite everything, the spirit does invest the physical in - get this for a philosophical joke - the pineal gland. The Maharal, however - no philosophical models for him thanks - is serious when he says that the mind and the body come together in the tongue.

Though a picture may be worth a thousand words - we know that even the most humble of the people of Israel experienced a prophetic vision which was more vivid and intense than that of the prophet Ezekiel - on seder night, we turn primarily to words. When the word for hearing - shmiya - is used in the Torah, Onkelos who provides the Aramaic 'Authorized Version' translates kabbala. Kabbala - don't think of Madonna here - means acceptance, or perhaps in more psychological terms, internalization. Though the people experienced the 'visuals' on their way out of Egypt, it wasn't long after that they were worshipping the golden calf. So much the more so in our generation, we need a way of taking our own cosmic consciousness and bringing it to life. For this, there is the speech and the redemptive power of story-telling - and a performance that leads to internalization.

In the hagadda, we read: 'one who expands on the story of the exodus from Egypt is praiseworthy.' The Alter of Kelm explains that praiseworthy - m'shubach - comes from the word mashbiach - improved or refined. Through our storytelling - to ourselves and our children - we have the opportunity of refining and improving ourselves. Of taking that transcendental cosmic consciousness - internalizing it - and making it real.

A Religion for Adults - Anyone?

2009-04-01T13:00:00.002+03:00

On Friday night, I heard a story - about a businessman in Baltimore who returned to Judaism late in life. Though he did not have the skills in Torah study of many of his new found peers, he found other ways to express his commitment to Torah and Jewish life - through tzedakah, charity and good deeds. For him and his wife, tzedakah was personal - it became for them what Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik describes as a 'worshipful performance' - an expression of their personalities in the service of G-d.

But then came Lehman and AIG, and the story that continues on the front page of every paper - that is, those papers not put out of business by the crisis. His portfolio declined forty-five percent; his profits diminished; his expenses, however, were on the rise. The couple hoped to continue giving as they had in previous years, though given their circumstances, they had already fulfilled their obligation for charity - even when defined by the most maximalist measure. So committed was his wife, however - even willing to give up her comfortable home for more modest quarters - that she encouraged her husband to consult a legal authority in Israel about their predicament. The rabbi answered quickly: of course the businessman - now down on his luck - had fulfilled his obligations. But, the rabbi added, if he and his wife were to find a cause which they found truly worthy, then further donations would be meritorious. Thinking through the advice of the sage, the couple determined to adjust their lifestyle - so they would be able to give close to the level they had in previous years.

An inspirational story - though it continues.

Only a few days later, the businessman received a phone call from a Swiss broker - who managed a large portion of his funds. It seems an error had been made - holdings had not been properly cataloged, account statements not properly calculated. The bottom line - the opposite of the Madoff story! - a surplus of funds in the range of several million dollars! Not only did this cover his previous losses, but the newly found income made the couple wealthier than ever before!

A triumphant look from the one telling the story; smiles all around, but when the warm fuzzy feeling dissipated, I thought of another story - that of Abraham, his uncle Haran, and the wicked tyrant Nimrod.

Our sages tell us that when Terach discovered his son's belief in one G-d, he turned him over to Nimrod, who threw him in a fiery furnace: 'if your G-d is so powerful,' Nimrod boasted to Abraham, 'let him rescue you!' Standing on the sidelines, Uncle Haran calculated - 'if Abraham gets torched, then I am with Nimrod; if he survives, I'm with Abraham.' When Abraham emerged triumphantly from the furnace, Nimrod asked Haran - 'whose side are you on?' True to his prepared script, Haran answered - 'For Abraham!' And then Nimrod threw Haran into the fire where he was burnt to a crisp.

Haran makes his calculations not on principle, but on cost-benefit. Not because of his faith in G-d, but because of hopes of reward. 'If Abraham turns out to be father of all the nations of the world, I will be his right-hand man... and if not - thinking like an Israeli politician - I'll find something to do in Nimrod's government.'

The message of this story is similar: do a good deed, and get properly compensated. It's as if I'm saying to G-d: 'Let's be business partners... I'll do my share, the mitzvos; you protect my family from hardship, and if you can throw in some earthly reward (BMW 320i in black please), that will also be fine. So whatever I give to you G-d, I will expect the dividends.' This is what Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik calls the mentality of a religion for children - the pragmatic quid pro quo, the calculation and anticipated receipt of my just returns. But it's not only childish - it's dangerous. What happens when G-d isn't the business partner I expect? Do I break off the business arrangement? After all, childish expectations do yield to disappointment. The facile stories of simple reward - our sages tell us we don't know the nature of the reward for any given mitzvah - may lead to not just disappointment, but despair. 'This business arrangement,' I might think, 'is not working out the way I had anticipated. Not at all.' And then what?

The couple from Baltimore did the right thing - an inspiring thing. Even - or especially - without the results. With the coda of wealth and reward - thank G-d that it was, in this case, the outcome - it becomes part of the literature for a religion for children where there is always a happy ending. Though we may hope - and pray - for such endings, our 'end' in the moment in which we live is to transform ourselves through mitzvos that bring us close to the divine. So the story of the businessman from Baltimore, without the coda of the guaranteed happy ending, fits in a different and more demanding canon of stories - that of a religion which a fellow blogger calls 'complex,' or more simply a religion for adults.

The purveyors of the happy endings - and in our post-holocaust generation there is, strangely, a near cultural obsession with such stories - assume there are no longer any adults in the audience. I'm betting otherwise. Am I wrong?

Public Service Announcement

2009-03-19T19:25:00.007+02:00

To the person who wished me Chag S'meach yesterday, it is not yet Passover! It is not even erev Pesach. Let's say - generously - that erev Pesach begins two weeks before the holiday. Well, that is not until next Wednesday. So please!

True, our sages tell us to start learning the laws of Passover thirty days before the holiday, and many of us may remember someone at the Purim meal (though I don't; see below) getting up to fulfill this mitzva.

I also fully understand people - like my wife - who begin the slow task of cleaning the house for chametz weeks before the holiday. But I don't really get the people who perform their religious observance in an aggressively public way.

It's a tricky thing really. For a good way to stay away from hypocrisy is to denounce all forms of outward religious observance as inauthentic - to be a kind of antinomian like one of my favorite poets, John Milton. But we Jews have a different mandate - which is to render the world holy by means of our performance. So the trick is to have those performances - in another language, mitzvos - serve as a way of expressing ourselves in service of G-d, and not as a means of the expressing our supposed superiority.

As with any thing, it's a matter of tone. So I don't mind my neighbors who - every year - cheerfully and without any appearance of attitude empty the entire contents of their house on to the sidewalk in their preparation for Pesach (though, it should be noted, this is probably spring cleaning and not Pesach cleaning). But I do find objectionable the women who - last year in the local makholet (grocery store) - shrieked at one of the arab workers who had inadvertently put a cup of instant coffee on the counter for 'treifing up' her vegetables.

The mitzvos are a vessel for holiness, not for our neuroses. So while I know that Pesach is one of the times of year when we attempt to be stringent, if we sense that our observance is turning into the expression of hysteria or self-righteousness - it's called frumkeit - it may be better to turn things down a notch.

The wife of a good friend of mine suffered pneumonia during the winter. Under doctor's orders, she has been instructed not to exert herself this year. Her husband consoled her for not being able to keep the stringincies she has in years past. 'I suppose,' he said, 'we'll have to settle and just keep the Shulchan Aruch' - the laws of Pesach as expressed in the authoritative code of Jewish Law. For the rest of us, that may also be enough.

So happy - oops I almost said it - shabbat shalom!

'Whose Letter is it Anyway?': Aristotle, Esther and the Art of Letter Writing

2009-03-09T10:42:00.011+02:00

I think the first philosophical question I pondered was that posed by a Razzles advertisement: 'candy or gum?' My first brush with categorical indeterminacy - Razzles, it turns out, depending on your perspective is both candy and gum (but in both cases revolting).

On Purim, there's another one of those category confusions - Megillat Esther refers to itself as both an igeret, a letter, and as a sefer, a book. Our sages point out this generic ambiguity: 'Megillat Esther is both a book and a letter.' When the Megilla refers to itself as a letter, Esther's name precedes Mordechai; when it refers to itself as a book, Mordechai's name comes first. So whose letter - or book - is it anyway?

A book has permanence, written for the generations; while a letter partakes of the day to day - the quotidian. Our sages tell us that the Megilla's establishement as a book entailed its inclusion among the rest of sacred scriptures, canonized for the generations. But even when included with those sacred texts - older sacred scrolls included not only the five books but the books of the prophets and writings as well - the Megilla has to be on parchment of a different size. At once sacred like the rest of the books in our tradition, but at the same time separate, distinguished from the rest of the books of the Torah - and different. To make matters more complicated, our sages explain that the events that transpired in Shushan had already been written, and were catalogued in the Baghdad Library: 'I am in the Persian Chronicles,' say Esther! So - if we have the chornicles - why do we need another version, the hybrid book/letter which is Megillat Esther?

The events of Shushan do seem - on their surface - to be the stuff of the everyday, material for a letter or maybe even a newspaper report. In the Megilla, there are court intrigues, domestic disagreements, beauty contests, sleepless nights, lotteries. Not the events we associate with the rest of the Torah, not even what we would associate with a successful literary work. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues for the importance of 'unity of action.' All parts of the story - down to the last detail - must serve the end of the plot. If there is an episode that doesn't fit, Aristotle advises the author, 'Get rid of it!' The Megilla, by Aristotelian standards, is a failure - nothing fits! A history that seems without reason, random, episode after episode - like the history present in Macbeth's 'tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.' Pesach, by contrast, the first holiday in the Jewish liturgical cycle, shows the providential hand of G-d at every turn. But in the story of Purim, there is no evidence of G-d's presence; the divine name is absent. Purim is the contemporary holiday - contemporary in the sense of accomodating our experience of G-d's absence. 'Where do we find Esther's name in the Torah?' - our sages ask. In the verse from Deuteronomy - וְאָנוֹכִי הַסְתֵּר אַסְתִּיר - and 'I will hide my face,' anochi hastir astir. Esther - and the work that bears her name - is associated with hiddenness.

And yet. The history that bears no evidence of the divine presence reveals itself - in the end - to show an order which we did not originally suspect. The apparently random details of the Megilla prove to be essential to the salvation which comes at the end. Those events - check them out tonite - which seemed all to conspire towards the destruction of the Jews of Shushan ultimately lead to their salvation. The episodes are intrinsic to the story - with the right perspective, the Megilla turns into an Aristotelian success story - where every event is necessary to the whole. V'anha'fuku - and everything turned around! We didn't know, but the letters from Shushan is sacred.

The Persian Chronicles will not do: for chronicle just lists events; they don't tell a story. Only Esther gives a complete narrative - with all of the necessary links between what readers in Bagdhad may have construed as unrelated events. The version in the Persian Library chronicled an unconnected set of random events; but the Megilla, unified through the consciousness of Esther, tells a story where everything fits, so see even in the apparent randomness of events, G-d's providential presence is revealed. To the question: whose Megilla is it anyway? The answer (the envelope please!) is undoubtedly Esther's. So Esther's name precedes Mordechai when it comes to authoring the 'letter.' But when Esther approaches the sages of her generation, asking to establish her letter as part of the Holy Writings, then Mordechai's name precedes her for his role - as member of the Sanhedrin - in transforming the letter into a book.

Our practice - watch in synagogue tonight - is to unroll the Megilla on the bima before we start reading it. We read the Megilla like a letter, to show that we are not reading from the other books of the Torah (And we also roll it up in the end showing how all the details are collected - igeret also means to colllect - in the scroll). All who hear the Megilla must know that this letter/book is fundamentally different from the other books of the Torah. The Megilla must be read as a letter to emphasize that the what we are reading could be - and is! - on a par with reading a newspaper, current events. A letter is merely transitory and temporal, a disposable witness to the life and times of daily life - a testimony to our own recurrent sense of 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.' The events of Shushan are the everyday. But when the Jews of Shushan fasted and repented, then from out of the meaningless randomness of life, the hester panim revealed itself. When at the end, events are revealed through the eyes of Esther, the letter becomes a book. Esther asked of the sages 'make my letter into a Book!'; turn my account of the everyday into a Book on a par with the other Holy Writings! Show the way in which the everyday - the dark repetitions of seemingly unredeemed history - are also a pattern of the divine!

