divrei torah Given by Havurat Shalom members
Divrei Torah given by members of Havurat Shalom may be reproduced, provided that no alterations are made, that the authors and Havurat Shalom are credited in writing, and that this work is not reproduced for sale.
table of contents
Parsha Noach: Notes on Babel (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Noach: On the Tower of Babel: Scenarios and Questions (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Vayeira: On Hagar, Ishmael, and Us (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Vayeira: Akeda The Binding of Isaac (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Vayeira: the Akedah – the “Binding” of Isaac (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Vayeira: On Hagar, Ishmael, and Us (Larry Rosenwald, 2018)
Parsha Vayeira (Esther Alter)
Parsha Vayechi (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Shemot (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Va'era (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Beshalach (Esther Alter)
Parsah Mishpatim (Crystal Huff)
Parsha Ki Tisa: On Ki Tisa and the Pogrom in Hawara (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Ki Tisa: On Ki Tisa (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Bamidbar (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Bamidmar (Esther Alter)
Shlach (Esther Alter)
Parsha Balak (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Pinchas (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Masei (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Devarim (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Re'eh (Larry Rosenwald)
Being Jewish Now (2025) (Larry Rosenwald)
On the Book of Jonah in Trump’s America (Larry Rosenwald)
On Teshuvah and the Book of Jonah (Larry Rosenwald)
Dvar Torah on Jonah (Heidi Friedman)
On the Feminism of the Havurah Liturgy (Larry Rosenwald)
A Letter from a Letter (Larry Rosenwald)
Tikkun Olam: War Tax Resistance (Larry Rosenwald)
Parsha Noach: Notes on Babel
Given by Larry Rosenwald
Coming again to the story of the Tower of Babel, I can’t not think about the sign outside our house, the sign that says, “wherever you’re from, we’re glad that you’re our neighbor” – in English, Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. I love seeing that sign; it expresses a right sense of neighborliness in its message, and also, and more pertinently this morning, in its multilingualism a right acknowledgment of the world after Babel, the world characterized by a multiplicity of languages. The sign in fact affirms the world after Babel, delights in it, celebrates it.
The Babel story does something different. The multilingual world comes into being in that story by divine action, so it must in theory be something to affirm, but no word of celebration is to be found in the brief, astonishingly resonant account. The plurality of languages is a punishment. The scene at the beginning, when there is only one language and one set-of-words, has its attractive, even utopian aspects: perfect communication, shared labor on a common project, vaulting ambition, magnificent construction. But then God intervenes, the people are baffled and bewildered, communication is impossible, the constructions are abandoned, all that was shared is now severed. There is no joy in what has been created.
How then do we put our politics, as represented by the welcoming and multilingual sign outside our door, in relation to our sacred text? There is no lack of midrashim critiquing the vanity, the cruelty of the builders: we read that they counted it worse for a brick to fall than for a worker to die, that women in labor were forbidden from interrupting their work on the tower even when giving birth. What we lack is a critique of the unilingualism, because only such a critique can lead to a celebration of the multilingualism that follows it.
So I’ve written one.
The world was full of languages, as it had been since the beginning, God creating all seventy of them from at the outset, equal in majesty and beauty. Never was one language alone, in miserable isolation; all constituted the world together, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in concord.
Then came the builders, the children of Nimrod, tormented by ambition, desiring control. They imposed on all those around them, all those in their power, a single language, the name of which is no longer known. Those who spoke other languages, who spoke their own languages, were whipped for a first offense, and if they transgressed a second time their tongues were cut out.
Nor was speaking the language of Nimrod the only commandment imposed; a second and still more devastating commandment supplemented it, requiring all sentient beings to speak not only the same language but also the same words, the same thoughts, and these words and thoughts all concerned the building of the city and the tower. “Carry the bricks” was permitted, “I love you” forbidden. Also forbidden were such impractical questions as “Why are we building the tower?” “Who lives at the edge of the desert”? These questions too were punished severely, and the joyous multilingual life of earlier times was lived only in the mind and in the memory, in gestures of the hand and expressions of the eyes.
God saw the power of the builders, and came down to challenge it; this is the God of judgment. But God discerned also the misery of the workers, and this although no sound conveyed that misery, no word expressed that misery, no word remained in the language to name that misery. A greater miracle even than the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt! - for in Egypt the children of Israel gave voice to their misery, and on the plain of Shinar none could give voice to theirs, and yet the Merciful One, the Discerner, though no prayers were made or cries of lamentation released, nonetheless knew the suffering of the speechless; this is the God of mercy.
The God of justice confounded the language of the builders. That language was never spoken again, no word of its remains, even its name is unknown. That is the God of destruction. But in confounding the one language God released the many. That is the God of creation. All the suppressed languages returned to the mouths of those who had spoken them, their tongues grew back and their lips were once again able to shape the sounds of speech, and the speakers heard the multiple languages sounding in their ears, those they knew and those they did not know, the delight of understanding no greater than and no less than the joy of bewilderment. And now, released from the dominion of the children of Nimrod, free to speak, free to move, free to hear, free to understand, free to not understand, they made their way across the plain of Shinar, looking with bitterness upon the unfinished city and the ruined tower, delighting in all the languages of the world.
Maybe they were even saying, as the sign in our yard says, “no matter where you’re from, no matter what language you speak, I’m glad we’re on this journey together.”
The Babel story does something different. The multilingual world comes into being in that story by divine action, so it must in theory be something to affirm, but no word of celebration is to be found in the brief, astonishingly resonant account. The plurality of languages is a punishment. The scene at the beginning, when there is only one language and one set-of-words, has its attractive, even utopian aspects: perfect communication, shared labor on a common project, vaulting ambition, magnificent construction. But then God intervenes, the people are baffled and bewildered, communication is impossible, the constructions are abandoned, all that was shared is now severed. There is no joy in what has been created.
How then do we put our politics, as represented by the welcoming and multilingual sign outside our door, in relation to our sacred text? There is no lack of midrashim critiquing the vanity, the cruelty of the builders: we read that they counted it worse for a brick to fall than for a worker to die, that women in labor were forbidden from interrupting their work on the tower even when giving birth. What we lack is a critique of the unilingualism, because only such a critique can lead to a celebration of the multilingualism that follows it.
So I’ve written one.
The world was full of languages, as it had been since the beginning, God creating all seventy of them from at the outset, equal in majesty and beauty. Never was one language alone, in miserable isolation; all constituted the world together, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in concord.
Then came the builders, the children of Nimrod, tormented by ambition, desiring control. They imposed on all those around them, all those in their power, a single language, the name of which is no longer known. Those who spoke other languages, who spoke their own languages, were whipped for a first offense, and if they transgressed a second time their tongues were cut out.
Nor was speaking the language of Nimrod the only commandment imposed; a second and still more devastating commandment supplemented it, requiring all sentient beings to speak not only the same language but also the same words, the same thoughts, and these words and thoughts all concerned the building of the city and the tower. “Carry the bricks” was permitted, “I love you” forbidden. Also forbidden were such impractical questions as “Why are we building the tower?” “Who lives at the edge of the desert”? These questions too were punished severely, and the joyous multilingual life of earlier times was lived only in the mind and in the memory, in gestures of the hand and expressions of the eyes.
God saw the power of the builders, and came down to challenge it; this is the God of judgment. But God discerned also the misery of the workers, and this although no sound conveyed that misery, no word expressed that misery, no word remained in the language to name that misery. A greater miracle even than the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt! - for in Egypt the children of Israel gave voice to their misery, and on the plain of Shinar none could give voice to theirs, and yet the Merciful One, the Discerner, though no prayers were made or cries of lamentation released, nonetheless knew the suffering of the speechless; this is the God of mercy.
The God of justice confounded the language of the builders. That language was never spoken again, no word of its remains, even its name is unknown. That is the God of destruction. But in confounding the one language God released the many. That is the God of creation. All the suppressed languages returned to the mouths of those who had spoken them, their tongues grew back and their lips were once again able to shape the sounds of speech, and the speakers heard the multiple languages sounding in their ears, those they knew and those they did not know, the delight of understanding no greater than and no less than the joy of bewilderment. And now, released from the dominion of the children of Nimrod, free to speak, free to move, free to hear, free to understand, free to not understand, they made their way across the plain of Shinar, looking with bitterness upon the unfinished city and the ruined tower, delighting in all the languages of the world.
Maybe they were even saying, as the sign in our yard says, “no matter where you’re from, no matter what language you speak, I’m glad we’re on this journey together.”
Parsha Noach: On the Tower of Babel: Scenarios and Questions
Given by Larry Rosenwald
(What’s below is the text of the devar torah I gave on October 25th, 2014, at Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts, my deeply nuturing and stimulating congregation since 2004. It’s not the first devar torah I’ve given on the Babel story; I find it inexhaustibly interesting, and know I’ll return to it often. I’ve made a few adjustments to the text I wrote for the devar.)
Leaving aside for the moment the stories the text offers us – they may well come back later, of course – I’ll focus on one of the stories the text does not offer us, or only hints at. God says, “we shall/ let us/nablah/ confound their language, that each will not/ that no man/ no one/ will
understand the language of his fellow/ anyone else.” The text later tells us that such a confounding has happened, but nothing of how it happened, of what it felt like. Here, therefore, some scenarios and questions.
“No one will understand the language of his fellow.” (I’ll touch on the gendered aspects of that sentence, but not till later.) I imagine a series of encounters of reciprocal incomprehension. Two workers on a high platform are finishing a ledge of the Tower. One says to the other, “could
you hand me that hammer?” or “what did you bring for lunch today?” or “I hope your daughter’s cold is better.” And between one utterance and the next, or perhaps in mid-utterance, mid-word, mid-syllable, the hearer stops understanding – literally stops “hearing,” lo yishme’u ish sefat re’ehu. But how? Is it as if previously they were both speaking Hebrew, but now the re’a is speaking Sumerian while the interlocutor continues to understand only the Hebrew that both were speaking only a moment ago, an eternity ago?
A question within a question, a meditation within a meditation. Is anyone in the city, now that the grand confusion has taken place, speaking the language that only a moment ago, an eternity ago, all were speaking together? Or has that common language not only ceased to be common but ceased to be?
What was it like, that first moment of bewilderment? No one in human history, as human history is imagined in the story, had ever had that experience before. I remember in this connection a wonderful passage in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in which the Italian-American nurse
Emily, speaking English with her patient Prior Walter, suddenly, without transition, begins speaking something else, something Prior does not understand.
EMILY: There’s really nothing to worry about. I think that shochen bamromim hamtzeh menucho nechono al kanfey hashchino.
PRIOR: What?
EMILY: Everything’s fine. Bemaalos k’doshim ut’horim kezohar horokeea mazhirim . . .
PRIOR: Oh I don’t understand what you’re . . .
EMILY: Es nishmas Prior sheholoch leolomoh, baavur shenodvoo z’dokoh b’ad hazkoras nishmosoh.
PRIOR: Why are you doing that?! Stop it! Stop!
EMILY: Stop what?
PRIOR: You were just . . . weren’t you just speaking in Hebrew or something.
EMILY: Hebrew? (Laughs) I’m basically Italian-American. No. I didn’t speak in Hebrew.
It is a big moment in the play, but a surprisingly small one for Prior and Emily; he asks about it, he protests somewhat, she replies casually and dismissively, the moment is over. But that’s partly because Prior, like all of us who live in the world after Babel, has had this experience before, is a
veteran of linguistic bewilderment. Besides, he has a name for what he has heard, the name “Hebrew.” (We in this congregation have a preciser name: the Ashkenazically pronounced Hebrew of part of the el maley rachamim, the prayer said in memory of the dead.)
But our friends on the tower, to whom we now return, are not veterans of bewilderment, this is their first experience of it, and they have no names to give to what they are hearing, or rather not hearing. Their bewilderment was more fundamental than ours can be, and is beyond our understanding.
How many languages were there after God confounded the language of all the earth? Our traditions say 70 or 72, more or less as many as the miraculously unanimous translators of the Septuagint. Linguists say, or used to say, three thousand. (“Used to say,” because so many
languages, like so many species, have gone, are going, extinct.) Our text, however, seems to imply that there must be as many languages as there are speakers; otherwise someone would indeed understand the language of his fellow. For perfect bewilderment, we need a plethora of languages.
(And, one might argue, a plethora of unrelated languages. Spaniards understand some Italian, Norwegians some Danish, Germans some Yiddish. Do we need, for the fulfillment of the divine wish, not only as many languages as speakers, but as many language families? How absolute does the rule of not-understanding have to be?)
Meditation within a meditation: what happened to infants, infantes, those who etymologically do not speak at all? If they were not yet speaking, were they untouched by the divinely mandated confusion of tongues, did the confusion pass over their heads as a squall on the sea passes over the heads of bottom-dwelling fish? Were they all raised multilingually, since no household henceforth spoke only one language? Did they become the polyglots by whom the sundered multilingual world was rejoined?
Which brings us to the question of gender . . . The gender of the person bewildered by the speech of his fellow is marked as masculine. So, grammatically at least, is the gender of the fellow, the re’a, that word too being masculine. Presumably what is meant by ish and re’ehu is “everyone” and “everyone else.” But suppose we take the phrase literally, as referring to a confusion affecting only males; women continue to understand one another, they even understand men. The confusion
affects only the men, who are perhaps also the only builders of tower and city, is thus a confusion focused on those who have committed an action, is a fit punishment for them but not for those who have done nothing wrong. And women become the bridges by which the gap between language and language is traversed.
A sadder speculation: each person ceases to understand the language only of that person’s fellow, of that person’s friend. Other relationships remain linguistically unconfounded, the language of strangers and functionaries and chance-met store date-sellers and shepherds at a well is understood, just not the language of the people one has a connection to or cares about.
After the Babel story, the Torah reverts to its default option for depicting the multilingual world, the option characterized by the Israeli theorist Meir Sternberg as “homogenizing convention,” when an author, having decided to represent a multilingual community, “dismisses the resultant
variations in the language presumably spoken by the characters as an irrelevant, if not distracting, representational factor” (224). The Bible’s Pharaoh and Philistines speak Hebrew just as Shakespeare’s Romans and Italians (and Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit and Humpty Dumpty) speak
English. The next moment that makes us aware of the multilinguality of the world comes during the Joseph story, when Joseph’s brothers and Joseph the Egyptian vizier are in the same chamber, the brothers are speaking, Joseph is of course understanding – they are, after all, speaking his native language –vehem lo yadu ki shome’a yosef ki hamelitz beynotam (“and they did not know that Yosef heard/understood/etc., for the interpreter [was] between them”). We are back in the world we
know, where confusion is present but can be remedied by translation, and where translators are, asso often, both means of communication and obstacles to it.
The Babel story opens up a space for thinking about the multilingual world we live in; that space is closed down by the text of Torah almost immediately. But what a delight to wander in it while it remains open!
Leaving aside for the moment the stories the text offers us – they may well come back later, of course – I’ll focus on one of the stories the text does not offer us, or only hints at. God says, “we shall/ let us/nablah/ confound their language, that each will not/ that no man/ no one/ will
understand the language of his fellow/ anyone else.” The text later tells us that such a confounding has happened, but nothing of how it happened, of what it felt like. Here, therefore, some scenarios and questions.
“No one will understand the language of his fellow.” (I’ll touch on the gendered aspects of that sentence, but not till later.) I imagine a series of encounters of reciprocal incomprehension. Two workers on a high platform are finishing a ledge of the Tower. One says to the other, “could
you hand me that hammer?” or “what did you bring for lunch today?” or “I hope your daughter’s cold is better.” And between one utterance and the next, or perhaps in mid-utterance, mid-word, mid-syllable, the hearer stops understanding – literally stops “hearing,” lo yishme’u ish sefat re’ehu. But how? Is it as if previously they were both speaking Hebrew, but now the re’a is speaking Sumerian while the interlocutor continues to understand only the Hebrew that both were speaking only a moment ago, an eternity ago?
A question within a question, a meditation within a meditation. Is anyone in the city, now that the grand confusion has taken place, speaking the language that only a moment ago, an eternity ago, all were speaking together? Or has that common language not only ceased to be common but ceased to be?
What was it like, that first moment of bewilderment? No one in human history, as human history is imagined in the story, had ever had that experience before. I remember in this connection a wonderful passage in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in which the Italian-American nurse
Emily, speaking English with her patient Prior Walter, suddenly, without transition, begins speaking something else, something Prior does not understand.
EMILY: There’s really nothing to worry about. I think that shochen bamromim hamtzeh menucho nechono al kanfey hashchino.
PRIOR: What?
EMILY: Everything’s fine. Bemaalos k’doshim ut’horim kezohar horokeea mazhirim . . .
PRIOR: Oh I don’t understand what you’re . . .
EMILY: Es nishmas Prior sheholoch leolomoh, baavur shenodvoo z’dokoh b’ad hazkoras nishmosoh.
PRIOR: Why are you doing that?! Stop it! Stop!
EMILY: Stop what?
PRIOR: You were just . . . weren’t you just speaking in Hebrew or something.
EMILY: Hebrew? (Laughs) I’m basically Italian-American. No. I didn’t speak in Hebrew.
It is a big moment in the play, but a surprisingly small one for Prior and Emily; he asks about it, he protests somewhat, she replies casually and dismissively, the moment is over. But that’s partly because Prior, like all of us who live in the world after Babel, has had this experience before, is a
veteran of linguistic bewilderment. Besides, he has a name for what he has heard, the name “Hebrew.” (We in this congregation have a preciser name: the Ashkenazically pronounced Hebrew of part of the el maley rachamim, the prayer said in memory of the dead.)
But our friends on the tower, to whom we now return, are not veterans of bewilderment, this is their first experience of it, and they have no names to give to what they are hearing, or rather not hearing. Their bewilderment was more fundamental than ours can be, and is beyond our understanding.
How many languages were there after God confounded the language of all the earth? Our traditions say 70 or 72, more or less as many as the miraculously unanimous translators of the Septuagint. Linguists say, or used to say, three thousand. (“Used to say,” because so many
languages, like so many species, have gone, are going, extinct.) Our text, however, seems to imply that there must be as many languages as there are speakers; otherwise someone would indeed understand the language of his fellow. For perfect bewilderment, we need a plethora of languages.
(And, one might argue, a plethora of unrelated languages. Spaniards understand some Italian, Norwegians some Danish, Germans some Yiddish. Do we need, for the fulfillment of the divine wish, not only as many languages as speakers, but as many language families? How absolute does the rule of not-understanding have to be?)
Meditation within a meditation: what happened to infants, infantes, those who etymologically do not speak at all? If they were not yet speaking, were they untouched by the divinely mandated confusion of tongues, did the confusion pass over their heads as a squall on the sea passes over the heads of bottom-dwelling fish? Were they all raised multilingually, since no household henceforth spoke only one language? Did they become the polyglots by whom the sundered multilingual world was rejoined?
Which brings us to the question of gender . . . The gender of the person bewildered by the speech of his fellow is marked as masculine. So, grammatically at least, is the gender of the fellow, the re’a, that word too being masculine. Presumably what is meant by ish and re’ehu is “everyone” and “everyone else.” But suppose we take the phrase literally, as referring to a confusion affecting only males; women continue to understand one another, they even understand men. The confusion
affects only the men, who are perhaps also the only builders of tower and city, is thus a confusion focused on those who have committed an action, is a fit punishment for them but not for those who have done nothing wrong. And women become the bridges by which the gap between language and language is traversed.
A sadder speculation: each person ceases to understand the language only of that person’s fellow, of that person’s friend. Other relationships remain linguistically unconfounded, the language of strangers and functionaries and chance-met store date-sellers and shepherds at a well is understood, just not the language of the people one has a connection to or cares about.
After the Babel story, the Torah reverts to its default option for depicting the multilingual world, the option characterized by the Israeli theorist Meir Sternberg as “homogenizing convention,” when an author, having decided to represent a multilingual community, “dismisses the resultant
variations in the language presumably spoken by the characters as an irrelevant, if not distracting, representational factor” (224). The Bible’s Pharaoh and Philistines speak Hebrew just as Shakespeare’s Romans and Italians (and Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit and Humpty Dumpty) speak
English. The next moment that makes us aware of the multilinguality of the world comes during the Joseph story, when Joseph’s brothers and Joseph the Egyptian vizier are in the same chamber, the brothers are speaking, Joseph is of course understanding – they are, after all, speaking his native language –vehem lo yadu ki shome’a yosef ki hamelitz beynotam (“and they did not know that Yosef heard/understood/etc., for the interpreter [was] between them”). We are back in the world we
know, where confusion is present but can be remedied by translation, and where translators are, asso often, both means of communication and obstacles to it.
The Babel story opens up a space for thinking about the multilingual world we live in; that space is closed down by the text of Torah almost immediately. But what a delight to wander in it while it remains open!
Parsha Vayeira: On Hagar, Ishmael, and Us
Given by Larry Rosenwald Rosh Hashanah 5779
I gave a devar on the story of Hagar and Ishmael once before, in 2005. I was then considerably under the spell of Franz Rosenzweig, and I confess I saw the story indirectly, through a remark Rosenzweig had made about it. The remark concerns an earlier episode than the one just read. God has just told Abraham that Sarah will “become nations/ [and] kings of peoples shall come from her.”” Abraham falls prostrate, speaks to himself with happy incredulity about God’s promise, then responds, lu yishma’el yichyeh lefanecha, “Oh that Ishmael might live in your presence” (17:18). Rosenzweig wrote that Abraham’s response was keneged kulah torah, “equivalent to all of Torah.”
Rosenzweig was right to celebrate that response; it reveals a capacious generosity. Someone of narrower generosity might think, and might be pardoned for thinking, only of himself, his wife, his son-to-be; Abraham instead thinks of his family in the broad sense, not only of his own tradition and line, but also of traditions and lines related to it if distinct from it, and he turns for a moment from the promise to husband and wife to think of the bondwoman and her son, who is also his son.
But now it’s 2018, the world we live in is grimmer, and it has in these days become clear just how radical and direct one needs to be in resisting the infliction of suffering on those who, like Hagar and Ishmael, are at the margins; how our resistance needs to be not only in our words, though words matter, but also in our actions; how much our focus needs to be on those marginalized people whom injustice is causing to suffer, and not on the attitudes of those beholding them. (As Ayanna Pressley put it, in what seems to me a powerfully Jewish sentence: “the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”) And by these pressing standards, Abraham’s response is not enough. (Nor, I should note, was my admiration of Rosenzweig’s remark enough; I wasn’t looking closely enough at what happens to the most vulnerable persons in the story.) Abraham grieves, but Sarah prevails; Hagar and Ishmael are banished. God reassures Abraham that Ishmael will be the ancestor of a great people, Abraham says nothing, Hagar and Ishmael are banished. The promise is real, the great future will come to be, but Hagar and Ishmael are banished. Of their immediate and terrible future, of the exiles’ despair in the desert, God says nothing, Abraham says nothing.
But the text has something to say, and all honor to the storyteller for saying it:
Avraham rose early in the morning,
he took some bread and a skin of water
and gave them to Hagar – placing them upon her shoulder –
together with the child and sent her away.
She went off and roamed in the wilderness of Be’er-Sheva.
Now when the water in the skin was at an end, she cast the child under one of the
bushes [“cast” renders the Hebrew tashlech, the word we use to describe our casting of sins into the water, and here heartbreaking in its graphic intensity]
and went and sat by herself, opposite, as far away as a bowshot,
for she said to herself:
Let me not see the child die!
So she sat opposite, and lifted up her voice and wept.
(tr. Everett Fox, from In the Beginning)
Hagar has been told by God of God’s promise to her, and right after this passage God calls to Hagar to see a spring of water; she is able to see the water, as Abraham later, when he is about to slaughter Isaac, is able to see the ram caught in a thicket by its horns, and her promised future unfolds from that act of seeing. For the moment, though, the promise is forgotten and the future full of death. Hagar cannot bear to see Ishmael die, casts the child away, averts her gaze from him, and weeps – not, like Rachel in the book of Jeremiah, in the passage we’ll hear when the haftarah is chanted tomorrow, “weeping for her children because they were not,” but precisely because her child is unbearably present. She does not go as far as some enslaved mothers in this country have gone, killing their children to spare them the misery of slavery; but she is not far away from that despairing action. Abraham does not see this. But he should have, and we must.
The American pacifist Kathy Kelly likes to say that pacifists need to be concrete, to strip away grand ideas and look at bodies in pain. She’s right, and not just for pacifists; her point holds good for anyone who makes choices that inflict suffering. All of us need to be concrete when tempted by grand ideas to such choices, need to look suffering in the face, human face to human face. Like many here, I imagine, I’ve been wanting the devisers and enforcers of current American immigration policies to do just that: to look, face to face, at the people, the mothers, the children, whom their policies affect, torment, traumatize. But in that case, for me at any rate, the idea itself is wrong, and my desire is to have the enforcers look closely enough at the faces of those who are suffering to give up the idea altogether. The point is more challenging, and more important, in Abraham’s case, because Abraham’s idea is the grandest of all ideas, a divine and true promise; yet even Abraham, or especially Abraham, needs to be concrete here, to imagine Hagar and Ishmael in the proximate future, at the point of death, and to do what he can to avert that agony. to be in the presence of that agony.
A digression: I turn often to the poems of Itzik Manger for explorations of neglected, marginal figures in Torah. Here, alas, he avoids the heart of the matter. He’s fascinated by Hagar. But he’s not ready to follow her to the place of desolation; she is for him like a Jew on the move, looking for a homeland, angry at those exiling her, resourceful in coping with the tasks that exile imposes. She and Ishmael are carried away by a wagon-driver Abraham has hired, and no sooner do they dismount from the wagon than Islamic emissaries arrive to take them in. What Abraham does not see, Manger does not describe.
A second digression, a second poet. I think often in connection with this story of some lines in Adrienne Rich’s great poem “Yom Kippur 1984”:
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?
In the world of our biblical text, souls have not yet crashed together, the refugee child and the exile’s child have not yet re-opened the city, and Hagar and Ishmael are in one of the cruelest of solitudes, that of exile, of banishment, of the desert, a solitude even from each other.
I’ll conclude with two reflections, one about teshuvah, one about a pun.
About teshuvah – well, contemplating the story of Hagar and Ishmael teaches me something that teshuvah needs to be, but something that in my case at least it hasn’t consistently been.
Here’s the lesson as I see it. On the one hand, Teshuvah entails a movement of the heart, a new willingness to repent and to change. That is why we direct our fists to our hearts when we recite the vidui, whether to wake our hearts or to rebuke them. But teshuvah also entails a movement of perception, a clear discerning of what our actions have been, what their consequences have been for others, what grand ideas they emerge from, what bearing those consequences have on our judgment of those ideas. Absent a movement of the heart, we are immobile; absent a movement of perception, we may well not know what direction to go in. The story of Hagar and Ishmael can help us learn that.
As for the pun, that mode of verbal wit which our tradition (and many in this congregation) have a high regard for – well, the pun is on Hagar’s name, it’s not quite philologically legitimate, and it emerged for me in considering a phrase we’ll sing next week, right after the declaration of Kol Nidre: lager hagar betocham: “the entire congregation of the house of Israel, and the foreigner who dwells among them, hager hagar betocham, Hagar the foreigner among them, shall be forgiven.” The pun has a cruel point here: Hagar is precisely not, in our text today, betocham, “dwelling among them.” But a wonderful, saving aspiration lies beneath the cruel point: that our repentance will be made complete when Hagar is indeed betocheinu, among us. Not belonging to our tradition – to imagine that is to deny the reality of her tradition, of Ishmael’s tradition, the one they are about to establish, no less than the reality of the tradition of Sarah and Abraham – but also not banished from our tradition, from our homes, our places, into a desert where people die, not forgotten in our delight and awe at being chosen in the covenant, present to us, among us. Which is, after all, the deep meaning of what some in our congregation say when called to the Torah: asher bachar banu im kol ha’amim, blessed be the one who chose us along with all other nations.
May we at this time and at all times see clearly what we have done, the consequences of what we have done, the suffering we have caused, the ideas and structures leading us to cause that suffering; and may that clarity of vision help us to develop a right relation with all the chosen nations and communities and families under the sun.
(An epilogue: on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I had the honor of being called to the Torah. In our congregation, everyone so called is further honored by an individualized misheberach, the witty and moving individualizing being done, on the fly, in Hebrew and English, by Aliza Arzt. Aliza’s misheberach for me included the wish that a devar like mine would never need to be given again.)
Rosenzweig was right to celebrate that response; it reveals a capacious generosity. Someone of narrower generosity might think, and might be pardoned for thinking, only of himself, his wife, his son-to-be; Abraham instead thinks of his family in the broad sense, not only of his own tradition and line, but also of traditions and lines related to it if distinct from it, and he turns for a moment from the promise to husband and wife to think of the bondwoman and her son, who is also his son.
