All That You Can’t Leave Behind

This week’s Torah portion, Sh’lach (Numbers 13-15), has one clear focus: Moving forward. The portion focuses on the 13 Israelite scouts sent forth into the land of Canaan to report back on who and what was in the land. To make a long story short, they find incredible fruits of gigantic size, but also people of gigantic size. The scouts spend forty days looking around, then come back and report on both of these things. Unfortunately, most of the scouts that return bear a bad report, saying that the giant people are too strong to fight, and that it’s not worth it. The minority, Caleb and Joshua, try to get the people to keep faith in God and go forward anyway, but to no avail. The Israelites get mad, say they should just head back to Egypt, and start to throw stones at Aaron, Moses, Joshua, and Caleb, but God swoops down in a cloud to protect them. Per usual, God gets mad and Moses has to talk him out of killing everyone. Instead he just says that this entire generation must die off before he will lead the Israelites into the promised land, and that is that.

The theme of this portion builds pretty well on the last one. Last week, we read about the Israelites attempting to upset the hierarchy laid upon them. Now we see the next step in development – nostalgia and fear of the unknown. The people are being asked to accept a lot in a short period of time. Freedom from slavery, a new hierarchy, a new God, new roles within society, and now, a new land that they’ll have to fight for themselves. Who can’t identify with the impulse to look back on the past in all its shiny glory? It’s arguable that most versions of religion are based on this. We look back in wonderment on the history of our faith, to times when gods and humanity walked together. We raise up our holy books as the lens through which we can recount what it meant to, long ago when things were ever so different and so much better, see the divine face to face. In fact, in Jewish literature, Heaven, or the World To Come, is also often called “Gan Eden,” or the Garden of Eden. How’s that for looking back? Even the future is the past!

I know I fall into this trap all of the time. Wouldn’t it be nice to just be able to go back to the way it was 10 years ago, when I didn’t have as many responsibilities? Wouldn’t it be better to attempt to recreate that, rather than struggling forward into the unknown? Who’s to say that this future I see before me isn’t just going to be a big fat flop? What if the great giants that are already in the space I’m geared up to attempt to occupy are just going to use their power to destroy me before I can even get what I’m working for? Might as well turn back now and just go back to what I’m used to.

This impulse, to over exaggerate the dangers of the future while playing down the hardships of the past, may be as much of a limiting factor to the progress of humanity as sheer laziness. The deep, dark fear of the unknown mixed with our incredible ability for selective memory of the past holds us back from both being present in the present, and from acting upon our futures. It’s quite easy to claim that with a direct connection to a deity of untold power we wouldn’t balk on the possibilities of the future for a second, but this clearly wasn’t the case for the Israelites. They were still haunted by the fear of failure.

In spite of their fears and faithlessness (keep in mind, these folks have seen God do some pretty heavy things, like the Ten Plagues, splitting the Red Sea, and pretty much explode a mountain), the Israelites end up making it into the land of Canaan a couple of books later, in the book Joshua. This also happens to be the haftarah portion for the week – Joshua sending spies into Canaan again and then leading the conquest of the land. This Torah portion, especially linked to the haftarah portion, points to the incredible uselessness of the fear of failure. To quote a wonderful TED talk by Regina Dugan, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

Dr. Dugan is speaking about human achievements in technology at DARPA. I try not to be too cynical, but it is much easier to not be worried about failure when you’re the director of a government agency with a $3.2 billion budget. If anything is comparable today to having the support of a deity, though, I’d say this would be it. We all wish we had something akin to this week’s haftarah (or a budget in the billions) to help assuage fears about the future, but unfortunately, all we really have is the fact that we’ve made it this far. Now, I’m not claiming that I’ve had God descend in a cloud of smoke in front of me and tell me that I am certainly going to get anywhere. I’m generally suspicious of anyone that claims they have. But if instead of looking back to our own personal Egypts with the rose colored glasses of the fearful wanderer, we look back at the actual struggles, hardships, successes, and failures we’ve overcome in the past, we have something very close to as good. We’ve made it to where we are today.

Be Careful What You Wish For

In this week’s Torah portion is Beha’alotecha, we have a cycle of boundaries being tested and defined. As the Torah is the record of the birth of the Israelite nation, we’re approaching the Israelite toddler phase: Lots of whining, attempts at asserting individuality, challenging authority, and even a diffusion of power. The Israelites complain that they want their diet raised up from the miraculous manna that God has been raining down on them throughout their journey in the wilderness to actual meat. Moses can’t stand the constant whining of the Israelites so God, at Moses’ behest, takes some of Moses’ prophetic power and doles it out to the 70 elders who are tasked to aid him. This leads a couple of the elders (Eldad and Medad) to prophecy in the camp, which raises Joshua’s hackles. Keep in mind, Joshua is basically Moses’ protégé, so the next in line to have this special relationship with God.  Joshua tells Moses that he thinks the El- and Medad are overstepping their bounds with their prophecy, but Moses responds in an extremely interesting way. Moses responds in a way that recontextualizes the entirety of the Torah portion. He says, “God should give all of his people prophecy, and let his spirit reside upon all of them!” This becomes even clearer in the conflict between God and Moses’ older brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam.

Behind the complaints of Aaron and Miriam is the desire to have the prestige and power of their younger brother. Miriam even goes so far as to insult Moses for having married a Cushite. God immediately and abruptly descends in his cloud and calls Miriam and Aaron to explain to them that Moses is the only person that he speaks to face to face, and no other prophet has or will ever be as close to him. God’s explanation as to the difference is not based in the character of Moses, but in the character of God. God then gives Miriam a horrible skin disease for good measure and only heals her once Moses, who is apparently entirely unfazed by his siblings’ disrespect, asks for her to be healed. Again, Moses seems unconcerned with the hierarchy of his society, or his role at the top of it.