A happy Purim!

Off-Road: Postcards from LA

2009-02-23T15:50:00.010+02:00

I remembered that song from my youth - 'it never rains in California, it pours.' So it was - 'Open Minded Torah' on the road (that is, me) ended up in a Friday down pour in LA. Thankfully, I was saved from a day wandering around the drenched UCLA campus by a friend who suggested an afternoon trip to the Getty Museum.

So civilized: the underground parking garage, the tram easing up the hill to the museum complex, the cheerful volunteers in their parkas (it wasn't that cold!) handing out umbrellas upon our disembarking.

I had never been to the Getty. But for all of my love of museums, I had flashbacks to my high school years and what a friend described as 'museum madness' - that dreadful boredom of being dragged to yet another gallery, when all you're thinking of is the hot pretzel or chestnuts outside on the museum steps. When we got to the featured exhibit, 'Captured Emotions' - only in California I thought could the come up with a cheesy name - my own emotions sagged even further. The explanatory text on the wall - who wants to read all that? - while overhearing the museum guide droning: 'in this room alone, there are over three hundred million dollars worth of paintings.' I wanted to escape to the gift shop.

Turns out that the emotions captured were from Renaissance Bologna - though repackaged for the southern California crowd. 'Egyptian Desperate House Wife' in one gallery - that did get my attention - paintings of Joseph attempting to escape from the lustful embraces of Potiphar's wife. In the first by Carlo Cignani, it's the fleshly and buxom wife of Potiphar grasping the resistant Joseph - eyes towards the heavens.

She is pure flesh; her face belies no intelligence, only dumb desire, while the upraised hands of Joseph seem at once to be warding her off and raised up imploring divine assistance. Joseph is enveloped in both her arms and her garment - Cignani's liberty since in the Biblical story, it is the wife of Potiphar who grabs on to Joseph's cloak. Though aher garment, as much as drawing them together, separates her dumb passion from his fearful resistance.

The desperate housewife had staying power in Bologna - Guido Reni painted the scene as well:

Reni's painting provides a different take - it's not dumb desire, more like carnal knowledge. Potiphar's wife may be fleshly, but she looks at Joseph with intimacy and understanding. His left hand is up held up in resistance, though his right hand - is he holding on to his cloak, or reaching for her? - tells a different story. She is fair and white; Joseph is dark with desire - his looks betray him. He is Dustin Hoffman to her Anne Bancroft of The Graduate - 'I know you want me,' her eyes seem to be saying, and the bedpost in the center of the painting, as well as Joseph's ambivalent pose and darkened face seem to show his assent. Cignani's Joseph is at the mercy of the divine; Reni's Joseph is at her mercy.

But then this, also by Reni - a picture of Saint Cecilia, the Christian patron saint of music. The painting has been hiding in Pasadena - why, I thought, is it not in the Louvre surrounded by thousands daily, like Leonardo's mysterious lady?

In this painting, there's the knowledge, to be sure, of Reni's wife of Potiphar, but here it's refined, rendered spiritual. The split between the physical and the spiritual shown in Cignani's picture is absent - it's a pose of intense spirituality, but also beautiful physicality. Her eyes lift upward as if to pull her out of the canvas, the cloak on her arms, seeming to bind her to the ground. But as the whiteness of her neck and her upward glance move upwards, the curve of the violin bow brings her down to earth. And more than that - you can almost see it in the reproduction - the whiteness of her cheeks, brought to life by the slightest hint of a flush under her translucent skin.

I don't know St Cecilia - to me, it looks like how the sages might have imagined Serach bat Asher, who, while Joseph was in captivity played a melody for her grandfather, Jacob, which let him know that his favorite son was still alive. Through Serach's music, the patriarch knew that Joseph lived, that the Jewish people would reach their salvation - that history, the physical world had and would continue to yield to the divine. This is the figure I saw in Reni's painting on the rainy day in southern California - the supple refinement of the flesh, the intense beauty of the otherworldly.

Lighting Up: the Beauty of Chanuka

2008-12-25T14:14:00.014+02:00

מצות נר חנוכה מצוה חביבה היא עד מאד

'The mitzva of the lighting of the Hanuka lamp,' says Maimonides, is a very beloved mitzva.' To encounter this passage on its own, you might forget that scholars like to call Maimonides a 'rationalist,' instead we get here a rare expression of enthusiasm - not only an adjective, but even an adverb! There are 613 mitvos in the Torah, and many more decreed by the rabbis, but nowhere else do we find Maimonides in his massive legal compilation evidencing such enthusiasm for a mitzva. We may wonder, adapting the idiom that my kids use when a sibling is evidencing too much enthusiasm for an activity - lama ata kol kach mitlahev? - 'why are you getting so excited?' or more literally, 'why are you so lit up?' Why is Maimonides so 'lit up' by the mitzva of Hanuka?

But there other questions to which we'd have to attend as well. Continuing, Maimonides writes, 'a person should be careful so as to make known the miracle (הנס), and to multiply his thanks to G-d and praise him for the miracles (נסים).' Why is there a disagreement in number? which one is it - miracle or miracles? The inconsistency in Maimonides is paralleled by a seeming inconsistency in the sages. For example, when the sages of the Talmud ask 'what is Hanuka?' - that is, on what basis was Hanuka established as a holiday? - the answer given is the miracle of the oil that should have lasted only one day, but lasted eight days instead. Yet in the prayers on the eight days of Hanuka, there is no mention at all of the miracle of the oil, only the miracles of Jewish victory against the Greeks - that the stronger and more numerous Greek forces succumbed to the weaker Jewish minority. So in the question of miracles - to Maimonides we ask, 'how many?', and to the sages, 'which one?'

The miracle of Hanuka - or the miracles - become clearer in relation to the Greeks and the particular threat they represented to the people of Israel. For the sages, the Greeks occupy an ambiguous position. A Torah scroll can be written in two languages - Hebrew and Greek, but the sages say that it is forbidden for a father to teach his child Greek! Further, while the sages recognize that of all the nations of the world the Greeks have the greatest claim to wisdom, they associate the Greeks with the aboriginal darkness - the חושך - from before the Creation. The Greeks with their decrees, our sages say, darkened the eyes of Israel. The means through which they brought about that darkness, as well as the response of the Jewish people, may provide a way into better understanding the miraculous nature of Hanuka.

The parallels - or better the contrasts - between Hanuka and Purim help in explaining the distinctive nature of galut Yavan, the exile of darkness imposed on the Jews by the Greeks. On Purim, the Jewish people transgressed through attending the feast of the Persian King Achashverus. That is, they transgressed with their bodies, and as a result, the threatened punishment was to their bodies: Haman wanted to destroy all of the Jewish people. He was not interested in Jews who wanted to convert - Jewish father or mother, or even grandparent: their fate would be the same. To avoid the threat against them - they appealed to G-d through fasting, again with their bodies. So when salvation came, the Jews celebrated with their bodies - with drinking and eating, objectifying their joy through physical pleasure. In contrast, the transgression which leads up to the Hanuka story was the neglect of the service in the Temple. As a consequence, the Jews were threatened not with the destruction of their bodies, but their minds and souls. The Greeks had a consistent strategy: they did not destroy the oil; rather they defiled it, leaving its external form, though rendering it impure. So also, they left the Temple in Jerusalem standing, but transformed it internally, turning it into a gymanasia, a place celebrating the primacy of Greek wisdom. So the decrees of Antiochus were not against the body of the Jew: the latter retained his external form, but he, like the oil and the Temple, was defiled internally. The strange exile of Greece - the Jews still in their land! - is the internal and spiritual exile of assimilation. The Greeks were מחלל - they turned sacred into secular - literally leaving a חלל or void in the people of Israel. To avoid this threat against them, the Jews renewed their spiritual efforts, they dedicated their souls - they were מוסר נפש - to divine service. So when salvation came after these trials, the Jews celebrated not through food and drink, but with thanks and praise to G-d.

Praise or hoda'ah - הודאה - is connected to הוד or hod, that is beauty. The kabbalists tell us that the eight days of Chanuka are eight days of hod; the days of Hanuka are days of both praise and beauty. Both words imply flexibility even dependence - to praise G-d is to confess and recognize a reliance upon the divine. Hod is a particular form of beauty - there are many - that defines itself through an acknowledged vulnerability, a yielding. The Greeks emphasized the beauty of the external form, yofi or יופי, but such beauty begins and ends with the external. Unlike the beauty of Greece - yofi - hod represents a beauty that comes about when the physical first joins and then yields to the spiritual. The hod of Moses splenderous face in Numbers is not the external beauty of Greece, but an external testimony to an inner state. Hod is a beauty that breaks forth from the physical, yielding to a force beyond it.

Here is the beauty of Chanuka - in the hod of the Hanuka lamp, burning for eight days. Ask Aristotle how long the lamp will burn, or ask Newton - they will both tell you: one day. The lamp that burns for eight days testifies to a force beyond both the Aristotelian laws of physics and the Newtonian laws of nature. The Greeks are darkness - Maimonides tells us that they were the first of the nations of the world to embrace atheism. Other nations of the world may have worshipped strange gods, but the world of the Greeks was godless. As great as their wisdom was and is, they darkened our eyes, habituating us to a world in which there is nothing more than the laws of nature - a world exhausted by the empirical and defined by the expression 'seeing is believing.'

So Maimonides tells us be careful to make the miracle (in the singular) known - this is the miracle of the oil, the miracle which the eight days of Hanuka commemmorate. But I might ask: why do I have to be careful? I live in a Jewish neighborhood! There are thousands of menoras - of course the miracle is known! Maimonides may emphasize that I need to make the miracle known not only to others, but to myself. Be careful to recognize the hod of the Hanuka lights which testify that nature is flexible; it bends; it yields. First comes the acknowledgement of the hod of the Hanuka lamps, then the hoda'ah or praise for the miracles (in the plural) of the Jewish victory. The Hanuka lamp is acknowledged as a miracle in and of itself, but it also provides a lens through which to see the נסים, the other miracles. The wars between Jews and Greeks can be reduced to a history book example of geo-politics - and they are by the Greeks. But the hod of the Hanuka lamps leads to the hoda'ah or praise for the miraculous nature of the everyday - starting for us with the Jewish victory over the Greeks, but leading outward to the other miracles of our lives. The mitzva of the Hanuka lamps is beloved - חביבה היא עד מאד - in allowing us to thus find light - even hod - in the darkness of Greek exile. Acknowledging the hod of the lamp activates praises and thanks for the miracles that are less easily seen in a world where the Greeks have darkened - and may still succeed in darkening - our eyes. So Maimonides gets 'lit up' by the lights of Hanuka. G-d transformed the oil of the lamp. And through the lamp - if we see the hod - the world we see is also transformed.

Wounding, Vulnerability and Identity: Jacob's Scar

2008-12-12T10:58:00.009+02:00

The most famous scar in Western Literature is that of Odysseus. Disguised as a beggar, he returns from his voyages to Ithaka; to prove his identity to the still faithful servants, he shows his wound. Not his driver's license, or his college ID, but the scar on his thigh. Odysseus's scar is what defines him.

What's in a name, Shakespeare's Juliet asks Romeo: 'would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?' The answer for Homer - as for Shakespeare - is no! Odysseus's name is central to his identity: his grandfather, in the Homeric version of the bris, names him: 'I have suffered and caused other to suffer says his grandfather, let his name be Odysseus' - a name which means to suffer and to cause suffering. Not the name that proud Jewish parents would bestow! And so Odysseus lives out the fate of his name, suffering, causing suffering, and winning glory. As a young man, he hunts a dangerous wild boar - which 'hooks him aslant,' ripping 'his flesh just beneath the knee.' The young Odysseus finally triumphs over the wild beast; and when he returns home, he 'spins the tale' of how he got his wound. His wound defines him. When, he returns home, disguised as an old beggar, his old nurse washes him, and only when she runs her hands over the groove of his wound, only then does she cry out, 'Odysseus, it's you!'