But now it’s 2018, the world we live in is grimmer, and it has in these days become clear just how radical and direct one needs to be in resisting the infliction of suffering on those who, like Hagar and Ishmael, are at the margins; how our resistance needs to be not only in our words, though words matter, but also in our actions; how much our focus needs to be on those marginalized people whom injustice is causing to suffer, and not on the attitudes of those beholding them. (As Ayanna Pressley put it, in what seems to me a powerfully Jewish sentence: “the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”) And by these pressing standards, Abraham’s response is not enough. (Nor, I should note, was my admiration of Rosenzweig’s remark enough; I wasn’t looking closely enough at what happens to the most vulnerable persons in the story.) Abraham grieves, but Sarah prevails; Hagar and Ishmael are banished. God reassures Abraham that Ishmael will be the ancestor of a great people, Abraham says nothing, Hagar and Ishmael are banished. The promise is real, the great future will come to be, but Hagar and Ishmael are banished. Of their immediate and terrible future, of the exiles’ despair in the desert, God says nothing, Abraham says nothing.
But the text has something to say, and all honor to the storyteller for saying it:
Avraham rose early in the morning,
he took some bread and a skin of water
and gave them to Hagar – placing them upon her shoulder –
together with the child and sent her away.
She went off and roamed in the wilderness of Be’er-Sheva.
Now when the water in the skin was at an end, she cast the child under one of the
bushes [“cast” renders the Hebrew tashlech, the word we use to describe our casting of sins into the water, and here heartbreaking in its graphic intensity]
and went and sat by herself, opposite, as far away as a bowshot,
for she said to herself:
Let me not see the child die!
So she sat opposite, and lifted up her voice and wept.
(tr. Everett Fox, from In the Beginning)
Hagar has been told by God of God’s promise to her, and right after this passage God calls to Hagar to see a spring of water; she is able to see the water, as Abraham later, when he is about to slaughter Isaac, is able to see the ram caught in a thicket by its horns, and her promised future unfolds from that act of seeing. For the moment, though, the promise is forgotten and the future full of death. Hagar cannot bear to see Ishmael die, casts the child away, averts her gaze from him, and weeps – not, like Rachel in the book of Jeremiah, in the passage we’ll hear when the haftarah is chanted tomorrow, “weeping for her children because they were not,” but precisely because her child is unbearably present. She does not go as far as some enslaved mothers in this country have gone, killing their children to spare them the misery of slavery; but she is not far away from that despairing action. Abraham does not see this. But he should have, and we must.
The American pacifist Kathy Kelly likes to say that pacifists need to be concrete, to strip away grand ideas and look at bodies in pain. She’s right, and not just for pacifists; her point holds good for anyone who makes choices that inflict suffering. All of us need to be concrete when tempted by grand ideas to such choices, need to look suffering in the face, human face to human face. Like many here, I imagine, I’ve been wanting the devisers and enforcers of current American immigration policies to do just that: to look, face to face, at the people, the mothers, the children, whom their policies affect, torment, traumatize. But in that case, for me at any rate, the idea itself is wrong, and my desire is to have the enforcers look closely enough at the faces of those who are suffering to give up the idea altogether. The point is more challenging, and more important, in Abraham’s case, because Abraham’s idea is the grandest of all ideas, a divine and true promise; yet even Abraham, or especially Abraham, needs to be concrete here, to imagine Hagar and Ishmael in the proximate future, at the point of death, and to do what he can to avert that agony. to be in the presence of that agony.
A digression: I turn often to the poems of Itzik Manger for explorations of neglected, marginal figures in Torah. Here, alas, he avoids the heart of the matter. He’s fascinated by Hagar. But he’s not ready to follow her to the place of desolation; she is for him like a Jew on the move, looking for a homeland, angry at those exiling her, resourceful in coping with the tasks that exile imposes. She and Ishmael are carried away by a wagon-driver Abraham has hired, and no sooner do they dismount from the wagon than Islamic emissaries arrive to take them in. What Abraham does not see, Manger does not describe.
A second digression, a second poet. I think often in connection with this story of some lines in Adrienne Rich’s great poem “Yom Kippur 1984”:
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?
In the world of our biblical text, souls have not yet crashed together, the refugee child and the exile’s child have not yet re-opened the city, and Hagar and Ishmael are in one of the cruelest of solitudes, that of exile, of banishment, of the desert, a solitude even from each other.
I’ll conclude with two reflections, one about teshuvah, one about a pun.
About teshuvah – well, contemplating the story of Hagar and Ishmael teaches me something that teshuvah needs to be, but something that in my case at least it hasn’t consistently been.
Here’s the lesson as I see it. On the one hand, Teshuvah entails a movement of the heart, a new willingness to repent and to change. That is why we direct our fists to our hearts when we recite the vidui, whether to wake our hearts or to rebuke them. But teshuvah also entails a movement of perception, a clear discerning of what our actions have been, what their consequences have been for others, what grand ideas they emerge from, what bearing those consequences have on our judgment of those ideas. Absent a movement of the heart, we are immobile; absent a movement of perception, we may well not know what direction to go in. The story of Hagar and Ishmael can help us learn that.
As for the pun, that mode of verbal wit which our tradition (and many in this congregation) have a high regard for – well, the pun is on Hagar’s name, it’s not quite philologically legitimate, and it emerged for me in considering a phrase we’ll sing next week, right after the declaration of Kol Nidre: lager hagar betocham: “the entire congregation of the house of Israel, and the foreigner who dwells among them, hager hagar betocham, Hagar the foreigner among them, shall be forgiven.” The pun has a cruel point here: Hagar is precisely not, in our text today, betocham, “dwelling among them.” But a wonderful, saving aspiration lies beneath the cruel point: that our repentance will be made complete when Hagar is indeed betocheinu, among us. Not belonging to our tradition – to imagine that is to deny the reality of her tradition, of Ishmael’s tradition, the one they are about to establish, no less than the reality of the tradition of Sarah and Abraham – but also not banished from our tradition, from our homes, our places, into a desert where people die, not forgotten in our delight and awe at being chosen in the covenant, present to us, among us. Which is, after all, the deep meaning of what some in our congregation say when called to the Torah: asher bachar banu im kol ha’amim, blessed be the one who chose us along with all other nations.
May we at this time and at all times see clearly what we have done, the consequences of what we have done, the suffering we have caused, the ideas and structures leading us to cause that suffering; and may that clarity of vision help us to develop a right relation with all the chosen nations and communities and families under the sun.
(An epilogue: on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I had the honor of being called to the Torah. In our congregation, everyone so called is further honored by an individualized misheberach, the witty and moving individualizing being done, on the fly, in Hebrew and English, by Aliza Arzt. Aliza’s misheberach for me included the wish that a devar like mine would never need to be given again.)
Parsha Vayeira: Akeda The Binding of Isaac
Given by Larry Rosenwald
What is hard about talking about the akedah, the binding of Isaac, is not the task of finding something of one’s own to say, after all the astonishingly diverse things said by others; the story is inexhaustible. The hard thing is doing justice to the simple horror of it: that God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and that Abraham consents. (One of our daughters had her first child this last February, a son. She and I were talking a while back, I told her I’d be giving the devar this year on this day, on this story, and she said, “you know, this is the first time I’ve thought about that story since I gave birth, and what I know now is that I wouldn’t believe in a God who would ask me to sacrifice my boy.”)
Most of my remarks today will be contemplative, analytical, my tone of voice its usual modulated self. But I’ll come back to the horror, the trauma, in the end.
My most recent experiences of the story are experiences of a voice: Martin Buber’s voice, reading the German translation of the passage done by him together with Franz Rosenzweig, recorded in 1961, some four years before Buber’s death. It’s a very appealing voice, and a distinctive one, a grainy, husky, amiable baritone speaking a cultivated Austrian German with Yiddish inflections. It’s a very appealing style of declamation as well, with the careful breaks Buber makes between lines, the slowing of tempo and increasing of volume when he speaks the Buber-Rosenzweig rendering of the Tetragrammaton, the general lack of affect or pretense, the occasional conversational tone, even the occasional over-reaching for prophetic majesty.
Hearing Buber’s voice so often and so attentively, I found myself wondering about the voices evoked in our story, their speaking and their silences.
Some of my thoughts were in a sense theatrical, questions you’d have to answer if you were staging the scene. How loud are the voices the story tells us of? How loud is Abraham’s response to God, how soft is Isaac’s question to Abraham? Do father and son speak the same Hebrew, as in Buber’s voice they speak the same German, or is Abraham’s Hebrew the product of the multicultural place of his growing up (as Buber’s German is), does Isaac’s retain any of the traits of the speech varieties of Hagar or Ishmael? Has Isaac’s voice changed yet? (There are several rabbinic views regarding his age.) If not, are we to imagine a duet between baritone and boy soprano, like that of the father and son in Goethe’s Erlkönig?
These are, as noted, theatrical questions, not theological ones. What is quite pressingly theological is the task of understanding the relation between the human voices and the divine ones, God’s and the angel’s. What, in the end or the beginning, does it mean to say, “God said,” or “the angel called”? The medieval philosopher and poet Boethius wrote that when we predicate things of God, the things themselves are entirely changed. Is saying a thing that is so changed? The Hebrew text leaves the question unresolved; it keeps saying vayomer, vayomer, he said, he said, the same verb for all, for God and human adult and human child and angel.
We are placed between two unknowables. If the voice of God is something other than a human voice, then how are we to imagine it? I think of all the insufficient ways of creating a divine voice in all the movies I’ve ever seen that attempt that creation, from Star Trek V to The Prince of Egypt. I think of George Bernard Shaw’s remark, made earnestly but without a theology, that Sarastro’s two great arias in Mozart’s The Magic Flute are the only music ever written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.
But if the voice of God is not something other than a human voice, then the task is no easier, the questions it leads one to no more answerable. It seems impious to imagine, as we then must, God’s dialect and idiolect, God’s mode of declamation. Does God pause as Buber does, between the increasingly terrifying adjectives leading up to the name at the end of the terrifying question? “Pray take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Isaac.” Is God’s Hebrew Ashkenazic or Sephardic?
As noted, I hold these to be serious theological questions. But they are, also as noted, distractions from the central drama and our response to it, to which I now turn, though still in the context of thinking about voices, their presences and absences, their powers and limitations.
I might in that context describe the story as dramatizing the failure of human voices. I have in mind partly what human voices do or do not do. Abraham speaks when God calls him, hineni, da bin ich, here I am, but is silent when God commands him to sacrifice his son, his only-one, whom he loves, Isaac. He speaks disingenuously or deceitfully when he instructs his servants, evasively in response to Isaac’s question along the way, “but where the lamb for this burnt-offering?” (Isaac’s question stands out for its genuineness and truthfulness: he asks regarding what he does not know, seeking to know it.)
I also have in mind mean the general, eerie, appalling voicelessness of the first part of the story, each brief utterance or exchange breaking what the text leads us to imagine as an unendurably long silence, in which actions are taken and sounds are absent. (“Abraham the bargainer,” writes Everett Fox, “so willing to enter into negotiations, with allies, local princes, and God, here falls completely silent.”) This in the first part of the story, before they arrive at the mountain of which God has spoken to them; but still more in the second part, the preparation and almost the performance of the sacrifice, during which no one says anything: “They came to the place that God had spoken to him of; / there Abraham built the slaughter-site/ and arranged the wood/ and bound Isaac his son/ and placed him on the slaughter-site atop the wood./ Abraham stretched out his hand, he took the knife to slay his son” (Fox edited). We long for a voice – Isaac’s in fear or protest, even Abraham’s in explanation or misery. But the actions unfold as if in some silent horror movie, some nightmare where we can watch but not speak.
At the end, in the 3rd part, we get speech in abundance, the voices we have been longing for. But not for the most part human voices. Abraham one last time says hineni, that primal word of responsibility or acquiescence, and Abraham “calls,” vayikra, i.e., gives a name to, the mountain where the binding has taken place. But the abundant speech is the angel’s, its abundance in strange counterpoint to the story’s earlier silences, protesting too much, compensating for what cannot be compensated for.
At the climax of the angel’s speech Abraham is praised for his obedience to the divine voice: eikev asher shamata b’koli, “because you have heard my voice.” One might take this as the essence of the story as a whole, the divine voice speaking, the human voice silent, the human agent hearing and obeying.
Who of us can know what it might feel like to be addressed, commanded, by the voice of God? I set out these reflections not to stand in judgment of Abraham, who was so addressed and commanded, but to note the perturbing absence from this perturbing story of the remarkable human capacity of speech, and in connection with these days of awe we are at the beginning of, to assert the necessity of deploying that capacity, in our arduous repentance and more generally; to suggest that one use of the story’s silence is to encourage our speech.
My wife is a Quaker and a thoughtful zealot for the wonderful gathered silence of the Quaker meeting. I like to say to her that Judaism is a very noisy religion, and a very vocal one. Sometimes I mean that ruefully – we are always talking! – but here and today I mean it as identifying a human capacity we trust, and never more fully, more liberatingly, than during these ten days. Shamata bekoli, “you have heard my voice, “ says God through the angel to Abraham. Sh’ma koleinu, hear our voice, we say in our own persons back to God during these days, with the Ark open, give ear to what we say, amareinu ha’azini.
In this season, in this year, in this time that remains to us, may we use our voices as in my admiring judgment Buber used his, to their full extent and their full glory, in all their imperfection and local rootedness, unsubmissively, urgently, unquenchably, irresistibly.
Most of my remarks today will be contemplative, analytical, my tone of voice its usual modulated self. But I’ll come back to the horror, the trauma, in the end.
My most recent experiences of the story are experiences of a voice: Martin Buber’s voice, reading the German translation of the passage done by him together with Franz Rosenzweig, recorded in 1961, some four years before Buber’s death. It’s a very appealing voice, and a distinctive one, a grainy, husky, amiable baritone speaking a cultivated Austrian German with Yiddish inflections. It’s a very appealing style of declamation as well, with the careful breaks Buber makes between lines, the slowing of tempo and increasing of volume when he speaks the Buber-Rosenzweig rendering of the Tetragrammaton, the general lack of affect or pretense, the occasional conversational tone, even the occasional over-reaching for prophetic majesty.
Hearing Buber’s voice so often and so attentively, I found myself wondering about the voices evoked in our story, their speaking and their silences.
Some of my thoughts were in a sense theatrical, questions you’d have to answer if you were staging the scene. How loud are the voices the story tells us of? How loud is Abraham’s response to God, how soft is Isaac’s question to Abraham? Do father and son speak the same Hebrew, as in Buber’s voice they speak the same German, or is Abraham’s Hebrew the product of the multicultural place of his growing up (as Buber’s German is), does Isaac’s retain any of the traits of the speech varieties of Hagar or Ishmael? Has Isaac’s voice changed yet? (There are several rabbinic views regarding his age.) If not, are we to imagine a duet between baritone and boy soprano, like that of the father and son in Goethe’s Erlkönig?
These are, as noted, theatrical questions, not theological ones. What is quite pressingly theological is the task of understanding the relation between the human voices and the divine ones, God’s and the angel’s. What, in the end or the beginning, does it mean to say, “God said,” or “the angel called”? The medieval philosopher and poet Boethius wrote that when we predicate things of God, the things themselves are entirely changed. Is saying a thing that is so changed? The Hebrew text leaves the question unresolved; it keeps saying vayomer, vayomer, he said, he said, the same verb for all, for God and human adult and human child and angel.
We are placed between two unknowables. If the voice of God is something other than a human voice, then how are we to imagine it? I think of all the insufficient ways of creating a divine voice in all the movies I’ve ever seen that attempt that creation, from Star Trek V to The Prince of Egypt. I think of George Bernard Shaw’s remark, made earnestly but without a theology, that Sarastro’s two great arias in Mozart’s The Magic Flute are the only music ever written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.
But if the voice of God is not something other than a human voice, then the task is no easier, the questions it leads one to no more answerable. It seems impious to imagine, as we then must, God’s dialect and idiolect, God’s mode of declamation. Does God pause as Buber does, between the increasingly terrifying adjectives leading up to the name at the end of the terrifying question? “Pray take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Isaac.” Is God’s Hebrew Ashkenazic or Sephardic?
As noted, I hold these to be serious theological questions. But they are, also as noted, distractions from the central drama and our response to it, to which I now turn, though still in the context of thinking about voices, their presences and absences, their powers and limitations.
I might in that context describe the story as dramatizing the failure of human voices. I have in mind partly what human voices do or do not do. Abraham speaks when God calls him, hineni, da bin ich, here I am, but is silent when God commands him to sacrifice his son, his only-one, whom he loves, Isaac. He speaks disingenuously or deceitfully when he instructs his servants, evasively in response to Isaac’s question along the way, “but where the lamb for this burnt-offering?” (Isaac’s question stands out for its genuineness and truthfulness: he asks regarding what he does not know, seeking to know it.)
I also have in mind mean the general, eerie, appalling voicelessness of the first part of the story, each brief utterance or exchange breaking what the text leads us to imagine as an unendurably long silence, in which actions are taken and sounds are absent. (“Abraham the bargainer,” writes Everett Fox, “so willing to enter into negotiations, with allies, local princes, and God, here falls completely silent.”) This in the first part of the story, before they arrive at the mountain of which God has spoken to them; but still more in the second part, the preparation and almost the performance of the sacrifice, during which no one says anything: “They came to the place that God had spoken to him of; / there Abraham built the slaughter-site/ and arranged the wood/ and bound Isaac his son/ and placed him on the slaughter-site atop the wood./ Abraham stretched out his hand, he took the knife to slay his son” (Fox edited). We long for a voice – Isaac’s in fear or protest, even Abraham’s in explanation or misery. But the actions unfold as if in some silent horror movie, some nightmare where we can watch but not speak.
At the end, in the 3rd part, we get speech in abundance, the voices we have been longing for. But not for the most part human voices. Abraham one last time says hineni, that primal word of responsibility or acquiescence, and Abraham “calls,” vayikra, i.e., gives a name to, the mountain where the binding has taken place. But the abundant speech is the angel’s, its abundance in strange counterpoint to the story’s earlier silences, protesting too much, compensating for what cannot be compensated for.
At the climax of the angel’s speech Abraham is praised for his obedience to the divine voice: eikev asher shamata b’koli, “because you have heard my voice.” One might take this as the essence of the story as a whole, the divine voice speaking, the human voice silent, the human agent hearing and obeying.
Who of us can know what it might feel like to be addressed, commanded, by the voice of God? I set out these reflections not to stand in judgment of Abraham, who was so addressed and commanded, but to note the perturbing absence from this perturbing story of the remarkable human capacity of speech, and in connection with these days of awe we are at the beginning of, to assert the necessity of deploying that capacity, in our arduous repentance and more generally; to suggest that one use of the story’s silence is to encourage our speech.
My wife is a Quaker and a thoughtful zealot for the wonderful gathered silence of the Quaker meeting. I like to say to her that Judaism is a very noisy religion, and a very vocal one. Sometimes I mean that ruefully – we are always talking! – but here and today I mean it as identifying a human capacity we trust, and never more fully, more liberatingly, than during these ten days. Shamata bekoli, “you have heard my voice, “ says God through the angel to Abraham. Sh’ma koleinu, hear our voice, we say in our own persons back to God during these days, with the Ark open, give ear to what we say, amareinu ha’azini.
In this season, in this year, in this time that remains to us, may we use our voices as in my admiring judgment Buber used his, to their full extent and their full glory, in all their imperfection and local rootedness, unsubmissively, urgently, unquenchably, irresistibly.
Parsha Vayeira: the Akedah – the “Binding” of Isaac
Given by Larry Rosenwald Rosh Ha-Shanah 5775, Sept. 24, 2014
The Akedah might seem to be inherently paradoxical. After Abraham and Sarah finally bring forth Isaac -- the son who is promised by God that their descendants will be numerous as the sand by sea and the stars in heaven, will acquire the land of Canaan as their home, and will be a blessing to the peoples of earth -- Abraham is now told to offer him up as a sacrifice. That at the end of the chapter he doesn’t do so should be no surprise to us or to ancient Israelites or later Jews. Elsewhere in the Bible child sacrifice is an abomination (see Leviticus 18:21, 30:3, Deuteronomy 18:10, and most emphatically Micah 6.6-8, “With what shall I come before the Lord… shall I give my firstborn for my transgression…? He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you – only [I love that “only”] to do justice and to love goodness and to walk modestly with your God.”
Why is Abraham not depicted as challenging God when he is told to take Isaac to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering (22:2)? Abraham had the moral passion to do so, which may help explain why he became “Avraham avinu” (Abraham our father) in the course of the unfolding of the Jewish tradition. Three chapters earlier in Genesis Abraham had been informed of God’s intention to destroy the evil cities of Sodom and Gemorrah, whereupon he demanded of God, “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? ... Far be it from you, Adonai, Lord, to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty? Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly?” (18:25).
In his fine commentary to the Torah (p.149), Rabbi Gunther Plaut noted that at the beginning of the Akedah the command to Abraham is conveyed in the name of Elohim, a generic term in biblical Hebrew for God or gods (grammatically plural so that whether it is singular or plural in meaning is tied to the accompanying verb). However, at the climax of the chapter the instruction not to sacrifice the child is attributed to a messenger from Adonai, YHVH being Abraham’s personal God, a deity as yet unknown to the world at large. Adonai (Lord) is the traditional synonym for the personal name of the God of the Jewish people, Yud-he-vav-he, “I am that I am” (Ehyeh asher ehyeh) as confided to Moses. YHVH is thereafter used throughout the Hebrew Bible but eventually to be pronounced only by the high priest at the Temple in Jerusalem once a year on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, and subsequently never to be spoken aloud (a nice Orthodox circumlocution is to refer to God as ha-Shem, the Name).
Could it be that the original narrator had in mind that in Abraham’s world, gods did condone such sacrifices and even order them? Might Abraham have believed that Elohim might have implanted this instruction in his mind but not Adonai? Hearing messages from gods happened frequently in the ancient world; one could cite many examples that it was a spiritual experience on all levels of society. Did ancient spirituality assure even Abraham at the beginning of Genesis 22 that such a command from Elohim was possible, whereas faith in Adonai’s commands would a quite different spiritual mode?
After all, Abraham did not yet have “a religion” that prohibited it, although we noted in the course of time it would eventually do so emphatically.
What is spirituality but the diverse expressions of what it means to be deeply human in the history of cultures. There were beautiful forms of Ancient Near Eastern spirituality (for instance. the Epic of Gilgamesh). And this yearning still manifests itself to sensitive souls, as witnessed by the contemporary quest for such experiences through yoga, kabbalistic meditation, contemplating the wilderness, in inspiration of soul through poetry, music, dance – and moral absolutes. In our day the search for spiritual experience can fill a void in our increasingly commodified civilization, even for those who claim to reject all religions and/or “religion as such.”
In this connection I recalled a passage I came across years ago in The Myth of More and Other Lifetraps that Sabotage the Happiness You Deserve by the psychiatrist Joseph R. Novello:
“While there are profound differences between the secular spiritual life and the traditional religious life, I believe the two can be complementary rather than contradictory. Although this type of spirituality requires no middleman or institution, the majority of us, in fact, benefit most when our spirituality is rooted in religion. If religion without spirituality can be rigid, dogmatic, and restrictive, spirituality without religion can be transient, skittish, rudderless, faddish, and excessively experiential. Spirituality without religion risks the short life of cut flowers; spirituality with religion is more like a well-potted plant.” [i]
I suggest that the Akedah can be interpreted as an emblematic moment as Israel’s direct ancestors struggled to come to terms with the spiritualities of their environment and in so doing lay the groundwork for a religion that combined moral seriousness with respect for each individual’s soul. Abraham’s wanderings can symbolize his rejection of the venerable religions of his time, a step in his becoming Avraham avinu (“our father”), that is, that he represents an early stage in the transition from polytheism to monotheism, the process from what used to be designated as “paganism” to what is now called “Abrahamic religion,” or more precisely “the Abrahamic religions.” He (and his descendants) had to learn, step by step, what voices in the head to reject versus those messages to be inspired by, which of them were false prophecies versus which revealed the divine imperative of justice and mercy that became our Judaism, the heart of its continuity and destiny as a “light to the nations.”
[i] [A more apt simile would be “a centuries-old tree”? Novello’s book (Paulist Press, 2001) reflects to some extent his Catholic religious commitment.]
Why is Abraham not depicted as challenging God when he is told to take Isaac to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering (22:2)? Abraham had the moral passion to do so, which may help explain why he became “Avraham avinu” (Abraham our father) in the course of the unfolding of the Jewish tradition. Three chapters earlier in Genesis Abraham had been informed of God’s intention to destroy the evil cities of Sodom and Gemorrah, whereupon he demanded of God, “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? ... Far be it from you, Adonai, Lord, to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty? Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly?” (18:25).
In his fine commentary to the Torah (p.149), Rabbi Gunther Plaut noted that at the beginning of the Akedah the command to Abraham is conveyed in the name of Elohim, a generic term in biblical Hebrew for God or gods (grammatically plural so that whether it is singular or plural in meaning is tied to the accompanying verb). However, at the climax of the chapter the instruction not to sacrifice the child is attributed to a messenger from Adonai, YHVH being Abraham’s personal God, a deity as yet unknown to the world at large. Adonai (Lord) is the traditional synonym for the personal name of the God of the Jewish people, Yud-he-vav-he, “I am that I am” (Ehyeh asher ehyeh) as confided to Moses. YHVH is thereafter used throughout the Hebrew Bible but eventually to be pronounced only by the high priest at the Temple in Jerusalem once a year on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, and subsequently never to be spoken aloud (a nice Orthodox circumlocution is to refer to God as ha-Shem, the Name).
Could it be that the original narrator had in mind that in Abraham’s world, gods did condone such sacrifices and even order them? Might Abraham have believed that Elohim might have implanted this instruction in his mind but not Adonai? Hearing messages from gods happened frequently in the ancient world; one could cite many examples that it was a spiritual experience on all levels of society. Did ancient spirituality assure even Abraham at the beginning of Genesis 22 that such a command from Elohim was possible, whereas faith in Adonai’s commands would a quite different spiritual mode?
After all, Abraham did not yet have “a religion” that prohibited it, although we noted in the course of time it would eventually do so emphatically.
What is spirituality but the diverse expressions of what it means to be deeply human in the history of cultures. There were beautiful forms of Ancient Near Eastern spirituality (for instance. the Epic of Gilgamesh). And this yearning still manifests itself to sensitive souls, as witnessed by the contemporary quest for such experiences through yoga, kabbalistic meditation, contemplating the wilderness, in inspiration of soul through poetry, music, dance – and moral absolutes. In our day the search for spiritual experience can fill a void in our increasingly commodified civilization, even for those who claim to reject all religions and/or “religion as such.”
In this connection I recalled a passage I came across years ago in The Myth of More and Other Lifetraps that Sabotage the Happiness You Deserve by the psychiatrist Joseph R. Novello:
“While there are profound differences between the secular spiritual life and the traditional religious life, I believe the two can be complementary rather than contradictory. Although this type of spirituality requires no middleman or institution, the majority of us, in fact, benefit most when our spirituality is rooted in religion. If religion without spirituality can be rigid, dogmatic, and restrictive, spirituality without religion can be transient, skittish, rudderless, faddish, and excessively experiential. Spirituality without religion risks the short life of cut flowers; spirituality with religion is more like a well-potted plant.” [i]
I suggest that the Akedah can be interpreted as an emblematic moment as Israel’s direct ancestors struggled to come to terms with the spiritualities of their environment and in so doing lay the groundwork for a religion that combined moral seriousness with respect for each individual’s soul. Abraham’s wanderings can symbolize his rejection of the venerable religions of his time, a step in his becoming Avraham avinu (“our father”), that is, that he represents an early stage in the transition from polytheism to monotheism, the process from what used to be designated as “paganism” to what is now called “Abrahamic religion,” or more precisely “the Abrahamic religions.” He (and his descendants) had to learn, step by step, what voices in the head to reject versus those messages to be inspired by, which of them were false prophecies versus which revealed the divine imperative of justice and mercy that became our Judaism, the heart of its continuity and destiny as a “light to the nations.”
[i] [A more apt simile would be “a centuries-old tree”? Novello’s book (Paulist Press, 2001) reflects to some extent his Catholic religious commitment.]
Parsha Vayeira: On Hagar, Ishmael, and us
Given by Larry Rosenwald, 2018
I gave a devar on the story of Hagar and Ishmael once before, in 2005. I was then considerably under the spell of Franz Rosenzweig, and I confess I saw the story indirectly, through a remark Rosenzweig had made about it. The remark concerns an earlier episode than the one just read. God has just told Abraham that Sarah will “become nations/ [and] kings of peoples shall come from her.” Abraham falls prostrate, speaks to himself with happy incredulity about God’s promise, then responds to God, lu yishma’el yichyeh lefanecha, “Oh that Ishmael might live in your presence” (17:18). Rosenzweig wrote that Abraham’s response was keneged kulah torah, “equivalent to all of Torah.”
Rosenzweig was right to celebrate that response; it reveals a capacious generosity. Someone of narrower generosity might think, and might be pardoned for thinking, only of himself, his wife, his son-to-be; Abraham instead thinks of his family in the broad sense,not only of his own tradition, his own line, but also of traditions and lines related to it if distinct from it, and he turns for a moment from the promise to husband and wife to think of the bondwoman and her son, who is also his son.