The echeloning of society is what is necessary at this specific point in the birth and growth of the Israelite nation. Although Moses wishes for true spiritual egalitarianism amongst the Israelites, it is clear that ambition, jealousy, greed, and avarice still run rampant amongst the Israelites, and this is especially true amongst the people just under Moses in the hierarchy – his siblings and Joshua. God’s plan for his people is contingent upon these issues being governed by the people themselves.

While the rest of the Israelites are complaining about the limitation of their roles in society, asking for greater power, asking for more from God, and generally displaying the elements of terrible two-ness, Moses, in his response to Joshua, shows very clearly why it was he who was chosen by God to be the leader. He didn’t want to be. Moses never wanted the role, doesn’t want to be different, doesn’t want to be set above everyone else. All Moses ever asks God for is for greater knowledge of God himself, so that he can understand more clearly who it is that he is serving. This becomes a trope amongst many of the prophets of the Tanach, but in this instance it makes strikingly clear the issues of the hierarchy of the Israelite camp, and what it is that actually does set Moses apart.

In our lives we have similar issues. Everyone has specific roles of power in every relationship they hold. Our jobs inherently have limitations; our personal lives also have inherent power dynamics that are agreed upon by all involved, either implicitly or explicitly. These boundaries, either spoken or unspoken, are what we learn to navigate in our infancy. Pushing the boundaries of our relationships with our parents, then within our communities, and ultimately working out where we fit into these spaces is a growing process each of us need to experience to successfully integrate into society. Moses’ wish, that all people be privy to God’s plan and act accordingly, is echoed by many people. A society of true equality, egalitarianism, and freedom is an admirable dream. Unfortunately, many more of us are like the Israelites, always asking for more miracles to fulfill our base desires, or like Aaron, Miriam and Joshua, always striving and fighting for more power for power’s sake.

The name of the portion comes from the first sentence in the portion – when Aaron is given the specific directions for when he lights up the great candelabra (menorah in Hebrew) of the Tabernacle. At the beginning of the portion, God commands Moses to command Aaron to make this menorah in this specific way. A couple of chapters later, we see Aaron complaining that he wants a piece of Moses’ pie, while Moses complains that he didn’t want any of the pie to begin with, and in fact would rather die than eat the whole damn thing. And so it is with us.

Although there are innumerable instances of deep injustice and suffering caused by power differentials people claim to be “God given,” I think it is worthwhile to consider our own strivings and ambitions in light of what the individual we are using as the example of our ambition actually experiences. When you complain that your boss is inept, and that you’d be better at his/her job, you must also consider what it means to actually HAVE that job. When you wish for more, you must consider what the more would actually look like. Do you want so much of it that you’d have it coming out of your nose, as God tells the Israelites they will have of meat (Num 11:20)? Do you really want the power and responsibility that causes the individual who actually has it to wish for death? When we wish for things, be it greater power, greater wealth, someone else’s job, or a different position within the hierarchies we exist in, we must really consider the reality of what we are asking for. Sometimes it’s best to simply count your blessings, and not asked to be raised up for more. Sometimes, like the 70 elders, you get picked for it simply by being a righteous, wise, and good person in your current role. But often, like in the case of Moses, being raised up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Priestly Blessing

One of the most famous, beautiful, and ancient passages of the Tanach, the Priestly Blessing, is a simple and poignant poem. You’re supposed to be a Jewish Priest, or Cohen (like Leonard), to give the Blessing, but nowadays it gets used by all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. Some give it to their children every Shabbat, and it was definitely said at my wedding in January. And it’s also one of the oldest pieces of the Tanach we have found in outside sources. Some amulets with an abbreviated version of the blessing were found in an archaeological dig in Israel and have been dated to around 600 BCE.

But so what? On the face of it, this blessing is a pretty normal, platitude-laden selection of poetry. In English, you probably wouldn’t even call it poetry. In Hebrew (which you can hear recited by the foremost priest of our time by clicking the Leonard link above), the rhythm of the lines flows beautifully together. I think that with this blessing, as with most liturgical pieces, it is easy to accept it as sodden, stagnant, and stale ancient work. If we can give the writers of the original blessing, who lived around 3000 years ago or so, the benefit of the doubt, let us accept that they were probably trying to transmit something of value. In fact I find this the most meaningful way to approach the traditions found in Judaism. As a people we have somehow managed to survive beyond the bounds of any great empire or great culture, and although we have clearly changed and grown throughout the millennia we are still Jews. So there must be something worthwhile that our ancestors are trying to pass down through these pieces that have survived for so long.

With each line of the blessing, the perception of the Israelites relationship to God is revealed more concretely. The first line is the most clear. The word “bless” in Hebrew is related to the word for knee. This is often used to explain why, in certain Hebrew prayers, we bend our knees and bow. So the idea that God would take a moment to “bend his knees” before us means for God to take notice of us — to stop for a moment and give us his full attention. Anyone who has read much of the Tanach, though, knows that it isn’t always so good to have God taking notice of you. Sometimes things like this happen. So to clarify what is meant by seeking God’s attention in the first line, the writers wrote “guard you” which is often translated as “keep you,” but means ultimately the same thing. But even this must be clarified in the next line. The blesser asks for God to be gracious upon his reflection about the blessee, letting his “face shine,” which is clearly related to smiling or looking upon someone with favor. Finally, the graciousness is clarified in the third line as meaning bringing the blessee shalom. Shalom is most often translated as peace, but it also means wholeness.

Each line, then, begins with the blesser asking for God to pay attention to the blessee, and each line is concluded with a hope for this attention to be favorable. In this day and age of aggressive atheists and burgeoning scientific materialism, it seems unfathomable to believe that these people’s deepest anxiety, revealed in this revered and ancient blessing, was God’s attention. Similarly, the fact that this blessing reflects a view of God’s face directed at an individual being of great importance makes it easy to discount the blessing as a primitive people’s reaction to the uncertainty of life, in hopes that their huge man in the sky would keep an eye on them.