Odysseus's scar is famous, but there are other famous wounds.

Fearing the vengeful wrath of Esau after having taken the birthright, Jacob sends emissaries to his brother with gifts; takes special precautions for his family; and then finds himself alone, isolated on the banks of the Yabok river in the middle of the night:

And Yaakov was left alone, and someone wrestled with him until break of day. He saw that he could not prevail against him, so he touched the upper joint of his thigh - which was dislocated as he wrestled with him.

Our sages say that the dust which whirled up from these two wrestlers 'rose up to the Throne of God.' Not any ordinary wrestling match, Jacob was in battle with the 'ministering angel' of Esau - a battle between Israel and the culture of the West which Esau represents. Jacob also suffers a wound - his thigh was dislocated. And as a result, Jacob limps through history. In the end, the sun does shine 'for him,' and the healing light promises an end to the painful traumas - the experience of suffering and exile. But for now, Yaakov limps through history. After their meeting, Esau receives instant gratification - he travels directly to Mount Seir to the seat of his inheritance - Jacob builds a sukkah, a temporary structure, anticipating the path of the people of Israel - a path of wandering, first in the desert, and then throughout history.

Odysseus uses his wound - narrates his suffering - to win himself glory: 'I am Odysseus!' he proclaims to the Cyclops he defeats. Jacob's wound, by contrast, has a different purpose. Following Jacob's triumph over Esau's 'guardian angel,' G-d commands that Jacob abstain from eating the gid hanashe - the sciatic nerve. 'Nashe' means weakness or vulnerability. Odysseus suffers and brings himself glory -through retelling his exploits; Jacob however embraces the law of the sinew of weakness, foregoing the physical strength of this world. Esau in his physical prowess - our sages tell us that he was born with hair, fully formed - cannot recognize the infirmity of others. The law of the sinew - bringing glory or cavod to G-d in its observance - reminds Jacob to embrace his vulnerability, not to forego it. Esau expects - in his desire for instant gratification - perfection from the world. Those of us who are in constant search of 'happiness' or constantly affirming our own contenment may have a bit of Esau in us.

In acknowleding his vulnerability, Jacob is prepared to see the vulnerability of others. When Esau invites Jacob, 'come with me,' the latter refuses, he rather 'leads on softly' - accommodating the pace and needs of his cattle and 'tender' children. Jacob will one day fulfill the fate of his name of Israel - when the dawn breaks, at the end of history, and Israel will prevail over his brother. But in the meantime, he is Jacob, the one who comes from behind, who is incomplete, and who lacks. So Jacob leads on softly.

The wounds of Odysseus and Jacob stand both as a testimony to the sufferings of life. The wounds - in the respective frames - define what it means to be alive. But how does one respond to suffering? Odysseus pursues glory; Jacob pursues cavod shmayim - glory to heaven - all the time recognizing his own vulnerability, allowing him to be open to the vulnerability and needs of others.

Esau to Jacob: 'Carpe Diem, Dude'

2008-11-27T07:45:00.004+02:00

The most famous meal in the Bible - Jacob's pot of lentils. His brother Esau comes from the field hungry and asks about the red stew. 'Who died?' - knowing that lentils are the food of mourners. 'Our grandfather, Abraham' -Jacob replied. Esau halted - 'Zeidi is dead?' Jacob nods, Esau pauses, composes himself and proclaims - 'if Abraham is dead, there is no Judge and no Justice,' and sells his birthright to his brother Jacob.

Esau did not think that Abraham was going to live forever. To be sure, Abraham told his children and grandchildren the covenant that G-d had sealed with him - that his seed would inherit the land of Israel. Esau knew as much. He also knew that his grandfather would die - at 'a ripe age,' as G-d had told him - before seeing that inheritance. But there was another part of G-d's message that Esau also remembered: that Abraham's offspring were to be enslaved as 'strangers in a strange land' where they would be 'oppressed and enslaved for four hundred years.' Esau was the first born, and he thought he would bear the brunt of the exile. 'Not for me,' he thought. So our sages reveal the motivation for what the Bible tells us happened next: Esau 'ate, drank, got up and left, and scorned his birthright.'

From Esau's perspective, as long as Avraham was alive, as long as the family dwelled together in the Land of Israel - so long as G-d's presence was immediately felt, then he could believe in the one true Judge and his Justice. But when Abraham died and there was the likelihood of exile, then Esau claims 'there is no Judge and no Justice.' No more birthright. Better to enjoy, to eat and drink. 'Pass the lentils,' he tells his brother. Carpe diem. Sieze the day for tomorrow we die. For now, it's party on.

Jacob however is different. His faith is born when G-d's presence is no longer immediate; in the face of loss and death and exile, he agrees to buy the birthright -with all that entails. Esau knows for a certainty that his grandfather's seed will inherit the land. Just as assuredly as the 'tick' of a clock is followed by a 'tock,' Esau knows that the descendants of Abraham will receive their portion. But the duration between the 'tick' and the 'tock' - between the promise of redemption and its fulfillment - is interminable to Esau. The interim promises too much hardship. So he proclaims: 'There is no Judge, and no Justice.' Jacob by contrast - when he purchases the birthright - shows himselt ready to suffer the long night of exile.

Jacob embodies the faithful waiting of Israel - even after Abraham is dead - when there is no prospect of redemption, but rather suffering. As a people, today, we have our own 'tick'-'tock,' beyond the inheritance of the land promised to the Patriarch. Our 'tick' is Genesis, our 'tock,' the end of days, the coming of Mashiach. Sometimes the wait - the duration between the 'tick' and the 'tock' - seems interminable. So long that we may forget the end: 'is this the promised end?,' Shakespeare's King Lear asks anxiously. Not yet...

When Maimonides lists his principles of faith, number twelve of the thirteen is the belief in the Mashiach, the messenger of G-d - he is not divine himself - who proclaims the end of days. Maimonides does not merely say: 'I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Mashiach.' You would have thought that would suffice, but in an uncharacteristic expansiveness, Maimonides continues: 'and even though he delays - with all of this - I will wait, every day, for him to come.'

Even though he delays, the duration between the 'tick' and the 'tock' does seem endless! Yet even though he delays, אם כל זה - 'with all of this' - I will wait. 'With all of this' - if a principle of faith can be poignant and poetic this quailifes. 'This' - this is what Esau will not bear - the suffering, the anguish, the waiting for redemption. Yet the children of Israel, with all of this they declare, with all of this - they will nonetheless wait every day for him to come. And how much of this there has been!

My twelve year old daughter asks: 'Is Mashiach coming?'

'Yes! He is!'

'We want Mashiach now!'

We are a generation of instant gratification - even when it comes to Mashiach! Children can afford such an attitude. But as adults, it sometimes seems like there is 'no Judge and Judgement,' like the clock has permanently stopped, and that the 'tock' will never come. So we teach our children - and ourselves - not to be like Esau. For with the need for instant gratification comes disappointment, and the indulgence in the pleasures of the moment dressed up in Esau's resigned 'carpe diem!' Yes, we know Mashiach is coming - he is! - but we also know the fine art of waiting. 'With all this' - with Jacob - we still believe!

'No Good Deed Goes Unpunished'?

2008-11-19T14:41:00.009+02:00

A friend called the other day: he needed my help. I had to rearrange my schedule to get to his office on time, but the thought of the loss to my work was compensated by the pleasure of the mitzvah: I was happy to help. Then, my phone rang. It was him: 'Never mind,' he said casually, 'I solved it without you.' 'Oh, and thanks anyway' - as he hung up. Never mind?!? Thanks anyway?!? My afternoon was lost, the traffic back to my neighborhood worse than usual; and when I finally got home, it was without my scarf! My favorite scarf! I had gone out of my way - and all I got for my efforts was a 'thanks anyway!' The phrase ran through my mind - I almost said it! - 'no good deed goes unpunished!' As a friend once observed, in the Jewish Bartlett Book of Quotations, 'no good deed goes unpunished' takes special place.

Abraham, our sages tell us, overcame many obstacles on his way to fulfill the divine command to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Coming down the mountain, the test at once fulfilled and averted (a paradox), the father and son meet the waiting lads, Ishmael and Eliezer: we can imagine their hopes for a triumphant homecoming. But our sages tell us that the Satan (or the evil inclination) had something else in mind. Sarah was home, preparing for Abraham's return, when the Satan arrived: 'Know where your husband is?,' he asked. Without giving Sarah the chance to answer, he continued: 'well your husband - how old is he now, in his hundred and thirties? - took your son Isaac to Mount Moriah to sacrifice him.' 'I saw him' - he lied - 'terrible sight, really, your son, screaming, crying, saying he couldn't take it.' At which point, our sages tell us, Sarah died. It turns out that not everyone survived the Akeida - the binding of Isaac. Sarah was its casualty.

When Abraham does return home, it's not to greet her, but to fulfill a grim task - 'to eulogize her and to cry for her.' The laws of mourning - that both accomodate and structure the needs of human psyche - tell us that first one cries and only after gives a eulogy. Before the formality of mourning and speech, there is the expression of raw emotion. It is as if God says, 'do not supress your humanity to please me!' First the outpouring, then the mourning which enables the transition back to the world of the living. But Abraham engaged in the formal act of mourning first.

Abraham was a celebrity. With Sarah, he had dedicated his life to bringing people close to the one G-d. Abraham had no regrets for his actions: the Torah calls him tamim - pure, even perfect, in his acceptance of G-d's will. But he knew how people think. They will say, Abraham thought to himself: 'Abraham has come back from Mount Moriah with his son to find Sarah dead. Surely, he should have expected G-d to reward his deeds, and instead he finds this!' That is why Abraham refrained from crying. For had he cried, the people of Hebron would have thought - Abraham is crying out of regret for having performed the mitzvah of attending to G-d's words! Like us, they would have shaken their heads knowingly and said to themselves, 'no good deed goes unpunished!' There's Abraham regretting the Akeida. So Abraham mourns first, and then cries.

'Be pure' - תמים תהיה - 'with Hashem your G-d' - the Torah exhorts in Deuteronomy. While the nations of the world practice witchcraft and hearken after those who claim to divine the future, the Torah commands, 'be pure with your G-d': don't anticipate what the future will bring, live in the present! Be pure - like Abraham - who makes himself present to the moment, as when he answers the divine call: 'Hineni, here I am.' Presence to the moment - to the here and now - means to refrain from calculating what the future will or should bring. Abraham knows that mitzvos are rewarded, that his portion is with the one G-d but he doesn't know how. In that humble knowledge, he leaves room for the divine, for the unfolding of a future which he does not fully understand, and which may not go according to his expectations. Surely, there are scoffers in Hebron who will want to say that the world is run by a god with a bad sense of humor whose main principle is 'no good deed goes unpunished.' But while they mock Abraham's beliefs, it is they who indulge in divination, who have created an impoverished religion out of their own laziness or stinginess: 'We told you so,' they say, 'your good deeds have done you no good.' 'You lost your scarf,' they deride, 'next time you will know better!' But telling their own stories about reward and punishment is really just a form of avoidance - avoiding the present, the imperative of now, the imperative of saying 'Hineni, I am here!'

In the evening prayers, we turn to G-d and ask: remove the Satan from before us and from behind us. There are not only obstacles which we meet on the way to performing good deeds, but also those we encounter after. Sometimes, the Satan, as in the case of Abraham, does his best to run after us. So we entreat G-d to take away the obstacles that lie before us, as well as the ones that come from behind - that we will be pure like Abraham. That is, we pray that the thought - 'no good deed goes unpunished' - will remain far from our minds!