But now it’s 2018, the world we live in is grimmer, and it has in these days become clear just how radical and direct one needs to be in resisting the infliction of suffering on those who like Hagar and Ishmael are at the margins; how our resistance needs to be not only inour words, though they matter, but also in our actions; how much our focus needs to be on those marginalized people whom injustice is causing to suffer, and not on the attitudes of those beholding them. (As Ayanna Pressley put it, in what seems to me a powerfully Jewish sentence: “the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”) And by these pressing standards, Abraham’s response is not enough. (Nor was my admiration of Rosenzweig’s remark enough; I wasn’t looking closely enough at what happens to the most vulnerable persons in the story.) Abraham grieves, but Sarah prevails; Hagar and Ishmael are banished. God reassures Abraham that Ishmael will be the ancestor of a great people, Abraham says nothing, Hagar and Ishmael are banished. The promise is real, the great future will come to be, but Hagar and Ishmael are banished. Of their immediate and terrible future, of the exiles’ despair in the desert, God says nothing, Abraham says nothing.
But the text has something to say, and allhonor to the storyteller for saying it:
Avraham rose early in the morning,
he took some bread and a skin of water
and gave them to Hagar –placing them upon her shoulder –
together with the child and sent her away.
She went off and roamed in the wilderness of Be’er-Sheva.
Now when the water in the skin was at an end, she cast the child under one of the
bushes [“cast” renders the Hebrew tashlech, the word we use to describe our casting of sins into the water, and here heartbreaking in its graphic intensity]
and went and sat by herself, opposite, as far away as a bowshot,
for she said to herself:
Let me not see the child die!
So she sat opposite, and lifted up her voice and wept.
(tr. Everett Fox, from In the Beginning)
Hagar has been told by God of God’s promise to her, and right after this passage God calls to Hagar to see a spring of water; she is able to see the water, as Abraham later, as he is about to slaughter Isaac, is able to see the ram caught in a thicket by its horns, and her promised future unfolds rom that act of seeing. For the moment, though, the promise is forgotten and the future full of death. Hagar cannot bear to see Ishmael die, casts the child away, averts her gaze from him, and weeps–not, like Rachel in the book of Jeremiah, “weeping for her children because they were not,” but precisely because her child is unbearably present. She does not go as far as some enslaved mothers in this country have gone, killing their children to spare them the misery of slavery; but she is not far away from that despairing action. Abraham does not see this. But he should have, and we must.
The American pacifist Kathy Kelly likes to say that pacifists need to be concrete, to strip away grand ideas and look at bodies in pain. She’s right, and not just for pacifists; her point holds good for anyone who makes choices that inflict suffering. All of us need to be concrete when tempted by grand ideas to such choices, need to look suffering in the face, human face to human face. Like many here, I imagine, I’ve been wanting the devisers and enforcers of current American immigration policies to do just that: to look, face to face,at the people, at the mothers, the children, whom their policies affect, torment, traumatize. But in that case, for me at any rate, the idea itself is wrong, and my desire is to have the enforcers look closely enough at the faces of those who are suffering to give up the idea altogether. The point is more challenging, and more important, in Abraham’s case, because Abraham’s idea is the grandest of all ideas, a divine and true promise; yet even Abraham, or especially Abraham, needs to be concrete here, to imagine Hagar and Ishmael in the proximate future, at the point of death, and to do what he can to avert that agony.
[A digression: I turn often to the poems of Itzik Manger for explorations of neglected, marginal figures in Torah. Here, alas, he avoids the heart of the matter. He’s fascinated by Hagar. But he’s not ready to follow her tothe place of desolation; she is for him like a Jew on the move, looking for a homeland, angry at those exiling her, resourceful in coping with the tasks that exile imposes. She and Ishmael are carried away by a wagon-driver Abraham has hired, and no sooner do they dismount from the wagon than Islamic emissaries arrive to take them in. What Abraham does not see, Manger does not describe.
A second digression, a second poet.] I think often in connection with this story of some lines in Adrienne Rich’s great poem “Yom Kippur 1984”:
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?
In the world of our biblical text, souls have not yet crashed together, the refugee child and the exile’s child have not yet re-opened the city, and Hagar and Ishmael are in one of the cruelest of solitudes, that of exile, of banishment, of the desert, a solitude even from each other.
I’ll conclude with two reflections, one about teshuvah, one about a pun.
About teshuvah –well, contemplating the story of Hagar and Ishmael teaches me something that teshuvah needs to be, but something that in my case at least it hasn’t consistently been.
Here’s the lesson as I see it. On the one hand, Teshuvah entails a movement of the heart, a new willingness to repent and to change. That is why we direct our fists to our hearts when we recite the vidui, whether to wake our hearts or to rebuke them. But teshuvah also entails a movement of perception, a clear discerning of what our actions have been, what their consequences have been for others, what grand ideas they emerge from, what bearing those consequences have on our judgment of those ideas. Absent a movement of the heart, we are immobile; absent a movement of perception, we may well not know what direction to go in. The story of Hagar and Ishmael can help us learn that.
As for the pun, that mode of verbal wit which our tradition–and many in this congregation -havea high regard for –well, the pun is on Hagar’s name, it’s not quite philologically legitimate, and it emerged for me in considering a phrase we’l lsing next week, right after the declaration of Kol Nidre: lager hagar betocham: “the entire congregation of the house of Israel, and the foreigner who dwells among them, hager hagar betocham, Hagar the foreigner among them, shall be forgiven.” The pun has a cruel point here: Hagar is precisely not, in our text today, betocham, “dwelling among them.” But a wonderful, saving aspiration lies beneath the cruel point: that our repentance will be made complete when Hagar is indeed betocheinu, among us. Not belonging to our tradition –to imagine that is to deny the reality of her tradition, of Ishmael’s tradition, the one they are about to establish, no less than the reality of the tradition of Sarah and Abraham–but also not banished from our tradition, from our homes, our places, into a desert where people die, not forgotten in our delight and awe at being chosen in the covenant, present to us, among us. Which is, after all, the deep meaning of what some in our congregation say when called to the Torah: asher bachar banu imkol ha’amim, blessed be the one who chose us along with all other nations.
May we at this time and at all times see clearly what we have done, the consequences of what we have done, the suffering we have caused, the ideas and structures leading us to cause that suffering; and may that clarity of vision help us to develop a right relation with all the chosen nations and communities and families under the sun.
Rosenzweig was right to celebrate that response; it reveals a capacious generosity. Someone of narrower generosity might think, and might be pardoned for thinking, only of himself, his wife, his son-to-be; Abraham instead thinks of his family in the broad sense,not only of his own tradition, his own line, but also of traditions and lines related to it if distinct from it, and he turns for a moment from the promise to husband and wife to think of the bondwoman and her son, who is also his son.
But now it’s 2018, the world we live in is grimmer, and it has in these days become clear just how radical and direct one needs to be in resisting the infliction of suffering on those who like Hagar and Ishmael are at the margins; how our resistance needs to be not only inour words, though they matter, but also in our actions; how much our focus needs to be on those marginalized people whom injustice is causing to suffer, and not on the attitudes of those beholding them. (As Ayanna Pressley put it, in what seems to me a powerfully Jewish sentence: “the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”) And by these pressing standards, Abraham’s response is not enough. (Nor was my admiration of Rosenzweig’s remark enough; I wasn’t looking closely enough at what happens to the most vulnerable persons in the story.) Abraham grieves, but Sarah prevails; Hagar and Ishmael are banished. God reassures Abraham that Ishmael will be the ancestor of a great people, Abraham says nothing, Hagar and Ishmael are banished. The promise is real, the great future will come to be, but Hagar and Ishmael are banished. Of their immediate and terrible future, of the exiles’ despair in the desert, God says nothing, Abraham says nothing.
But the text has something to say, and allhonor to the storyteller for saying it:
Avraham rose early in the morning,
he took some bread and a skin of water
and gave them to Hagar –placing them upon her shoulder –
together with the child and sent her away.
She went off and roamed in the wilderness of Be’er-Sheva.
Now when the water in the skin was at an end, she cast the child under one of the
bushes [“cast” renders the Hebrew tashlech, the word we use to describe our casting of sins into the water, and here heartbreaking in its graphic intensity]
and went and sat by herself, opposite, as far away as a bowshot,
for she said to herself:
Let me not see the child die!
So she sat opposite, and lifted up her voice and wept.
(tr. Everett Fox, from In the Beginning)
Hagar has been told by God of God’s promise to her, and right after this passage God calls to Hagar to see a spring of water; she is able to see the water, as Abraham later, as he is about to slaughter Isaac, is able to see the ram caught in a thicket by its horns, and her promised future unfolds rom that act of seeing. For the moment, though, the promise is forgotten and the future full of death. Hagar cannot bear to see Ishmael die, casts the child away, averts her gaze from him, and weeps–not, like Rachel in the book of Jeremiah, “weeping for her children because they were not,” but precisely because her child is unbearably present. She does not go as far as some enslaved mothers in this country have gone, killing their children to spare them the misery of slavery; but she is not far away from that despairing action. Abraham does not see this. But he should have, and we must.
The American pacifist Kathy Kelly likes to say that pacifists need to be concrete, to strip away grand ideas and look at bodies in pain. She’s right, and not just for pacifists; her point holds good for anyone who makes choices that inflict suffering. All of us need to be concrete when tempted by grand ideas to such choices, need to look suffering in the face, human face to human face. Like many here, I imagine, I’ve been wanting the devisers and enforcers of current American immigration policies to do just that: to look, face to face,at the people, at the mothers, the children, whom their policies affect, torment, traumatize. But in that case, for me at any rate, the idea itself is wrong, and my desire is to have the enforcers look closely enough at the faces of those who are suffering to give up the idea altogether. The point is more challenging, and more important, in Abraham’s case, because Abraham’s idea is the grandest of all ideas, a divine and true promise; yet even Abraham, or especially Abraham, needs to be concrete here, to imagine Hagar and Ishmael in the proximate future, at the point of death, and to do what he can to avert that agony.
[A digression: I turn often to the poems of Itzik Manger for explorations of neglected, marginal figures in Torah. Here, alas, he avoids the heart of the matter. He’s fascinated by Hagar. But he’s not ready to follow her tothe place of desolation; she is for him like a Jew on the move, looking for a homeland, angry at those exiling her, resourceful in coping with the tasks that exile imposes. She and Ishmael are carried away by a wagon-driver Abraham has hired, and no sooner do they dismount from the wagon than Islamic emissaries arrive to take them in. What Abraham does not see, Manger does not describe.
A second digression, a second poet.] I think often in connection with this story of some lines in Adrienne Rich’s great poem “Yom Kippur 1984”:
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?
In the world of our biblical text, souls have not yet crashed together, the refugee child and the exile’s child have not yet re-opened the city, and Hagar and Ishmael are in one of the cruelest of solitudes, that of exile, of banishment, of the desert, a solitude even from each other.
I’ll conclude with two reflections, one about teshuvah, one about a pun.
About teshuvah –well, contemplating the story of Hagar and Ishmael teaches me something that teshuvah needs to be, but something that in my case at least it hasn’t consistently been.
Here’s the lesson as I see it. On the one hand, Teshuvah entails a movement of the heart, a new willingness to repent and to change. That is why we direct our fists to our hearts when we recite the vidui, whether to wake our hearts or to rebuke them. But teshuvah also entails a movement of perception, a clear discerning of what our actions have been, what their consequences have been for others, what grand ideas they emerge from, what bearing those consequences have on our judgment of those ideas. Absent a movement of the heart, we are immobile; absent a movement of perception, we may well not know what direction to go in. The story of Hagar and Ishmael can help us learn that.
As for the pun, that mode of verbal wit which our tradition–and many in this congregation -havea high regard for –well, the pun is on Hagar’s name, it’s not quite philologically legitimate, and it emerged for me in considering a phrase we’l lsing next week, right after the declaration of Kol Nidre: lager hagar betocham: “the entire congregation of the house of Israel, and the foreigner who dwells among them, hager hagar betocham, Hagar the foreigner among them, shall be forgiven.” The pun has a cruel point here: Hagar is precisely not, in our text today, betocham, “dwelling among them.” But a wonderful, saving aspiration lies beneath the cruel point: that our repentance will be made complete when Hagar is indeed betocheinu, among us. Not belonging to our tradition –to imagine that is to deny the reality of her tradition, of Ishmael’s tradition, the one they are about to establish, no less than the reality of the tradition of Sarah and Abraham–but also not banished from our tradition, from our homes, our places, into a desert where people die, not forgotten in our delight and awe at being chosen in the covenant, present to us, among us. Which is, after all, the deep meaning of what some in our congregation say when called to the Torah: asher bachar banu imkol ha’amim, blessed be the one who chose us along with all other nations.
May we at this time and at all times see clearly what we have done, the consequences of what we have done, the suffering we have caused, the ideas and structures leading us to cause that suffering; and may that clarity of vision help us to develop a right relation with all the chosen nations and communities and families under the sun.
Parsha Vayeira
Given by Esther Alter
We just read the story of Hagar and Sarah. Sarah gives birth to Isaac and casts Hagar, who gave birth to Abraham’s first child, Ishmael, out into the wilderness. It’s a brutal story that’s hard to connect back to the themes of Rosh Hashanah. But there is a connection. Logically, you know there has to be, and you know it emotionally, too.
On Rosh Hashanah, we read what we read because we read [past tense] what we read. We read the story of Hagar this year because we read it last year, and we read it last year because we read it before that, and so on. This is obvious, because as Jews we generally value the concept of precedence. It’s part of what defines us. But it should be equally obvious that we didn’t always read the story of Hagar on Rosh Hashanah. Long ago, there was a year when there were no readings on Rosh Hashanah, followed by a year were there were readings.
The Book of Leviticus mentions that there is a festival day on the first of Tishrei, Yom Teruah. Teruah is the word used for the nine short shofar blasts.
In the days of the First Temple, before we read the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, and Hagar on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, there was, maybe, a day of exclamation. We shouted! The horns blared! There was nothing to read yet so we held hands in a circle and we SCREAMED!
An incomprehensible amount of time passes and now we are writing the Mishnah. We remember the destruction of the Second Temple and the suffering and death that followed like you, yourselves, remember the Holocaust—it was about as long ago, and just as traumatizing. We don’t shout on the First of Tishrei anymore. If anyone thinks about Yom Teruah at all, it’s wrapped up in some smaller story, like how Fiddler on the Roof has come to encapsulate an entire culture that we can’t hold in active memory anymore. Yom Teruah feels like that.
Growing up, when we were kids, it was dangerous to not be Roman. But it felt important to write down the old ways. We asked our elders about the old festivals. Their health was already failing. They told us to speak up because they could barely hear us. So we SHOUTED! THE QUESTION! And all they could tell us was that on Rosh Hashanah they used to read Leviticus 23: “You shall observe complete rest, a sacred occasion commemorated with teruah.”
Why did we read a Torah verse that tells us to do what we used to do? They don’t remember.
It’s fine. They’re doing their best to remember something they’d rather forget. They can rest now.
But it wasn’t fine. Of course it wasn’t fine. We do all these rituals and observe all these laws because Tradition! but we also expect someone to stand up here and do their best to tell us why. From generation to generation, across an incomprehensible amount of time, we debated what our ancestors had written in the Mishnah because it didn’t sit with us. It wasn’t enough.
Our ancestors wrote in the Mishnah that we read about Yom Teruah, in the Book of Leviticus, on Rosh Hashanah. In the Gemara, the commentary on the Mishnah that forms the second component of the Talmud, we overtly ignored that and said actually, we used to read the story of Hagar, from the Book of Genesis. Many of us don’t really believe this. But remembering that we once shouted doesn’t feel sufficient. We are passionate and curious and so we remember that we used to read a passage that speaks to us now. We don’t record why this story speaks to us, because we are, of course, merely preserving tradition.
Throughout an incomprehensible amount of time, across the entire world, individuals tried to answer the why’s of Judaism, questions that began in the Talmud, among them being: Why tell the Hagar story on Rosh Hashanah? There are many answers, all of them equally incorrect, because there simply isn’t any way to know.
We don’t celebrate Rosh Hashanah like we used to! We don’t celebrate Rosh Hashanah like we do when we’re shouting or when the temples still stood or when we debate what will become the Talmud or while we gather in a wooden shul in a shtetl. We don’t remember the original reasons for doing anything. The Talmud preserves the arguments but not the desire. There’s no direct connection between the story of Hagar and today’s Rosh Hashanah because the reading was selected for a very different Rosh Hashanah.
Does a story about domestic abuse resonate with you at the start of the new year? It was selected because it’s disquieting. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know why our ancestors needed to be disturbed and, in all likelihood, neither did they. But if we can’t remember why, we can remember how it felt.
Rosh Hashanah felt like wanting to do what society expects you to do but you can’t. It felt like violence. It felt like being cast out. It felt like wanting more than you’ll ever get.
Rosh Hashanah used to have this edge to it, this pain, and we read about Hagar doing exactly as she was told to do and being punished for it because it felt like how we used to want to feel on this day. It didn’t feel like the new year—in fact, wasn’t the new year: the year used to begin in the spring. Rosh Hashanah didn’t feel like a fresh new start and judgment for prior transgressions. It felt like discontent.
When we read the story of Hagar, we can, still, recall that we chose to read it and we can remember how we read it: With gnashing teeth. With fear and with courage. And with the sort of feeling that sometimes you cannot compress into words and it boils up inside you and then you just have to—SHOUT!
On Rosh Hashanah, we read what we read because we read [past tense] what we read. We read the story of Hagar this year because we read it last year, and we read it last year because we read it before that, and so on. This is obvious, because as Jews we generally value the concept of precedence. It’s part of what defines us. But it should be equally obvious that we didn’t always read the story of Hagar on Rosh Hashanah. Long ago, there was a year when there were no readings on Rosh Hashanah, followed by a year were there were readings.
The Book of Leviticus mentions that there is a festival day on the first of Tishrei, Yom Teruah. Teruah is the word used for the nine short shofar blasts.
In the days of the First Temple, before we read the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, and Hagar on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, there was, maybe, a day of exclamation. We shouted! The horns blared! There was nothing to read yet so we held hands in a circle and we SCREAMED!
An incomprehensible amount of time passes and now we are writing the Mishnah. We remember the destruction of the Second Temple and the suffering and death that followed like you, yourselves, remember the Holocaust—it was about as long ago, and just as traumatizing. We don’t shout on the First of Tishrei anymore. If anyone thinks about Yom Teruah at all, it’s wrapped up in some smaller story, like how Fiddler on the Roof has come to encapsulate an entire culture that we can’t hold in active memory anymore. Yom Teruah feels like that.
Growing up, when we were kids, it was dangerous to not be Roman. But it felt important to write down the old ways. We asked our elders about the old festivals. Their health was already failing. They told us to speak up because they could barely hear us. So we SHOUTED! THE QUESTION! And all they could tell us was that on Rosh Hashanah they used to read Leviticus 23: “You shall observe complete rest, a sacred occasion commemorated with teruah.”
Why did we read a Torah verse that tells us to do what we used to do? They don’t remember.
It’s fine. They’re doing their best to remember something they’d rather forget. They can rest now.
But it wasn’t fine. Of course it wasn’t fine. We do all these rituals and observe all these laws because Tradition! but we also expect someone to stand up here and do their best to tell us why. From generation to generation, across an incomprehensible amount of time, we debated what our ancestors had written in the Mishnah because it didn’t sit with us. It wasn’t enough.
Our ancestors wrote in the Mishnah that we read about Yom Teruah, in the Book of Leviticus, on Rosh Hashanah. In the Gemara, the commentary on the Mishnah that forms the second component of the Talmud, we overtly ignored that and said actually, we used to read the story of Hagar, from the Book of Genesis. Many of us don’t really believe this. But remembering that we once shouted doesn’t feel sufficient. We are passionate and curious and so we remember that we used to read a passage that speaks to us now. We don’t record why this story speaks to us, because we are, of course, merely preserving tradition.
Throughout an incomprehensible amount of time, across the entire world, individuals tried to answer the why’s of Judaism, questions that began in the Talmud, among them being: Why tell the Hagar story on Rosh Hashanah? There are many answers, all of them equally incorrect, because there simply isn’t any way to know.
We don’t celebrate Rosh Hashanah like we used to! We don’t celebrate Rosh Hashanah like we do when we’re shouting or when the temples still stood or when we debate what will become the Talmud or while we gather in a wooden shul in a shtetl. We don’t remember the original reasons for doing anything. The Talmud preserves the arguments but not the desire. There’s no direct connection between the story of Hagar and today’s Rosh Hashanah because the reading was selected for a very different Rosh Hashanah.
Does a story about domestic abuse resonate with you at the start of the new year? It was selected because it’s disquieting. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know why our ancestors needed to be disturbed and, in all likelihood, neither did they. But if we can’t remember why, we can remember how it felt.
Rosh Hashanah felt like wanting to do what society expects you to do but you can’t. It felt like violence. It felt like being cast out. It felt like wanting more than you’ll ever get.
Rosh Hashanah used to have this edge to it, this pain, and we read about Hagar doing exactly as she was told to do and being punished for it because it felt like how we used to want to feel on this day. It didn’t feel like the new year—in fact, wasn’t the new year: the year used to begin in the spring. Rosh Hashanah didn’t feel like a fresh new start and judgment for prior transgressions. It felt like discontent.
When we read the story of Hagar, we can, still, recall that we chose to read it and we can remember how we read it: With gnashing teeth. With fear and with courage. And with the sort of feeling that sometimes you cannot compress into words and it boils up inside you and then you just have to—SHOUT!
Parsha Vayechi
Given by Larry Rosenwald
First and foremost: I miss you! I’m so sorry I can’t be at shul. But it’s some comfort to write this devar, and imagine how lively, diverse, and unpredictable your responses to it might be.
So the devar is composed of three parts: a family anecdote, a book recommendation, and some observations on the relation between being Jewish and being Egyptian, which might extend into observations on the relation between being Jewish and being Christian.
What Phoebe wanted from my dad was precisely what Jacob gives his sons, a precise, vivid, differentiated sense of what each son’s life will be like. It’s true that Jacob is offering prophecy rather than advice, which is in a strict sense what Phoebe was asking for, but she would have been fine with my father offering prophecy had he chosen to.
I get why Phoebe was hurt by my father’s refusal. My heart, though, is with my dad. Jacob is precise and vivid, but so much of what he says is cruel and resentful, and in its effect hurtful; I try to imagine being one of the sons Jacob reproaches on his deathbed, and my heart breaks for him. So I think there was some wisdom in my father’s bland, evasive reply, his general approval; he wasn’t inflicting pain, he wasn’t denouncing, he wasn’t saying to Phoebe, “I see your right-wing politics and I fear where they may lead,” which he may well have felt- Phoebe was on her way to being a Clarence-Thomas-supporting, Brett-Cavanaugh-supporting Republican - but chose not to say, and I’m with him. We can see in Jacob the dangers that Phoebe was courting, and which my father spared her.
2) The book recommendation. Much of what I’ll say in a moment about Egyptianness and Jewishness results at least in part from my reading of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, his astonishing four-volume novel, written relatively late in his life, occupying him for some fifteen years. It is, in my view, the greatest work of Gentile midrash ever written, and if you have any spare time - well, quite a lot of spare time, the one-volume edition runs 1500 pages - do have a look. (The translation by John Woods is excellent.)
3) One thing that Mann insists on, persuasively, repeatedly, diversely, is how intertwined Jews were with their Gentile neighbors generally, and how Egyptian a person Joseph became. And our portion powerfully reminds us of that. Even Jacob, who implored Joseph to bury him in Canaan, is embalmed in Egypt, for the full forty days of that Egyptian process, and his funeral ceremonies are such that those who behold them call out, “This is a solemn mourning on the part of the Egyptians.” And Joseph, with much less fanfare - he is so obviously an Egyptian that the fact is hardly worth emphasizing - is embalmed in Egypt, and is buried in Egypt. Like Jacob, he wants his final resting place to be in Canaan, and asks his brothers to carry his bones with them when they go, some 410 years later (and they do, and there are wonderful midrashim about how Moses searched for the bones until he found them); but his resting place until that time is in Egypt, as his life has been.
Which facts pose for us the question of just how Egyptian it’s okay for a Jew to be, or more generally what relation a Jew should have, and should not have, with the surrounding or adjacent cultures. This question becomes thematic and oppressively dogmatic towards the end of the Torah, with its injunctions about destroying the altars and high trees of the Canaanites, and not intermarrying with their daughters, and in general slaughtering them; but the book of Genesis is freer, less dogmatic, and its account of Egyptian embalmings and funerals of patriarchs allow greater play.
Maybe, in fact, we could take this account as a guide. To be a Jew is to maintain dos pintele yid, the core of Jewishness, intact and uncompromised. For Jacob, that is to be buried in the Cave of Machpelah; for Joseph, it is to have his bones taken up from Egypt to Canaan in the Exodus. But Jacob can live for 17 years in Egypt, and, cosmopolitan and curious migrant that he is, get to know that rich culture; and Joseph can live most of his life in Egypt, become a quasi-native speaker of its language, a cosmopolitan bilingual, Egyptian in style and dress and manner, drawing on whatever is alive for him in the culture of that country, holding on to whatever Jewishness is essential for him.
These issues matter for us as well, of course, in our daily lives in diaspora. That large topic I don’t propose to explore here, though of course you who are at davening may well want to do so. I’ll end with a couple of observations about a small aspect of the topic, namely, the tunes we use in davening. Many are written by Jews. But not all. There’s a lovely round we sometimes sing to illuminate the last line of psalm 150; the tune was written by the German Christian Renaissance composer Michael Praetorius, to the text of jubilate deo, alleluia, “rejoice in God, alleluia.” The tune we often use for ma tovu is an English secular round: hey no, nobody home, no meat no drink no money have I none, yet I will be happy. And back when we were maybe, in some ways though not in others, more radical, David Roskies led adon olam to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” (I don’t think we ever went so far as a davening leader at Harvard Hillel did, who led it to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” and got flamed.) We hold to the text, our beloved mutkan text, we keep the prayers in their traditional places, but we marry them, or join them, or fuse them, pick your metaphor, to the tunes of our non-Jewish neighbors, and we all gain both from what we hold to and what we borrow.
A gutn shabes to you all!
So the devar is composed of three parts: a family anecdote, a book recommendation, and some observations on the relation between being Jewish and being Egyptian, which might extend into observations on the relation between being Jewish and being Christian.
- The family anecdote - well, when my father was dying, in the fall of 1991, my sister Phoebe came to him to ask for what one might call a blessing, though what Phoebe wanted was also an assessment: “this part of your life I admire wholeheartedly, this part of your life I’d offer some critical advice about etc.”. My dad didn’t want that role, didn’t want to distinguish one of his children from the others, hated parental authority generally, and all he said to Phoebe was that he loved her and thought she was doing just fine. I don’t think my sister ever forgave him, and certainly when we talk about our father, and about those days, that’s the story she wants most to tell.
What Phoebe wanted from my dad was precisely what Jacob gives his sons, a precise, vivid, differentiated sense of what each son’s life will be like. It’s true that Jacob is offering prophecy rather than advice, which is in a strict sense what Phoebe was asking for, but she would have been fine with my father offering prophecy had he chosen to.
I get why Phoebe was hurt by my father’s refusal. My heart, though, is with my dad. Jacob is precise and vivid, but so much of what he says is cruel and resentful, and in its effect hurtful; I try to imagine being one of the sons Jacob reproaches on his deathbed, and my heart breaks for him. So I think there was some wisdom in my father’s bland, evasive reply, his general approval; he wasn’t inflicting pain, he wasn’t denouncing, he wasn’t saying to Phoebe, “I see your right-wing politics and I fear where they may lead,” which he may well have felt- Phoebe was on her way to being a Clarence-Thomas-supporting, Brett-Cavanaugh-supporting Republican - but chose not to say, and I’m with him. We can see in Jacob the dangers that Phoebe was courting, and which my father spared her.
2) The book recommendation. Much of what I’ll say in a moment about Egyptianness and Jewishness results at least in part from my reading of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, his astonishing four-volume novel, written relatively late in his life, occupying him for some fifteen years. It is, in my view, the greatest work of Gentile midrash ever written, and if you have any spare time - well, quite a lot of spare time, the one-volume edition runs 1500 pages - do have a look. (The translation by John Woods is excellent.)
3) One thing that Mann insists on, persuasively, repeatedly, diversely, is how intertwined Jews were with their Gentile neighbors generally, and how Egyptian a person Joseph became. And our portion powerfully reminds us of that. Even Jacob, who implored Joseph to bury him in Canaan, is embalmed in Egypt, for the full forty days of that Egyptian process, and his funeral ceremonies are such that those who behold them call out, “This is a solemn mourning on the part of the Egyptians.” And Joseph, with much less fanfare - he is so obviously an Egyptian that the fact is hardly worth emphasizing - is embalmed in Egypt, and is buried in Egypt. Like Jacob, he wants his final resting place to be in Canaan, and asks his brothers to carry his bones with them when they go, some 410 years later (and they do, and there are wonderful midrashim about how Moses searched for the bones until he found them); but his resting place until that time is in Egypt, as his life has been.
Which facts pose for us the question of just how Egyptian it’s okay for a Jew to be, or more generally what relation a Jew should have, and should not have, with the surrounding or adjacent cultures. This question becomes thematic and oppressively dogmatic towards the end of the Torah, with its injunctions about destroying the altars and high trees of the Canaanites, and not intermarrying with their daughters, and in general slaughtering them; but the book of Genesis is freer, less dogmatic, and its account of Egyptian embalmings and funerals of patriarchs allow greater play.