In some instances this might be true, but I think we can give our ancestors greater honor than that. Look only so far as God’s name in the poem, and Exodus 3:13-14. God’s name, as used here, is related to the verb “to be,” and in Ex. 3:13-14 God explains his nature, or being, as entirely existential. By this I mean that God, even in his own words (or however we want to explain how Moses interacted with God), is that which is constantly becoming. The Hebrew verb in 3:13-14 can be translated it many ways, and the line is most famously translated as “I am that I am.” It’s not that simple, though. The verb is not in a perfect tense, which is to say the “being” act is still unfolding when he is speaking, and I’d argue is still unfolding today. So if God is the unfoldment of everything, as he appears to say in Exodus 3:13-14, what would God “raising his face” to an individual mean?

Everyone knows the deep anxiety of living in time. We all keep an eye on our watches, our youthful marking of the years passing with cakes and candles become less celebrations and more fearful as our age accrues, and the speed of the year seems to accelerate as we move further and further away from our births. This God of the Israelites revealed himself most candidly as time, and his name (יהוה) is repeated over and over again in the blessing is clearly related to the verb “to be” (היה). If we look at this God as being the director of time’s passage, this prayer is asking for something we all want. We want time to be gentle. We want the future to unfold in a way that makes us whole and at peace. And when I think of what the metaphor of the face of time would mean, I think it would mean the cutting edge of the future. It would mean the moment where the unfoldment occurs, when the present becomes the past and we can feel the formless void of the future beginning to coalesce into the present. I think that this blessing in particular has been brought forward to us along this constantly destroying and rebirthing stream of history simply because it charts this anxiety so very well. Who doesn’t want the future to unfold in such a way that guards them, smiles upon them, and brings them wholeness and peace? Who, when they consider our relationship to time like this, doesn’t feel the same anxieties that this blessing is so clearly attempting to ameliorate?

Samson, the Impious Demigod

The section of Parshat Nasso focused on the restrictions of being a Nazirite are pretty cut and dry: Don’t consume any grape products, don’t cut your hair, and don’t be near any corpses. This is all, apparently, so that these individuals can cut their hair as an offering to God. There is no clear rationale for why anyone would want to do this, what other roles Nazirites might have played in ancient Israelite society, or where the category came from in the first place. The only clarification we have is oblique and from much later: the haftarah portion of Nasso, Judges 13:2-25.

This portion of the book of Judges is the opening of the most widely famous story from the book: the story of Samson. The book of Judges is one that often goes unread. It is full of strange, disturbing, and violent stories, many of which seem to have little to no moral or ethical value. One of my professors at JTS convinced me that the book of Judges is a satire. The stories are lampooning differences between the ancient Israelites, and using over the top imagery and behavior as the vehicle for these often humorous criticisms.

So, Samson is no exception to this case. The satirization of his story, though, is twofold. One piece, and the one that is much less obvious, is in this haftarah portion. Without going into the details of Hebrew grammar and deep comparison of Biblical stories, the basic gist of the Hebrew of this story makes it, at the very least, unclear of who Samson’s biological father is. The messenger of God, or man of God, who comes to visit Samson’s mother multiple times has a pretty questionable relationship with her, and some of the verbs used to describe their interactions describe people gettin’ down elsewhere in the Bible. Similarly, it is never said that Manoah (Samson’s assumed human father) ever got down with his wife.

This puts Samson in the company of Chuchulain,  Hercules, and Gilgamesh – part human, part divine. Along with this, Samson is pledged by his mother to be a Nazirite, to follow the laws laid out in this week’s portion of Numbers. Now, when most people think of Samson they think of his long hair, his great strength, and his betrayal by Delilah. The rest of the story is usually forgotten. The rest of the story, though, is about Samson summarily disregarding his Nazirite status by breaking all of the restrictions, betraying his parents, and destroying most everything he comes in contact with. He was then tricked into allowing his hair to be cut by Delilah. According to the story, his great power resided in his hair, which clearly relates to the Nazirite restriction on cutting hair.

The story of Samson can be read as a diatribe against both the piety of Nazirites, and the idea of demigods so prevalent in the Bible’s age. According to this reading of the story not only was it ridiculous that a man could be part deity, part human, but also that an individual with this kind of power isn’t therefore inherently more holy, or to be regarded with great respect. Instead it is a warning tale: a demigod isn’t to be trusted with their power, and a being born a Nazirite doesn’t make you holy. In a way, these two things are extraordinarily similar. Your birth and the intentions of your parents do not necessarily directly inform who you are.

Now, Samson’s end came at his own hands, and in fact, he killed more Philistines through his suicide attack on their Temple than he did throughout the rest of his life. Which is again a warning. This man’s great power, and all of his parents’ pious intentions, led to a life full of destruction and drunkenness, and a tortured suicide-attack of a death.

Like many of the characters in the Tanach, Samson is fraught with a human spirit of being torn between the good and the bad, the selfish and the altruistic, and the sacred and the profane. Having this haftarah portion matched up with the portion laying out the laws of the Nazirite brings this into greater clarity. Pious ritual without the proper intention, or to put it more Jewishly a lack of kavanah, can be much more destructive than having not attempted the piety in the first place. Especially if you’re a super strong demigod.

Jealousy and Control

This week I was given the opportunity to lead an adult Torah study class. This class meets weekly to go over the Torah portion of the week, and is usually led by a rabbi in the congregation, but every so often I’m asked to stand in for him. The group is made up predominantly of senior women, a few senior men, and a few middle-aged men and women. The rareness of my interaction with the senior crowd makes it pretty uncomfortable for me to lead the class sometimes, though, as it seems both impudent and imprudent to attempt to correct or guide people so obviously my superiors in age. It takes a certain finesse and a very light touch to reign conversations in or to focus the discussion back onto the text when it appears that the strand of discussion isn’t leading anywhere fruitful. This wasn’t needed at all when we got into the sotah ritual.