Under the Black Hat: A Bar Mitzva Celebration

2008-11-11T07:45:00.008+02:00

There was a bar mitzva in shul this past shabbos. As is the custom, upon hearing the bar mitzva boy's blessing over the Torah, the girls in shul, leaning over the mechitza, rifled - more like uzi-machine-gunned - toffees towards the bima. 'Ouch'! - a little sister's revenge - a strawberry toffee right in the bar mitzva boy's face! Meanwhile, the rugby-scrum scramble for candy: there was such an excess of it - the frenzied stuffing of booty into plastic bags - that more than one of the older boys offered toffees to their dejected younger brothers. As order was restored, and the congregation prepared for the musaf prayer, I watched one of the older boys - also already bar mitzva, you could tell from his hat - working through a private dilemma: his bag of toffees was overflowing - too big for his pocket and too unwieldy to balance on the shtender in front of him. With the chazan intoning the kaddish directly preceding musaf, I watched the boy's 'eureka' moment: he lifted his hat and plunked the bag of toffees on his head. By the time the congregation answered 'amen,' the boy's hat was back in place, and he was shuckling away.

When a boy reaches bar mitzva, he becomes a bar da'as - a person of sound mind, responsible for his actions. Our sages tell us, 'just as their faces are not alike, so their da'as is not alike.' Da'as loosely translates as knowledge, but also means opinion, intelligence or even way of thinking. But what is this way of thinking - as distinctive as a person's face - that makes a person responsible for his actions?

Da'as is one of those words - Freud writes about them in his essay on the 'Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words' - that has different, sometimes even opposing, connotations. On the one side, da'as is an ability to make distinctions - that is, to see differences; on the other, da'as is the means to make connections. והאדם ידע את חוה - 'And Adam knew Chava': through knowledge one achieves the closest kind of connection. But to know another person, there first has to be recognition of the separateness of that person. In the earliest stages of child-development, there is no real recognition of the other - just the expansive self, fulfilling his needs in relationship to a world whose independence he cannot yet fully recognize. Many of us know someone who seems still to inhabit (or at least wants to inhabit!) such a world; being an adult, however, means recognizing that the world is not just an extension of the self.

The power of da'as to join together is not, however, only shown in relationship to the outside world: a bar da'as distinguishes, orders and connects with different parts of his internal world as well. A bar da'as first distinguishes: there are some demands of the internal world which he will not heed. Metaphors abound to describe the agent producing desires to which a bar da'as must say 'no': our sages call it the yetzer hara - or evil inclination; Freud calls it the id. But da'as contains its opposite as well: it is a means to distinguish, but is also a כח החיבור - a capacity to connect. A bar mitzva boy binds tefillin on his head and arm to show the connection between the realms of thought and action. Though we may know a precociously intelligent eleven year old, he is not a bar da'as - because he has not yet developed that capacity - da'as - to link thought to action [for those who like to note invidious gender distinctions: da'as is reached by a boy at 13, a girl at 12]. The prophet says, 'on that day you shall know - וידעת היום - and rest it on your heart that G-d is One in the heavens above and the earth below.' G-d's unity is affirmed in the heavens, and then on earth: through da'as, the abstract ideal rests on the heart: da'as - knowledge of the heart - is an act of internalization, bringing the knowledge of Torah down to earth.

'You shall love Hashem, your G-d with all of your heart' - בכל לבבך. Hashem is the name of G-d as unknowable, ein sof - a G-d beyond comprehension. He becomes 'your G-d' - a personal and beloved God through love - the worship of the heart. Through the doubling of the letter bes - ב - in the word for 'your heart' לבבך, the Torah tells us that we should serve G-d with both our good and evil inclinations. It is not, therefore, a one-way street: da'as not only connects the upper to the lower world, but the lower to the upper world as well. Only on the sixth day of the creation does G-d behold His handiwork and call it 'very good' - טוב מאד. Not just good, as in the other days of creation, but very good, because on it, our sages tell us, the evil inclination was created - without which a man would not marry, establish a household or engage in creative activity. A person develops, opens himself up to unknown future possibilities, through harnessing all of the resources of his personality - both of his inclinations, all of his heart. One who is insensitive to the demands of his inner world risks becoming an external shell - 'a frozen ego.'

The greatest form of individuality does not come through intellect alone, but though unifying upper and lower worlds, integrating parts of the soul. The tzadik - our sages tell us - brings together heavens and earth; he does so through the powers of da'as. This is what makes a person an individual: 'just like their faces are different, so is their da'as.' The face is where the soul shows itself in the body; da'as is that internal link between body and soul. My da'as is as distinctive as my face, the point where my energies and desires engage with the ideal image of who I want to be - my way of bringing the Torah down to earth. It's the work of a lifetime, starting with bar mitzva - for one thirteen year old, standing in prayer before G-d, a bag of toffees tucked safely under his hat.

In the Sukka: 2008

2008-10-20T15:00:00.000+02:00

Repentance for Dummies III: Yom Kippur, Time and Creative Repentance

2008-10-05T06:45:00.006+02:00

Someone recently told me: there are two kinds of people in the world - neurotics who dwell obsessively on the past and those who have the good sense to ignore the past and move forward. Everyone, after all, has skeletons in their closet, and to dwell on past misdeeds and transgressions seems like a sour and pointless activity. For the philosopher Benedict Spinoza, the soul-searching required for repentance is not, he says, 'a virtue' - rather the irrational impulse of someone steeped in 'suffering' and 'sadness.' For Friedrich Nietzsche, someone who pursues repentance first suffers a 'fearful paralysis,' then an 'enduring depression' - and eventually a 'shattered nervous system.' 'Ask a psychologist!' says Nietzsche: he will tell you about the masochistic 'remorse' and 'convulsions' that repentance always brings with it. Many of us know the type - someone depressed and melancholic, wallowing in the transgressions of the past. To such a person we might say, 'get a life; the past is the past; don't dwell neurotically on things that you can't change!' If this the kind of remorse required during the ten days of repentance before Yom Kippur, then perhaps better to follow Spinoza and Nietzsche and give up repentance altogether!

There are models of repentance which, in taking account the enormity of human transgression, require an intermediary for the weight of sin to be lifted. In these models, man can only be passive in relationship to an irredeemably evil past. In many versions of Christian doctrine, this is in fact so: because of the perceived weight of transgression, hope is placed in a redeemer who satisfies the desire for justice of a 'wrathful' G-d - by whose miraculous grace alone, repentance is granted. In this model, all one can do is passively acknowledge one's irredeemably sinful past and rely upon G-d to grant forgiveness. Is this the model that Jews follow?

Rabbi Akiva says: 'how happy are the people of Israel! Before whom do you render yourself pure? Who purifies you? Your Father in Heaven!' Rabbi Akiva cites a verse from Ezekiel as a proof for the principle: 'And I sprinkled upon you purifying waters, and you became pure.' He goes on to provide an additional verse from Jeremiah in which G-d is called 'Mikveh Yisrael' - the purifying waters of Israel. 'As a mikveh or ritual bath purifies the impure,' Rabbi Akiva explains, 'so the Holy One purifies Israel.' But why does Rabbi Akiva need to bring two verses? That he does suggests an unexpected complexity to t'shuva. When we implore G-d to sprinkle his purifying waters upon us, we are passive; but the metaphor of mikveh Yisroel implies an activity. True, it is G-d who will purify us, but we have to jump into the mikveh! G-d will do His part, but we must also do ours. In retrospect, the two verses allow us to look back at Rabbi Akiva's question: 'before whom do you render yourself pure?' G-d is certainly an actor in the process, but we are as well - making ourselves pure in the presence of G-d.

But what is t'shuva? 'Great is t'shuva,' says Reish Lakish, 'for deliberate transgressions are accounted meritorious deeds,' as the prophet says, 'when the wicked shall turn from his wickedness and do that which is lawful and right - through them he shall live.' T'shuva transforms my willfull sins into meritorious deeds'! That sounds like a good deal! What I had thought was at best a dead weight of past misdeeds becomes the source of life - 'through them he shall live!' But 'transgressions turned into merits? That does sound like a kind of hocus-pocus. Is there some kind of divine waving of the magic wand through which the alchemy of bad deeds into good takes place? And if Reish Lakish doesn't argue with Rabbi Akiva, and t'shuva involves human action, then what am I possibly supposed to do enact such a change?

T'shuva is made possible by a particular conception of time. One version of time is distilled by Shakespeare's Macbeth for whom the 'tomorrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow' of successive meaningless moments leads the 'way to dusty death.' But Macbeth's time is really just a sophisticated version of a popular contemporary notion of time, popularized on t-shirts as - I'll paraphrase it - 'stuff happens.' T'shuva requires a notion of time which is different from that of Macbeth where past, present and future interact - as on Rosh Hoshana, when, in the moment of hearing the shofar, we become aware of the Creation, Mount Sinai, and the End of Days. The present is no longer part of a chain of separable and unrelated moments, but it is infused by a knowledge of a future when the Great Shofar announces the redemption of humanity. The future - our ideal image of it - enters the present and even the past. In the resonances of the shofar on Rosh Hoshana we hear, as R. Joseph Soloveitchik says, 'the evanescent moment transformed into eternity.'

It is with this consciousness of time that we approach the days of awe and Yom Kippur. For not only do we as a nation have an ideal image of our future, but each person has his own ideal - cultivated and created through repentance and good deeds. Just as the ideal future - the End of Days - invests the present moment with meaning for the people of Israel, so a person's own ideal future connects up with the present, as well as the past. Through the image of my own ideal future, I not only mold my present - and here is the power of t'shuva - I re-create my past. This is a long way from the past as an object of my neurotic obsessions weighing me down. Rather, through the retrospective glance of t'shuva, my past is transformed. Undoing the relation of cause and effect, it's not my past actions which cause future events, but rather my conception of an unrealized future which re-creates the past! Instead of A leading to B, B leads to A!

But I still might protest: 'I'm ashamed of my past! I did bad things! best for me to start with a clean slate! or even better - I need to seek absolution!' But such absolution only comes - remember Rabbi Akiva - through the creative act of repentance, the creative transformation of my past. It's true that I did bad things, but my motives - and even the actions themselves - were not all bad, not irredeemably bad. In fact, my retrospective glance reveals that willful transgressions - my stubborness, waywardness and selfish desires - are not only consistent with, but they have actually propelled me towards (now I realize it!), my ideal future. The very actions I thought had most distanced me from G-d are in fact those that now bring me close. So willful transgression are turned into meritorious deeds! Refined by the image of my ideal self, my past misdeeds are seen to have shaped my present in a way that they now have the power to help me realize my ideal future. I'm not stuck with the depressing either/or of obsessing about my past or abandoning it. Nor need I despair about a past weighing on me - determining who I am now. Moving towards the future, the past re-cast in its light, my present is transformed. Through the power of t'shuva - no hocus pocus here - sins become good deeds: they are actually the source of a new and transformed life - through them we will live!

Repentance for Dummies: Hypocrisy and the Power of T'shuva

2008-09-15T09:30:00.004+03:00

'One who has transgressions in his hand, and feels ashamed to repent or to do t'shuva, let him exchange his transgressions for good deeds, and do t'shuva, and it will be accepted. Let it be compared to a person who has bad coins in his hand who goes to a money changer and gives something extra — in exchange for good coins; so also, one who has transgressions, let him do good deeds, and t'shuva.'

The words of the sages are strange. For they imply that one should first do good deeds or mitzvos, and then only after tshuva. Yet a verse from Psalms suggests just the opposite: 'turn away from evil, and then do good' - first repent, and then, only after, do good deeds. It makes sense, as Rambam writes of the penitent:

Yesterday he was separated from G-d: when he called out, he was not answered; when he did good deeds, they were ripped up in front of him. Today, after he he has done t'shuva, he is attached to the shechina, the divine presence; he calls out, and is answered; he performs good deeds and mitzvos and they are accepted with pleasure and joy.

A person who does good deeds without first having done t'shuva has those deeds ripped up in his face! So one might think: 'I had better desist from doing good deeds until I have transformed my inner world. It's better to do nothing then to be a hypocrite! G-d doesn't want my lip service!' The kabbalists go so far as to say that such lip-service gives strength to the Forces of Evil in the world.