Maybe, in fact, we could take this account as a guide. To be a Jew is to maintain dos pintele yid, the core of Jewishness, intact and uncompromised. For Jacob, that is to be buried in the Cave of Machpelah; for Joseph, it is to have his bones taken up from Egypt to Canaan in the Exodus. But Jacob can live for 17 years in Egypt, and, cosmopolitan and curious migrant that he is, get to know that rich culture; and Joseph can live most of his life in Egypt, become a quasi-native speaker of its language, a cosmopolitan bilingual, Egyptian in style and dress and manner, drawing on whatever is alive for him in the culture of that country, holding on to whatever Jewishness is essential for him.
These issues matter for us as well, of course, in our daily lives in diaspora. That large topic I don’t propose to explore here, though of course you who are at davening may well want to do so. I’ll end with a couple of observations about a small aspect of the topic, namely, the tunes we use in davening. Many are written by Jews. But not all. There’s a lovely round we sometimes sing to illuminate the last line of psalm 150; the tune was written by the German Christian Renaissance composer Michael Praetorius, to the text of jubilate deo, alleluia, “rejoice in God, alleluia.” The tune we often use for ma tovu is an English secular round: hey no, nobody home, no meat no drink no money have I none, yet I will be happy. And back when we were maybe, in some ways though not in others, more radical, David Roskies led adon olam to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” (I don’t think we ever went so far as a davening leader at Harvard Hillel did, who led it to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” and got flamed.) We hold to the text, our beloved mutkan text, we keep the prayers in their traditional places, but we marry them, or join them, or fuse them, pick your metaphor, to the tunes of our non-Jewish neighbors, and we all gain both from what we hold to and what we borrow.
A gutn shabes to you all!
Parsha Shemot
Given by Larry Rosenwald 2001
It’s tempting to skip over the beginning of the portion, and to turn at once to the beginning of the story of Moses: “there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi.” My own inclination, though, is the reverse: to leave that story for those who come after me, in order to focus more closely on the first chapter, and not even the whole of that chapter but rather on certain phrases in it, and above all on the nature and actions of the two midwives. I do that, as you’ll see, for personal reasons; I hope, though, that the results of my doing it will be of some general use.
How, then, does the portion begin? “These are the names of the children of Israel, who came into Egypt with Jacob; every man and his house.” Or, more skeletally: “names . . . children of Israel . . . . houses.” The sentence suggests an ideal completeness: person plus name plus house equals mature adult.
On names, Plaut paraphrases a beautiful formulation made by Benno Jacob: previously, says BJ, we heard of the toledot, the lines, of Jacob; now we hear of the shemot, the names, of the children of Israel. BJ makes the most of both antitheses. Jacob, he says, is “the natural man who engenders physical offspring or ‘lines’. Israel is the spiritual man who cannot transmit his gifts by testament, whose sons have to mature and acquire their own shemot in order to merit and acquire the inheritance” (Plaut 385). A name, then, isn’t just something you’re given; it’s something you have to earn. (And something you have to keep – hence the tradition that the Israelites remained distinguishable in Egypt, and thus remained a people whose cries could be heard by God, partly by retaining their names.)
A house, too, is something you have to earn, in all its senses: a dwellingplace, surely, but also, as here, a household, a family and its servants, a community.
Of these children of Israel, who have names and houses, we learn that they “were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them.” Part of this is simply a vivid image of human beings growing in number through having children. Part of it, though, is spooky – the account of something more like an epidemic than like ordinary human reproduction. The verb used, yishretsu, is often translated “swarming”; it has been, in Gen. 1:20, associated with (and is connected etymologically with) the term sherets, which Rashi takes as meaning “any creature that is low upon the earth, e.g., flies, ants, worms and rodents” (SC 5). To make sense of this odd phrase, I think, our midrashic traditions imagine that Israelite women habitually gave birth to multiple children at a time, and that, at the death of Jacob, the Israelites numbered 600,000, having come down to Egypt as a clan of seventy. When the king who does not know Joseph arises over Egypt, his response to the new numerousness of the children of Israel is both paranoid and profoundly wicked; but he’s not wrong in feeling that that numerousness has something anomalous about it.
We come, then, to the midwives, whom Pharaoh orders to kill the male infants of the Hebrews and let the females live. The first thing we notice about them, appropriately enough, is that they have names. Pharaoh himself does not. The individual Egyptians do not. At this point, even the then-living children of Israel do not – we’ve been told, after all, that “joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation.” The treasure-cities do, though their names are stated almost casually. The names of the midwives are stated with ceremonial exactness: “and the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah.” And these names have meanings, as the names of the children of Israel do – Shifrah, I gather, derived from a word meaning to be beautiful, Puah from a word meaning a fragrant blossom.
Here a question presents itself: are the midwives Egyptians or Hebrews? The Hebrew phrase, meyalledot hivriot, permits either construction; i.e., either midwives who are also Hebrews, or midwives who work with the Hebrew women but are not Hebrew themselves. Our traditions divide on the matter. Their names, Plaut says, are of northwest Semitic type. Rashi famously identifies them with Jochebed and Miriam, the mother and sister of Moses – Hebrews with a vengeance!
The Septuagint, on the other hand, takes the phrase as meaning, “midwives to the Hebrews”; so does Josephus, so does Abravanel. They’re identified as Egyptians by Ibn Ezra and Sforno. Judah he-Hasid cites a tradition to the same effect. And – to turn from citing commentators I only know at third hand to what the text itself suggests – they’re certainly treated by Pharaoh as belonging to his people rather than to the children of Israel; surely, after all, it’s implausible that Pharaoh would ask Hebrew midwives to slaughter Hebrew children.
Where, then, does the first tradition come from? Is it an attempt to deny the saving kindness of strangers? Odd, in the context of a story that places so much unmistakable emphasis on the saving kindness of strangers, above all that of Pharaoh’s daughter. I myself, therefore, respectfully prefer the tradition that considers the midwives as midwives to the Hebrews; I count Shiphrah and Puah as two notable figures in the long, noble line of righteous gentiles.
Whether Egyptians or Hebrews, the midwives are ordered by Pharaoh to kill the male Hebrew babies. They do not, however, obey: “they feared God, and and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them.” “Their defiance of tyranny,” writes Sarna, “constitutes history’s first recorded act of civil disobedience in defense of a moral imperative.” *True enough. But this question of civil disobedience is important to me, and I’d like to spend most of the rest of my time lingering over it.*
As a war tax resister for the last fifteen years – that is, as someone committing annually what I like to think of as an “act of civil disobedience in defense of a moral imperative” – I’ve been consistently inspired and moved by the midwives’ act. But I’m also aware that their act is something quite different from what we usually call civil disobedience, and certainly different from the tradition of civil disobedience I know best and have been most influenced by.
I’d like to say something about that tradition, by way of defining more precisely the specific nature of the midwives’ heroism. The tradition I have in mind is vividly summed up by the Quaker phrase, “speaking truth to power.” Participants in that tradition accept the risks of their actions. Many of them decline strategies that would avoid or diminish such risks, valuing instead candid moral speech to those in power who are exercising that power wickedly. They are willing to sacrifice themselves. They treat their powerful oppressors as fellow human beings. Some of them go so far as to seek to love those oppressors. “Nonviolence,” writes Martin Luther King Jr., “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding . . . . the nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him” (Lynd and Lynd 217-18).
The midwives’ heroic action is at odds with pretty much every aspect of this tradition, except in the fundamental matter of refusing to commit an evil action – or, to quote King’s phrase regarding what he learned from Thoreau, of “refusing to cooperate with an evil system” (Lynd and Lynd 210). The midwives are not obeying the unjust commands of the powerful; but neither are they speaking their true response to it. They do, I should note, speak their true response in some of the midrashic elaborations of the story; Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jews, for example, tells us that when ordered by Pharaoh to kill the male children, Miriam responded, “woe be to this man when God visits retribution upon him for his evil deeds” (251). In the biblical text, though, there is nothing of this. The midwives want not only to act well but also to survive. They do not want to obey power; but what they speak to it is not truth but trickery.
And it is very ingenious trickery. The lie they tell Pharaoh is plausible to him. It is plausible because, in one interpretation at least, it rests on a negative stereotype about the Hebrew women, and because the midwives present themselves as sharing that stereotype with Pharaoh. “[The Hebrew women] are animals,” they say – or at least that is one way of rendering ki hayyot henah. Buber and Rosenzweig render the word hayyot as tierlebig, “beast-natured.” The midwives gain credibility, that is, by making an anti-Semitic dig – the Hebrew women give birth so quickly because they’re more like animals than they are like people. And this particular anti-Semitic dig is one that, as noted, the story up to this point has given some warrant for. Calling the Hebrew women “animals” is connected to seeing the children of Israel as a “swarming” people. Even calling them “lively” – another rendering of hayyot – might be understood, by Pharaoh at any rate, as praising the physical vitality of people whose intellectual and moral dignity you are busy denying and suppressing.
I wondered, in the course of working this out, whether there might be something characteristically Jewish about this mode of civil disobedience. Now, having read around a bit, I’m not sure. It’s surely not the only Jewish mode – there are Shadrach, Mishach, and Abednego, who when Nebuchadnezzar commands them to commit idolatry frankly and courteously proclaim that they will not; there are the martyrs we remember on Yom Kippur; there is the whole complex of law and law regarding kiddush ha-shem, the sanctification of the name through refusal to commit certain transgressions, murder among them. But it’s perhaps a Jewish mode, and in my view a useful supplement to the dominant American tradition I described before. The story of the midwives recognizes, I think, that sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes maybe impossible, to treat oppressors as human beings. It recognizes that survival matters, that we should try not to throw our own lives away. And it takes what I think of as a characteristically Jewish pleasure in outwitting the oppressor – not so much speaking truth to power as deploying wit against power, in a situation where wit is all that’s available to deploy. I might even argue that there are hints of the midwives’ way of working in the great biblical example of speaking truth to power, namely, in Abraham’s not-quite-remonstrances with God regarding the inhabitants of Sodom, cunningly woven of artfully ordered questions rather than bold declarations.
For now, though, I’d like to return to the story. The midwives succeed. They avoid committing the wicked act they have been ordered to commit. And they are rewarded. What they are rewarded with, appropriately enough, is houses: “and it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses.”
This text permits two interpretations, one inspiring and one gloomy. If it is God who has “made them houses,” then by these houses the midwives are made complete, complete as the children of Israel are complete, each with a name and a house. (Rashi, taking the midwives as Jochebed and Miriam, considers them as having been given, not only houses, but noble households; they have by this gift become “the founders of dynasties of priests, Levites, and kings” (SC 322).
There is, however, another reading of the text, a reading at least as old as Rashi’s grandson the Rashbam, which Sarna says is the more probable one: that the subject of the verb “made” is not God but Pharaoh, that making the midwives houses means putting them under state control – what one might call, I suppose, “house arrest” – and that the “houses” in question are not, alas, households of esteem and permanence but houses of imprisonment. There’s a grim plausibility in this last reading, which links the midwives again with their comrades in the American history of civil disobedience, who also were all to often housed, so to speak, in state prisons. The houses are no less houses of honor for being houses of imprisonment; but in being houses of imprisonment as well as houses of honor, they remind us what having an honorable name, and taking an honorable action, can cost.
On which sad but not despairing note, I’ll stop, eager for your questions and comments.
How, then, does the portion begin? “These are the names of the children of Israel, who came into Egypt with Jacob; every man and his house.” Or, more skeletally: “names . . . children of Israel . . . . houses.” The sentence suggests an ideal completeness: person plus name plus house equals mature adult.
On names, Plaut paraphrases a beautiful formulation made by Benno Jacob: previously, says BJ, we heard of the toledot, the lines, of Jacob; now we hear of the shemot, the names, of the children of Israel. BJ makes the most of both antitheses. Jacob, he says, is “the natural man who engenders physical offspring or ‘lines’. Israel is the spiritual man who cannot transmit his gifts by testament, whose sons have to mature and acquire their own shemot in order to merit and acquire the inheritance” (Plaut 385). A name, then, isn’t just something you’re given; it’s something you have to earn. (And something you have to keep – hence the tradition that the Israelites remained distinguishable in Egypt, and thus remained a people whose cries could be heard by God, partly by retaining their names.)
A house, too, is something you have to earn, in all its senses: a dwellingplace, surely, but also, as here, a household, a family and its servants, a community.
Of these children of Israel, who have names and houses, we learn that they “were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them.” Part of this is simply a vivid image of human beings growing in number through having children. Part of it, though, is spooky – the account of something more like an epidemic than like ordinary human reproduction. The verb used, yishretsu, is often translated “swarming”; it has been, in Gen. 1:20, associated with (and is connected etymologically with) the term sherets, which Rashi takes as meaning “any creature that is low upon the earth, e.g., flies, ants, worms and rodents” (SC 5). To make sense of this odd phrase, I think, our midrashic traditions imagine that Israelite women habitually gave birth to multiple children at a time, and that, at the death of Jacob, the Israelites numbered 600,000, having come down to Egypt as a clan of seventy. When the king who does not know Joseph arises over Egypt, his response to the new numerousness of the children of Israel is both paranoid and profoundly wicked; but he’s not wrong in feeling that that numerousness has something anomalous about it.
We come, then, to the midwives, whom Pharaoh orders to kill the male infants of the Hebrews and let the females live. The first thing we notice about them, appropriately enough, is that they have names. Pharaoh himself does not. The individual Egyptians do not. At this point, even the then-living children of Israel do not – we’ve been told, after all, that “joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation.” The treasure-cities do, though their names are stated almost casually. The names of the midwives are stated with ceremonial exactness: “and the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah.” And these names have meanings, as the names of the children of Israel do – Shifrah, I gather, derived from a word meaning to be beautiful, Puah from a word meaning a fragrant blossom.
Here a question presents itself: are the midwives Egyptians or Hebrews? The Hebrew phrase, meyalledot hivriot, permits either construction; i.e., either midwives who are also Hebrews, or midwives who work with the Hebrew women but are not Hebrew themselves. Our traditions divide on the matter. Their names, Plaut says, are of northwest Semitic type. Rashi famously identifies them with Jochebed and Miriam, the mother and sister of Moses – Hebrews with a vengeance!
The Septuagint, on the other hand, takes the phrase as meaning, “midwives to the Hebrews”; so does Josephus, so does Abravanel. They’re identified as Egyptians by Ibn Ezra and Sforno. Judah he-Hasid cites a tradition to the same effect. And – to turn from citing commentators I only know at third hand to what the text itself suggests – they’re certainly treated by Pharaoh as belonging to his people rather than to the children of Israel; surely, after all, it’s implausible that Pharaoh would ask Hebrew midwives to slaughter Hebrew children.
Where, then, does the first tradition come from? Is it an attempt to deny the saving kindness of strangers? Odd, in the context of a story that places so much unmistakable emphasis on the saving kindness of strangers, above all that of Pharaoh’s daughter. I myself, therefore, respectfully prefer the tradition that considers the midwives as midwives to the Hebrews; I count Shiphrah and Puah as two notable figures in the long, noble line of righteous gentiles.
Whether Egyptians or Hebrews, the midwives are ordered by Pharaoh to kill the male Hebrew babies. They do not, however, obey: “they feared God, and and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them.” “Their defiance of tyranny,” writes Sarna, “constitutes history’s first recorded act of civil disobedience in defense of a moral imperative.” *True enough. But this question of civil disobedience is important to me, and I’d like to spend most of the rest of my time lingering over it.*
As a war tax resister for the last fifteen years – that is, as someone committing annually what I like to think of as an “act of civil disobedience in defense of a moral imperative” – I’ve been consistently inspired and moved by the midwives’ act. But I’m also aware that their act is something quite different from what we usually call civil disobedience, and certainly different from the tradition of civil disobedience I know best and have been most influenced by.
I’d like to say something about that tradition, by way of defining more precisely the specific nature of the midwives’ heroism. The tradition I have in mind is vividly summed up by the Quaker phrase, “speaking truth to power.” Participants in that tradition accept the risks of their actions. Many of them decline strategies that would avoid or diminish such risks, valuing instead candid moral speech to those in power who are exercising that power wickedly. They are willing to sacrifice themselves. They treat their powerful oppressors as fellow human beings. Some of them go so far as to seek to love those oppressors. “Nonviolence,” writes Martin Luther King Jr., “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding . . . . the nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him” (Lynd and Lynd 217-18).
The midwives’ heroic action is at odds with pretty much every aspect of this tradition, except in the fundamental matter of refusing to commit an evil action – or, to quote King’s phrase regarding what he learned from Thoreau, of “refusing to cooperate with an evil system” (Lynd and Lynd 210). The midwives are not obeying the unjust commands of the powerful; but neither are they speaking their true response to it. They do, I should note, speak their true response in some of the midrashic elaborations of the story; Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jews, for example, tells us that when ordered by Pharaoh to kill the male children, Miriam responded, “woe be to this man when God visits retribution upon him for his evil deeds” (251). In the biblical text, though, there is nothing of this. The midwives want not only to act well but also to survive. They do not want to obey power; but what they speak to it is not truth but trickery.
And it is very ingenious trickery. The lie they tell Pharaoh is plausible to him. It is plausible because, in one interpretation at least, it rests on a negative stereotype about the Hebrew women, and because the midwives present themselves as sharing that stereotype with Pharaoh. “[The Hebrew women] are animals,” they say – or at least that is one way of rendering ki hayyot henah. Buber and Rosenzweig render the word hayyot as tierlebig, “beast-natured.” The midwives gain credibility, that is, by making an anti-Semitic dig – the Hebrew women give birth so quickly because they’re more like animals than they are like people. And this particular anti-Semitic dig is one that, as noted, the story up to this point has given some warrant for. Calling the Hebrew women “animals” is connected to seeing the children of Israel as a “swarming” people. Even calling them “lively” – another rendering of hayyot – might be understood, by Pharaoh at any rate, as praising the physical vitality of people whose intellectual and moral dignity you are busy denying and suppressing.
I wondered, in the course of working this out, whether there might be something characteristically Jewish about this mode of civil disobedience. Now, having read around a bit, I’m not sure. It’s surely not the only Jewish mode – there are Shadrach, Mishach, and Abednego, who when Nebuchadnezzar commands them to commit idolatry frankly and courteously proclaim that they will not; there are the martyrs we remember on Yom Kippur; there is the whole complex of law and law regarding kiddush ha-shem, the sanctification of the name through refusal to commit certain transgressions, murder among them. But it’s perhaps a Jewish mode, and in my view a useful supplement to the dominant American tradition I described before. The story of the midwives recognizes, I think, that sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes maybe impossible, to treat oppressors as human beings. It recognizes that survival matters, that we should try not to throw our own lives away. And it takes what I think of as a characteristically Jewish pleasure in outwitting the oppressor – not so much speaking truth to power as deploying wit against power, in a situation where wit is all that’s available to deploy. I might even argue that there are hints of the midwives’ way of working in the great biblical example of speaking truth to power, namely, in Abraham’s not-quite-remonstrances with God regarding the inhabitants of Sodom, cunningly woven of artfully ordered questions rather than bold declarations.
For now, though, I’d like to return to the story. The midwives succeed. They avoid committing the wicked act they have been ordered to commit. And they are rewarded. What they are rewarded with, appropriately enough, is houses: “and it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses.”
This text permits two interpretations, one inspiring and one gloomy. If it is God who has “made them houses,” then by these houses the midwives are made complete, complete as the children of Israel are complete, each with a name and a house. (Rashi, taking the midwives as Jochebed and Miriam, considers them as having been given, not only houses, but noble households; they have by this gift become “the founders of dynasties of priests, Levites, and kings” (SC 322).
There is, however, another reading of the text, a reading at least as old as Rashi’s grandson the Rashbam, which Sarna says is the more probable one: that the subject of the verb “made” is not God but Pharaoh, that making the midwives houses means putting them under state control – what one might call, I suppose, “house arrest” – and that the “houses” in question are not, alas, households of esteem and permanence but houses of imprisonment. There’s a grim plausibility in this last reading, which links the midwives again with their comrades in the American history of civil disobedience, who also were all to often housed, so to speak, in state prisons. The houses are no less houses of honor for being houses of imprisonment; but in being houses of imprisonment as well as houses of honor, they remind us what having an honorable name, and taking an honorable action, can cost.
On which sad but not despairing note, I’ll stop, eager for your questions and comments.
Parsha Va'era
Bar Mitzvah Parsah
Given by Larry Rosenwald
Given by Larry Rosenwald
Gut shabes, shabbat shalom, welcome. This is all somewhat overwhelming . . . .Yesterday Reena [Kling, z”l] quoted to me this extraordinary Talmudic phrase, “where there is rejoicing, let there be trembling,” which seems right in general and right in particular to describe what all this feels like.
I’ll get to the portion in a few moments, but I’ll start with gratitude. Gratitude first to everyone who’s come today, Havniks and non-Havniks alike, not just for coming – and on this snow-encumbered day! - but also for what I’ve learned from you, since I see no one here to whom I don’t owe gratitude for that. I can’t tell all the stories, there’s isn’t time, but they’re there to be told.
Gratitude in particular to those whom I’ve invited to be part of the ceremony, and who’ve honored me by accepting that invitation and done their parts so beautifully. In Jewish tradition there’s this notion of hiddur mitzvah, “beautifying the commandment,” not just doing a task but doing it radiantly, and hiddur mitzvah has been at work in what my friends have been offering here and now.
I’ll say a word of thanks to each, in alphabetical order. To Aliza, whose virtuosic, expressive, and indefatigable leyning would be intimidating if it weren’t so inspiring, but inspiring is what it is, and I’ve been inspired by it. (Really, come back some other Saturday, you should experience it.) To Ben, who by his service leading early in my time here showed me how closely, in this congregation, prayer and politics and poetry could be allowed to intertwine. To Gail Reimer, who in the 1980s led me to Harvard Hillel and the world of serious Judaism, and who beautifully and umpompously embodied and embodies that Judaism, with great joy and with a happy admixture of irony and feminist critique. (She also made me the tape I used when I was learning the aliyah blessings I chanted a few minutes ago.) To Josh, who gave me my first leyning lession, and suggested the grand scheme of expressive and significant gestures that leyning is connected to. To my daughter Lili, who by her irresistibly direct questions and comments led me to Havurat Shalom in the first place, then led me to make the transliterations booklets that some of you are using (and, I hope, are finding useful!), and who knows where they’ll lead me next? (If my daughter Elizabeth were here, I’d be thanking her for, among other things, showing me in her dramatic work what a Jewish theological imagination can look like.) To Miriam, for endlessly patient, supportive, and precise teaching about how to lead some of the High Holiday services, and for being an inspiring model of what service leading can be generally, how powerful and inward an intention such leading can communicate. To Nina, for a hundred illuminating conversations about the Bible and about everything connected with it, i.e., about pretty much all the things there are, philology and ethics and botany and textiles and poetry among them. And finally to Reena, whom I was going to put last in any case - so a heartfelt thanks to the alphabet, dem alef-beys a hartsikn dank, for making it work out that way. Reena’s been my teacher in this process, and everyone should have a teacher like that, irresistibly inspiring and encouraging, filled with delighted reverence for the subject, precise and rigorous when precision and rigor are what’s needed. “Come on in, the water’s fine,” she’s saying, “the water’s beautiful in fact, it’s crystal, it’s buoyant; and now that you’re here, let’s be sure that you really learn how to swim.”
There’s one more person to thank, but I’ll hold off on that last and intensest thanksgiving till the end.
I’ll now turn to the portion, the part of it I leyned at any rate. I’d describe it as being about names. (It’s also, as Reena pointed out to me, about a man of eighty and a man of eighty-three revving themselves up to speak truth to power – an inspiring example, and with a special intensity for someone like me, who turned sixty-four eleven days ago.) It’s most abundantly about names in the context of genealogy, names that make up a family tree - part of the family tree at any rate, since we learn nothing of the birth of daughters, and women with names come into this passage only as wives and mothers. These names are hard to learn for the leyner (for this leyner at any rate), they feel arbitrary, though once learned they have the solidity of stone, of fundamental fact. They are not explained in the passage, not etymologized. Elsewhere - as with the children of Jacob, for instance - the biblical authors and the biblical characters are insatiably eager to find and proclaim meanings in names. Here, though, the names are not so much containers of meaning as indicators of kinship.
Which leaves the divine name, or names. El shaday, not explained but at least characterized; it is the God-name known to the three patriarchs, less mysterious, less sacred than the name God now reveals to Moses, the name that in Jewish tradition is not spoken, whose pronunciation we do not know and would not articulate if we did, for which we substitute, in most congregations adonay, “my lords,” in this congregation also yah, another God name close to the sound of an exhaled breath, also yud-hey-vav-hey, the name’s four letters, and often in non-liturgical contexts simply hashem, The Name, the name par excellence.
Which two modes of naming, the genealogical and the unapproachably sacred, the mode without meaning and the mode overcharged with meaning, create by extrapolation between them a third mode, human names that we can say and in which we find meaning, with which we associate meaning. It’s that middle mode I’ll be working in for a while, in relation, predictably enough, to my own name - my own Hebrew name at any rate, I’ll leave Lawrence and Alan and Rosenwald for some other day.
My parents didn’t give me a Hebrew name, nor did they themselves have Hebrew names. So when I came to feel that a Hebrew name was something I needed, I was free – and obliged – to choose one. I liked the idea of naming myself after a relative, I think because that idea provided some structure, some limits. (Absolute limitlessness makes me nervous.) The relative I admired and wanted to link myself to was my great-grandfather Solomon Florsheim (not related to the shoe manufacturers, nor am I myself related to the Sears & Roebuck Rosenwalds). I’d never met him, but I’d seen a wonderful photograph of him, bending down to hold a cocker spaniel – a small man, a face with a lot of smile lines, an impression of warmth in the gesture he was making. My mother had liked him, alone – not counting my father! - among the members of my father’s family. And there was this story about him, which I told here once to a smaller group but am going to tell again. I love it because, being myself as an extremist about some things, a war tax resister and a non-reader of translations of works I can read even imperfectly in the original, I know that yielding on strongly held principles is sometimes great wisdom.
So . . . . Solomon came from Hamburg to the American southwest, sometime in the 1870s, and became an itinerant bill collector, traveling from town to town checking up on deadbeats. In July of 1881 he arrived in a small New Mexico town and went to some saloon for lunch – though not to drink, he was a strict teetotaler. He ordered his lunch and sat down to eat it. Shortly afterwards a young man wearing two six-guns came in, who didn’t sit down but paced around the room. He walked up to Solomon and said, jovially, “have a drink.” Solomon replied, “no thank you.” More pacing, more eating of lunch, some customers were making hasty exits, and the young man returned for a second attempt: “go on, have a drink, it’s on me, it’ll do you good.” Solomon stuck to his principles: “no thank you, really, you’re most gracious, but I never drink, I’m a teetotaler, I’ve made a pledge.” More pacing, maybe by now it was swaggering, maybe the six-guns were being twirled, and now the customers were all gone, danger was in the air, and the young man came back a third time. He drew one of the guns, held it to Solomon’s head, and said, not smiling any more, “have a drink.” And my great-grandfather said, “thank you.”
The family account doesn’t indicate what he drank, or when the young man left, but at some point afterwards someone told Solomon that he was lucky, that the young man was a certain William Bonney, otherwise known as Billy the Kid, a killer. Solomon told the local sheriff, a certain Pat Garrett, who used the tip to track the Kid down and killed him that same night.
What I like to think about this story is that it’s a lesson about zealotry, about when to yield. Solomon could have stuck to his principles, he would have been heroic for doing that. But maybe he’d also have been dead, and his long and useful and gracious life would have been truncated, and my grandfather’s life and my father’s life and my life and Cynthia’s life and Lili’s life would never have come into being. I prefer the version of history in which he takes the drink.
Jewish tradition has plenty of zealots. Some of them – like Levi, like Pinchas, even like Moses, all men of the same tribe, the tribe of Levi – are mentioned in what I leyned, and of course they’re essential. But so, if I may borrow an idea from Norman Janis as I earlier borrowed a tune from him, so are people of the house of Judah, people with friends, imperfect, people like my great-grandfather, who chose to live.
By the time I chose Solomon’s name as mine, my father was dead. I faxed my mother – this in place of a phone call because she couldn’t hear well enough to use the phone – to say I’d settled on Solomon’s name for myself, and to ask whether it would be all right if I chose Hebrew names for my father and for her. She faxed back almost immediately: an enthusiastic, exclamation-pointed yes to my choosing Solomon’s name, and a forthright, equally exclamation-pointed no to my devising Hebrew names for my father and her. She didn’t say why, but her whole life – passionately socialist, agnostic, and secular – was in accord with the decision, so I didn’t press her. Nor would I wish to deny the importance of her life, or my father’s life, in my identity. So I became, and remain, Shlomo ben Alan v’Charlotte, an occasional zealot named after a reasonable man, a moderately but ardently observant Jew identified as the son of two equally ardent secular atheists.