The sotah ritual is a strange, archaic and seemingly magic-based practice that is alien to the Torah. To boil it down into a sentence, if a husband is jealous and suspects his wife of cheating he can take his wife to the priests who will publicly shame her and make her drink a mixture of water and dirt from the Tabernacle floor as a trial by ordeal. According to the text if the woman is guilty she will become barren or possibly miscarry, and if she is innocent she will be made more fertile. I expected this topic to be wildly uncomfortable for me to discuss with a room of something like 20 women and two other men (the other men were conspicuously silent throughout), but instead it was just extremely interesting.

In particular, there was a dialogue going on between two of the women, one who must be in her 80s, and one who looked to be in her late 30s or early 40s. The woman in her 80s, a firebrand that always speaks very passionately about equality, individual rights and empowerment, and is always deeply concerned with empathy and morality, spoke about the nature of adultery. I’m still not quite certain that I fully understand what she was saying, but her point of view seemed to circle around the idea that individuals have a certain level of unrestrainable impulse that leads them to do things such as cheat, accuse each other of cheating, and punish each other for cheating. She appeared to be saying that humanity must accept these as realities, and deal with them as inevitable.

In a way, the middle-aged woman was agreeing with her. She described the ritual as being a sort of sublimation of male rage and desire to exert power over women. Although she was careful to say that the sotah was clearly not a positive practice (and the practice was done away with by the leadership of the Temple during the Second Temple Period) she believed that, similar to the older woman, there are certain men who cannot restrain their impulses, and that this ritual gave them an outlet to exercise their “power” rather than being openly violent towards their wives.

One of the other women pointed out that it seemed pretty insane that these ancient Israelite men would be so deeply concerned with such an issue when they were faced with so many other problems, like wandering in the desert without any kind of real stability.  This apparent irony led us to one of the greatest points that can be drawn from this awful ritual. It is entirely clear why this would be such a popular issue in the community, and I believe it is for the same reason that domestic violence happens so often in socioeconomic areas where people have the least control over their lives.

To spin all of the reflections and reactions these women had to the ritual into one thread, the act of men exerting power over women has been a consistent outlet for anxieties related to individual disempowerment throughout human history. When people feel deeply that have little to no control over their lives, but do not recognize it for what it is, they tend to clamp down on whatever it is that they do have control over. Tyrannical bosses, abusive partners or parents, anyone with a modicum of power over others can be seen to exhibit these tendencies. As the older woman in the class pointed out, this is an almost universal tendency in humanity: passions cause us to act irrationally, and often cruelly, when we are put into tenuous and difficult situations. As the younger woman in the class pointed out as well, this ritual may very well have been an attempt at a pressure release valve for men who had the tendency to sublimate their power and control issues into something more devastating than causing the public humiliation of having to drink water and dirt.

I think the authors, priests, or whoever decided to include this ritual in the Torah included it for this reason. It shows that a person inflamed by jealousy is bound to do some kind of damage. In fact, jealousy is often used in the Torah and the Tanach to explain God’s angry reaction to the Israelites, which often led to violence against the Israelites. We all know that we have done regrettable things based on false assumptions and deep-seated control issues. I honestly believe most neuroses stem from a perceived or very real lack of control over our lives, and the incredibly anxiety caused by the lack. The sotah as a construct for ritual release of these powerful forces has been, and surely should have been, done away with. Regardless, the basis for it is still important to remember. There is a great lesson we can take from such an archaic and unsettling practice: As a moment of reflection, the next time you feel the need to knock someone else down a peg through any means, including but not limited to public humiliation as seen in the sotah, consider what is driving your desire. Is it jealousy? Or is it a need to exert what little control you have? Either way, I doubt that the mixture of dirty water you are attempting to force someone else to drink will have any real effect at all.

Parashat Nasso

This week’s parshah is Nasso (Numbers 4,21-7,89), the second in the book of Numbers. The book of Numbers is one that gets overlooked pretty often, I think, because it starts out with a really, really boring census of the Israelites. This second parshah, though, has some interesting pieces to it. I’m going to break this post up into three different segments, as there’s just too much in here to write as one post. The first segment will be about a strange, archaic, and abusive ritual that is described in Numbers 5:12-31, called the sotah, or “unfaithfulness” ritual. The second segment will be about the nazirites (Numbers 6:1-21) and the haftarah portion of the week, which is Samson’s birth (Judges 13:2-25). The third segment will be about one of the best known, oldest, and most beautiful passage in the Torah – the priestly blessing which is found in Numbers 6:22-27.

The U.N. vs. The Torah

Last week, I was talking to a couple of friends when one of them asked, “What do you think is a human right?”

Considering the fact that my wife has studied human rights pretty extensively, and I’ve had many conversations about human rights with her and other people, I figured I’d immediately have at least one answer. Actually sitting down and trying to think it through in the span of a quick moment I realized that there’s a reason we haven’t established an effective human rights system for the world. Sure, the UN and the Hague and all those other international groups try pretty hard. In fact, in case you haven’t been paying attention, The Hague has finally started prosecuting and convicting people. In spite of their possible good intentions and attempts, though, the world has still not fully accepted the documents claiming universal status. On top of that, many people claiming to accept them don’t uphold them anyway.

So my answer to my friends ended up being a series of statements immediately discounted by the next statement. I’ve heard many people claim all kinds of things as human rights, from individual survival to Wi-Fi, but I’m still not certain we can pin down in simple, clear, 10 commandments-like language a list of human rights that everyone in the world would respect. Too many entities pull the “cultural imperialism” card in response to the attempts of outside regulation. Although many of these entities use this card as a get out of jail free card for wild abuses of their populations for personal gain, there is definitely a sliver of truth to the claim. This doesn’t mean that individuals shouldn’t be protected against tyrannical leaders, but if we just simply boil it down to the individual we are missing some of the point.