But our sages are warning us from leaning on the hypocrisy claim - 'I can't do t'shuva, it wouldn't represent the real me! I'd be a hypocrite!' For honesty can also be a form of avoidance behavior - a way of cheering myself up in my complacency. So they advise: even before a person transforms his inner world, he should look to do as many good deeds - acts of kindness, mitzvos - as possible. Even though they are not accepted at the moment, when eventually he does t'shuva, that is, when he makes the attempt to perfect his inner world, to come close to God, his good deeds will be accepted retroactively. The parable makes this point: the good deeds that a person does before t'shuva are like bad coins. But at least he has some currency - not only transgressions - in his hand! He brings something to the table! When he adds something extra (ie t'shuva), the bad coins are exchanged for good ones; the deeds of questionable status before t'shuva, because they didn't reflect his inner being, are transformed into good deeds. Not only that, but his t'shuva is so powerful that past transgressions are nullified - as if they were never committed.

One feels despondent at his distance from G-d; each transgression appears as yet another barrier between him and G-d. He fears, or thinks he knows, that his mitzvos will be rejected - torn up in front of his face. To be sure, the sages understand that good deeds without the prospect of internal tikkun (or repair) are of no value - only a symptom of hypocrisy. Yet they teach that t'shuva spiritual renewal - cannot be achieved through turning an internal switch. Contrary to what we might think, change begins not from the inside, but from the outside, through action. First I have to perform good deeds, and try to be the person I want to become on the outside - even though at first it doesn't really feel genuine. I may even say to myself: 'it's not really me!' But when I've accrued enough coins - even if they are an inferior currency, my inner world catches up. Through that extra that I am now ready to add - for now I am ready to admit to myself that I am the kind of person who can do t'shuva! - I reveal a continuity between who I am now, and the person I once was. The person who did those good deeds at the beginning with ambivalence turns out in the end not to have been a hypocrite; in fact, he has been transformed retroactively - the amazing powers of t'shuva! - into the person who now stands in the divine presence. My good deeds propel me towards repentance - revealing from the very outset someone who desired to return to G-d.

So when the sages advice us - especially in Elul - to focus on deeds first, and then the inner world, it is not an exercise in hypocrisy, but rather pragmatism: part of the pragmatic guide to repentance.

It's Only A Lobster: Woody Allen's Neurotic Pleasures

2008-08-24T08:00:00.003+03:00

There's a new film by Woody Allen. Which made me wonder: why have Allen's movies been so disappointing for so many years? Or, why is Annie Hall of 1977 still the standard against which all of his later films are judged? It's not much of a movie, more a series of memorable vingettes, held together by a feeble plot line-the failed romance of Alvy Singer played by Allen and Diane Keaton, the title character.

Would it be too much of a stretch to say it's his best film because it's his most Jewish? Between screenings of Max Ophul's Sorrow and the Pity, a four hour documentary on the Nazis, Alvy hangs out with 'some guys from NBC', and asks: 'did you eat yet or what?' One of them, Tom Christie [read Tom Christian] responds with the innocent, 'no, did you?,' misheard by Allen as 'd'jew?' 'You get it? Jew eat?' Jew? 'You're paranoid Max,' says Roberts to Allen who always has Jews and Judaism on his mind. But the paranoid anti-semitism probably doesn't get as much play as Allen's tortured Jewish consciousness. How many non-kosher animals are there in Annie Hall? Alot. There's the ham served at Annie's family gathering. 'Nice ham this year' says Annie's mother to Grammie Hall, 'the classic Jew hater' in whose eyes Alvy appears-at least to his own imagination-as a chassid, complete with hat and long payos.

Then there's the 'pork and shellfish' that Alvy's doctor rules out as causes for his stomach ailment (surprise: it's hypochondria), and the spiders--one the 'size of a Buick'--in Annie's bathroom. Most notable of the non-kosher creepy crawlers are the lobsters on the kitchen floor of Hampton's summer home, with the squirming Alvy's shouting 'they're disgusting!' As one of the lobsters escapes behind the refrigerator, Alvy implores Annie: 'you talk to him, you speak shellfish!'

Annie does speak shellfish, and that's part of Alvy's fascination with her. There's enormous pleasure for Allen--even though it seems like he's in pain--with the transgressive love affair with the shellfish-speaking Keaton and her lobsters. It's the kind of pleasure that French psychoanalysts call jouissance-the neurotic pleasure one gets from unresolved psychic battles. Alvy knows he shouldn't be eating the lobster, but there's the jouissance in doing it anyway. Towards the end of the movie, after Alvy and Annie have separated, Alvy tries to repeat the scene-same house, same kitchen, same lobsters. Allen with lobster in hand, looks up plaintively to his new companion who responds with utter indifference: 'it's only a lobster.'

There's a whole generation of Jews who share Alvy's neurotic pleasures; the kabbalists might look generously at such neurosis and see the 'sparks of holiness' of a struggling Jewish soul. Not that the Torah wants us to be neurotic. The Talmud tells us we shouldn't make theatrical shows of disgust at non-kosher animals: it's not that I don't want to try the eel at the local sushi place; really I crave it. But, as Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel says of the cheeseburger he forgoes, 'I want it, but my Father in Heaven decreed me not to partake of it.' So I admit my desires, and become responsible for them, even as I decide not to pursue them.

Some might say that Alvy admits that he really likes lobsters, and just wants to eat them. That's one form of resolution, and maybe some sort of psychic health for Allen. Though it's a shame really, because for all of the images of Jews in his films, almost all center on fear--paranoid anti-semitism and neurotic anxiety about being Jewish. When there are Jewish scenes in Annie Hall, they are more generically ethnic than particularly Jewish. If Alvy--with all those Jews he represents--had access to a lived Judaism and not just its negative stereotypes, he might have worked out his inner conflicts in some other way, true to his neshama as well as his psyche. He might have been responsive to his desires, as well as the voices of Jewish tradition which he knows and feels, but eventually represses to satisfy the perspectives of those who say: 'it's only a lobster.'

And had he found some other resolution, and sought an audience other than the one which looks with pitying condescension at his Jewish connections, maybe his movies would still be funny.

Cosmic Sharing and Cycles of Love: Parenting for Independence

2008-08-14T14:00:00.013+03:00

In Kurt Vonnegut's short story, 'Harrison Bergeron,' a society of the future installs 'mental handicap radios' in the ears of its population, sending out periodic sharp noises to keep the overly intelligent 'from taking unfair advantage of their brains.' My oldest daughter was in London recently, and on the Friday before her return I thought of the story I read with so much pleasure in junior high. That day, each time I sat down to my computer to work, there was that vibrating buzz--'one message received'-'where are you?' When she and her friend first arrived at Heathrow, I welcomed the buzz: after the first encounter with British Immigration, and the flurry of messages which accompanied it (the two Israeli Beis Yaakov girls, deemed a threat to Her Majesty's Commonwealth, were detained for over an hour), I was less enthusiastic: 'two messages received'-'what are you doing now?'; 'four messages received'-'what are you having for dinner?' When we finally spoke, just before the onset of shabbos, I couldn't disguise my frustration: 'fifty-seven messages in one day! you're joking, right?'

So parents make mistakes. Mentioning the sms excess had been the planned opening to the conversation, but from her point of view it was already over: 'Where's Mommy?' That was a snub.

'Your mother has already lit shabbos candles.'

Silence.

I quickly improvised: 'Mommy made the cholent, but added too many chick peas; I made your spicey orange chicken with eggplant, but Freidie left it in the oven too long and it burnt; the girls helped Mommy make the brownies, but ran out of chocolate chips; and the boys are napping and will wake up just in time to cry through the shabbos meal.' I understood that though she is eighteen and managing her independence half a hemisphere away she wanted to be grounded, reminded of home.

Recently my three year-old son gave me an understanding of what had happened. On an afternoon visit to shul, he was restless and felt like exploring, but as he started to lean away from me, ready to wander, he tightened his grip. A living emblem: his feet perched on mine, tilting away from me, pulling my hands-almost an inverted compass.

Though it was not just a simple question of his need for re-assurance. More than that, when our children are becoming themselves as toddlers or even adults, if we are good enough parents, they will be, at the same time, asserting their connection to us. Or maybe it's through connecting to us that they become independent? Almost like a conceit from a poem by John Donne: we become most independent at the very moment we are most connected. This is the identification born out of love, allowing for the self to grow. For 'living,' as Freud writes, 'is the the same as being loved.'

'Beloved is man, because he was created in G-d's image; even more beloved is he because he was so informed, as it is written: "in the image of G-d, He created man."' So Rabbi Akiva tells of the love that links G-d and man, but there is an even greater love: the love that G-d shows by telling us that we are created in His image. G-d loves man, says the Maharal, and with His cosmic 'I love you,' elicits our love. Not only is there a connection-expressed in the image of G-d that links the Creator and man-but G-d informs us of that connection because he wants our love. Through the mutuality of love, man does not become divine as the Serpent falsely promises; rather man, through becoming godly, elevates himself as man.

So when the shabbos siren sounded-just as I ran out of details of Friday's preparation to recount-I added one more thing to our globetrotting and ever-more independent daughter: 'We love you!'

Birthin' Babies: 'Orthodox Jews Don't Care About Their Children'

2008-08-06T19:30:00.001+03:00

Dateline: Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv

In a story first reported in Haaretz, and then syndicated to the BBC, Yahoo, and, among other places, the Fort Mill Times (it's a South Carolina paper), a toddler was left behind at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv as her parents and four siblings boarded a flight to Paris. By the time the four and a half year old girl, roaming around a duty-free shop, was found by an Israeli policeman, the flight was in the air. The parents were informed by a stewardess, according to Haaretz, forty minutes into the flight, that they had left their daughter on the ground.

The left-leaning and often anti-religious Haaretz was unusually restrained in their coverage--only intimating that the girl's family is 'ultra-orthodox.' Sarit Ben Eden, the officer in charge of the departure area, Haaretz reports, bought the crying girl an ice cream cone; the latter had become sufficiently composed to inform the officer that she only eats food with strict orthodox supervision (Badatz hechsherim). Subsequent accounts in the syndicated press, however, include due mention of the toddler's 'ultra-orthodox' background. A post by 'Jane' on the Haaretz 'Talk-Back' gives insight into the world-wide fascination with the story. Jane's post--'That's What I'd Call Too Many Children'--implores: 'If you can't keep track of them it's time to stop birthin' babies.' Anyway, everyone knows, as Jane implies: 'not only do the ultra-orthodox children have too many children, they don't even care about them!'

I'm not going to try to explain or justify what happened. Perhaps the parents were anxious about their departure from Israel, overwhelmed by their eighteen bags and their return to France; perhaps they had arranged some buddy system among their children, and there had been a failure of communication. Even though we've sometimes had a hard time keeping track of our children (as recounted in these pages), I can't fathom leaving one of them behind in the departure lounge (and then snacking peacably on airplane pretzels until given the news by a stewardess!). It's unimaginable to me.

But as much as I'm not interested in apologetics for the parents, I'm also not interested in a diatribe against the media's anti-orthodox prejudice. I'd rather think about why we are so compelled by stories like this one. It probably has to do with the kind of thinking that literary critics associate with synecdoche--which is an expression through which a part of something comes to stand in for the whole. By looking at a supposedly representative part, I claim to be able to make generalizations about the whole. So the story of the hapless French couple becomes a synecdoche for all orthodox parents: 'you see they have too many kids! and the ones they have they don't even care about!'