I didn’t, at the time, make much of the connection between my new name and the most famous of Solomons, who commanded the building of the Temple, the poet of the Song of Songs, the epigrammatist of the book of Proverbs, the grand pessimist, Melville’s “unfathomably wondrous Solomon” of the book of Ecclesiastes. Pacifist though I was, I didn’t even make much of the etymological sense of the name, its relation to the word for peace, shalom. Today, though, I’ll make something of that last relation – this is my almost-conclusion – though not as bearing on myself but as bearing on the other being whose name I’d like to explore today, this congregation, Havurat Shalom.
One thing shalom means is completeness. (When it means peace, the peace meant is one of fullness, not of emptiness, positive peace rather than negative.) And one thing the Hav has meant to me is a loving pressure towards completion. What I like to say when I describe this congregation is that because we’re both small and lay-led, if you know how to do something connected with the davening, you do it a lot; and if you sort of know how to do something, or want to know how to do something, you end up wanting to complete or at least supplement your knowledge of that thing, and then you end up doing it a lot. Put differently: what it means for me to be a member of Havurat Shalom, the fellowship of peace, the fellowship of completeness, is to be subject to that pressure, to that urge to complete oneself - or rather, since we never do that, we’re never complete, to the pressure to extend oneself, to grow. For which pressure, encoded in the congregation’s name and in my name, and to which I am delighted to be subject, my heartfelt thanks.
I end, or almost end, where I began, with gratitude. I’ve got one thank you left to say, the deepest thank you I can articulate, to my wife Cynthia Schwan; but I’d like to wait to say that till she’s said what she herself has to say, I invited her to make some comments and she did me the honor to say yes. . . .
[Cynthia’s remarks.]
In thinking about how I could thank Cynthia, I found myself thinking about some noble praises written, or so tradition says, by that other Solomon, the king and not the bill collector; I’ll quote those praises and then stop talking. When our kids were growing up, they’d read this to Cynthia on Friday nights, speaking as daughters to their mother; I say it to her now as a husband praising and thanking his wife. “A woman of valor who can find, for her price is far above rubies? . . . You open your mouth with wisdom, and the law of kindness is upon your tongue. . . . Many have done valiantly, but you have excelled them all.” You have indeed.
I’ll get to the portion in a few moments, but I’ll start with gratitude. Gratitude first to everyone who’s come today, Havniks and non-Havniks alike, not just for coming – and on this snow-encumbered day! - but also for what I’ve learned from you, since I see no one here to whom I don’t owe gratitude for that. I can’t tell all the stories, there’s isn’t time, but they’re there to be told.
Gratitude in particular to those whom I’ve invited to be part of the ceremony, and who’ve honored me by accepting that invitation and done their parts so beautifully. In Jewish tradition there’s this notion of hiddur mitzvah, “beautifying the commandment,” not just doing a task but doing it radiantly, and hiddur mitzvah has been at work in what my friends have been offering here and now.
I’ll say a word of thanks to each, in alphabetical order. To Aliza, whose virtuosic, expressive, and indefatigable leyning would be intimidating if it weren’t so inspiring, but inspiring is what it is, and I’ve been inspired by it. (Really, come back some other Saturday, you should experience it.) To Ben, who by his service leading early in my time here showed me how closely, in this congregation, prayer and politics and poetry could be allowed to intertwine. To Gail Reimer, who in the 1980s led me to Harvard Hillel and the world of serious Judaism, and who beautifully and umpompously embodied and embodies that Judaism, with great joy and with a happy admixture of irony and feminist critique. (She also made me the tape I used when I was learning the aliyah blessings I chanted a few minutes ago.) To Josh, who gave me my first leyning lession, and suggested the grand scheme of expressive and significant gestures that leyning is connected to. To my daughter Lili, who by her irresistibly direct questions and comments led me to Havurat Shalom in the first place, then led me to make the transliterations booklets that some of you are using (and, I hope, are finding useful!), and who knows where they’ll lead me next? (If my daughter Elizabeth were here, I’d be thanking her for, among other things, showing me in her dramatic work what a Jewish theological imagination can look like.) To Miriam, for endlessly patient, supportive, and precise teaching about how to lead some of the High Holiday services, and for being an inspiring model of what service leading can be generally, how powerful and inward an intention such leading can communicate. To Nina, for a hundred illuminating conversations about the Bible and about everything connected with it, i.e., about pretty much all the things there are, philology and ethics and botany and textiles and poetry among them. And finally to Reena, whom I was going to put last in any case - so a heartfelt thanks to the alphabet, dem alef-beys a hartsikn dank, for making it work out that way. Reena’s been my teacher in this process, and everyone should have a teacher like that, irresistibly inspiring and encouraging, filled with delighted reverence for the subject, precise and rigorous when precision and rigor are what’s needed. “Come on in, the water’s fine,” she’s saying, “the water’s beautiful in fact, it’s crystal, it’s buoyant; and now that you’re here, let’s be sure that you really learn how to swim.”
There’s one more person to thank, but I’ll hold off on that last and intensest thanksgiving till the end.
I’ll now turn to the portion, the part of it I leyned at any rate. I’d describe it as being about names. (It’s also, as Reena pointed out to me, about a man of eighty and a man of eighty-three revving themselves up to speak truth to power – an inspiring example, and with a special intensity for someone like me, who turned sixty-four eleven days ago.) It’s most abundantly about names in the context of genealogy, names that make up a family tree - part of the family tree at any rate, since we learn nothing of the birth of daughters, and women with names come into this passage only as wives and mothers. These names are hard to learn for the leyner (for this leyner at any rate), they feel arbitrary, though once learned they have the solidity of stone, of fundamental fact. They are not explained in the passage, not etymologized. Elsewhere - as with the children of Jacob, for instance - the biblical authors and the biblical characters are insatiably eager to find and proclaim meanings in names. Here, though, the names are not so much containers of meaning as indicators of kinship.
Which leaves the divine name, or names. El shaday, not explained but at least characterized; it is the God-name known to the three patriarchs, less mysterious, less sacred than the name God now reveals to Moses, the name that in Jewish tradition is not spoken, whose pronunciation we do not know and would not articulate if we did, for which we substitute, in most congregations adonay, “my lords,” in this congregation also yah, another God name close to the sound of an exhaled breath, also yud-hey-vav-hey, the name’s four letters, and often in non-liturgical contexts simply hashem, The Name, the name par excellence.
Which two modes of naming, the genealogical and the unapproachably sacred, the mode without meaning and the mode overcharged with meaning, create by extrapolation between them a third mode, human names that we can say and in which we find meaning, with which we associate meaning. It’s that middle mode I’ll be working in for a while, in relation, predictably enough, to my own name - my own Hebrew name at any rate, I’ll leave Lawrence and Alan and Rosenwald for some other day.
My parents didn’t give me a Hebrew name, nor did they themselves have Hebrew names. So when I came to feel that a Hebrew name was something I needed, I was free – and obliged – to choose one. I liked the idea of naming myself after a relative, I think because that idea provided some structure, some limits. (Absolute limitlessness makes me nervous.) The relative I admired and wanted to link myself to was my great-grandfather Solomon Florsheim (not related to the shoe manufacturers, nor am I myself related to the Sears & Roebuck Rosenwalds). I’d never met him, but I’d seen a wonderful photograph of him, bending down to hold a cocker spaniel – a small man, a face with a lot of smile lines, an impression of warmth in the gesture he was making. My mother had liked him, alone – not counting my father! - among the members of my father’s family. And there was this story about him, which I told here once to a smaller group but am going to tell again. I love it because, being myself as an extremist about some things, a war tax resister and a non-reader of translations of works I can read even imperfectly in the original, I know that yielding on strongly held principles is sometimes great wisdom.
So . . . . Solomon came from Hamburg to the American southwest, sometime in the 1870s, and became an itinerant bill collector, traveling from town to town checking up on deadbeats. In July of 1881 he arrived in a small New Mexico town and went to some saloon for lunch – though not to drink, he was a strict teetotaler. He ordered his lunch and sat down to eat it. Shortly afterwards a young man wearing two six-guns came in, who didn’t sit down but paced around the room. He walked up to Solomon and said, jovially, “have a drink.” Solomon replied, “no thank you.” More pacing, more eating of lunch, some customers were making hasty exits, and the young man returned for a second attempt: “go on, have a drink, it’s on me, it’ll do you good.” Solomon stuck to his principles: “no thank you, really, you’re most gracious, but I never drink, I’m a teetotaler, I’ve made a pledge.” More pacing, maybe by now it was swaggering, maybe the six-guns were being twirled, and now the customers were all gone, danger was in the air, and the young man came back a third time. He drew one of the guns, held it to Solomon’s head, and said, not smiling any more, “have a drink.” And my great-grandfather said, “thank you.”
The family account doesn’t indicate what he drank, or when the young man left, but at some point afterwards someone told Solomon that he was lucky, that the young man was a certain William Bonney, otherwise known as Billy the Kid, a killer. Solomon told the local sheriff, a certain Pat Garrett, who used the tip to track the Kid down and killed him that same night.
What I like to think about this story is that it’s a lesson about zealotry, about when to yield. Solomon could have stuck to his principles, he would have been heroic for doing that. But maybe he’d also have been dead, and his long and useful and gracious life would have been truncated, and my grandfather’s life and my father’s life and my life and Cynthia’s life and Lili’s life would never have come into being. I prefer the version of history in which he takes the drink.
Jewish tradition has plenty of zealots. Some of them – like Levi, like Pinchas, even like Moses, all men of the same tribe, the tribe of Levi – are mentioned in what I leyned, and of course they’re essential. But so, if I may borrow an idea from Norman Janis as I earlier borrowed a tune from him, so are people of the house of Judah, people with friends, imperfect, people like my great-grandfather, who chose to live.
By the time I chose Solomon’s name as mine, my father was dead. I faxed my mother – this in place of a phone call because she couldn’t hear well enough to use the phone – to say I’d settled on Solomon’s name for myself, and to ask whether it would be all right if I chose Hebrew names for my father and for her. She faxed back almost immediately: an enthusiastic, exclamation-pointed yes to my choosing Solomon’s name, and a forthright, equally exclamation-pointed no to my devising Hebrew names for my father and her. She didn’t say why, but her whole life – passionately socialist, agnostic, and secular – was in accord with the decision, so I didn’t press her. Nor would I wish to deny the importance of her life, or my father’s life, in my identity. So I became, and remain, Shlomo ben Alan v’Charlotte, an occasional zealot named after a reasonable man, a moderately but ardently observant Jew identified as the son of two equally ardent secular atheists.
I didn’t, at the time, make much of the connection between my new name and the most famous of Solomons, who commanded the building of the Temple, the poet of the Song of Songs, the epigrammatist of the book of Proverbs, the grand pessimist, Melville’s “unfathomably wondrous Solomon” of the book of Ecclesiastes. Pacifist though I was, I didn’t even make much of the etymological sense of the name, its relation to the word for peace, shalom. Today, though, I’ll make something of that last relation – this is my almost-conclusion – though not as bearing on myself but as bearing on the other being whose name I’d like to explore today, this congregation, Havurat Shalom.
One thing shalom means is completeness. (When it means peace, the peace meant is one of fullness, not of emptiness, positive peace rather than negative.) And one thing the Hav has meant to me is a loving pressure towards completion. What I like to say when I describe this congregation is that because we’re both small and lay-led, if you know how to do something connected with the davening, you do it a lot; and if you sort of know how to do something, or want to know how to do something, you end up wanting to complete or at least supplement your knowledge of that thing, and then you end up doing it a lot. Put differently: what it means for me to be a member of Havurat Shalom, the fellowship of peace, the fellowship of completeness, is to be subject to that pressure, to that urge to complete oneself - or rather, since we never do that, we’re never complete, to the pressure to extend oneself, to grow. For which pressure, encoded in the congregation’s name and in my name, and to which I am delighted to be subject, my heartfelt thanks.
I end, or almost end, where I began, with gratitude. I’ve got one thank you left to say, the deepest thank you I can articulate, to my wife Cynthia Schwan; but I’d like to wait to say that till she’s said what she herself has to say, I invited her to make some comments and she did me the honor to say yes. . . .
[Cynthia’s remarks.]
In thinking about how I could thank Cynthia, I found myself thinking about some noble praises written, or so tradition says, by that other Solomon, the king and not the bill collector; I’ll quote those praises and then stop talking. When our kids were growing up, they’d read this to Cynthia on Friday nights, speaking as daughters to their mother; I say it to her now as a husband praising and thanking his wife. “A woman of valor who can find, for her price is far above rubies? . . . You open your mouth with wisdom, and the law of kindness is upon your tongue. . . . Many have done valiantly, but you have excelled them all.” You have indeed.
Parsha Beshalach
Given by Esther Alter 5784
We were slaves in Egypt and now we are free. Not “we” as in “our ancestors”; “we” as in us. We were slaves.
The Haggadah instructs us to enter a metaphysical state of temporal confusion to understand what happened to them which is the same as what is happening to us which is the same as what is now happening to them.
We live by the river. We despair. All we want is the freedom to travel from the river, to the sea.
All they want is the freedom to travel from the river, to the sea. Some of them live by the river and have never seen the sea. Some of them live by the sea and have never seen the river.
We are preventing them from traveling from the river to the sea.
How can that be, if it is us who want to travel from the river to the sea? Is someone else preventing them from traveling from the river to the sea? Is someone else preventing them, and us, from traveling from the river to the sea? Are we that someone else?
Can we travel from the river to the sea, freely, if they can’t?
Pharaoh tried to kill our children. Their children are dying. Enormous numbers of children are dying. We are killing them. There is a plague of murdered firstborn children. There is a river of blood. We were once murdered child slaves in the land of Egypt. Are we killing their children? Are we the children who are being killed? Is someone trying to annihilate both of us? Are we trying to annihilate ourselves? We are dying, we are being killed, we are killing.
Then came a man who was delivered to us from the waters of the river and who led us to the waters of the sea and who split the sea and who led us across and who closed the waters on our pursuers.
Most of us do not want to leave. None but the most embittered of us want to venture into the Sinai. We live in Egypt. Egypt is our home. They live in Palestine. Palestine is their home. We don’t want to leave. We want freedom. They want freedom. We are pushed into the Sinai. We are pushing them into the Sinai.
If God had led us out of Egypt but not led us through the Sinai, it would not have been enough. We trespassed in a foreign desert for forty years and none who left Egypt ever exited that desert. Without God’s help, our children would not have exited the Sinai either. They would have died of war and thirst and disease and starvation. They are dying, right now, of war and thirst and disease and starvation. There is famine in the land of Gaza. We are pushing them into the Sinai. God is not going to lead them through the Sinai.
We are being murdered. We are being pushed out of our homes and into the Sinai. We are remembering it and we are perpetrating it and we are experiencing it. Last year we were slaves in Egypt. This year, we will taste the salt water that we have poured for ourselves and remember the tears that they are crying that we cried when we were slaves in Egypt. Next year in Jerusalem may they all be free from the river to the
The Haggadah instructs us to enter a metaphysical state of temporal confusion to understand what happened to them which is the same as what is happening to us which is the same as what is now happening to them.
We live by the river. We despair. All we want is the freedom to travel from the river, to the sea.
All they want is the freedom to travel from the river, to the sea. Some of them live by the river and have never seen the sea. Some of them live by the sea and have never seen the river.
We are preventing them from traveling from the river to the sea.
How can that be, if it is us who want to travel from the river to the sea? Is someone else preventing them from traveling from the river to the sea? Is someone else preventing them, and us, from traveling from the river to the sea? Are we that someone else?
Can we travel from the river to the sea, freely, if they can’t?
Pharaoh tried to kill our children. Their children are dying. Enormous numbers of children are dying. We are killing them. There is a plague of murdered firstborn children. There is a river of blood. We were once murdered child slaves in the land of Egypt. Are we killing their children? Are we the children who are being killed? Is someone trying to annihilate both of us? Are we trying to annihilate ourselves? We are dying, we are being killed, we are killing.
Then came a man who was delivered to us from the waters of the river and who led us to the waters of the sea and who split the sea and who led us across and who closed the waters on our pursuers.
Most of us do not want to leave. None but the most embittered of us want to venture into the Sinai. We live in Egypt. Egypt is our home. They live in Palestine. Palestine is their home. We don’t want to leave. We want freedom. They want freedom. We are pushed into the Sinai. We are pushing them into the Sinai.
If God had led us out of Egypt but not led us through the Sinai, it would not have been enough. We trespassed in a foreign desert for forty years and none who left Egypt ever exited that desert. Without God’s help, our children would not have exited the Sinai either. They would have died of war and thirst and disease and starvation. They are dying, right now, of war and thirst and disease and starvation. There is famine in the land of Gaza. We are pushing them into the Sinai. God is not going to lead them through the Sinai.
We are being murdered. We are being pushed out of our homes and into the Sinai. We are remembering it and we are perpetrating it and we are experiencing it. Last year we were slaves in Egypt. This year, we will taste the salt water that we have poured for ourselves and remember the tears that they are crying that we cried when we were slaves in Egypt. Next year in Jerusalem may they all be free from the river to the
Parsha Mishpatim
Given by Crystal Huff
Hi, everyone! I’m excited to be here, and to give my first ever dvar Torah. I am also rather nervous about this. I hope I will do a reasonable job of it, and if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I would like to say shehecheyanu.
Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech haolam, shehecheyanu, v'kiy'manu, v'higiyanu laz'man hazeh.
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season.
This is an approximate translation of the Hebrew words, but I like to think of it as a sort of affirmation of being in the right place at the right time with the right people. Thank you, God, for bringing us to this moment. This is also how I tend to think of deja vu, by the way – a confirmation of being in the right moment.
The Torah reading this week is Mishpatim, from Exodus, and it is placed just after Moses has received the ten commandments on Mt Sinai. Talk about being in the right place at the right time!
When I first signed up for this dvar Torah, I wanted to talk about something scholarly, like theories of biblical authorship as they apply to this parsha… or maybe I could say something about Mt Sinai versus Mt Horeb in Torah, or the nature of covenants in ancient Judea, or the Biblical context of our relationship with God versus our relationship with other humans. Maybe I could try to impress everyone with my academic chops? If I were really on top of things, I could even give a dvar Torah about Mishpatim and modern-day reparations.
This might be a result of being a convert or it might just be about my personality, but I want to be a good member of the Hav. I want to contribute to the community in helpful ways, and I want to be someone who can be counted on to keep the scholastic level high in this community. I don’t want to hold people back, and I don’t want to be a drain on our resources. Havurat Shalom is a very intellectually rigorous and thoughtful community, and I want to fit in.
Ultimately, however, I think the thing I need to talk with everyone about right now is community. Mishpatim is a series of legal strictures and codes and requirements, a long and perhaps random-seeming patchwork of how we humans need to treat each other in the eyes of God in order to maintain our relationships with each other and our covenant with God. It’s an establishment of community norms from a particular moment in Jewish history. A lot of these things are very hard to look at in the modern era – particularly the first part, which is literally about slavery. I wanted to have really thoughtful commentary on the meaning of these verses now, for us, in this moment.
In terms of community and being honest with my community, however, I am here this week, at the end of a really hard week of sleep deprivation and expensive repairs to my home and the first layoff my husband and I have ever experienced, and I am not sure I’m able to bring a high level of academic discourse to you now.
What I can talk about, though, is community in general. What I want to talk with you about, very briefly, is our relationship, together. That, also, is about Mishpatim and how we interact, today.
Mishpatim has a lot about slavery, capital punishment, ox goring, thievery, etc. From a certain point of view, it’s mostly a long list of wrongs people might do to each other and how to punish wrongs done. What I think is interesting, though, is that when I read this portion of Torah, it has a lot of stuff we now avoid even potentially touching. We have built a lot of fences around the issues, here. We, as a community, avoid putting people to death. We don’t punish ox goring because we don’t have oxen in Somerville (so far as I’m aware). I also don’t see anything about how to establish zoom norms in Mishpatim, for that matter.
As a community, we have continued to adapt and grow together, and some of this reading is so hard because it shows a snapshot of where things were, at an earlier point in time in Jewish history. Where we’ve grown from, what we’ve grown beyond. How we’ve grown together, as a people, in order to form this community, at this time, in this place.
What I read in layers of Mishpatim is a shared establishment of agreements, a shared understanding of community, and shared investment in each other. My modern interpretation of that is the overarching Jewish value of community.
We are hybrid for the service today because we want to keep our community agreements with each other and also want to offer accessibility in keeping with our shared community goals. We won’t always get things right, but being on zoom for this means that my parents-in-law and some of my far-flung friends can attend who wouldn’t normally be able to. Also being outside for the earlier portion of the service meets the needs of other members of our community. We are negotiating this space together, in this place, and at this time.
I really value that, and I am so excited to grow and change together with this community. I said shehecheyanu at the beginning of this dvar Torah with use of male words for God because that’s how I memorized it years ago, but one thing I’m excited about learning from the community here is how to say it with other gendered words. I will be changed by this community, and grow, just as I will change it.
I don’t have a grand ending for my dvar Torah, particularly at my current levels of sleep dep, but I want to put these thoughts out there in the community. I want to ask if anyone here had thoughts about how this community will grow and change, and how we might be changed by each other.
Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech haolam, shehecheyanu, v'kiy'manu, v'higiyanu laz'man hazeh.
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season.
This is an approximate translation of the Hebrew words, but I like to think of it as a sort of affirmation of being in the right place at the right time with the right people. Thank you, God, for bringing us to this moment. This is also how I tend to think of deja vu, by the way – a confirmation of being in the right moment.
The Torah reading this week is Mishpatim, from Exodus, and it is placed just after Moses has received the ten commandments on Mt Sinai. Talk about being in the right place at the right time!
When I first signed up for this dvar Torah, I wanted to talk about something scholarly, like theories of biblical authorship as they apply to this parsha… or maybe I could say something about Mt Sinai versus Mt Horeb in Torah, or the nature of covenants in ancient Judea, or the Biblical context of our relationship with God versus our relationship with other humans. Maybe I could try to impress everyone with my academic chops? If I were really on top of things, I could even give a dvar Torah about Mishpatim and modern-day reparations.
This might be a result of being a convert or it might just be about my personality, but I want to be a good member of the Hav. I want to contribute to the community in helpful ways, and I want to be someone who can be counted on to keep the scholastic level high in this community. I don’t want to hold people back, and I don’t want to be a drain on our resources. Havurat Shalom is a very intellectually rigorous and thoughtful community, and I want to fit in.
Ultimately, however, I think the thing I need to talk with everyone about right now is community. Mishpatim is a series of legal strictures and codes and requirements, a long and perhaps random-seeming patchwork of how we humans need to treat each other in the eyes of God in order to maintain our relationships with each other and our covenant with God. It’s an establishment of community norms from a particular moment in Jewish history. A lot of these things are very hard to look at in the modern era – particularly the first part, which is literally about slavery. I wanted to have really thoughtful commentary on the meaning of these verses now, for us, in this moment.
In terms of community and being honest with my community, however, I am here this week, at the end of a really hard week of sleep deprivation and expensive repairs to my home and the first layoff my husband and I have ever experienced, and I am not sure I’m able to bring a high level of academic discourse to you now.
What I can talk about, though, is community in general. What I want to talk with you about, very briefly, is our relationship, together. That, also, is about Mishpatim and how we interact, today.
Mishpatim has a lot about slavery, capital punishment, ox goring, thievery, etc. From a certain point of view, it’s mostly a long list of wrongs people might do to each other and how to punish wrongs done. What I think is interesting, though, is that when I read this portion of Torah, it has a lot of stuff we now avoid even potentially touching. We have built a lot of fences around the issues, here. We, as a community, avoid putting people to death. We don’t punish ox goring because we don’t have oxen in Somerville (so far as I’m aware). I also don’t see anything about how to establish zoom norms in Mishpatim, for that matter.
As a community, we have continued to adapt and grow together, and some of this reading is so hard because it shows a snapshot of where things were, at an earlier point in time in Jewish history. Where we’ve grown from, what we’ve grown beyond. How we’ve grown together, as a people, in order to form this community, at this time, in this place.
What I read in layers of Mishpatim is a shared establishment of agreements, a shared understanding of community, and shared investment in each other. My modern interpretation of that is the overarching Jewish value of community.
We are hybrid for the service today because we want to keep our community agreements with each other and also want to offer accessibility in keeping with our shared community goals. We won’t always get things right, but being on zoom for this means that my parents-in-law and some of my far-flung friends can attend who wouldn’t normally be able to. Also being outside for the earlier portion of the service meets the needs of other members of our community. We are negotiating this space together, in this place, and at this time.
I really value that, and I am so excited to grow and change together with this community. I said shehecheyanu at the beginning of this dvar Torah with use of male words for God because that’s how I memorized it years ago, but one thing I’m excited about learning from the community here is how to say it with other gendered words. I will be changed by this community, and grow, just as I will change it.
I don’t have a grand ending for my dvar Torah, particularly at my current levels of sleep dep, but I want to put these thoughts out there in the community. I want to ask if anyone here had thoughts about how this community will grow and change, and how we might be changed by each other.
Parsha Ki Tisa
On Ki Tisa and the Pogrom in Hawara
On Ki Tisa and the Pogrom in Hawara
Given by Larry Rosenwald 3/11/2023
There is, to put it mildly, a lot to talk about in this portion – the half a shekel that all, even the poorest, are to contribute (a model for some aspects of our own dues structure), the construction of the mishkan, Moses going up to the mountain, the making, or happening, of the golden calf, the descent of Moses and the shattering of the tablets, the slaughter by sword and plague of those who were worshipping the calf, the threat-saturated quarrels between God and Moses, Moses’s vision of God, the thirteen attributes . . .
What caught my attention this year, though, and what I’ll comment on, is an exchange between Joshua and Moses. And I should let you know now that in thinking about that exchange I’ve been led to some thoughts about the recent and obscene settler pogrom in Hawara. I don’t as a rule bring political questions into shabbat davening; but at this moment I felt I had to.
The calf has been cast, or – as Aaron claims – has spontaneously emerged, the unfaithful people are rejoicing, dancing, exulting, and the noise of their doings is heard by Joshua and Moses. Joshua says, I hear the sound of war in the camp. Moses responds, Not the sound that sings of triumph, not the sound that sings of defeat, rather the sound of responsive song, i.e., song for song’s sake. They are, we presume, hearing the same thing, but read or interpret it differently.
What, though, is the difference in question? What is the difference between the sound of war – kol milchamah – and the sound of responsive song, kol anot? The immediate biblical context offers little help here, i.e., it does not even tell us that the rebellious children of Israel are singing, only that they are dancing; the sound of what they are doing is evoked only in the comments made by Joshua and Moses.
There are not so many accounts of song in the Five Books. The one that comes most forcefully to mind here suggests that this question isn’t easy to answer: the Song of the Sea, which we leyn when the time comes round but choose not to include in our liturgy – as one member likes to say when we get to the point at which the Song would be chanted, “we now pass by the ghost of az yashir.” It is a great song for whose can exult in triumph, there are voices and instruments and dances, and it has many of the elements of what one might call, lehavdl, the Song of the Calf. It is also, in some way, a song of war – what Moses calls kol anot gevurah, a song of (military) triumph or victory – and its unstinted delight in triumph, in the slaughter of the antagonist, is of course why we don’t, in our ordinary Saturday morning davening, sing it. And it is absolutely a responsive song, if we understand Miriam’s song as a kind of choral refrain within the verses of the song of Moses.
Which is to say, maybe both Moses and Joshua are right, because maybe figuring out the difference between the noise of war and the noise of song isn’t so easy. I wish it were, I confess – as a long-time pacifist and singer, I’d like to pretend that the difference is clear, that war is the antithesis of music and vice-versa, but that is preposterous. What Moses is hearing is the rhythmic, joyous aspect of the singing, and surely that was there, in the Israelites’ ecstatic if idolatrous relief at having something tangible, golden, luminous, and present to worship. What Joshua hears is the anger at the absent Moses, at the God who refuses to be present in visible form, the anger of rebellion that is indeed joyous but also rebellious. They’re both right.
Which brings me, alas and as noted, to the recent settler pogrom in the Palestinian village Hawara. Some of you will know of this, some won’t. I quote excerpts from the account given by David Shulman, an Israeli peace activist I admire and trust:
Some 400 Israeli settlers from Itamar and nearby outposts enter the village of Hawara, supposedly to avenge the murder of two settler brothers that day in Hawara . . .Many of the marauding settlers are armed with automatic weapons; many are masked. They spend five full hours in the town. Israeli soldiers are there, mostly standing idly by. By all accounts—and there are many first-hand witnesses—it was a night of terror in Hawara. The settler terrorists tried to break into houses and successfully set fire to some 40 homes, in nearly all cases with families huddling inside. Mothers tried to hide their children in the bathrooms or storage rooms; husbands who were coming home from work were unable to get through the vicious settler bands and received desperate phone calls from their wives: “They are here, dozens of them, trying to break down the door. They have broken the windows and they’re throwing flaming torches inside. The smoke is choking us. We can’t see or breathe. We’re going to die. Where are you?” By a miracle none of the children and women and elderly were killed. I guess God exists, sometimes.
What has this to do with my theme? This: that during those five hours, the invading settlers ceased wreaking havoc and chanted ma’ariv. There is video footage of this. It is brief. You can hear the sound of voices, though, and they are singing, and presumably they were singing for as long as ma’ariv lasted.