If I were to try to just free hand draft a list that I think most people would come up with, I’d throw out there that all human beings have a right to clean water, food, housing and exercising one’s happiness, but it’s really just not that simple. What about someone whose happiness is only fulfilled by wearing other people’s skins like a costume? Is a person who continually attempts to do so worthy of a share of the limited resources society has? Even in the most individualistic society focused on making space for people with all sorts of varying tastes and desires, we’ve got to draw a line somewhere. There are just too many exceptions and specific cases that undermine an easy, pithy statement of human rights. People have known this for a long time. In fact, it’s arguable that the huge amount of specific laws in the Torah is one of the earliest attempts at clearing this problem up. As a human rights document, though, I don’t think it stands the test of thousands of years in all instances.

In last week’s Torah portion, Emor (Lev 21:1-24:23) a pretty serious line of this nature is drawn. An Israelite and a half-Israelite, half-Egyptian get in a fight, which ends when the half-Israelite, half-Egyptian blasphemes the Name of God.  I’m sure there’s a huge amount of Midrashic literature written on what went on during the fight, and why the blasphemy was pronounced, but the Torah itself glosses over the fight entirely. All that matters here is that the name of God was blasphemed for what appears to be the first time, as no one knows what to do about it.

God’s answer to Moses is a strange ritual. The congregation is supposed to take the blasphemer out of the camp, everyone who was in earshot of the blasphemy are supposed to lay their hands on the blasphemer’s head, and then the entire congregation is supposed to stone the blasphemer to death.

This ritual of laying hands on the individual’s head appears over and over again throughout the Torah, but most of the time it is a priest, or many priests, putting their hands on the heads of sacrificial animals before they are offered to God.  I’m sure someone somewhere has written a dissertation on that topic, but it’s not particularly pertinent here. What is more pertinent is the fact that immediately after God delivers the command to stone the blasphemer to death comes a list of legislation, including the death penalty to individuals who kill others, the famous “eye for an eye” law, and a differentiation between killing people’s animals which demands restitution, and killing the actual person which, again, is deserving of death. It is then stated explicitly that all of these laws apply equally to native and non-native people residing with the Israelites.

So what we ultimately have here is a declaration that the blaspheming of God’s Name is an equal sin to the killing of another human. For those that don’t know, it is actually impossible to blaspheme God’s Name now, so don’t worry about your goddamns. The correct pronunciation of God’s Name was lost long ago, which is why I keep capitalizing Name – by Name I mean the ineffable Name that was used only by the chosen few High Priests of the Temple.

Returning to the point here, what does this say about human rights and values in the Israelite camp? As I said last week, God in the Tanach is ultimately the ordering principle of the universe, and we are seeing this in action on the micro level here. By attributing this legislation to God, and attributing ultimate value to the use of God’s Name, what we’re actually seeing here is the protection of the ordering principle of this new society. These people were, not long ago in the narrative, a nation of slaves under the foot of a ruthless pharaoh, oppressed again and again. Now, with their freedom, they’re much like that guy in Shawshank Redemption that wanted to go back to jail. A zealousness surrounding their ordering principle, the one that that is keeping them from fully losing their goddamn minds out there in the desert, makes perfect sense. Maybe Moses knew this, or maybe he did have some kind of direct channel to the ordering principle that let him “hear” the necessary order for the moment for each given situation. Regardless, these kinds of values, depending upon the society, are necessary glue holding the fabric of otherwise chaotic societies together.

And this was the crux of my inability to answer my friends’ question. The question was later contextualized within the confines of being stuck on a desert island with a bunch of people where you had to establish law, which, funnily, mirrors the situation of the Israelites in the desert in a very real way. Again, this was a people recently freed from 430 years of slavery, suddenly finding itself wandering in the desert behind some guy claiming to speak to the pillar of smoke and fire that led them all. It’s really not that different than Lost. In either of these instances, what is more valuable: Keeping the newly cobbled society together or preserving the individual human lives that make up the society?

It is far beyond members of the liberal West to claim that blasphemy is worthy of death, and I think that’s great for us. But should we be so quick to claim our sense of individual entitlements and the individual human life as the trump card of all value for everyone? Is the threat of an entire culture coming unglued a big enough issue to deserve death? I think this example from Emor serves to point out the deepest issue in our idea of human rights. How do we strike a balance between the survival and rights of the individual, and the survival of the disparate cultures? It is quite clear that they are interdependent on the deepest level. Without a people to carry them, societies and cultures simply cease to exist, and without a society and culture, individuals face the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short life in total chaos. This question of balance, I think, is one of the deepest and most profound of our times. Unfortunately, many of the people that claim that Western liberalism and international human rights undermine their culture and society also claim to have a direct channel to the higher order, a god, or a Truth. I do hope that we can find some middle ground without having to have a guy talking to a giant smoke and fire monster show us the way.

A Timely Man

Last week’s double portion of Torah was Acharei/Kedoshim. This double portion is the beginning of the Holiness Code, the section of Leviticus that legislates the ins and outs of ritual purity for the Israelite camp. This stuff can be quite interesting, as the lines of purity and impurity are drawn very starkly. This impurity, too, is contagious – coming into another Israelite that had contracted ritual impurity gave the contactee the same impurity. One can imagine some kind of ancient OCD taking hold of these Israelites fearing possible impurity, and constantly making the sacrifices necessary to cleanse themselves of these missteps.

One of the most interesting parts of the parshat, though, comes before the holiness code begins. In chapter 16 of Leviticus, there is a segment laying out the ritual central to what was the Yom Kippur of the time. This ritual involved two goats. One was to become a sacrifice to God, the other was to be marked for Azazel. There is a lot of debate over who or what Azazel was. Although it’s relatively interesting, I think most people would accept that whatever Azazel is, it is not God. In fact, it might not be too big of a leap from the context to state that it is the opposite of whatever God is. But Azazel is only one of the strange mysteries involved in this ritual.

The part that is of the most interest to me is the man who is supposed to deal with this whole ritual. Ish iti, usually translated as “the designated man,” is an interesting individual in this whole performative drama. Aaron, the high priest, would lay his hands on the goat set for Azazel and confess the sins of the entire people of Israel, and then this “designated man” would be tasked to walk the goat out into the wilderness. The man would then come back, be ritually cleansed, and rejoin the camp. But who was this designated man? And why did he need to lead the goat out?