Stories like this help us keep our pre-conceived notions about people we'd prefer not to know. They are the urban legends--which the quantitative methods of sociology (and the statistics course I never took)--would tell us not to believe. But the stories are widespread, and it's not only stories about the orthodox: there are corresponding stories about other communities as well, stories which are the means by which one community or sector retains its prejudices about another. The 'horror' story of the 'secular promiscuous adolescent,' for example, which gets great play in some circles in Israel, comes from the same psychic place as that of the 'indifferent ultra-orthodox parents.' Though totally different in their content, the stories serve a similar function--insulating from any real knowledge of people who are different. Both stories serve as cautionary tale and modern allegory, ways of transforming people--sometimes whole communities--from their complex realities into cartoon characters. To be sure, sometimes these stories are true in the particular, but they are rarely representative--they are rarely synecdoches--in the ways which some like to claim. What if all secular people are not immoral hedonists? what if all ultra-orthodox are not irresponsible and indifferent to their children?

Imagine: we'd have to re-think. And once we re-think--who knows?--we might see things differently.

Why I (still) Love Milton, or Milton in Love

2008-07-17T07:45:00.005+03:00

Stanley Fish has a column in Monday's Times about the Milton Conference in London, marking 400 years since the poet's birth.

Well, I was there too! Stanley came over to me--it's been a long time since he was my very first Milton teacher at Columbia--and said he wanted to talk. Preparing his piece for the Times, he was surveying the gathered Miltonists on the question of why we continue to find Milton 'captivating.' I was at the National Portrait Gallery (Madame Tussauds for snobs), the Tate Modern (chasing pigeons with Pinchos while my wife was in the gift shop), and then at Magdalen College at Oxford (and All Souls and Christ Church!), so I never got to have what Milton calls 'meet conversation' with the brilliant (and to me avuncular) Fish.

Sometimes an invited shabbos guest--usually a seminary girl or a yeshiva boy--will ask about the connection between Milton and Judaism. To which I usually respond by passing the hummus and charif (hot sauce), and reminding them, in not-so-subtle ways, that I am the One Who Asks the Questions (especially the personal ones!). But it is a good question.

The archangel Raphael in Book 5 of Milton's Paradise Lost explains to Adam:

...freely we serve
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall...

Service and love come together: in this we stand or fall. And so Milton's Adam returns:

...we never shall forget to love
Our Maker.

The enjambment (remember that from high school?)--the line which both ends and runs into the next--shows how love of man and love of the divine are related, a service based upon love. We never shall forget to love!

Love, as Jonathan Lear writes, is the impulse towards connection and union. While Milton's seventeenth-century philosophical contemporaries were inventing reason and objectivity, Milton himself was hopelessly in love--with God, with poetry, with his fellow Englishmen. Milton understood that only through love does the individual truly 'stand': through identification and union the individual--and this is the paradox--becomes more and more himself. Thus Milton was both the greatest of individuals and the most faithful! (a paradox reduced to a contradiction by some of my Miltonist colleagues).

The modern university--the institutional legacy of those philosophers against which Milton rebelled--is founded upon the knowledge that comes from a disembodied and supposedly neutral reason, not the wisdom that comes from the connection of love. Universities train the detachment of sophisticated distance, the studied disengagement that trickles down into pop-culture, distilled in the expression: 'whatever.' There was no 'whatever' for Milton; for him the wisdom of love is 'an act of union'; he knew as Lear does that the 'perspective outside love'--what passes today as 'being objective'--must be 'one of developmental failure and pathology.' Milton passed on the philosophical innovations of his contemporaries--Descartes, Hobbes, and the rest of them--and continued to love. Without love, there is the illusion of an objective view of the world, but it is actually one of disinterested nullity--the pathology of disengagement.

So when in London last week, I was reminded of the importance of Milton in my path to engagement, as well as the persistent resonances of Adam's claim--that 'we never shall forget to love'!

Two Black Boxes and A Murderer

2008-07-16T11:00:00.003+03:00

I don't blog politics. But like many of us, I suppose I had images of them--Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev--defying the pronouncements of the politicians and walking triumphantly out of Lebanon. And the parades that would follow (like the one we still imagine--perhaps one day?--for Ron Arad). But instead only funerals:

And here is part of the package of what was given up for the black boxes... And this...

Delayed Architecture Review: Yad Vashem and the New Zionism

2008-07-02T07:30:00.001+03:00

There's something about the Arrivals Hall at Ben Gurion which always draws me. Maybe because I compare it with the dreary arrivals building at JFK--which though also a gateway for immigants just doesn't compare. Getting to Ben Gurion early means more time watching the spectacle--where the airport guards sometimes seem less interested in security than overseeing family reunions. It also gives me more time to imagine and embellish the stories of the arriving passengers: the Beis Yaakov girl back from her first trip abroad away from her family; the high-tech executive returning from Silicon Valley to his wife and balloon-bearing twin daughters; the squat Bukharin women walking tentatively as their flag-waving family members, upon sighting them, let out shouts of joy. There's a common set of fantasies expressed in the financial pages of the newspapers here: if only all of the Jewish CEOs and CFOs would come to Israel, then the Israel economy would really be strong! But it's not Steve Jobs and Stephen Spielberg that I want here (though they can come also), but all of my friends and relatives! When a longtime friend of mine left Israel, I felt not only the loss of a friend, but the loss of a particular lens through which to experience Israel. And so when a friend visits, it's a new lens on Israel.

So naturally, when an old colleague and friend of mine came to town for an academic conference, I was happy to put aside my current research on British Church history (exciting as it) and make the trip to the holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. When I was in high school, I remember writing an article for the school paper called 'Museum Madness'--which was about the experience of culture overdose I used to feel after about thirty minutes in a museum (I've been scouring the net, thought to no avail, for late seventies web archives of the Hilltop Beacon). Nowadays, I can usually go about forty-five minutes of concentrated museum-going, but then it's back to that old 'museum madness' state. At Yad Vashem, 'museum madness' sets in quickly. I have a hard time concentrating for long on the exhibits: all of those galleries!; the written testimonies (such small print!); so many oral histories! But in Israel, there's always so much more going on (just my bus ride to the library this morning included several mini-dramas). Like the exhibit of a pre-war living room (replete with dining room table and embroidered wall-hangings) destined to be abandoned in the late thirties, but now filled--with a kind of awkward triumph--by kippa-wearing soldiers in their green khakis, some of them looking as if they stumbled into the wrong movie. And in the Auschwitz galleries, an American in a Boston Red Sox hat volunteered: 'If any one has any questions, my father can answer,' pointing to the man beside him, 'he was there.' And the girl in the Def Leppard T-shirt, with one of her IPod earplugs dangling, sobbing uncontrollably in the Hall of Names.

If that wasn't enough to keep us busy, there's also, like any really great museum, the amazing architecture of the place--and, in the case of Yad Vashem, the contrast with its predecessor. You can still see the the old museum, the two-panel scruptural frieze adorning the squarish building's outer walls. On the right side is the image of a procession of Jews--weak, shrowded and downcast. Here are the old Jews of exile, and at the center, a Moses-like figure, carrying the Torah in his hands.

On the left side (remember the Hebrew-reading mind moves from right to left) is a very different vision: the Jew is no longer downtrodden, but standing upright and noble. The cylindrical centerpiece of the previous tableau--the Torah--is replaced in the second image by a machine gun: from Revelation at Sinai to the Uzi.

As it turns out, the second sculpture was created as a commemoration for the fighters of the Warsaw Rebellion. Whatever the original intention, on the old museum facade, it's part of a 'before and after' story: the 'before': the old weak European Jew wed pitiably to the Torah; the 'after': the new strong Israeli Jew independent, defiant in his own might and military strength.

In the new museum--not in a frieze, but in the architecture of the building itself--the before and after story is re-told. Walking into the museum, there's a continuous film-loop--projected on the triangular wall that serves as one end to the long prism-like structure of the museum--with scenes from the World That Was Lost, the Europe of before the war. In these fantastic grainy old images, there is so much more than the story told by the old museum frieze. There are still the pious Jews marshalling their horse-drawn carts down shtetl paths, but also Jewish trade unionist marching on modern city avenues. Then there's the Hitchcock-like Rear Window sequence which peaks into various windows of Jewish life: two women framed by a door sporting the latest fashions, an older man seated at a piano practicing, a chassidische boy fehered (tested) by his rebbe. The Jew of Europe is portrayed in a diversity absent from the corresponding image on the frieze; what replaces the machine-gun bearing modern Jew is even more arresting. True, in the last exhibit hall, there are the children of Munkatch, trundled up in their winter coats outside of a school, singing what would become the Israeli National anthem Ha Tivka--interspersed with the footage of May 14, 1948, Ben Gurion's declaration of the State.

But this more recognizable ending to the zionist story is in one of the side galleries--subordinate to another story which becomes clearer as one emerges from the dark low center of the museum which brightening into another triangle, a window, directly opposite the projected images at the museum entrance. Opening the glass doors, the burst of wind, the view of the Jerusalem Forest: my friend Ken turned to me and said what I felt: "exhilirating!" One walks through the doors not to the polemical zionist triumph of the old museum frieze (though there are those who continue to thive on the tired antagonism represented there), but to the zionism of the endless horizon of possibilities. Turning away from the iconic story of Israeli military triumph of כחי ועצם ידי, the new Yad Vashem opens up a story for a zionism without idolatry. This is the zionism of the land of Israel and the many lenses--like the Torah with its many faces--by which, with every one who enters the Arrivals Hall at Ben Gurion, a new face of Israel is revealed.

Modernity is Hell: Korach and Hobbes

2008-06-26T07:45:00.004+03:00

I have plans to go to London in a couple of weeks for the International Milton Symposium. When people ask me about my upcoming academic trip, and I tell them I'll be speaking about 'Milton and Hobbes,' they gently correct me: 'you mean, "Calvin and Hobbes"'? No, it's not early senility, and not a slip of the tongue, and not a Bill Watterson spin-off, and not a tiger and a boy, but the poet, John Milton, and the philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. So, given my current scholarly interests and the time of year, I've been thinking a lot about Hobbes, and his predecessor in the desert, Korach. I'm picturing some of my graduate students now giving a collective eye-roll, and saying to themselves: 'there you go again Kolbrener, yoking the most heterogenous ideas by violence together!' Korach and Hobbes: p-lease...! And yet...

I sometimes wonder about interesting historical figures to have at my shabbos table (a strange thought, i know); I think Hobbes would be a great candidate--though he would probably scare the children. He scares me! Hobbes, the first philosopher of modernity, saw a world--or maybe he helped invent it--of only bodies, just an interacting 'motion of limbs.' Though Hobbes devotes half of his book to discussions of religion, he allows no place for spirituality among those limbs: there's just the physical world, nothing divine. Out of Hobbes's universe of only physical bodies and their conflicting desires comes the need for the Leviathan--who through his 'rule by the sword' provides the only barrier to endless war, and the life of man which he describes (so very cheerfully!) as "nasty, brutish and short." In a world without spirit or common rationality, there are only competing political interests: she may dress up her interests in certain value systems and beliefs; and he in others, but everything always boils down to politics and interest. The sensible person (ie Hobbes) will say: in such a world of warring passions and interests, the best thing to do is to give into the authoritative and authoritarian Leviathan, and just let him keep the peace. In a world without anything else holding people together, raw authority holds sway. It's all power.

Enter Korach, the Leviathan of the desert. Korach questions Moses's authority, Moses--the most humble of all men, G-d's true prophet. And how does he challenge Moses? He says: 'You are a politician! you've set up your brother Aharon in a cushy position as High Priest; your nephew as next in line; and you take the leadership position for yourself! You're running a corrupt government based upon protexia (for non-Israelis, nepotism); and you benefit the most!' As a way of winning favor, Korach then morphs into Spinoza and says, 'we are all holy, Moses; not just you; spread some of the power around.' (I admit I'm being overly academic here, but for those not in the know, Spinoza was the seventeenth century philosopher--an honest to goodness heretic--who made possible the scene, centuries later, of Shirley MacLaine on an East Hampton Beach, shouting, "I am God!"). Korach doesn't believe in Torah min Ha'shmayim--Torah from Heaven: Korach 'deconstructs' Moses's actions, and finds their true meaning: 'It's your doing Moses!; your Torah keeps you in control!; your Torah reflects your preferences; you don't like cheeseburger's Moses; you are of the levitical class and like the day of rest; that's why you gave us this Torah of yours!' All Korach sees is his own desire for power, so he can't see anything else (everyone, I think, knows someone like this). So even in Moses, the spiritual man par excellence, he only sees politics and power.