If we had been there, what would we have heard? The sound of war in the camp, as was I imagine the experience of the inhabitants of Hawara, hearing the voices of those assaulting them raised in song? The sound of song, sung with the meditative intensity that we as Jews bring to davening, and which with all my revulsion at their actions these Jews, too, brought to their davening? Would we have heard what Joshua heard, or what Moses heard, or both?
What is the sound of war? What is the sound of singing?
What caught my attention this year, though, and what I’ll comment on, is an exchange between Joshua and Moses. And I should let you know now that in thinking about that exchange I’ve been led to some thoughts about the recent and obscene settler pogrom in Hawara. I don’t as a rule bring political questions into shabbat davening; but at this moment I felt I had to.
The calf has been cast, or – as Aaron claims – has spontaneously emerged, the unfaithful people are rejoicing, dancing, exulting, and the noise of their doings is heard by Joshua and Moses. Joshua says, I hear the sound of war in the camp. Moses responds, Not the sound that sings of triumph, not the sound that sings of defeat, rather the sound of responsive song, i.e., song for song’s sake. They are, we presume, hearing the same thing, but read or interpret it differently.
What, though, is the difference in question? What is the difference between the sound of war – kol milchamah – and the sound of responsive song, kol anot? The immediate biblical context offers little help here, i.e., it does not even tell us that the rebellious children of Israel are singing, only that they are dancing; the sound of what they are doing is evoked only in the comments made by Joshua and Moses.
There are not so many accounts of song in the Five Books. The one that comes most forcefully to mind here suggests that this question isn’t easy to answer: the Song of the Sea, which we leyn when the time comes round but choose not to include in our liturgy – as one member likes to say when we get to the point at which the Song would be chanted, “we now pass by the ghost of az yashir.” It is a great song for whose can exult in triumph, there are voices and instruments and dances, and it has many of the elements of what one might call, lehavdl, the Song of the Calf. It is also, in some way, a song of war – what Moses calls kol anot gevurah, a song of (military) triumph or victory – and its unstinted delight in triumph, in the slaughter of the antagonist, is of course why we don’t, in our ordinary Saturday morning davening, sing it. And it is absolutely a responsive song, if we understand Miriam’s song as a kind of choral refrain within the verses of the song of Moses.
Which is to say, maybe both Moses and Joshua are right, because maybe figuring out the difference between the noise of war and the noise of song isn’t so easy. I wish it were, I confess – as a long-time pacifist and singer, I’d like to pretend that the difference is clear, that war is the antithesis of music and vice-versa, but that is preposterous. What Moses is hearing is the rhythmic, joyous aspect of the singing, and surely that was there, in the Israelites’ ecstatic if idolatrous relief at having something tangible, golden, luminous, and present to worship. What Joshua hears is the anger at the absent Moses, at the God who refuses to be present in visible form, the anger of rebellion that is indeed joyous but also rebellious. They’re both right.
Which brings me, alas and as noted, to the recent settler pogrom in the Palestinian village Hawara. Some of you will know of this, some won’t. I quote excerpts from the account given by David Shulman, an Israeli peace activist I admire and trust:
Some 400 Israeli settlers from Itamar and nearby outposts enter the village of Hawara, supposedly to avenge the murder of two settler brothers that day in Hawara . . .Many of the marauding settlers are armed with automatic weapons; many are masked. They spend five full hours in the town. Israeli soldiers are there, mostly standing idly by. By all accounts—and there are many first-hand witnesses—it was a night of terror in Hawara. The settler terrorists tried to break into houses and successfully set fire to some 40 homes, in nearly all cases with families huddling inside. Mothers tried to hide their children in the bathrooms or storage rooms; husbands who were coming home from work were unable to get through the vicious settler bands and received desperate phone calls from their wives: “They are here, dozens of them, trying to break down the door. They have broken the windows and they’re throwing flaming torches inside. The smoke is choking us. We can’t see or breathe. We’re going to die. Where are you?” By a miracle none of the children and women and elderly were killed. I guess God exists, sometimes.
What has this to do with my theme? This: that during those five hours, the invading settlers ceased wreaking havoc and chanted ma’ariv. There is video footage of this. It is brief. You can hear the sound of voices, though, and they are singing, and presumably they were singing for as long as ma’ariv lasted.
If we had been there, what would we have heard? The sound of war in the camp, as was I imagine the experience of the inhabitants of Hawara, hearing the voices of those assaulting them raised in song? The sound of song, sung with the meditative intensity that we as Jews bring to davening, and which with all my revulsion at their actions these Jews, too, brought to their davening? Would we have heard what Joshua heard, or what Moses heard, or both?
What is the sound of war? What is the sound of singing?
Parsha Ki Tisa
On Ki Tisa
Given by Larry Rosenwald March 14, 2025
Given by Larry Rosenwald March 14, 2025
In honesty, I find the most interesting passage in the parashah to be the conversation between Joshua and Moses, the subject being the sounds made by the children of Israel (and the mixed multitude mingled with them) as they gaze on the golden calf. Joshua hears it as a the sound of war. Moses hears it differently, and to characterize uses a word used only here in the Torah. “Not the kol anot gevurah, the sound of the answering of victory, not the kol anot chalushah (another hapax legomenon], the sound of the answering of defeat, but the kol anot, the sound of answering I hear” – Joshua gives a meaning, Mosheh denies two possible meaning, and hears, in a way, only sound without meaning, singing of some kind or another.
Which I find fascinating because it’s so mysterious. What are they hearing? How does the temperament of each hearer affects his interpretation of what he hears? Why the highly unusual words? What does Moses mean when he refuses to define the sound he hears, while that murderous zealot Joshua is quick to define it as the sound of war? And more generally, how should we imagine, or hear, the soundscape of the biblical narratives? What was loud or soft, what was ordinary or singular, what was silence like when there was so much less sound, what was a crack of thunder of the blowing of a shofar when there were no eardrum-deafening mechanical sounds to compare it with?
But I’ll leave that topic for another day, or for conversation after the devar, because at the present moment, with the murderous war in Gaza and the devastations of the Trump administration, with the sharpening and intensifying of feeling occasioned by celebrating Purim, talking about the soundscape of biblical Palestine feels evasive
So the golden calf . . .I’ll focus on a particular verb, la’asot, to make something, and about the good ways and bad ways of making that the portion contrasts for us, with a hope that we can learn something from the contrast to shape our own ways of making, and judge with understanding and compassion the ways of making of others.
By the time we reach the moment when Aaron makes the calf – and yes, that’s the verb, veya’asehu egel masechah – we’ve been taught what making should be like, because we’ve been told the qualities with which God fills the named and exemplary makers Bezalel and Oholiab: “I shall fill him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, in every kind of labor.”). Not exactly clear what this all means, how the terms are to be differentiated one from another, but it is clear that at the core is ruach elohim, as manifested in particular mental competences, and as manifested in every kind of work, as manifested also in an ability to design designs, devise devices (noun and verb the same). Also clear is that all these abilities, all these inspirations or inward gifts, are in the service of making things. And God puts “wisdom into the hearts of all who are wise at heart,” the doubling being an intensifying, a divinization, one might say, of an inward quality. It’s beautifully elaborate, almost technical in its precision, both egalitarian and of high and discriminating standards.
And then we got to Aaron and the golden calf. And of course the central transgression involved in making the calf is that of idolatry: the calf is proclaimed and worshipped as God, is in the strict sense an idol. But there’s also something problematic, suggestively problematic, in the process of making. Aaron’s making the calf, no question. But it’s a quick process, at least in the text, a sentence or two, nothing of the deliberation, the internal fullness of spirit, the manifestation of that spirit in skill and judgment and understanding, the craft that lets the craftsperson make whatever is needed, in all manner of materials. Here there is just one material, the gold of the Israelites’ earrings, here the process is quick and undeliberative, the skill is at best unproven. There is another verb of making at work, a verb used of humans who make things but also of God who creates them: vayatsar oto bacheret, Aaron fashioned/ created/ it with a an engraving tool (or in a mould, the two possible translations seem equally plausible though irreconcilable). So there is a liquid mass of gold, and Aaron the hasty and unskilled is undertaking, or so the verb seems to suggest, the loftiest and most divine of creative tasks, and the mismatch of verb and implement is striking – as is the contrast drawn in the Tanchuma, between Aaron chiseling the calf and God on Sinai engraving the tablets, the former a parody of the latter.
And it gets worse, for Aaron the workman, in his conversation with an enraged Mosheh, denies his own work, his own craft – as in a way he should. Va’ashlichehu va’esh vayetzei ha-egel hazeh, “I cast it in the fire and out came this calf.” You are mostly too young to recall a great James Thurber cartoon, which I will therefore summarize for you. A man in a dinner jacket stands before an outraged wife. It is late at night, it seems. The man is holding a rabbit. And he says to his wife, “my dear . . . I seem to have this rabbit.” Which is, really, what Aaron is saying, at the very opposite end of skill and responsibility, of ruach elohim and what it makes possible. It would be comic if the consequences of Aaron’s bad making weren’t so horrific: three thousand dead, slaughtered by the murderous Levites, the descendants of those who slaughtered the men of Shechem.
.
The power to make is an amazing human power. Inspired by the divine spirit, ordered by skill and knowledge and craft, it makes the tabernacle and the paintings of Van Gogh. Uncontrolled, over-arrogant, over-mechanized, denied by the artificers who misuse it, it makes the calf and mustard gas. Up to us to figure out how to use that power, and this parasha gives us some good advice.
Which I find fascinating because it’s so mysterious. What are they hearing? How does the temperament of each hearer affects his interpretation of what he hears? Why the highly unusual words? What does Moses mean when he refuses to define the sound he hears, while that murderous zealot Joshua is quick to define it as the sound of war? And more generally, how should we imagine, or hear, the soundscape of the biblical narratives? What was loud or soft, what was ordinary or singular, what was silence like when there was so much less sound, what was a crack of thunder of the blowing of a shofar when there were no eardrum-deafening mechanical sounds to compare it with?
But I’ll leave that topic for another day, or for conversation after the devar, because at the present moment, with the murderous war in Gaza and the devastations of the Trump administration, with the sharpening and intensifying of feeling occasioned by celebrating Purim, talking about the soundscape of biblical Palestine feels evasive
So the golden calf . . .I’ll focus on a particular verb, la’asot, to make something, and about the good ways and bad ways of making that the portion contrasts for us, with a hope that we can learn something from the contrast to shape our own ways of making, and judge with understanding and compassion the ways of making of others.
By the time we reach the moment when Aaron makes the calf – and yes, that’s the verb, veya’asehu egel masechah – we’ve been taught what making should be like, because we’ve been told the qualities with which God fills the named and exemplary makers Bezalel and Oholiab: “I shall fill him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, in every kind of labor.”). Not exactly clear what this all means, how the terms are to be differentiated one from another, but it is clear that at the core is ruach elohim, as manifested in particular mental competences, and as manifested in every kind of work, as manifested also in an ability to design designs, devise devices (noun and verb the same). Also clear is that all these abilities, all these inspirations or inward gifts, are in the service of making things. And God puts “wisdom into the hearts of all who are wise at heart,” the doubling being an intensifying, a divinization, one might say, of an inward quality. It’s beautifully elaborate, almost technical in its precision, both egalitarian and of high and discriminating standards.
And then we got to Aaron and the golden calf. And of course the central transgression involved in making the calf is that of idolatry: the calf is proclaimed and worshipped as God, is in the strict sense an idol. But there’s also something problematic, suggestively problematic, in the process of making. Aaron’s making the calf, no question. But it’s a quick process, at least in the text, a sentence or two, nothing of the deliberation, the internal fullness of spirit, the manifestation of that spirit in skill and judgment and understanding, the craft that lets the craftsperson make whatever is needed, in all manner of materials. Here there is just one material, the gold of the Israelites’ earrings, here the process is quick and undeliberative, the skill is at best unproven. There is another verb of making at work, a verb used of humans who make things but also of God who creates them: vayatsar oto bacheret, Aaron fashioned/ created/ it with a an engraving tool (or in a mould, the two possible translations seem equally plausible though irreconcilable). So there is a liquid mass of gold, and Aaron the hasty and unskilled is undertaking, or so the verb seems to suggest, the loftiest and most divine of creative tasks, and the mismatch of verb and implement is striking – as is the contrast drawn in the Tanchuma, between Aaron chiseling the calf and God on Sinai engraving the tablets, the former a parody of the latter.
And it gets worse, for Aaron the workman, in his conversation with an enraged Mosheh, denies his own work, his own craft – as in a way he should. Va’ashlichehu va’esh vayetzei ha-egel hazeh, “I cast it in the fire and out came this calf.” You are mostly too young to recall a great James Thurber cartoon, which I will therefore summarize for you. A man in a dinner jacket stands before an outraged wife. It is late at night, it seems. The man is holding a rabbit. And he says to his wife, “my dear . . . I seem to have this rabbit.” Which is, really, what Aaron is saying, at the very opposite end of skill and responsibility, of ruach elohim and what it makes possible. It would be comic if the consequences of Aaron’s bad making weren’t so horrific: three thousand dead, slaughtered by the murderous Levites, the descendants of those who slaughtered the men of Shechem.
.
The power to make is an amazing human power. Inspired by the divine spirit, ordered by skill and knowledge and craft, it makes the tabernacle and the paintings of Van Gogh. Uncontrolled, over-arrogant, over-mechanized, denied by the artificers who misuse it, it makes the calf and mustard gas. Up to us to figure out how to use that power, and this parasha gives us some good advice.
Parsha Bamidbar
Given by Larry Rosenwald June 8th, 2019
What is a wilderness? For them, for us? What is the opposite of a wilderness, for them, for us?
A place through which we travel, not a place in which we live – we “sojourn” there, we wander there. We are guided through that place, by fire at night and cloud by day. A place of journeying, not of arriving. (The risk, all too present in the context of present-day Israeli-Palestinian politics, is that we forget that others are living there, not on their way, at home.) A desert not a garden, a place where we are fed on manna rather than on the savories of Egypt or the milk and honey of Canaan. A place in which we are bewildered, unknowing. (The poet David Ferry won the National Book Award for his book Bewilderment. Asked in an interview what he was bewildered by, he answered, “everything.”) A place we wander in longer because we are being punished, suggesting that it is a place we would wish not to be in any longer than we need to.
What is not a wilderness? Eden, Egypt, Canaan, Jerusalem. Somewhere ordinary, maybe, where we have no need of pillars of cloud or fire, no need of manna. A place of cultivation, a garden, a vineyard, a field of wheat, an orchard. A city. A place of secular and sacred structures that cannot be moved, houses and not tents, the Temple and not the mishkan. A place in which we wish to stay, from which we can be exiled, to which we can hope to return, long to return. A place of knowing, of knowledge.
What is the right relation between being in the wilderness and being in the land, ha’arets? Which entails a further question: when was the nation formed? In Egypt, of course: vayehi sham l’goi gadol atsum verav, and there became a great nation, mighty and numerous. In the land of course, where we built the temple and the city, and figured out how to be something like a state.
But also in the desert, during those extra thirty-eight years, figuring out how to create a sustainable system of governing even while under the leadership guidance of charismatic leaders who could not be replaced but would eventually die. There we were disciplined and chastened again and again and again, failing again and again and again, but learning, as Beckett that writers needed to do, to feel better.
Do we need to wander in the desert again, from time to time, living on what we can carry, all of our structures impermanent? What would that mean for us, for the people Israel, bound as we are, as it is, to cities and towns and edifices?
The story of the Tower of Babel comes to mind. (For me, it almost always comes to mind, being for me the most important or at any rate the most inexhaustibly rich and perplexing of stories.) Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, its top in the heavens, lest our name be erased and we ourselves scattered. For which, for building the permanent place, the immoveable place, the place that is the opposite of wilderness, they were indeed scattered and their names effaced, their city and tower left unfinished. The moral: don't build the city and tower, don’t seek permanence, don’t leave the condition of wilderness. But of course we later do all these things, build cities and towers to outlast bronze and marble.
So the question is, When do we need to build the city and the tower, when do we need to make ourselves a name, when do we need to be dispersed, to wander in the wilderness, bamidbar?
A place through which we travel, not a place in which we live – we “sojourn” there, we wander there. We are guided through that place, by fire at night and cloud by day. A place of journeying, not of arriving. (The risk, all too present in the context of present-day Israeli-Palestinian politics, is that we forget that others are living there, not on their way, at home.) A desert not a garden, a place where we are fed on manna rather than on the savories of Egypt or the milk and honey of Canaan. A place in which we are bewildered, unknowing. (The poet David Ferry won the National Book Award for his book Bewilderment. Asked in an interview what he was bewildered by, he answered, “everything.”) A place we wander in longer because we are being punished, suggesting that it is a place we would wish not to be in any longer than we need to.
What is not a wilderness? Eden, Egypt, Canaan, Jerusalem. Somewhere ordinary, maybe, where we have no need of pillars of cloud or fire, no need of manna. A place of cultivation, a garden, a vineyard, a field of wheat, an orchard. A city. A place of secular and sacred structures that cannot be moved, houses and not tents, the Temple and not the mishkan. A place in which we wish to stay, from which we can be exiled, to which we can hope to return, long to return. A place of knowing, of knowledge.
What is the right relation between being in the wilderness and being in the land, ha’arets? Which entails a further question: when was the nation formed? In Egypt, of course: vayehi sham l’goi gadol atsum verav, and there became a great nation, mighty and numerous. In the land of course, where we built the temple and the city, and figured out how to be something like a state.
But also in the desert, during those extra thirty-eight years, figuring out how to create a sustainable system of governing even while under the leadership guidance of charismatic leaders who could not be replaced but would eventually die. There we were disciplined and chastened again and again and again, failing again and again and again, but learning, as Beckett that writers needed to do, to feel better.
Do we need to wander in the desert again, from time to time, living on what we can carry, all of our structures impermanent? What would that mean for us, for the people Israel, bound as we are, as it is, to cities and towns and edifices?
The story of the Tower of Babel comes to mind. (For me, it almost always comes to mind, being for me the most important or at any rate the most inexhaustibly rich and perplexing of stories.) Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, its top in the heavens, lest our name be erased and we ourselves scattered. For which, for building the permanent place, the immoveable place, the place that is the opposite of wilderness, they were indeed scattered and their names effaced, their city and tower left unfinished. The moral: don't build the city and tower, don’t seek permanence, don’t leave the condition of wilderness. But of course we later do all these things, build cities and towers to outlast bronze and marble.
So the question is, When do we need to build the city and the tower, when do we need to make ourselves a name, when do we need to be dispersed, to wander in the wilderness, bamidbar?
Parsha Bamidbar
Given by Ester Alter
I’m going to talk about history today, and how to read history. I need everyone here to set aside the question of whether or not anything in the Torah can be taken literally or the question of what “really” happened. No, nothing in the Torah can be taken literally and no, none of it happened. But we don’t need to worry about either of those questions. They don’t matter right now. Likewise, the question of how to tie this parsha to our own modern system of morals isn’t important right now. When we read history, it’s still very important to find moral relevance in the past–history is never objective, the reason we even care about what dead people did has everything to do with why the answer matters to us and little if anything to do with “fact”. Within these constraints, we can’t treat the Torah as history. But we can treat the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Torah as history. After all, we do know that someone created the Torah. Actually, it was a lot of people, over a very long period of time, but one person had to have started writing this week’s parsha. And right now I want to ask a relatively narrow question: What was that person thinking?
Bamidbar kicks off with a census. God tells Moses, Aaron, and representatives of the tribes to count each male over twenty who can bear arms. The total number is 603,550.
This is a ludicrous number of people. For context, the Persian Empire at its peak had around 26 million people. I did some back-of-the-napkin math and found that around 20% of that population would’ve been over twenty and able to bear arms. If we take that percentage and apply it to the Israelites, we get something like three million Israelites packed into the Sinai Peninsula.
In the centuries it took to write and edit the Torah, there were at most several hundred thousand Jews. That means there are ten times more Israelites in Bamidbar than there were living Jews in its author’s days.
It would be very naive to assume that the author simply didn’t know that these sums can’t possibly be realistic, so let’s consider why the author of Bamidbar–that is, the first author–wrote down such obviously wrong numbers. It seems strange to me that the author would go out of his way to imply a massive drop-off in population since the days of Moses, simply because that’s orthogonal to everything else the Torah is trying to convey.
Perhaps we could learn more if we consider not just the result of taking this census, but the process.
As described, the census of millions of people is carried out by fourteen people. Each tribal representative could’ve feasibly done some ad-hoc delegation of tasks but that’s assuming they could find enough people to help.
Census taking is very complicated. In the ancient world, census taking was extremely complicated, and very expensive. It’s unlikely that the ancient kingdom of Israel ever took a census simply because there were never enough people who could read and write.
Empires, on the other hand, could and did take censuses. The Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians, and others all took censuses of their respective empires. Only an empire could deploy the resources and personnel required to take a census.
Which means that what the author of Bamidbar is describing is a miracle.
The author of Bamidbar is telling us about a legendary past in which God bestows upon the Israelites not only the military strength of empire, but the administrative sophistication of empire as well. We’re all familiar with the innumerable times God grants the Israelites miraculous victories against seemingly impossible odds. But there are also a lot of censuses in the Tanakh. We don’t think about them as much as the battles, but each census can be thought of as a miracle.
Which brings me back to the original question: What was the author of Bamidbar thinking when they wrote this?
I imagine the author sitting in some library or scriptorium in ancient Jerusalem. It’s a small room and gets a lot of foot traffic throughout the day. Scribes are coming and going at all hours. They are tired and overworked. They all know that there simply aren’t enough of them to accomplish everything that the kingdom requires. The author of the first words of what would become the Book of Numbers observes their exhausted coworkers and thinks: What if everyone in this room worked together on just one thing? What if every Israelite could read and write? What would we be capable of then?
Bamidbar kicks off with a census. God tells Moses, Aaron, and representatives of the tribes to count each male over twenty who can bear arms. The total number is 603,550.
This is a ludicrous number of people. For context, the Persian Empire at its peak had around 26 million people. I did some back-of-the-napkin math and found that around 20% of that population would’ve been over twenty and able to bear arms. If we take that percentage and apply it to the Israelites, we get something like three million Israelites packed into the Sinai Peninsula.
In the centuries it took to write and edit the Torah, there were at most several hundred thousand Jews. That means there are ten times more Israelites in Bamidbar than there were living Jews in its author’s days.
It would be very naive to assume that the author simply didn’t know that these sums can’t possibly be realistic, so let’s consider why the author of Bamidbar–that is, the first author–wrote down such obviously wrong numbers. It seems strange to me that the author would go out of his way to imply a massive drop-off in population since the days of Moses, simply because that’s orthogonal to everything else the Torah is trying to convey.
Perhaps we could learn more if we consider not just the result of taking this census, but the process.
As described, the census of millions of people is carried out by fourteen people. Each tribal representative could’ve feasibly done some ad-hoc delegation of tasks but that’s assuming they could find enough people to help.
Census taking is very complicated. In the ancient world, census taking was extremely complicated, and very expensive. It’s unlikely that the ancient kingdom of Israel ever took a census simply because there were never enough people who could read and write.
Empires, on the other hand, could and did take censuses. The Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians, and others all took censuses of their respective empires. Only an empire could deploy the resources and personnel required to take a census.
Which means that what the author of Bamidbar is describing is a miracle.
The author of Bamidbar is telling us about a legendary past in which God bestows upon the Israelites not only the military strength of empire, but the administrative sophistication of empire as well. We’re all familiar with the innumerable times God grants the Israelites miraculous victories against seemingly impossible odds. But there are also a lot of censuses in the Tanakh. We don’t think about them as much as the battles, but each census can be thought of as a miracle.
Which brings me back to the original question: What was the author of Bamidbar thinking when they wrote this?
I imagine the author sitting in some library or scriptorium in ancient Jerusalem. It’s a small room and gets a lot of foot traffic throughout the day. Scribes are coming and going at all hours. They are tired and overworked. They all know that there simply aren’t enough of them to accomplish everything that the kingdom requires. The author of the first words of what would become the Book of Numbers observes their exhausted coworkers and thinks: What if everyone in this room worked together on just one thing? What if every Israelite could read and write? What would we be capable of then?
Parsah Shlach
Given by Esther Alter
It’s 719 BCE and Caleb, a scribe in Samaria, has just received word that the Assyrians are on their way. He thinks the end times are upon them, but they’re not. The city of Samaria will be besieged for three years and then the end times will be upon them. The Assyrians will find Caleb emaciated to the bone and send him off with the others to distant lands. Caleb won’t survive the journey.
Caleb is writing the core of what will become the Book of Kings. He has seen war firsthand and he knows that it’s not about kings or succession or heresy or territory. War is when people forcibly remove their respective insides from each other and throw them in the mud.
So yes, Caleb is writing about the Assyrian invasion, and when Israel and Aram waged war against Judah and when Israel waged war against Aram and when Israel waged war against Aram and Judah and when Israel waged war against Judah while Aram stayed neutral and on and on but Caleb knows that beneath his terse chronology there is entrails and dirt and screaming that has persisted for as long as anyone is aware of. Caleb is one of a handful of literate people in the northern Kingdom of Israel which means that he has a better sense than almost anyone of how long this scream has persisted. It’s a lonely feeling.
The Kingdom of Israel was defined by the forever war it was locked into for the entirety of its history. The very existence of the kings described in the Book of Kings was justified by the need to levy soldiers and churn guts and mud into slurry because Israel, of course, had a right to defend itself.
And before that? Before that there were mythological kings who united the tribes. Before that, there was warlordism, the destitution and suffering caused by the Late Bronze Age Collapse, an event beyond Caleb’s awareness and comprehension. And who can blame him? Who among us can imagine inexorable societal collapse due to a changing climate and systemic economic and political failure?
What Caleb is aware of is that the endless violence must have started at some point. He imagines himself free from the present, which means that he steps into a past of his own making. What if there was an invasion, he says to himself. What if we weren’t always hillfolk in the West Bank. What if we invaded it.
Caleb has been instructed to continue writing the Book of Kings but, instead, he starts to write a story. It’s set many many years ago. The Israelites were wanderers (Caleb doesn’t explain what this means or where they were wandering from; someone will fill in the blanks later). The Israelites wandered all the way to the land of Canaan. And then there was a moment of inflection. This is what Caleb wants to write about. Twelve people were detached from the camp to scout the land in front of them.
There was consensus among the twelve reports that Canaan was a land of agriculture and towns that would not welcome the Israelites and that war was inevitable. The only question was whether the Israelites could slaughter more Canaanites or vice versa. Most of the scouts said that the Canaanites would triumph.
Caleb doesn’t include anyone who suggests that, yes, Canaan can be taken, but the Israelites shouldn’t do it, because Caleb can’t imagine such a person. If such a person ever existed, it was long ago, and their bodies were torn open and their souls left their bodies, again and again, until they were all gone. And now what’s left is the looming realization that everything that constitutes Caleb’s reality, everything that fuels the howling despair in his heart, is a mistake that could’ve been avoided, could have been stopped, if not now, then then.
Unless, of course, it wasn’t a mistake. Unless eternal war is a gift and conquest is a commandment and defeat is the result of sin and the land is a promise. It’s far, far, easier to accept this version of events.
Caleb inserts himself into his narrative and says to the Israelites: “The land we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If our god is pleased with us, he will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us; only you must not rebel against him.” And in the story that’s exactly what happens. The pessimistic scouts are destroyed and the Israelites seize Canaan for themselves. The end.
Some of that land is still theirs, for now. It won’t be for much longer. And then, thousands of years later, it will be again, and the forever war will begin anew, in emulation of the old days, because enough of us still believe what Caleb’s story tells us: That the land and the rocks and the shit and the bones and the guts and the weapons and the tears and the fire and the sand and the mud, all of this, has been promised to us.
Caleb is writing the core of what will become the Book of Kings. He has seen war firsthand and he knows that it’s not about kings or succession or heresy or territory. War is when people forcibly remove their respective insides from each other and throw them in the mud.
So yes, Caleb is writing about the Assyrian invasion, and when Israel and Aram waged war against Judah and when Israel waged war against Aram and when Israel waged war against Aram and Judah and when Israel waged war against Judah while Aram stayed neutral and on and on but Caleb knows that beneath his terse chronology there is entrails and dirt and screaming that has persisted for as long as anyone is aware of. Caleb is one of a handful of literate people in the northern Kingdom of Israel which means that he has a better sense than almost anyone of how long this scream has persisted. It’s a lonely feeling.
The Kingdom of Israel was defined by the forever war it was locked into for the entirety of its history. The very existence of the kings described in the Book of Kings was justified by the need to levy soldiers and churn guts and mud into slurry because Israel, of course, had a right to defend itself.
And before that? Before that there were mythological kings who united the tribes. Before that, there was warlordism, the destitution and suffering caused by the Late Bronze Age Collapse, an event beyond Caleb’s awareness and comprehension. And who can blame him? Who among us can imagine inexorable societal collapse due to a changing climate and systemic economic and political failure?
What Caleb is aware of is that the endless violence must have started at some point. He imagines himself free from the present, which means that he steps into a past of his own making. What if there was an invasion, he says to himself. What if we weren’t always hillfolk in the West Bank. What if we invaded it.