I think this ritual is interesting for many reasons. The ish iti is central to it, but little is said about him. I’m going to attempt to not bore anyone who has enough kindness in their heart to have read this far with too much Hebrew grammar the word “iti” doesn’t appear anywhere else in the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. It clearly comes from the word “eit,” which has to do with time and timing, and has the suffix “i” which is similar to the English suffix “-ish” or “-ly.” So, Robert Alter translates ish iti as “the timely man.” This doesn’t get us any closer to figuring out what the hell this guy was, though.

It seems strange that in a section of the Torah so deeply laden with specificity that the ritual laid out as arguably the most important of the year would have such a clear loose end. Maybe it wasn’t important who he was? Was it just some guy that got chosen at random from the camp? I don’t think so. I think that the use of the word “iti” here, as the use of any hapax usually does, points to it having a pretty special meaning.

Now, of what relevance is this ritual to us today? We don’t do it anymore (some haredim do something similar, in which they ritually abuse a chicken to do away with their sins), and we have our own Yom Kippur rituals. But I am a firm believer that everything in the Torah is pointing to something worthwhile, even if it is something that is only worthwhile to disagree with. If we look at this ritual as the goat, which symbolizes the sum total of the sins of the Israelite people for the year, being led out into the wilderness, we are given three objects to work with: The goat, or the sins, the special man, and the wilderness.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the special individuals are always plunged into the wilderness. Adam, Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Joseph, Moses (with the entirety of the Israelite people!), just to name a few. The wilderness is a space that every great leader of the Israelite people had to venture through, usually in times of great trouble, to become the person they were bound to become. This theme is a clear key to heroism in the Tanach, but leads us down a very interesting path if investigated.

The wilderness, in many ways, represents disorder and chaos within the cosmology of the Hebrew Bible. It is the untamed place, the place where one can both encounter God, but also encounter great danger. It is the forge of greatness throughout the narrative of the Jewish people, a place of trial by fire. But this disorder and chaos, like Azazel, is actually the antithesis of the God of the Torah. The first thing we see in the Tanach is God creating the earth and the heavens, which is initially in a state of tohu va vohu, chaos and void of form. Then, through language, God orders the cosmos to his will, calling each piece good when it is in order. In spite of this ordering of the cosmos, chaos and disorder still exist in God’s creation. The nation of Israel is, in essence, supposed to be another ordering element within this creation. But this nation, too, needs individual humans deeply in touch with God, or order, to help face down the chaos and lead them towards a higher order.

The wilderness is then a testing ground for the special individual. Given this understanding of the relationship between order and chaos, and God and the wilderness, why then is the wilderness where both heroes go to be have their closest contact with God, and why is the goat of sin sent there as a way to purge the nation of Israel of their sin? God’s relationship to tohu va vohu at the beginning of Genesis helps us to understand this. Not only is chaos antithetical to God’s nature, but it is also the raw materials with which God can enact God’s will. Within these areas of chaos, God’s will can be seen most manifest because this is exactly where it can affect the most change. This is equally true of those heroes in our history who were given direct commissions by God. And maybe this is the key to the ish iti.

One of the questions the kids I teach ask most often is why God doesn’t speak directly to humanity like he did in the Tanach. Why aren’t there prophets? Why doesn’t God speak to them in the way that he did to Abraham and Moses? My usual answer is that we are just spoken to in different ways now, one of which is through the Torah. I think that the fact that we don’t need someone to walk the goat out into the wilderness to purge us of sin on Yom Kippur is relevant to this question. We no longer have the Tabernacle and Ark of the Covenant. We no longer have a priesthood, or a prophet to speak God’s word to us.

I think that it’s pretty clear given our current cultural circumstances that we’re not going to get an individual ish iti to come and purge us all of sin. During the Exodus the Israelites lived as one group wandering through the desert. Having one person tasked with this job for the physically collected nation made sense. Each individual within the nation could be present to witness the head priest perform the ritual over the individual goat, and watch the ish iti take the goat out into the wilderness. The far flung remnants of Israel today, present in almost every country in the world, are both deeply connected and deeply disconnected. We no longer have this kind of powerful top down organization to hold us together ritually. It is necessary that our interconnection be accepted as no longer physical, just as we no longer have a physical priesthood, Temple, or prophet. This lack of physicality leads to a much greater perception of chaos in our culture and lives. Without these physical guideposts to give us the clarity of order many struggle to find any relevance in our tradition at all.

A wise Jew once said that with great power comes great responsibility. In the wildly literate and self empowered society that we live in it is our responsibility to each be an ish iti. In this way the winding paths of history have flipped our entire cultural power structure on its head. Just like the singular ish iti who must venture out into the great impurity of the wilderness to cleanse the whole of Israel, we each take the risks and make the hard decisions which may sometimes miss their mark as we try to inject order into the chaos around us. Unlike the ish iti who had to cleanse himself to rejoin the community, we all join together on Yom Kippur to confess sins as a whole. On this day, we confess even those sins that we may not have committed personally. In this way, we cleanse ourselves as a whole community, mixing our impurity together and purging it through the liturgy and the ritual of the day.

I believe that this flipping of structure says a lot about the place of Judaism and religion today. In particular, the way we practice Yom Kippur stands as a symbol for the way we must accept our individual responsibility in our day to day lives. On our holiest of days we are one community again, and judged as such. On every other day, though, it is our job to be the ish iti, a product of our space and time, and one who must navigate the ever increasing chaos of our world as a figure attempting to locate and create peace and order for everyone.

Aren’t we all a little leprous?

I remember very little about my actual bar mitzvah. I don’t remember the name of the Rabbi, or either of the two other kids I was becoming bar mitzvah with. I remember who I invited, and I also remember the two girls that were tormenting me from the front row as I sat on the bima, nervous and unsure of what I was about to do. Also, I remember my Torah portion was Tazria–Metsorah (Leviticus 12:1-15:33), the worst Torah portion. It is three sections, all about impurity around childbirth, genital excretions, and an extended section  on how to do deal with a metsorah, someone with the skin disease tsera’at, which resembles leprosy, but involves more strange hair growth and pigment change. This disease is cured by all kinds of crazy magical rituals, including being separated from society for eight days, and eventually being anointed with oil.