Our sages tell us that there are two kinds of dispute, one for the sake of Heaven, represented in the dispute of Hillel and Shammai; the other of Korach and his followers. The dispute of Hillel and Shammai is beloved by G-d, because each are engaged and committed to bringing to light aspects of the Torah. And though they disagree--and sometimes say opposite things--they are united through their love and learning of the Torah. Here, we return to the mystical power of the number three. For two are transformed into one through the point that brings them together. In this way, as the Maharal puts it, three is at once less and greater than two. Jewish algebra: three unites into the number numerically less than two (one); but one is superior to two for representing unity. Hillel and Shammai are united in their disagreement (having a meaningful disagreement is hard to do!)--through the Torah.

Korach however is forever stuck in the world of two. He is not paired with Moses, but with his fellow politicians, the company of two hundred and fifty men who follow him to their death. Korach pursues not the unity which comes from dispute in the name of heaven, but the dispute of politics and division. The dispute which Korach pursues was created on the second day of creation, the day the waters above and below were separated (a cosmic division)--the only one of the six days of creation which G-d does not call 'good.' It is also the day, our sages tell us, when gehinom--hell--was created. Hell is the day of division without the hope of coming together, of separation and absence, a vacuum filled up only with the warring desires of men whose lives are 'nasty, brutish and short.' And so Korach projects a world based upon his own selfish desires and political machinations. But as Korach and his followers sink into the abyss of the fiery earth that swallows them, the rest of the people of Israel cry out, 'Moshe Emes, v'Toraso Emes,' 'Moses is True and his Torah is True!' The Torah of Moses makes possible a world where the division of two turns into the unity of three!

Hobbes describes a modern world in which many of us still live, a world without anything to unify but power, a world of politics and faction, self-interest and endless division. Korach's dispute provides a legacy for Hobbes which he gives to the modern world: Hell.

Living with Failure

2008-06-23T07:45:00.003+03:00

A few weeks after moving to the Bayit Vegan neighborhood of Jerusalem, a neighbor invited me to his home, and showing me his recently re-furbished dining room with its the long oak wood table, declared 'the shabbos table is the center-piece of family education.' Funny, I remember thinking to myself, our shabbos table is often the center-piece of family food-fighting. So if I've given an overly idealized impression of my family, I'm coming clean. Though I think it's important to weave rich and positive stories for and about the family, it's obviously not the whole picture.

In the Torah portion from last week, those who had been excluded from the experience of Pesach come to Moses and ask: 'why should we be diminished? we may have been ritually impure, but why shouldn't we also get the chance to participate in the Passover ritual?' They felt 'diminished' for not having had the opportunity to do a mitzvah--an amazing notion! So they ask Moses for a second chance. Though Moses is the greatest of all prophets, these laws were concealed to him. But upon relaying the question to G-d, the laws of Pesach Sheni--the 'second Pesach' for those who missed it the first time around--are revealed. The laws had been withheld from Moses so that, in the divine plan, those whom Rashi describes as 'meritorious' ask the question leading to further divine revelation. A question, as R. Yerucham from the Mir Yeshiva explains, already shows chachma or wisdom, because through it, one cultivates the possibility of a response. A good question--any teacher or parents knows this--allows for the bringing to light of something which otherwise would have remained unsaid. This sort of question is to be distinguished from those questions which are just dressed up answers; refusals to engage seriously; or ways of ending conversations before they start. But an engaged question is the means through which the concealed becomes revealed: the whole Torah, says R. Yerucham, is actually a response to Moses's questions!

I thought this would be a great entry point to a discussion at our shabbos table. Notwithstanding a recent NY Times piece advocating the contrary, my wife and I divide our labors (confession: I don't know how to use the washing machine!). At the shabbos table, even though my wife studies regularly, and arranges a weekly lecture (often in our house), I'm the one who usually initiates the words of Torah. With the same theatricality that I display when tasting the challos which my wife bakes, she introduces my divrei Torah. True, there was a time when both my divrei Torah and her challos (she started, years ago, with home ground organic wheat flour--which was like making motzie on compressed hockey pucks) needed work, but we've both become more proficient in our respective roles. I thought the 'Questions' topic would make a great discussion for the kids: 'Have any of you had any questions this week?' My son returned that a question occured to him, but he didn't ask because his rebbe wouldn't have known the answer (unlikely); one of my daughters said הכל מובן לי--or 'I already understand everything!' (extremely unlikely). One of my other daughters was already on the couch reading a book; and my youngest was still at the shabbos table, but singing a song (though not even a shabbos song). I paused, surveyed the situation, sighed, and gave up: 'will someone pass the cholent please?'

After lunch, I was hoping my wife might offer some consolation. She reminded me that R. Yitzchock Hutner wrote in a letter to a distressed student that the verse in Psalms--'A tzaddik falls seven times'--doesn't mean that even though he falls many times, the true tzaddik will eventually emerge. Rather when a true tzaddik finally does come into being, it's because he's fallen. Acknowledging personal failure and integrating those failures allows--in the end--for a person to reveal the tzaddik within. We become great because of our challenges, not in spite of them. It's almost as if, in the endless interplay between concealment and revelation, challenges are the questions which help us to reveal who we are. R. Hutner refers to internal battles, but sometimes, as my wife pointed out, the world doesn't accomodate the idealism of our plans, and one has to learn to live with those kinds of failures as well. Things sometimes don't go the way you want.

'Why don't you put that in your blog?'--she concluded.

So I am...

Sunday Special: Running Away Redux, A Woman's Perspective

2008-06-22T16:00:00.001+03:00

Guest Contributor, Leslie Kolbrener
[the following is excerpted from a longer piece; and no, this is not a different perspective on an old story; he ran away again--WDK]

Shmuel ran out of the house, dressed, and disappeared. Night was approaching and there were a lot of cars in the streets and everybody I could find standing or sitting still seemed just to have arrived in that position and so couldn't have had the leisure to sight a little boy with Down Syndrome running away from home. Freidy started crying after a time, our searches all coming up empty. I told her to have faith and keep on looking. She did and she found him, she out of all of us, enlisted friends and all the other children. He had crossed the busy street in front of our house--unless an angel had carried him across. Perfectly natural, I keep telling myself to want to leave the house alone, in the heat of the summer I feel it every night, the desire for it. He was newly created when he came home that night, one hand firmly in Freidy's, a stange new joy permeating his exuberant knowing little face, Freidy happy beyond expression, as if the hand she held were that of her newly wedded husband, instead of just the hand of her wayward younger brother.

Moon Mamas, Tradition, Innovation and Bliss

2008-06-19T16:30:00.004+03:00

David, an old high school friend, sent me a link to a web posting by the Moon Mamas Rosh Chodesh Group in the Bay Area and their innovative "transition ritual" (though the subject heading in David's e-mail was a succint 'oy vey!'). Here's part of the ritual:

Begin by having friends and family line a path for the individual marking the transition to walk through. Each individual holds a jar/cup filled with water. The transitioning individual begins at the start of the path holding an empty jar/bowl and states the following:

The transition I am about to honor is ___________

She/He continues stating each of the following:

I am leaving behind _________

I fear _____________________

I need ____________________

I hope for _________________

I welcome _________________

As she/he makes each statement, the family and friends repeat:

You are_________________

She/He continues walking as each statement is made. As the individual marking the transition makes her/his way through the path, each person she/he passes pours water from their jar into hers/his (representing support and giving). At the end of the path the individual marking the transition bows or pauses. The last person in the path then takes the jar/bowl from the transitioning individual and pours the water over the hands of the individual marking the transition.

The ritual testifies to a lot of things: to the powers of community, the continued need for ritual in an ostensibly secular world, and the persistence of, for lack of a better word, the 'spiritual.' But the ritual that grows out of the Moon Mamas group seem to assume that tradition and creativity are opposites--that to be authentic one has to throw off the rituals of the past, and supply new ones. True, the Moon Mamas acknowledge--with the very turn towards ritual--that spirituality needs some kind of vessel, but instead of embracing those traditions and practices sanctified by time and practice of generations of Jews, they create their own.

But does adhering to ritual and tradition necessarily mean the abandonment of creativity? Does being 'orthodox,' as so many people have told me since graduate school, really mean giving up one's authentic creative self? If you want to be yourself, Joseph Campbell-style (remember him? he was that anthropologist from that PBS special years back), you have to "follow your bliss." Is the only recipe for finding such bliss the kind pursued by the "Moon Mamas"?

It's common to think that being traditional means blind submission to the past or mimicry of the practices of others, and that creativity its opposite. So in the Jewish world, there are those who believe that authentic Judaism means either giving up subjectivity entirely (with everyone in the same mold), or, at the other extreme, the pursuit of individual 'bliss' independent of traditions (and the creation of new rituals and liturgy). But there is another route: I take the traditions, customs and laws, and I make them my own. Not through uprooting them, but through investing them with myself, they become new and distinctly mine.

In my travels giving lectures, I am the beneficiary of lots of hospitality; as a result, I get to see many Jewish families in action. A few months ago, I was at the house of the Kohls of New Hempstead in Monsey--master parents and educators. It's a custom to say over words of Torah at the shabbos table; the Kohl family had a particular way of making this custom their own. Right before dessert, the kids took out a huge box of candy, and from the different shapes, sizes, colors and brands available (tons of different kinds of kosher candy in America!), they spelled out in acrostic from--though often in cleverly complicated fashion--different verses from the weekly Torah portion. I couldn't guess them at first (I wasn't, for example, able to follow the manifold connotations of different sorts of laffy taffy), but their parents did, and the kids were exhilerated by the activity.

I thought to myself, I have to try this at home! But it wasn't long before I lost my resolve: in my house, it would never work. Forget about the fact that the local candy store doesn't boast the same variety of candy, but my wife would never countenance candy during the meal (for good reason: our kids would probably eat the whole box). But then there was that moment, when the resignation yielded and I realized I could make it my own. My kids love to put on shows, so I transformed the candy acrostic into what I coined 'Parsha Pantomine'--mini skits acting out Torah verses. At the outset, I was the director: in the first scene, two of the girls took their seats on the imaginary 39 bus, initially not noticing me walking down the aisle of our fantasy bus, but then, in the end, yielding their seats ('on behalf of an old person, you should stand'). That was an easy one. When they got the hang of it, they directed another 'play': one of the little ones was blindfolded; an older sibling placed a footstool in her path; and another of the kids--just at the crucial moment--came to the rescue, pushing the obstacle away: 'do not put a stumbling block before the blind.' All this, with the rest of the family guessing, and thinking of possible skits for the next verse.

Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, one of the great sages of the eighteenth century, writes: "At every moment that a person is working and cleaving to the words of the Torah, the words rejoice as if they were given from Sinai." Revelation is not limited to a particular time or place: but when we are truly engaged in Torah study, the process of revelation repeats itself. When someone produces a genuine new insight into Torah, the words themselves rejoice as if they were given at Sinai. Simcha, joy, is the linked by our sages with the experience of renewal: the words of the Torah themselves feel simcha--joy--because Sinai is renewed in a new and contemporary context. So it is true in our practices: at the moment that we fill the vessel of ancient rituals with our creative energies, we show a side of Torah which--now revealed for the first time in our homes, with our children--has its origin in the revelation of Sinai. This is not Campbell's bliss, but the simcha that unites past and present, the ancient and the modern--the new joy of a creativity which links back to Mount Sinai.

Writing an Inspirational Story

2008-06-04T13:00:00.000+03:00

I re-connected with an old friend last week. We had been in high school together (though not in the same class), and when a mutual friend let me know that Justin (not his real name) was going to be in town, the two of us set up a meeting. Justin recognized my name ('I knew a Billy Kolbrener when I was in high school!'; yes, that is how I was known back then), but when we met, he couldn't link my name to my face. Over cafe hafouch at David's Citadel in Jerusalem, we shared the pleasure of discovering similar paths taken. Though many of our fellow-classmate in Roslyn High School all strongly identified as Jewish (though it didn't stop many of them from intermarrying), only Justin and I (with just a handful of others of whom I know) overcame the suburban prejudices against orthodoxy to discover what Justin described as the "treasures" of Judaism. And he was not talking about the tunnel tour in the Old City or the laser show on the City's Walls...