Caleb has been instructed to continue writing the Book of Kings but, instead, he starts to write a story. It’s set many many years ago. The Israelites were wanderers (Caleb doesn’t explain what this means or where they were wandering from; someone will fill in the blanks later). The Israelites wandered all the way to the land of Canaan. And then there was a moment of inflection. This is what Caleb wants to write about. Twelve people were detached from the camp to scout the land in front of them.
There was consensus among the twelve reports that Canaan was a land of agriculture and towns that would not welcome the Israelites and that war was inevitable. The only question was whether the Israelites could slaughter more Canaanites or vice versa. Most of the scouts said that the Canaanites would triumph.
Caleb doesn’t include anyone who suggests that, yes, Canaan can be taken, but the Israelites shouldn’t do it, because Caleb can’t imagine such a person. If such a person ever existed, it was long ago, and their bodies were torn open and their souls left their bodies, again and again, until they were all gone. And now what’s left is the looming realization that everything that constitutes Caleb’s reality, everything that fuels the howling despair in his heart, is a mistake that could’ve been avoided, could have been stopped, if not now, then then.
Unless, of course, it wasn’t a mistake. Unless eternal war is a gift and conquest is a commandment and defeat is the result of sin and the land is a promise. It’s far, far, easier to accept this version of events.
Caleb inserts himself into his narrative and says to the Israelites: “The land we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If our god is pleased with us, he will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us; only you must not rebel against him.” And in the story that’s exactly what happens. The pessimistic scouts are destroyed and the Israelites seize Canaan for themselves. The end.
Some of that land is still theirs, for now. It won’t be for much longer. And then, thousands of years later, it will be again, and the forever war will begin anew, in emulation of the old days, because enough of us still believe what Caleb’s story tells us: That the land and the rocks and the shit and the bones and the guts and the weapons and the tears and the fire and the sand and the mud, all of this, has been promised to us.
Parsha Balak: On Bilam
Given by Larry Rosenwald
[Prefatory note: My remarks are partly drawn from a devar I gave some twenty years ago at Harvard Hillel. Some of what was in the devar still seems pertinent, some doesn’t – I’ve changed, the world has changed. As I read through the devar, with its scholarly armor – that seemed necessary in that congregation in those days – I was grateful to the Hav for encouraging a directer style of speech, and a more personal one.]
I want to talk about the story of Bilam. That’s partly because of its mix of high drama and low comedy, but also because it’s about a Gentile, in particular on a Gentile who speaks with, and is spoken through by, the God of Israel and all the earth, and because the question of how Torah and Jewish tradition look at Gentiles seems to me important.
In preparing this, I looked carefully at the biblical text and at some of the midrashic elaborations of that text contained in Louis Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jews, which I love, and as I looked, I had an odd reaction.
I often admire how the rabbis temper and ease harsh biblical laws, e.g., those governing potentially capital crimes. The laws feel vengeful and rigid, the rabbinic reinterpretations of them compassionate and supple. I see the rabbis as being in a dilemma somewhat like ours, encountering a clear commandment they can’t accept but can’t discard, then trying to interpret the commandment in such a way that it’s less at odds with their principles.
Here, though, comparing the biblical text with the rabbinic interpretations, I found myself wanting to hold to the text. The story in the text is strange, surprising, ambivalent, generous; the rabbinic reinterpretation of it is a polemical oversimplification.
To make clear what I mean, I’ll first set out the story as neutrally as I can; then say something about the rabbinic interpretation, then finally return to the text and describe it against that interpretation, to describe it as I myself see it.
Balak, ruler of Moab, sends emissaries to Bilam, son of Beor, a noted professional seer and maker of curses and blessings; through these emissaries, he asks Bilam to curse the Israelites, who are, in Balak’s view (a view very like Pharaoh’s at the beginning of Exodus), frighteningly numerous and powerful. Bilam neither consents nor refuses, saying only, “I will reply to you as Hashem may instruct me.” The Hebrew is, v’hashivoti etkhem davar kaasher y’daber adonai elai; that is, the God who will be instructing Bilam is the God of Israel. That God then instructs Bilam not to go, tells him in fact that “[he] must not curse that people, for they are blessed,” and the emissaries depart. Balak sends a second set of emissaries, still more eminent than the first. Bilam makes a similar response. This time, though, God tells Bilam to go, but to say only what God gives him to say. Bilam saddles his ass and rides off. But God is “incensed at his going,” and sends an angel with a sword to stand in his way. Three times Bilam cannot see the angel, three times Bilam’s ass does see the angel and maneuvers so as to avoid him, three times Bilam curses the ass and beats it. The ass, suddenly endowed with speech, protests; the angel reveals itself, Bilam says “I have sinned” and offers to turn back, the angel bids him go on. He arrives in Balak’s domain. Three times Balak makes preparations to have Bilam curse Israel, taking Bilam to high places and performing such sacrifices as Bilam bids; three times Bilam, saying only what God puts in his mouth, blesses Israel rather than cursing it. Balak gives up; and “Bilam set out on his journey back home; and Balak also went his way.”
The Rabbis acknowledges Bilam’s great gifts of vision, his power to bless and curse, indeed they elaborate those gifts in fantastic detail, e.g., stating that Bilam alone of human kind knew the one instant of the day (a day being composed of 24 hours, and an hour being composed of 85,088 instants) when God was angry, and therefore at what instant to curse. But the Rabbis are uncomfortable with this Gentile seer; and they make him a moral monster, filled with motiveless malignity against Israel, wishing “to destroy an entire nation without a cause.” They tell us that Bilam had been a counselor to Pharaoh, and had proposed to Pharaoh that “all the male children [of Israel] . . . be thrown into the water”; that he had been a counselor to Amalek as well; and that he spent “the seven weeks between the exodus and the revelation on Mount Sinai . . . with the fallen angels Azza and Azazel, endeavoring to force Israel back to Egypt.”
The rabbis also tell us that Bilam was in fact eager to do Balak’s bidding, that his refusal of Balak’s first embassy was done only to conceal the fact that what kept him from cursing Israel was God’s power and his own weakness, and that Bilam’s answer to Balak’s second embassy, “Though Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not do anything, big or little, contrary to the command of my God,” reveals only his “three bad qualities: a jealous eye, a haughty spirit, and a greedy soul.” The fact that Bilam “saddled his ass” is understood as revealing his eagerness to curse Israel, since he did it himself instead of waiting for his servants to do it. His response to the speaking ass is criticized for the poor quality of its Hebrew. (One of the few moments in the tradition, all of them precious, where the multilingual character of the ancient Near East is allowed to emerge.) His confession to the angel, “I have sinned,” hatati, is said to reveal only that he is “a shrewd sinner,” ready to show contrition without feeling it. He is said to have lost the gift of prophecy because of his conduct, and God’s decision to put into Bilam’s mouth the beautiful blessings he actually utters is said to have been made “grudgingly, as one loathes to touch an unclean things”; moreover, it is said that Bilam speaks these speeches in a loud voice rather than a quiet one “so that all the other nations might hear and out of envy make war upon Israel.”
Quite a list!
Now some of this derives simply from an acute reading of the text. Bilam clearly wishes to do Balak’s bidding. Why else, after all, would he so often “commence anew” to ask God what to do and say, if not the hope that at some point God will tell him to do what he wants to do anyway? “If we are not to be satisfied with God’s first clear words,” writes Franz Rosenzweig, “but must try what God, commencing anew, will say to us a second time, then God will this second time unerringly speak the words of our own heart’s demon . . .” (In Numbers 31, Moses blames “the counsel of Bilam” for the forbidden liaisons between the children of Israel and the daughters of Moab, which suggests that Bilam’s eagerness to curse remains strong even after our story is done.)
But emphasizing this aspect of the story means not seeing what else is there. It means, for example, missing the story’s comedy. Bilam is as much a corrupt and stumbling courtier as a dreaded enemy. The comeuppance he gets from the speaking donkey is almost slapstick – Etz Hayim says that “this parashah contains what may be the only comic passage in the Torah” – and he himself in that episode is the seer who cannot see, the man of words who is out-talked by his own donkey.
More importantly, emphasizing Bilam’s wickedness means missing his poignantly stubborn adherence to his vocation. He is a man who says what God gives him to say. That is what he proclaims about himself at the beginning of the story – hadavar asher yasim elohim b’fi, oto adaber – and it is what he does from the beginning of the story to its end. He would like the word of God that comes unto him to be some other word than it is; but the words he speaks are God’s words, and he speaks those words even when the fearsome Balak - who the commentators tell us was an even greater magician than Bilam himself - is urgently pressing him to say something different.
And what beautiful, charged words God gives him to speak! I’ll pass over his first two blessings to focus on the third, because the third is different and still more beautiful. What makes it different is that here, the biblical text tells us, Bilam “did not, as on previous occasions, go in search of omens, but turned his face towards the wilderness. As Bilam looked up and saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe, the spirit of God came upon him.” The spirit of God is ruah elohim, a phrase that we’ve seen only rarely (it’s used at the beginning of Genesis, of course, then later of Joseph and of Betsalel), and which has a lot of resonance. Previously Bilam was a professional magician. Now he seems to have become something else, someone more open to the experience of vision; as the text says, “he turned his face toward the wilderness,” the place where Moses is, after all, when he sees the burning bush. And what he sees there is so lovely a vision of the children of Israel that our liturgical tradition has made it its own, and we begin our Saturday morning services with it – ma tovu, oholekha yaakov, mishkenotayich yisrael.
Also, as Etz Hayim reminds us, “the Talmud bases its requirements for respecting privacy on this verse, explaining that Bilam was moved to praise the tents of Jacob because the arrangement of their entrances made it impossible for a family to see inside the tents of others.” I don’t know how many prooftexts are the utterances of Gentiles, but there can’t be all that many. (I do know, or at any rate am confident, that I can’t be the only one glad to see that our biblical text, unlike the United States Constitution as interpreted by the current Supreme Court, thinks of privacy as authoritatively commanded.)
I’ll conclude by turning for a moment from the story itself to the story in Hukkat that precedes it, about Moses and the rock. The rabbis take Moses and Bilam as diametric opposites: “How great a contrast between these two! Moses exhorted his people to keep from sin, whereas Bilam counselled the nations to become addicted to lewdness” (Ginzburg III: 355). The two stories, though, suggest some similarities. Moses too is in a troubled relation to the commandment God reveals to him. He is shaken, perhaps, by the recent death of Miriam – as Meryl movingly pointed out last week. Still, the commandment is clear: “order the rock to yield its water,” v’dibartem el-hasela. But he does not follow it, striking instead of speaking; and against him, as against Bilam, God’s anger flares up: Moses is an intimate of God, yet he goes against God’s command, or fails to understand it, or supplements it with his own ideas; the same is true of Bilam. Moses is barred from the promised land, Bilam stripped of the gift of prophecy. The biblical text, that is, is uncertain and curious not only about the heathen prophet Bilam, but also about the Jewish prophet Moses. That’s pretty great, when writers belonging to one culture can look so attentively at a gifted person belonging to another.
I want to talk about the story of Bilam. That’s partly because of its mix of high drama and low comedy, but also because it’s about a Gentile, in particular on a Gentile who speaks with, and is spoken through by, the God of Israel and all the earth, and because the question of how Torah and Jewish tradition look at Gentiles seems to me important.
In preparing this, I looked carefully at the biblical text and at some of the midrashic elaborations of that text contained in Louis Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jews, which I love, and as I looked, I had an odd reaction.
I often admire how the rabbis temper and ease harsh biblical laws, e.g., those governing potentially capital crimes. The laws feel vengeful and rigid, the rabbinic reinterpretations of them compassionate and supple. I see the rabbis as being in a dilemma somewhat like ours, encountering a clear commandment they can’t accept but can’t discard, then trying to interpret the commandment in such a way that it’s less at odds with their principles.
Here, though, comparing the biblical text with the rabbinic interpretations, I found myself wanting to hold to the text. The story in the text is strange, surprising, ambivalent, generous; the rabbinic reinterpretation of it is a polemical oversimplification.
To make clear what I mean, I’ll first set out the story as neutrally as I can; then say something about the rabbinic interpretation, then finally return to the text and describe it against that interpretation, to describe it as I myself see it.
Balak, ruler of Moab, sends emissaries to Bilam, son of Beor, a noted professional seer and maker of curses and blessings; through these emissaries, he asks Bilam to curse the Israelites, who are, in Balak’s view (a view very like Pharaoh’s at the beginning of Exodus), frighteningly numerous and powerful. Bilam neither consents nor refuses, saying only, “I will reply to you as Hashem may instruct me.” The Hebrew is, v’hashivoti etkhem davar kaasher y’daber adonai elai; that is, the God who will be instructing Bilam is the God of Israel. That God then instructs Bilam not to go, tells him in fact that “[he] must not curse that people, for they are blessed,” and the emissaries depart. Balak sends a second set of emissaries, still more eminent than the first. Bilam makes a similar response. This time, though, God tells Bilam to go, but to say only what God gives him to say. Bilam saddles his ass and rides off. But God is “incensed at his going,” and sends an angel with a sword to stand in his way. Three times Bilam cannot see the angel, three times Bilam’s ass does see the angel and maneuvers so as to avoid him, three times Bilam curses the ass and beats it. The ass, suddenly endowed with speech, protests; the angel reveals itself, Bilam says “I have sinned” and offers to turn back, the angel bids him go on. He arrives in Balak’s domain. Three times Balak makes preparations to have Bilam curse Israel, taking Bilam to high places and performing such sacrifices as Bilam bids; three times Bilam, saying only what God puts in his mouth, blesses Israel rather than cursing it. Balak gives up; and “Bilam set out on his journey back home; and Balak also went his way.”
The Rabbis acknowledges Bilam’s great gifts of vision, his power to bless and curse, indeed they elaborate those gifts in fantastic detail, e.g., stating that Bilam alone of human kind knew the one instant of the day (a day being composed of 24 hours, and an hour being composed of 85,088 instants) when God was angry, and therefore at what instant to curse. But the Rabbis are uncomfortable with this Gentile seer; and they make him a moral monster, filled with motiveless malignity against Israel, wishing “to destroy an entire nation without a cause.” They tell us that Bilam had been a counselor to Pharaoh, and had proposed to Pharaoh that “all the male children [of Israel] . . . be thrown into the water”; that he had been a counselor to Amalek as well; and that he spent “the seven weeks between the exodus and the revelation on Mount Sinai . . . with the fallen angels Azza and Azazel, endeavoring to force Israel back to Egypt.”
The rabbis also tell us that Bilam was in fact eager to do Balak’s bidding, that his refusal of Balak’s first embassy was done only to conceal the fact that what kept him from cursing Israel was God’s power and his own weakness, and that Bilam’s answer to Balak’s second embassy, “Though Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not do anything, big or little, contrary to the command of my God,” reveals only his “three bad qualities: a jealous eye, a haughty spirit, and a greedy soul.” The fact that Bilam “saddled his ass” is understood as revealing his eagerness to curse Israel, since he did it himself instead of waiting for his servants to do it. His response to the speaking ass is criticized for the poor quality of its Hebrew. (One of the few moments in the tradition, all of them precious, where the multilingual character of the ancient Near East is allowed to emerge.) His confession to the angel, “I have sinned,” hatati, is said to reveal only that he is “a shrewd sinner,” ready to show contrition without feeling it. He is said to have lost the gift of prophecy because of his conduct, and God’s decision to put into Bilam’s mouth the beautiful blessings he actually utters is said to have been made “grudgingly, as one loathes to touch an unclean things”; moreover, it is said that Bilam speaks these speeches in a loud voice rather than a quiet one “so that all the other nations might hear and out of envy make war upon Israel.”
Quite a list!
Now some of this derives simply from an acute reading of the text. Bilam clearly wishes to do Balak’s bidding. Why else, after all, would he so often “commence anew” to ask God what to do and say, if not the hope that at some point God will tell him to do what he wants to do anyway? “If we are not to be satisfied with God’s first clear words,” writes Franz Rosenzweig, “but must try what God, commencing anew, will say to us a second time, then God will this second time unerringly speak the words of our own heart’s demon . . .” (In Numbers 31, Moses blames “the counsel of Bilam” for the forbidden liaisons between the children of Israel and the daughters of Moab, which suggests that Bilam’s eagerness to curse remains strong even after our story is done.)
But emphasizing this aspect of the story means not seeing what else is there. It means, for example, missing the story’s comedy. Bilam is as much a corrupt and stumbling courtier as a dreaded enemy. The comeuppance he gets from the speaking donkey is almost slapstick – Etz Hayim says that “this parashah contains what may be the only comic passage in the Torah” – and he himself in that episode is the seer who cannot see, the man of words who is out-talked by his own donkey.
More importantly, emphasizing Bilam’s wickedness means missing his poignantly stubborn adherence to his vocation. He is a man who says what God gives him to say. That is what he proclaims about himself at the beginning of the story – hadavar asher yasim elohim b’fi, oto adaber – and it is what he does from the beginning of the story to its end. He would like the word of God that comes unto him to be some other word than it is; but the words he speaks are God’s words, and he speaks those words even when the fearsome Balak - who the commentators tell us was an even greater magician than Bilam himself - is urgently pressing him to say something different.
And what beautiful, charged words God gives him to speak! I’ll pass over his first two blessings to focus on the third, because the third is different and still more beautiful. What makes it different is that here, the biblical text tells us, Bilam “did not, as on previous occasions, go in search of omens, but turned his face towards the wilderness. As Bilam looked up and saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe, the spirit of God came upon him.” The spirit of God is ruah elohim, a phrase that we’ve seen only rarely (it’s used at the beginning of Genesis, of course, then later of Joseph and of Betsalel), and which has a lot of resonance. Previously Bilam was a professional magician. Now he seems to have become something else, someone more open to the experience of vision; as the text says, “he turned his face toward the wilderness,” the place where Moses is, after all, when he sees the burning bush. And what he sees there is so lovely a vision of the children of Israel that our liturgical tradition has made it its own, and we begin our Saturday morning services with it – ma tovu, oholekha yaakov, mishkenotayich yisrael.
Also, as Etz Hayim reminds us, “the Talmud bases its requirements for respecting privacy on this verse, explaining that Bilam was moved to praise the tents of Jacob because the arrangement of their entrances made it impossible for a family to see inside the tents of others.” I don’t know how many prooftexts are the utterances of Gentiles, but there can’t be all that many. (I do know, or at any rate am confident, that I can’t be the only one glad to see that our biblical text, unlike the United States Constitution as interpreted by the current Supreme Court, thinks of privacy as authoritatively commanded.)
I’ll conclude by turning for a moment from the story itself to the story in Hukkat that precedes it, about Moses and the rock. The rabbis take Moses and Bilam as diametric opposites: “How great a contrast between these two! Moses exhorted his people to keep from sin, whereas Bilam counselled the nations to become addicted to lewdness” (Ginzburg III: 355). The two stories, though, suggest some similarities. Moses too is in a troubled relation to the commandment God reveals to him. He is shaken, perhaps, by the recent death of Miriam – as Meryl movingly pointed out last week. Still, the commandment is clear: “order the rock to yield its water,” v’dibartem el-hasela. But he does not follow it, striking instead of speaking; and against him, as against Bilam, God’s anger flares up: Moses is an intimate of God, yet he goes against God’s command, or fails to understand it, or supplements it with his own ideas; the same is true of Bilam. Moses is barred from the promised land, Bilam stripped of the gift of prophecy. The biblical text, that is, is uncertain and curious not only about the heathen prophet Bilam, but also about the Jewish prophet Moses. That’s pretty great, when writers belonging to one culture can look so attentively at a gifted person belonging to another.
Parsha Pinchas
Given by Larry Rosenwald
Prologue:
1. There’s a technical challenge in dealing with a story split between portions. (I mean, in practice I’ll just talk about the story, the first part in Balak and the second in Pinchas, but whenever I’m led to comment on the story I note the fact of its being split in this way, and I’m not sure I can think of comparable splits in other stories of this kind.
2. The personal challenge as well. My wife is a Quaker, and some of our household practices are Quaker practices. This doesn’t exactly feel comparable to whoring with the daughters of Midian or prostrating oneself before the altar of Baal-Peor, the God of the Cleft - it’s just quiet time before meals, really, and a general reverence for silence - but I can’t not have my own experiences of out-of-group marital relations or religious practices affect my sense of this story - which I’m telling you to warn of possible distortions, and you’re welcome to call me on them, though let me have my say first.
So what happens?
1. The children of Israel - the sons of Israel, really - go whoring with the daughters of Midian. The word being translated as “whoring” refers to illicit sexual relations, and is more often applied to women - “to play the harlot,” as we might say in vastly outmoded language. In any case, Israelite men and Midianite women are having sex.
2. Sex precedes, and seems to lead to, idolatry, i.e., out-group sexual relations lead to out-group cultic relations, the sons of Israel worship at the altar of Baal-Peor, they eat forbidden things, they kneel. The text is not ethnographic, so we don’t know much more than that. (I note in passing that though I see how sex and idolatry might be linked, I would argue that they need not be, that they are at least potentially independent of each other.)
3. God’s anger flares up, God commands Moses to “impale” the backsliders, Moses tells the chiefs to “kill” all those who have bound themselves to Baal-Peor (not sure why he changes the verb, but see below). I note, and will talk more about later, the fact that only Israelites are to be impaled, or killed, or whatever.
4. In any case, some slaughter is going on, presumably, because people are weeping at the tent of meeting. Into the presence of those people, the Israelite man Zimri brings - it is his action, he is the subject of the sentence – the Midianite woman Kozbi (her name suggests “lying”). The text does not tell us what they are doing, but nothing forbids us, though nothing commands us, to imagine that what they are doing is having sex.
5. Pinchas of the house of Levi, which is the house from which so many zealots come, Moses among them, sees the two, grasps a spear, and runs them both through, in their private parts. I would note - and here I’m getting to one of the things that troubles me after I’ve gotten rid of all the things that initially trouble me but on reflection don’t - that Pinchas has changed the rules. Until now, those being impaled or otherwise killed were all Israelites, as God commands, and all men. And now it is a woman, a Midianite woman, and she is killed by having a spear thrust into and through her private parts. (Legends of the Jews tells us that one of the many miracles done in support of Pinchas’s action was that which enabled him to direct the spear to this place in the body.) It feels like a rape, or perhaps that’s too strong, though only a little too strong; it feels in any case like a manifestation of the misogyny, the hatred and fear of women, that so many cultures, our own included, are saturated with. And it is, as noted, the first time, though not the last, that the range of destruction broadens to include not only Israelites but also non-Israelites, with all the toxicities that we might associate with how one ethnic group thinks about another, because we have, after all, all too often been the victim of them.
6. The plague - for that is the name the text now gives this destructive process, not impaling or killing - is stayed by Pinchas’s action, though not until 24,000 Israelite men have died.
So far what’s in Balak. What happens in Pinchas, in today’s portion? What happens is oddly like the things we say about a dream, which reveal as much as the dream does. God singles out Pinchas for commendation, and what God is commending is what Everett Fox’s translation calls zealous-rage, one word. This because Pinchas in his zealous-rage, which killed two, has kept God in God’s zealous-rage (I’m uncharacteristically tempted to write “His zealous-rage,” though normally I prefer not to use gendered pronouns for God, because the zealous-rage being deployed feels masculine) from destroying the whole people of Israel.
Somewhat the way a homeopathic remedy is supposed to work: the small dose of arsenic is antidote to the symptoms arsenic creates, the small dose of bee-sting is the antidote to the bee-sting you’ve just suffered from a bee, so here with the small dose of zealous rage. I would only note that this trait of zealous-rage is, in my judgment, terrifying, terrifying as an attribute of God, terrifying as an attribute of a human being. We can think we can control it, but we cannot, and it is not clear that even God can control it - I mean, yes, God has refrained from destroying the entire people, but there are those 24,000 dead aforementioned, and that is a lot of dead people. It is like the atomic bomb, it is like violence itself, we imagine that we can act rationally in relation to essentially irrational forces.
Which brings us to the last act of this sequence, and it’s the one where the other shoe drops. Till this moment, the bad behavior to be chastised is the bad behavior of Israelites, and the people to be punished by whatever means are Israelites, the murder or execution or assassination of Kozbi being the anomaly. But now it’s the Midianites who are to be held responsible, for their “trickery,” their “craftiness.” The text does not indicate what tricks or crafts were deployed. What it does indicate is that the focus has changed. 24,000 Israelites are dead, presumably because they bore responsibility for the choices they made. But now they are, implicitly, no longer the agents of their fate, they are the dupes of the Midianites, and it is henceforth only against the Midianites, and no longer against the Israelites, that violence will be directed. And that too is something I fear, the impulse to blame the other, to shift the blame away from the self when it is in fact the self who has transgressed. I fear it as a falsehood, and I fear the violence it can release - that it has released, is releasing, will I fear will go on releasing.
I don’t like to end divrei torah on so melancholy a note, but that melancholy note is what I’ve got, and nothing else. Gut shabes, shabbat shalom, I await your comments and questions.
1. There’s a technical challenge in dealing with a story split between portions. (I mean, in practice I’ll just talk about the story, the first part in Balak and the second in Pinchas, but whenever I’m led to comment on the story I note the fact of its being split in this way, and I’m not sure I can think of comparable splits in other stories of this kind.
2. The personal challenge as well. My wife is a Quaker, and some of our household practices are Quaker practices. This doesn’t exactly feel comparable to whoring with the daughters of Midian or prostrating oneself before the altar of Baal-Peor, the God of the Cleft - it’s just quiet time before meals, really, and a general reverence for silence - but I can’t not have my own experiences of out-of-group marital relations or religious practices affect my sense of this story - which I’m telling you to warn of possible distortions, and you’re welcome to call me on them, though let me have my say first.
So what happens?
1. The children of Israel - the sons of Israel, really - go whoring with the daughters of Midian. The word being translated as “whoring” refers to illicit sexual relations, and is more often applied to women - “to play the harlot,” as we might say in vastly outmoded language. In any case, Israelite men and Midianite women are having sex.
2. Sex precedes, and seems to lead to, idolatry, i.e., out-group sexual relations lead to out-group cultic relations, the sons of Israel worship at the altar of Baal-Peor, they eat forbidden things, they kneel. The text is not ethnographic, so we don’t know much more than that. (I note in passing that though I see how sex and idolatry might be linked, I would argue that they need not be, that they are at least potentially independent of each other.)
3. God’s anger flares up, God commands Moses to “impale” the backsliders, Moses tells the chiefs to “kill” all those who have bound themselves to Baal-Peor (not sure why he changes the verb, but see below). I note, and will talk more about later, the fact that only Israelites are to be impaled, or killed, or whatever.
4. In any case, some slaughter is going on, presumably, because people are weeping at the tent of meeting. Into the presence of those people, the Israelite man Zimri brings - it is his action, he is the subject of the sentence – the Midianite woman Kozbi (her name suggests “lying”). The text does not tell us what they are doing, but nothing forbids us, though nothing commands us, to imagine that what they are doing is having sex.
5. Pinchas of the house of Levi, which is the house from which so many zealots come, Moses among them, sees the two, grasps a spear, and runs them both through, in their private parts. I would note - and here I’m getting to one of the things that troubles me after I’ve gotten rid of all the things that initially trouble me but on reflection don’t - that Pinchas has changed the rules. Until now, those being impaled or otherwise killed were all Israelites, as God commands, and all men. And now it is a woman, a Midianite woman, and she is killed by having a spear thrust into and through her private parts. (Legends of the Jews tells us that one of the many miracles done in support of Pinchas’s action was that which enabled him to direct the spear to this place in the body.) It feels like a rape, or perhaps that’s too strong, though only a little too strong; it feels in any case like a manifestation of the misogyny, the hatred and fear of women, that so many cultures, our own included, are saturated with. And it is, as noted, the first time, though not the last, that the range of destruction broadens to include not only Israelites but also non-Israelites, with all the toxicities that we might associate with how one ethnic group thinks about another, because we have, after all, all too often been the victim of them.
6. The plague - for that is the name the text now gives this destructive process, not impaling or killing - is stayed by Pinchas’s action, though not until 24,000 Israelite men have died.
So far what’s in Balak. What happens in Pinchas, in today’s portion? What happens is oddly like the things we say about a dream, which reveal as much as the dream does. God singles out Pinchas for commendation, and what God is commending is what Everett Fox’s translation calls zealous-rage, one word. This because Pinchas in his zealous-rage, which killed two, has kept God in God’s zealous-rage (I’m uncharacteristically tempted to write “His zealous-rage,” though normally I prefer not to use gendered pronouns for God, because the zealous-rage being deployed feels masculine) from destroying the whole people of Israel.
Somewhat the way a homeopathic remedy is supposed to work: the small dose of arsenic is antidote to the symptoms arsenic creates, the small dose of bee-sting is the antidote to the bee-sting you’ve just suffered from a bee, so here with the small dose of zealous rage. I would only note that this trait of zealous-rage is, in my judgment, terrifying, terrifying as an attribute of God, terrifying as an attribute of a human being. We can think we can control it, but we cannot, and it is not clear that even God can control it - I mean, yes, God has refrained from destroying the entire people, but there are those 24,000 dead aforementioned, and that is a lot of dead people. It is like the atomic bomb, it is like violence itself, we imagine that we can act rationally in relation to essentially irrational forces.