In retrospect, this could have been a great talking point for me. When I was 11 my family moved to Coral Springs, Florida from Tacoma, Washington, and I more often than not felt like I was some kind of outcast with a skin disease. What it was about me that kids didn’t like is still unclear to me, but it often led me to be ostracized and beaten up. I recovered to the point that I had a healthy swath of the middle school social scene present at my bar mitzvah party (a swimming pool party at my parents’ house), though, including a group of downtrodden proto-goths. One of these was a girl I had an on again off again relationship with, but I believe it was entirely off at this point.  These kids had not brought their bathing suits to the swimming party, and instead decided they would spend their time slowly making their way through the helium of the balloons that had been set up. After having my request for them to stop rebuffed I summarily cast them out of the party. Upon reflection I’m not exactly sure how I did it, or if I made a big scene of it. I very well may have done this as a deft 13-year-old move for social cache. No matter my method they were out of there. And that’s pretty much all I remember.

On Friday I was asked by a colleague at work to give the drash at our staff kiddish in place of someone who decided not to show up for their turn at the helm.  I had about an hour to prepare but I decided I’d do it, especially since it was coincidentally Tazria-Metsorah once again. I also just so happened to have read the whole parshat on the way to work out of curiosity, so I was already a little prepared. I proceeded to read the haftarah portion, and found that those mysterious fellas that created the haftarah series had done an awesome job this time.

The haftarah portion (2Kings 7:3-20) is all about five guys that have tsera’at, called metsoraim. These metsoraim were outside the city gates of Samaria, as they had to be separated from the main population to prevent the spreading of their disease. It just so happened that the Arameans had laid siege to Samaria, and everyone was starving, so these metsoraim decided that they’d head to the Aramean camp and surrender in hopes of being fed. As the men walked towards the Aramean camp God made the Arameans hear the noise of chariots, huge armies, and horns. The Arameans panicked and fled, leaving an empty camp for the metsoraim to just wander into and pillage. They ate their fill, took a whole bunch of silver and gold and hid it for later, and then returned to Samaria to tell everyone that there was a huge amount of food just waiting in the now-abandoned Aramean camp.

In my drash I used this story of the diseased outcasts playing a role in society as important as this as an argument for the importance of the multitude of facets of society.  The previous night, Bill Clinton had spoken at the synagogue I work at, and the main theme of his talk was the need for a greater communitarianism in the global society. Through the lens of tsera’at and the haftarah portion, I pointed out the inherent tension between Clinton’s idea of global communitarianism and the reality of individualized identities and roles throughout the multitude of cultures. 

Who knows why God would wait until these five outcasts were walking towards the Aramean camp to scare the Arameans off, but that’s how the story recounts it. It seems relatively clear that the guys that created the haftarah system were attempting to make some kind of statement about how even the metsoraim had an important role in God’s plan here. These individuals who needed to be separated from society for eight days due to their uncleanness were still used by God as a tool to help the entirety of the biggest city in the Northern Kingdom.

Unfortunately there’s no such resolution for my 13-year-old politicking. I don’t think the proto-goths ever spoke to me again after this. On the same note I didn’t become a more popular social powerhouse at my middle school. In fact, I pretty much didn’t associate with anyone from middle school, and made friends with a bunch of high schoolers. I think my bar mitzvah party speaks volumes about human nature when it comes to insiders, outsiders, and bridging that gap between the leprous and the anointed. If we look at the Torah portion as a ritualistic ideal for society when it comes to the metsoraim, and the haftarah portion as a narrative-style commentary on the actual role of metsoraim in Israelite society, we see a definite progression. These metsoraim are put in a position of liminality due to their unclean state, and due to this state of liminality they are available to be used by God as a mode for driving off the Arameans. Rather than simply being a group of pathetic turncoats, God turns these metsoraim into a wild threat confused by the Arameans as being the great militaries of the Hittite and Egyptian kingdoms of the time. They used their turn of luck to enrich both themselves and the city. I, on the other hand, in my tyrannous tweens, used my briefly gained social cache to turn on the pariahs of the group myself.  On this day, I was the one that could cast people out and flex my muscle.

I wonder which is more likely in the global community that President Clinton was referring to. Are the powerful within humanity more likely to act in the prophetic tradition found in the book of Second Kings, that of turning power structures on their head for the good of everyone? Or are they more likely to behave like a newly-adulted tyrant, ready to abuse their power as soon as they are able? I hope that humanity as a collective race is capable of maturing beyond the basic impulses of the overzealous tween, but I fear, based on simple observation of global politics, that we are still trapped in our selfish drive towards greater and greater individual empowerment.

As President Clinton pointed out in his speech, we are at a turning point. We’re rocking 7 billion on this planet right now, running out of the resources we’ve counted on to keep ourselves fed and comfortable, and our population growth isn’t looking like it’s going to slow down. If we continue to echelon ourselves into insiders and outsiders, the clean and the unclean, we’ve got the capacity to create untold human misery. On the other side of the coin if governments create a top-down enacted homogenization of societies by enforcing some kind of general equality or “us-ness” throughout the world what would we do when situations that require the liminal, the metsoraim, to be present outside of the general population to act in a way that no one locked inside could possibly conceive of? The Jews have been one of these populations throughout history, and in some ways continue to play that role today. As we become more accepted in societies and cultures around the world, though, we have begun to lose this outsider stance. Especially for the majority of Reform Jews in America the differentiating lens of outsider worldview has been more or less lost.  This is one of the greatest challenges for the leaders of Reform Judaism today – how do we maintain our distinct and separate identity while being welcomed with open arms into the center culture of America? Should we even? I think that our ability as Jews to maintain our identity throughout the ages speaks to its remarkable quality. As the world globalizes, and our 8 days on the outside of society ends, we ourselves need to decide whether we wish to keep our one foot in, one foot out stance with the general population. In fact, it may be incumbent upon us to be the ones to keep an eye on the powers that be, to admonishing them to both allow for the metsoraim of the world to exist, rather than to take their newfound mastery to the greatest extreme.