In the process of catching up, Justin asked if among my books and articles, I had anything that I might want to pass on--mentioning that he had an interest in stories providing inspiration, of people who had overcome challenges as they maintained and strengthened their faith. I've admittedly never written in that mode, and I wondered if I could come up with anything. Certainly, there are no shortage of such stories. In Jerusalem, you hear about them all the time. A friend of mine had just the previous day recounted a hesped (or eulogy) from a funeral service he had attended. In this case the eulogy was simple, a sparse recounting of the facts of a life: from a birth in Austro-Hungary, to a loss of parents in Auschwitz, to the beginnings of a life in France, to an eventual re-settlement in the US and then Israel--the story of a woman's life (or what seemed to be different lives) interspersed with the challenges and tragedies that someone from my background (and Justin's) can hardly even begin to imagine. My mind turned also to the pair of men who sit in front of me in shul--'regulars' (always precisely on time; "early is also not on time," one of them often tells me). Over sixty years ago, they had been among the children of the kinder transport--German Jewish children who were sent away from their homes by their parents who sensed the horrors to come. Brought on one of the special trains from Germany which carried children during the period that began shortly after kristelnacht and ended with the blitzkrieg), they were 're-located' with British families--many of them not even Jewish. The two bonded as young refugees in England while the war spread and the fate of their parents was sealed. At war's end, they were separated (one remained in England, the other to the US) until they were reunited in a little synagogue in Bayit Vegan in Jerusalem, my neighborhood shul. In Bayit Vegan alone, there must be hundreds of such stories, of enormous spiritual resilience in the face of adversity.

These are stories which can't fail to make an impression, but I was struck, by the end of our meeting by another story--Justin's. By any possible measure, Justin was wildly successful, having risen to the top of his field, with access to all of the accoutrements of luxury, wealth and privilege which his position afforded. But here he was in Jerusalem. Although I did not hear all of the details, I know that the path which brought him to the Holy City was also not without sacrifice--not the sacrifice of the previous generations, but sacrifice nonetheless. For Justin (to the mixed admiration and disbelief of friends and relatives) had made his own sacrifices, given up many of the benefits and entitlements that the fast track has to offer--moving his family to a community with a shul, placing his children in Jewish day school, and committing himself to a life of connection and service to G-d and others.

Our tradition teaches us that there are six hundred thousand letters in the Torah--one for each of the six hundred thousand who gathered on the foot of Mount Sinai at the time of matan Torah, the giving of the Torah. So every Jew has his or her corresponding letter in the Torah, and it's the task of a lifetime to discover that letter. No letter is the same; there is no 'objective' Torah template of how Torah observance should look. Achitophel, our sages tell us, wore all of the outward trappings of a frummer yid, a religious Jew, but G-d rejected his service, because the service was not his own. G-d wants the whole person--that is, he wants our subjectivity to express itself in and through our service. Achitophel did not search for and write his own letter, he merely imitated the service of others. Again, G-d wants our letter, not someone else's. As we write that letter--carving it's shape, adorning it with embellishments, deepening it's hues--we may gain strength and inspiration from the letters of others, but we should also own up to both the challenges and pleasures of writing ourselves. Making too much out of ourselves leads to egotistic self-satisfaction and stagnation; but making too much out of the stories of others may lead us to a resigned humility preventing us from finding and writing our own letters. (A friend relates to me that his Rebbe tells his students to avoid reading too many stories of great contemporary figures, lest they fail to develop their own distinctive avodas Hashem, service of God).

In Jewish practice, the absence of only one single letter from a Torah renders it invalid: for the Torah to show itself fully in this world, each Jew needs to find his or her own letter. Once found, we spend a lifetime crafting that letter, writing our letters for all to see. Sometimes, it's true, it takes someone else to see the beauty of the letters we have already begun to craft, to feel the inspiration of the stories we have begun to write.

On our way out, as Justin and I walked through the revolving doors of David's Citadel, he turned to me with a sudden realization and said, "you are the Billy Kolbrener I once knew; when you smiled, I recognize you; it is you!" So surely, people like Justin and I find inspiration in the stories of gedolim and tzaddikim--great and righteous people. Though sometimes we may also find evidence of letters in unanticipated places, and in recognizing them, discover how those letters are shaping us and others in ways we did not expect.

Current Events: Sociology, Tommy Lapid and the 'Ultra-Orthodox' Response.

2008-06-02T19:01:00.008+03:00

Just trying to distinguish--with my title--this more timely (and thus more conventionally blog like) post. I saw the following link on "Life in Israel" blog--which I thought I would share: http://lifeinisrael.blogspot.com/2008/06/more-haredi-reactions-to-death-of-tommy.html
The youtube link records Haredi (or ultra-orthodox; that word again!)reactions to the death of Tommy Lapid--who was best known for his activity in the Shinui Party, a party which according to the left of center newspaper Haaretz, "sought to curb the growing political power of ultra-Orthodox parties" (this is a generous assessment of Lapid's sometimes inflammatory and provocative political behavior). The Israeli YNET reporter went to religious neighborhoods in attempt to elicit reactions after Lapid's death. Even those who don't understand Hebrew can tell from the tone of the questions, and the tone and body language of those interviewed, that YNET was not able to elicit the reactions (that is, extremist) which it sought.

This goes to demonstrate what sometimes seems like a conspiracy between right-wing kanai'im (fanatics) and the left wing media which both want to portray the 'ultra-orthodox' sector as fanatically extreme. But beyond the stereotypes and sociological distinctions (which as I've said before put a wedge between people rather than unite them), there is something like normalcy, and maybe even room for common ground.

I've always felt, by the way, that Lapid's persistent attack on the orthodox was a sign of his own internal connection to Torah--to use a mystical register, the sparks of kedushah or holiness, that were trying to come out. I know others may think differently, though apparently many in the orthodox world against which Lapid fought so vigorously (and sometimes bitterly) felt a connection to him, and genuine sadness at his passing.

More Thoughts on Dentistry and Chesed (and the Middle Way)

2008-06-01T16:00:00.000+03:00

For those keeping up with the saga of my son Shmuel and his encounter with modern dentistry, last Sunday and Mondary mornings, it was back to the dentist--this time the Pediatric Emergency Dental Clinic at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem. The care was excellent, though we were told that Shmuel may need general anesthetic for further treatment. And we were also told--in a nice Kafka-esque (read Israeli) twist--that Shmuel requires the treatment in the next few months or so, but that the waiting list for that treatment is eight months. In any event, it's an eventuality we want to avoid; so we are considering our options. As I said in a comment in a previous posting: gulp...

Which goes back to my daughter Avital, and her show of chesed (mercy or loving kindness) for her brother, particularly her pleas to the dentist that he refrain from pulling Shmuel's tooth. In hindsight, while admirable in an abstract sense, Avital's cries on behalf of her brother may not have been the mature or pragmatic response (and sometimes, for better or for worse, the two coincide). Though we cultivate the mida (or trait) of chesed, it often needs to be tempered with it's opposite: pure chesed and pure din (adherence to strict legal judgment) may not fit the complexities that the world puts in our path.

The necessity to temper the tendency to show unqualified chesed (as siblings, parents or spouses) is a principle enacted in the lives of the patriarchs. Abraham represents pure chesed. Yet while we know of his acts of generosity and hospitality, we also know that he prayed for the transgressors of Sodom. Can chesed go too far? In Abraham's offspring can be seen the consequences of a chesed which has no bounds: while Isaac continued in the tradition of his father, Ishmael represented chesed without limits--which, as our sages tell us, showed itself in his lascivious behavior. Chesed, which was manifested in Avraham's openness and generosity to the world, transforms in Ishmael to a generosity without limits, a full giving of himself leading to sexual impropriety (so yes, and this is a message often lost in our generation: there is too much of a good thing). That the Torah in Leviticus uses the very word chesed to refer to sexually forbidden behavior reveals how a chesed without boundaries transforms from a virtue into a transgression. (On how words sometimes have double--and opposite--meanings, see Freud's essay, "The Antithetical Meanings of Primal Words.")

While Abraham brought the characteristic of mercy into the world, Isaac, the inheritor of the legacy of his father, brought the polar opposite, din or judgment. Isaac's life is one of heroic restraint and withholding (as evidenced foremost in his experiences during the akeidah, the sacrificial binding which he withstood). Our tradition tell us that Isaac did not want to give blessings to either one of his sons, Esau or Jacob (though he does of course in the end to both); for such a blessing would upset the order of judgment upon which for Isaac the world needed to operate. This characteristic, like that of his father, was primary and powerful in the make-up of Isaac, but also resulted in an offspring--in this case, Esau, the hunter--unsuitable to continue the tradition begun by Abraham. Ishmael's licentiousness represents the excess of chesed; Esau's murderousness, represents an excess of din. Making oneself too available, giving too much of oneself turns into an openness which leads to license; while too much of an insistence upon judgment can lead to a desire for strictness which transforms in the end into rapacious violence and murder.

The history of the patriarchs shows the coming into the world of the ideals for which we as a people are known (generosity and justice), as well as their progressive refinement. While Abraham represents the ideal of chesed, and Isaac that of din, it is Jacob--all of whose children continue in the tradition of Abraham and Isaac--who represents emet or truth. Of all of the patriarchs, only one merits the affirmation of ongoing life: "Jacob our Father is not dead"; the Torat Emet of Yaakov, the true Torah of Jacob, contains both chesed and din. Jacob takes the middle path, avoids the extremes of din and chesed by themselves, and is associated with tiferet, splendor or glory--what Maimonides describes as simply the path of the straight or middle way. Derech Hayashar, the path of b'nai Yisroel requires negotating between the extremes. When our sages tell us that there are "only three whom we call patriarchs," they are not engaging in a simple counting game. They are rather revealing the deep secret that the Jewish people have their beginnings, as well as their destiny, in the number three. Between chesed and din, which reached their perfection in Abraham and Isaac, is the middle and third way of Jacob, the way of rachomim: a more refined mercy, one informed by judgment.

Does this all mean that we will not continue to celebrate Avital's love for her brother? Certainly not. Though the refinement of chesed into rachamim, a maturity that balances between extremes, will hopefully also come in time.

Open Minded Torah Redux

2008-06-01T15:00:00.004+03:00

A recent post from Open Minded Torah was cross-posted on Cross Currents (www.cross-currents.com), a great resource for diverse Jewish perspectives within the orthodox (i hate that word!) framework. Sarah Shapiro, noted author (and friend), expressed a reservation about the title of this blog (which she had actually already shared with me privately). Since her comments appear on Cross-Currents, I thought I'd re-post them here with my response--which addresses, though indirectly, some of the comments posted on this blog. Her post came as a specific response to my "Loving the Stranger (within)"

Here are Sarah's comments:

The idea of understanding “love the stranger” as a command to “love the stranger within” is for me a new, fascinating interpretion, one that’s rich with multi-faceted meanings.

Yet the phrase itself — “Openminded Torah” — still grates, somehow, and strikes me as a misnomer. Even though it’s clear from the above essay that this is not at all Dr. Kolbrener’s intent, my inner ear still hears those words as if they were apologetically acquiescing to those who view the Torah-observant as “narrow-minded.”

Here's my response:

Sarah correctly intuits my intention (notwithstanding her diyuk--inference--from my blog title). I don’t want to give the sense that Torah observant Jews are narrow-minded, but I do think that there are representations of Torah (appearing extremely authoritative to some) which give the impression that somehow being ‘open minded’ goes against the spirit of authentic Torah. I’m not writing from a sociological perspective, but hoping to write something that may be enabling to those who–-in the service of their Judaism-–want to be more open-minded to themselves.