We want moshiach…right?

Yesterday as I was heading off from work to go for a Shabbat swim with my wife a couple of Lubavitchers asked me to stop and wrap t’fillin. These kids, who couldn’t have been older than 16, in their black suits and hats, dangling payot and tsitsit, were really into the mitzvah as all of the Lubavitchers are. The one that was wrapping my arm talked me through the blessings and the shema, and then I went ahead and did the v’ahavta by myself. But then, at the end, one of them got super zealous. “Now say, ‘We want moshiach now!’” he shouted. This one had been silent the whole time, just watching. At first I felt like I was being tricked. What? We want moshiach now isn’t part of the prayer.

So, anyone that knows me knows that I don’t just let things like this slide. Not in an “I’ve got to stand my ground” way, but more in an “I really enjoy arguing with people” way.  So I simply said, “I’m not going that far.”

The boy asked, “Why not? What do you mean?” I calmly informed him that I don’t really believe a single human messiah is going to come and save us all, but that the perfect golden age is simply a possibility in the future.

“But the prophets say that one from David’s line will come and save us,” he responded.

“Well, I think it was metaphorical,” I said. And I clearly could have left it at that, but I didn’t. Instead, I decided to tell them that I don’t think we should have a temple again. In fact, I told them that I think that the destruction of the Second Temple was a God’s way of telling us that we no longer need that kind of religion. We are now capable of independently worshipping and praising God, as God doesn’t need sacrifices, and we don’t need to give them.

I can’t tell if I’m projecting or not, but it was as if they’d never heard anything like it before. That didn’t stop them from arguing against it, but they didn’t quite seem to know how to deal with it.

I tried to explain to them a basic tenet of my theology – that although God doesn’t speak to us “face to face” as he did to Moses, we are spoken to through history. Through studying history we can look back and try to figure out what our lesson should be, and how we should act in relation to this lesson. This is why Jews reflect on Torah, Tanach, and all the rest of our history: To try to figure out what we should be focused on and doing today. If we can learn anything from the history of the destruction of the Second Temple, and the messianic war waged in the land of Israel afterwards, it is that nothing but strife has ever come from Jews going all messianic about rebuilding a Temple.

They wouldn’t budge, though. For them the belief in an individual messiah laid out in Maimonides’ 13 principles is central to being Jewish. In fact, they apparently couldn’t accept the idea that I could possibly do away with a portion of our tradition.

After thinking about the conversation for a while, I figured I’d take a look at this week’s Torah portion (Shemini) to see if there was anything relevant to what I was saying. Luckily it’s one of the most interesting portions of Leviticus. The scene where Aaron and his sons are giving their first shot at sacrifices to God comes right at the beginning. The legislation as to the specifics of how the sacrifice is to be prepared is laid out, along with a description of Aaron preparing it and God consuming it by shooting forth some kind of fire. This quickly leads into Nadab and Abihu, apparently two of the more zealous sons of Aaron, deciding to give a go at it themselves. I like to think of them having just got caught up in the moment of such a novel and amazing thing happening, and instead of falling on their faces like the rest of the Israelites, they decide to try to make it happen again. Unfortunately for them, God hadn’t asked them to do it, so instead of enjoying the incense and “strange fire” they brought before him, he simply consumed them with another tongue of flame.

Now, I think that a pretty clear parallel presents itself here. The Jews have had two failed attempts at Temples in the Land of Israel, and many more failed attempts at messiah-ship. Nadab and Abihu can be seen as paragons of overzealousness. Instead of simply allowing the sacrifice that God asked of their father to suffice, they had to go ahead and try it themselves.

Now, there are clear arguments for the Temple being a worldly symbol of overzealousness. God never wanted one. In Second Samuel chapter 7, God states very clearly that he dwells in the Tabernacle and follows his people around in there. He has no need for the Temple that David wants to build him, and even when he does allow Solomon to build it, only his name will dwell within it. In the period of the Tanach, a god’s “name” was a minor manifestation of the god on earth, a sacred piece of the deity that can be present in a physical location. This, then, is actually a downgrade from the relationship the Israelites have with God in the Tabernacle. On a similar note, if you continue reading the story of the Tanach in this way it is clear that the Temple is more often than not a locus of problems for the Israelites.

Now, outside of the theological argument, I think that there’s another parallel to the Nadab and Abihu story. The two Lubavitcher boys that helped me to wrap t’fillin were clearly quite zealous for moshiach. They enjoy helping other Jews to do mitzvot because their theology teaches them that each time a Jew (specifically, a male individual that falls within the Lubavitch legal strictures of Jewishness, of which I very well may not) does a mitzvah, moshiach, and therefore the Temple, draws closer. In my opinion this is a great practice driven by a wrongheaded thought process. I believe that it is wonderful to help other Jews connect to their Judaism in traditional ways, and that it does, in fact, help bring us closer to God and maybe even God closer to us (this is just my first post, so you’ll have to bear with me on this, and give me the benefit of the doubt about my personal conception of God). But to do these mitzvot in hopes that it will once again bring about a time that has already passed, and that this time around the configuration of Judaism that has shown to be deeply flawed will be perfect, is not the right kavanah, or intention.

Instead let us look to our history. Be it written in books, heard through prayer, or practiced through ritual, its metaphorically rich symbols guide us to how we should approach the new, ever novel, ever changing future. If God is speaking to us today, and I believe he is, what better way for him to communicate than through these vestiges of our ancient past that have miraculously survived the perilous course of past? If we have been gifted these wonderful traditions by the grace of whatever has allowed them to endure through the constantly churning and destroying wheel-work of history, should we then desire to offer the strange fire of a new Temple?