Which brings us to the last act of this sequence, and it’s the one where the other shoe drops. Till this moment, the bad behavior to be chastised is the bad behavior of Israelites, and the people to be punished by whatever means are Israelites, the murder or execution or assassination of Kozbi being the anomaly. But now it’s the Midianites who are to be held responsible, for their “trickery,” their “craftiness.” The text does not indicate what tricks or crafts were deployed. What it does indicate is that the focus has changed. 24,000 Israelites are dead, presumably because they bore responsibility for the choices they made. But now they are, implicitly, no longer the agents of their fate, they are the dupes of the Midianites, and it is henceforth only against the Midianites, and no longer against the Israelites, that violence will be directed. And that too is something I fear, the impulse to blame the other, to shift the blame away from the self when it is in fact the self who has transgressed. I fear it as a falsehood, and I fear the violence it can release - that it has released, is releasing, will I fear will go on releasing.
I don’t like to end divrei torah on so melancholy a note, but that melancholy note is what I’ve got, and nothing else. Gut shabes, shabbat shalom, I await your comments and questions.
Parsha Masei (Numbers 33:1-36:13)
Given by Larry Rosenwald June 26th, 2014
Devar Torah on parashat Masei (Numbers 33:1-36:13), Havurat Shalom, June 26th, 2014, Lawrence Rosenwald
As was the case last week – may it not be the case in subsequent weeks, though I fear it will be – a good part of my mind, and perhaps a good part of the minds of some others here, are concerned with events in the Middle East. As was also the case last week, I’m trying to figure out how to bear witness to that concern, but to do so in a way appropriate to shabbat and our diverse community, so as to honor rather than constrict that diversity.
What I’ll do is focus on some parts of the parasha that have been brought into relief for me by the ongoing violence; but in focusing on them I’ll be doing my best simply to describe how they work, what ideas underlie them or emerge from them. What application they might have regarding the present moment – well, I’ll leave that to you, and to the stretch of the week to come. (I shall not be focusing on, but cannot resist noting, the image offered us at the beginning of the parasha, of Moshe as scribe or secretary, “[writing] down their departures, by the marching-stages, by order of Hashem” – a different way of thinking about writing than that offered us by the stories of the tablets and of the Torah itself, and fascinating.)
I’ll focus on three passages: the account of the cities of refuge, the account of borders, and the account of dispossessing the inhabitants of Canaan.
I’ll start (and end) with the cities of refuge, which cities seem precious at a moment when refuge, safe and secure refuge, is so hard to come by. They are not cities of refuge for innocents, for widows and orphans, for children, but for those who may be innocent and may be guilty, for those who have killed bishgagah, unintentionally, and whose guilt must be determined by ha’edah lamishpat, the equities parceled out between the one who killed, harotzeach, and that mysterious figure the blood-avenger, goel hadam. That said, though, the striking thing about the account is how individualized a notion of justice and retribution is being offered by it. We are at the level of individuals and individual cases and for that matter individual avengers, at the level of court disputes and modes of resolving them. That notion of individual justice is something to cherish, I think, in a world in which so often acts of slaughter and retribution are de-individualized, collectivized in fact, in which the distinction between one individual and another matters so little.
In the other two passages I want to talk about, in particular the latter of them, no such individualization is in play; they concern collective boundaries, actions to be taken against collectivities, no one with a name or a face or a house.
There’s something elegantly playful about the account of borders, in the sense that if you play by the rules the biblical texts suggests, what you’re doing is drawing an enclosed space, starting at one point and ending at that same point, as if you were drawing a circle or an oval. Also, because so many of the borders are intelligibly linked to striking features of the natural landscape, mountains and seas and rivers, the borders themselves feel solid – in somewhat the same way as America’s borders do in some imaginations, “from sea to shining sea” as the song has it, regardless of the human cost of making those symmetrical and intelligible borders become political ones. The borders set out in the biblical account include, of course, what are now the West Bank and Gaza – I’m using for these areas the terms that seem to me best, though I’m aware that others make other choices in this regard – include, that is, areas inhabited in whole or in largest part by people other than the children of Israel and their descendants, then as now.
The other thing about those boundaries that’s striking is that they’re fixed. Emerson tells a story about a farmer who said, “I don’t want much land, I only want the land that adjoins mine” – i.e., all the land there is. The biblical account is different; just as there’s no sense that one should make the boundaries narrower, yield the land within the boundaries, just so there’s no sense that one should or would be permitted to make them broader. The boundaries define both a minimum and a maximum.
Within the boundaries, the children of Israel are to be sovereign and, it sometimes seems, alone. The inhabitants of the land, the prior inhabitants that is, are to be dispossessed – vehorashtem et-kol-yoshvey ha’aretz mipneichem. It’s a strange word, horashtem, since it can be used to tell you to dispossess a person, as in the phrase just quoted, but also to possess the land, vehorashtem et-ha’aretz. It makes sense, in a way; when we are someone’s heirs, as after a death and stipulated in a will, we are in fact dispossessing them, in that what was theirs is now ours. But there’s some energy in the paradox of the word, I think, the idea that possessing is dispossessing is possessing etc.
There is no such ambiguity or paradox in the following instruction, which is simply an instruction to destroy: figured objects, molten images, cult places, all understood as pollutions incompatible with genuine possession, all for that matter in other passages understood as threats to such possession, sources of temptation and apostasy.
Which is clear enough and sufficient, it would seem, and the passage goes on to talk about other matters, in particular about how to apportion the land among the clans, by lot. But in a way that’s characteristic of Torah, the writer somehow cannot abandon the subject, and the enunciation of a law creates, immediately or subsequently, a concern in the writer of what will happen, what should happen, if the law is disobeyed. “And if you do not dispossess/ disinherit/ possess/ inherit the inhabitants of the land from before you,” then, in Everett Fox’s translation, “those who are left of them shall be/ as barbs in your eyes, as spines in your sides; / they will assault you on the land that you are settling in,/ and it shall be: / as I thought to do to them, so I will do to you!” Which even someone like me, for whom the commandments to dispossess and destroy are repellent, is terrifying, with a double terror: first the excruciating physicality of the metaphor, the remaining inhabitants being barbs in one’s eyes, spines in one’s sides; and then the equally excruciating theology, God now suddenly, entirely, switching sides, empowering not the children of Israel but their wrongly tolerated antagonists. You could have nightmares about that.
But those nightmares depend, as implied earlier, on thinking of the inhabitants not individually but collectively, not distinguishing one from another. That habit of mind, powerful as it is, can have some very dangerous consequences – it’s what E. M. Forster was alluding to when he said, “if I have to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country, I hope to God I choose to betray my country.” And it’s as a safeguard against that habit of mind, maybe, that the parasha that asks us to nurture that habit of mind also, and at greater length, asks us to nurture the habit of mind that produces the respite, the slowing down of judgment, the attention to details of fact and person, that animate the cities of refuge.
May all who need them find them.
As was the case last week – may it not be the case in subsequent weeks, though I fear it will be – a good part of my mind, and perhaps a good part of the minds of some others here, are concerned with events in the Middle East. As was also the case last week, I’m trying to figure out how to bear witness to that concern, but to do so in a way appropriate to shabbat and our diverse community, so as to honor rather than constrict that diversity.
What I’ll do is focus on some parts of the parasha that have been brought into relief for me by the ongoing violence; but in focusing on them I’ll be doing my best simply to describe how they work, what ideas underlie them or emerge from them. What application they might have regarding the present moment – well, I’ll leave that to you, and to the stretch of the week to come. (I shall not be focusing on, but cannot resist noting, the image offered us at the beginning of the parasha, of Moshe as scribe or secretary, “[writing] down their departures, by the marching-stages, by order of Hashem” – a different way of thinking about writing than that offered us by the stories of the tablets and of the Torah itself, and fascinating.)
I’ll focus on three passages: the account of the cities of refuge, the account of borders, and the account of dispossessing the inhabitants of Canaan.
I’ll start (and end) with the cities of refuge, which cities seem precious at a moment when refuge, safe and secure refuge, is so hard to come by. They are not cities of refuge for innocents, for widows and orphans, for children, but for those who may be innocent and may be guilty, for those who have killed bishgagah, unintentionally, and whose guilt must be determined by ha’edah lamishpat, the equities parceled out between the one who killed, harotzeach, and that mysterious figure the blood-avenger, goel hadam. That said, though, the striking thing about the account is how individualized a notion of justice and retribution is being offered by it. We are at the level of individuals and individual cases and for that matter individual avengers, at the level of court disputes and modes of resolving them. That notion of individual justice is something to cherish, I think, in a world in which so often acts of slaughter and retribution are de-individualized, collectivized in fact, in which the distinction between one individual and another matters so little.
In the other two passages I want to talk about, in particular the latter of them, no such individualization is in play; they concern collective boundaries, actions to be taken against collectivities, no one with a name or a face or a house.
There’s something elegantly playful about the account of borders, in the sense that if you play by the rules the biblical texts suggests, what you’re doing is drawing an enclosed space, starting at one point and ending at that same point, as if you were drawing a circle or an oval. Also, because so many of the borders are intelligibly linked to striking features of the natural landscape, mountains and seas and rivers, the borders themselves feel solid – in somewhat the same way as America’s borders do in some imaginations, “from sea to shining sea” as the song has it, regardless of the human cost of making those symmetrical and intelligible borders become political ones. The borders set out in the biblical account include, of course, what are now the West Bank and Gaza – I’m using for these areas the terms that seem to me best, though I’m aware that others make other choices in this regard – include, that is, areas inhabited in whole or in largest part by people other than the children of Israel and their descendants, then as now.
The other thing about those boundaries that’s striking is that they’re fixed. Emerson tells a story about a farmer who said, “I don’t want much land, I only want the land that adjoins mine” – i.e., all the land there is. The biblical account is different; just as there’s no sense that one should make the boundaries narrower, yield the land within the boundaries, just so there’s no sense that one should or would be permitted to make them broader. The boundaries define both a minimum and a maximum.
Within the boundaries, the children of Israel are to be sovereign and, it sometimes seems, alone. The inhabitants of the land, the prior inhabitants that is, are to be dispossessed – vehorashtem et-kol-yoshvey ha’aretz mipneichem. It’s a strange word, horashtem, since it can be used to tell you to dispossess a person, as in the phrase just quoted, but also to possess the land, vehorashtem et-ha’aretz. It makes sense, in a way; when we are someone’s heirs, as after a death and stipulated in a will, we are in fact dispossessing them, in that what was theirs is now ours. But there’s some energy in the paradox of the word, I think, the idea that possessing is dispossessing is possessing etc.
There is no such ambiguity or paradox in the following instruction, which is simply an instruction to destroy: figured objects, molten images, cult places, all understood as pollutions incompatible with genuine possession, all for that matter in other passages understood as threats to such possession, sources of temptation and apostasy.
Which is clear enough and sufficient, it would seem, and the passage goes on to talk about other matters, in particular about how to apportion the land among the clans, by lot. But in a way that’s characteristic of Torah, the writer somehow cannot abandon the subject, and the enunciation of a law creates, immediately or subsequently, a concern in the writer of what will happen, what should happen, if the law is disobeyed. “And if you do not dispossess/ disinherit/ possess/ inherit the inhabitants of the land from before you,” then, in Everett Fox’s translation, “those who are left of them shall be/ as barbs in your eyes, as spines in your sides; / they will assault you on the land that you are settling in,/ and it shall be: / as I thought to do to them, so I will do to you!” Which even someone like me, for whom the commandments to dispossess and destroy are repellent, is terrifying, with a double terror: first the excruciating physicality of the metaphor, the remaining inhabitants being barbs in one’s eyes, spines in one’s sides; and then the equally excruciating theology, God now suddenly, entirely, switching sides, empowering not the children of Israel but their wrongly tolerated antagonists. You could have nightmares about that.
But those nightmares depend, as implied earlier, on thinking of the inhabitants not individually but collectively, not distinguishing one from another. That habit of mind, powerful as it is, can have some very dangerous consequences – it’s what E. M. Forster was alluding to when he said, “if I have to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country, I hope to God I choose to betray my country.” And it’s as a safeguard against that habit of mind, maybe, that the parasha that asks us to nurture that habit of mind also, and at greater length, asks us to nurture the habit of mind that produces the respite, the slowing down of judgment, the attention to details of fact and person, that animate the cities of refuge.
May all who need them find them.
Parsha Devarim
by Larry Rosenwald
The book of Deuteronomy, sefer devarim, is, as its Hebrew name suggests, mostly a presentation of the devarim, the speech, the discourses or words or matters, proclaimed by Mosheh to the Israelites before his death, and before the Israelites’ entry into, or invasion of, Canaan. It is an extraordinary speech. I've sometimes imagined a gifted, ambitious actor presenting a part of it as an audition piece, trying to do justice to its range of emotion - grief, resentment, anger, pride, satisfaction - and to its range of theological, historical, and political thought.
What I'll focus on today, though, is the brief passage preceding the speech, what one might in the same theatrical context call its stage directions . . .
Eleh devarim, these are the words that Mosheh worded - the verb and the noun have the same root - to all Israel . . .
To all Israel. Including, some commentators say, Mosheh himself, the words being spoken by him but also to him, indicting but also self-indicting. And we might linger longer over kol yisrael, reminding ourselves of how much might be included in that "all." All who obey, all who disobey, Israelites of all genders and ages, prominent and obscure, named and unnamed (though of course all had names, even if not all are named in the biblical text), elders and officials, woodchoppers and water carriers. All who are present; perhaps even, as a later passage suggests, the beginning of Nitzavim, all who are not present: "I make this covenant . .. not with you alone, not only with those who are standing here with us this day before God, but also those who are not with us here this day." All, all, all. All of them, all of us.
Where did Mosheh speak these words? be'ever hayarden, across or on the other side or beyond the Jordan. Spoken, clearly, from the standpoint of someone on the opposite side of the river from Mosheh, meaning, the commentaries tell us, an Israelite who has entered Canaan. Which is almost unbearably poignant, because from the standpoint of Mosheh, across or beyond the Jordan is the place God has told him he will not enter, be'ever hayarden is a definition of what he will not have. For the speaker of the narration, the phrase denotes only location; for Mosheh, privation. He is as he speaks, as the next word tells us, bamidbar, in the wilderness. Which word - I'm borrowing this line of thought from Aliza - seems to derive from the same root as does devarim itself, the word for speech and the word for wilderness. In this context, that makes profound sense: there, in the wilderness, on the far or near side of the Jordan, in the place of words, Mosheh words his words to all Israel.
We learn more of where he is, the narrator naming the place more precisely if less evocatively: in the Arabah near Suph, between Paran and Tofel, Lavan, Chatzerot, Di-Zahav. But then the narrator, between naming place and naming time, turns aside to note that it is eleven days from Horeb, i.e., Sinai, the place of revelation, to Kadesh-Barnea, by way of Mt. Seir, Kadesh-Barnea being at the border of Canaan. Eleven days, eleven days, that's all it would have taken had the Israelites proceeded directly, with courage and in obedience, had Mosheh not - we might think - predisposed the spies to gloomy pessimism, better instilled in them a spirit of confidence. It is a cruel observation, or implication, if a just one - and its cruelty is the greater because the narrator, having told us that eleven days would have sufficed, then names, in precise and lacerating detail, the day on which the speech was actually given: in the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month. Eleven days; forty years.
Then, in a last situating before the speech itself begins, the narrator notes one particular event as the event significantly proceeding the speech, namely, Mosheh's "defeat" of Sichon and Og, as if this military conquest were what gave authority to Mosheh's words, as in our own world we are in the habit, if not the unchallenged habit, or listening deferentially to the discourses of generals. "Conquest," with its political semantic field, may not be the word here; when Mosheh describes the event later, in the speech, he is describing an extermination, a conquest the kills men, women, and children - another poignant "all," this time "all" of the people Sichon and Og ruled over.
Now at last the narrator is ready, or almost ready, to let Mosheh begin to speak. The narrator reminds us once again of where the speech takes place, be'ever hayarden, in the land of Moab, in the wilderness, not in Canaan. And in that place of unarrival, the leader, the failure, the conqueror, speaks to all Israel, Israel then, Israel now, this teaching, this torah, leimor.
Which is to say, "and now the speech," and the speech begins. But my devar now ends.
What I'll focus on today, though, is the brief passage preceding the speech, what one might in the same theatrical context call its stage directions . . .
Eleh devarim, these are the words that Mosheh worded - the verb and the noun have the same root - to all Israel . . .
To all Israel. Including, some commentators say, Mosheh himself, the words being spoken by him but also to him, indicting but also self-indicting. And we might linger longer over kol yisrael, reminding ourselves of how much might be included in that "all." All who obey, all who disobey, Israelites of all genders and ages, prominent and obscure, named and unnamed (though of course all had names, even if not all are named in the biblical text), elders and officials, woodchoppers and water carriers. All who are present; perhaps even, as a later passage suggests, the beginning of Nitzavim, all who are not present: "I make this covenant . .. not with you alone, not only with those who are standing here with us this day before God, but also those who are not with us here this day." All, all, all. All of them, all of us.
Where did Mosheh speak these words? be'ever hayarden, across or on the other side or beyond the Jordan. Spoken, clearly, from the standpoint of someone on the opposite side of the river from Mosheh, meaning, the commentaries tell us, an Israelite who has entered Canaan. Which is almost unbearably poignant, because from the standpoint of Mosheh, across or beyond the Jordan is the place God has told him he will not enter, be'ever hayarden is a definition of what he will not have. For the speaker of the narration, the phrase denotes only location; for Mosheh, privation. He is as he speaks, as the next word tells us, bamidbar, in the wilderness. Which word - I'm borrowing this line of thought from Aliza - seems to derive from the same root as does devarim itself, the word for speech and the word for wilderness. In this context, that makes profound sense: there, in the wilderness, on the far or near side of the Jordan, in the place of words, Mosheh words his words to all Israel.
We learn more of where he is, the narrator naming the place more precisely if less evocatively: in the Arabah near Suph, between Paran and Tofel, Lavan, Chatzerot, Di-Zahav. But then the narrator, between naming place and naming time, turns aside to note that it is eleven days from Horeb, i.e., Sinai, the place of revelation, to Kadesh-Barnea, by way of Mt. Seir, Kadesh-Barnea being at the border of Canaan. Eleven days, eleven days, that's all it would have taken had the Israelites proceeded directly, with courage and in obedience, had Mosheh not - we might think - predisposed the spies to gloomy pessimism, better instilled in them a spirit of confidence. It is a cruel observation, or implication, if a just one - and its cruelty is the greater because the narrator, having told us that eleven days would have sufficed, then names, in precise and lacerating detail, the day on which the speech was actually given: in the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month. Eleven days; forty years.
Then, in a last situating before the speech itself begins, the narrator notes one particular event as the event significantly proceeding the speech, namely, Mosheh's "defeat" of Sichon and Og, as if this military conquest were what gave authority to Mosheh's words, as in our own world we are in the habit, if not the unchallenged habit, or listening deferentially to the discourses of generals. "Conquest," with its political semantic field, may not be the word here; when Mosheh describes the event later, in the speech, he is describing an extermination, a conquest the kills men, women, and children - another poignant "all," this time "all" of the people Sichon and Og ruled over.
Now at last the narrator is ready, or almost ready, to let Mosheh begin to speak. The narrator reminds us once again of where the speech takes place, be'ever hayarden, in the land of Moab, in the wilderness, not in Canaan. And in that place of unarrival, the leader, the failure, the conqueror, speaks to all Israel, Israel then, Israel now, this teaching, this torah, leimor.
Which is to say, "and now the speech," and the speech begins. But my devar now ends.
On Re'eh
Given by Larry Rosenwald 8/27/2022
There’s much to say about the parashah -the great image and theater of the choice between curse and blessing, for example, or the supercharged commandments to destroy the sacred places of the Canaanites. But today is also the day for the third of the haftarot of consolation, a passage from Isaiah 54-55, and it’s about consolation and that passage that I’d like to talk.
What consoles us? That’s the question. What consoled them, the writers and hearers of the text? The same things that would console us,different things? If we were imagining consolation, would it look like the passage in Isaiah?
To that passage in a moment, but first some more general remarks. Consolation isn’t happiness (though it may include happiness), it isn’t utopia (though it may sound like it now and then). It is what follows misery, deprivation, oppression, just as the haftarot of consolation follow Tisha B’Av, which in turn follows the haftarot of admonition. Admonition, punishment, comfort, restoration. There is a temporal sequence that consolation is part of.
This is no doubt evident, but I mention it explicitly because doing so reminds us to think about two different things when we weigh the passage. One is the ethical validity of the consolations promised us: do we want them, are they good in themselves? The other is their psychological plausibility: can we imagine finding in ourselves a desire to have this or that consolatory thing happen? -e.g., victory over the oppressor, slaughtering the enemy or the enemy’s children. I do not want anyone’s children dashed against stones, that is immoral if anything is, but it is possible, if I imagine, khas v’kholile, that my own children had been dashed against stones, to imagine myself wanting revenge in just that form. I would hold back as ardently and forcefully as I could from bringing that about, but not because I wouldn’t feel the desire . . .
The other thing about consolation -I mean, there are many things about consolation, but this is the other one that struck me most forcefully -is that it is, in some way, passive. We can behave in such a way as to earn it, just as -in the world of the Torah -we can behave in such a way as to earn the appalling miseries described in the Book of Lamentations on Tisha B’Av. But God is doing the consoling, just as God is doing the chastising. (Related, maybe: the difference between thinking of Passover as the festival of freedom and thinking of it as the festival of liberation, the latter term suggesting a larger role for God, the former a larger role for us.) The haftarot of consolation are not about our sovereign power to console ourselves.
General remarks over, and now to the passage.
Isaiah 54:11-12: *. Emma Lazarus must have been reading this when she wrote “The New Colossus” -send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me -and on another day I’d love to talk about her as a great Jewish poet, but not today. Today what I notice is the exuberant beauty with which this third haftarah of consolation begins -carbuncles and sapphires and rubies, unspecified precious stones and gems. Beauty as consolation.
Note that the addressee is female (i.e., the Hebrew verbs etc. are in the feminine). Consolation is gendered feminine; it would seem, offered -by a male God, presumably -to a woman, a husband to a wife. (Readers of the Hav siddur and machzor will recognize as old friends the feminine forms, rare in other prayerbooks.)
13-14: *. The second aspect ofconsolation: the well-being of one’s children, mentioned even before one’s own well-being is. What we ourselves are promised is not happiness but a freedom from fear. This is not a Rooseveltian freedom -“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” teaches us something about the nature of fear, but it locates the solution in the self and the self’s control of the emotions. Here, in accord with what was noted above, we are not to be afraid because God controls the “instruments of havoc,” determines the outcomes of events. If God controls the instruments, then we need not fear them.
When we go further, everything changes. Gender first; now, as is all too common, we are in the masculine. Now we are also in the realm of the body and the purse. Water for all, and nothing to pay, food without money, “wine and milk without cost.” A blessed inversion of Lamentations, where “they have bartered their treasures for food to stay alive.” This feels paradisal, utopian, fundamental -the most consoling moment in the passage, for me at any rate. Adorno says of utopia that “the only tender aspect would be the most obvious:that no one would be hungry any more.” Nor would anyone go into debt, or go broke, or steal, so as not to be hungry, all of which extreme injustices are all too common. Think of it -it’s as if the whole world were a little free pantry.
The passage ends with a triumphant national victory: *. Or at least I imagine that image, of the supplicant or defeated nation running toward Israel, is intended as an image of triumph for Israel, wretched capitulation of the Gentiles. Not for me a compelling image of consolation ethically, though as noted above an understandable one psychologically. In any case, I propose to understand it in accord with our Siddur as Aliza as emended it -this is right after the ark is opened, and the flight of enemies is reconfigured as the return of enemies to God, or here the return of disparate nations to some sort of reconciliation.
I come back to my initial question. Are these images of consolation -dazzling beauty, the flourishing of one’s children, freedom from fear, food and water without cost, elemental needs met without financial exploitation, triumph over one’s enemies (or reconciliation with one’s enemies) -are they our images of consolation? Do they make ethical sense, psychological sense? Are you consoled by them? Is there something missing, something false? Does the gendering work for you? What would youwrite if you were to write a haftarah of consolation?
What consoles us? That’s the question. What consoled them, the writers and hearers of the text? The same things that would console us,different things? If we were imagining consolation, would it look like the passage in Isaiah?
To that passage in a moment, but first some more general remarks. Consolation isn’t happiness (though it may include happiness), it isn’t utopia (though it may sound like it now and then). It is what follows misery, deprivation, oppression, just as the haftarot of consolation follow Tisha B’Av, which in turn follows the haftarot of admonition. Admonition, punishment, comfort, restoration. There is a temporal sequence that consolation is part of.
This is no doubt evident, but I mention it explicitly because doing so reminds us to think about two different things when we weigh the passage. One is the ethical validity of the consolations promised us: do we want them, are they good in themselves? The other is their psychological plausibility: can we imagine finding in ourselves a desire to have this or that consolatory thing happen? -e.g., victory over the oppressor, slaughtering the enemy or the enemy’s children. I do not want anyone’s children dashed against stones, that is immoral if anything is, but it is possible, if I imagine, khas v’kholile, that my own children had been dashed against stones, to imagine myself wanting revenge in just that form. I would hold back as ardently and forcefully as I could from bringing that about, but not because I wouldn’t feel the desire . . .
The other thing about consolation -I mean, there are many things about consolation, but this is the other one that struck me most forcefully -is that it is, in some way, passive. We can behave in such a way as to earn it, just as -in the world of the Torah -we can behave in such a way as to earn the appalling miseries described in the Book of Lamentations on Tisha B’Av. But God is doing the consoling, just as God is doing the chastising. (Related, maybe: the difference between thinking of Passover as the festival of freedom and thinking of it as the festival of liberation, the latter term suggesting a larger role for God, the former a larger role for us.) The haftarot of consolation are not about our sovereign power to console ourselves.
General remarks over, and now to the passage.
Isaiah 54:11-12: *. Emma Lazarus must have been reading this when she wrote “The New Colossus” -send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me -and on another day I’d love to talk about her as a great Jewish poet, but not today. Today what I notice is the exuberant beauty with which this third haftarah of consolation begins -carbuncles and sapphires and rubies, unspecified precious stones and gems. Beauty as consolation.
Note that the addressee is female (i.e., the Hebrew verbs etc. are in the feminine). Consolation is gendered feminine; it would seem, offered -by a male God, presumably -to a woman, a husband to a wife. (Readers of the Hav siddur and machzor will recognize as old friends the feminine forms, rare in other prayerbooks.)
13-14: *. The second aspect ofconsolation: the well-being of one’s children, mentioned even before one’s own well-being is. What we ourselves are promised is not happiness but a freedom from fear. This is not a Rooseveltian freedom -“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” teaches us something about the nature of fear, but it locates the solution in the self and the self’s control of the emotions. Here, in accord with what was noted above, we are not to be afraid because God controls the “instruments of havoc,” determines the outcomes of events. If God controls the instruments, then we need not fear them.
When we go further, everything changes. Gender first; now, as is all too common, we are in the masculine. Now we are also in the realm of the body and the purse. Water for all, and nothing to pay, food without money, “wine and milk without cost.” A blessed inversion of Lamentations, where “they have bartered their treasures for food to stay alive.” This feels paradisal, utopian, fundamental -the most consoling moment in the passage, for me at any rate. Adorno says of utopia that “the only tender aspect would be the most obvious:that no one would be hungry any more.” Nor would anyone go into debt, or go broke, or steal, so as not to be hungry, all of which extreme injustices are all too common. Think of it -it’s as if the whole world were a little free pantry.
The passage ends with a triumphant national victory: *. Or at least I imagine that image, of the supplicant or defeated nation running toward Israel, is intended as an image of triumph for Israel, wretched capitulation of the Gentiles. Not for me a compelling image of consolation ethically, though as noted above an understandable one psychologically. In any case, I propose to understand it in accord with our Siddur as Aliza as emended it -this is right after the ark is opened, and the flight of enemies is reconfigured as the return of enemies to God, or here the return of disparate nations to some sort of reconciliation.
I come back to my initial question. Are these images of consolation -dazzling beauty, the flourishing of one’s children, freedom from fear, food and water without cost, elemental needs met without financial exploitation, triumph over one’s enemies (or reconciliation with one’s enemies) -are they our images of consolation? Do they make ethical sense, psychological sense? Are you consoled by them? Is there something missing, something false? Does the gendering work for you? What would youwrite if you were to write a haftarah of consolation?
Being Jewish Now (2025)
Given by Larry Rosenwald
April 26, 2025
April 26, 2025
I’m a person of strongly held views, and much of this devar will make that clear. But the devar comes from deep uncertainty, and I hope make that clear as well. And everything is in flux; perhaps the best way to regard the devar is as a snapshot of a state of mind.
In any case, the devar emerges from some experiences I had while reading Peter Beinart's recent book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. It will then be a devar that has to do with the present political moment in Israel-Palestine. It will not, though, principally be a devar about that political moment. Rather I'll be taking that moment, and Beinart's book, as occasions for reflecting on what it means to be Jewish now, after or rather during the destruction of Gaza, and for reflecting in particular on one aspect of being Jewish now, namely, the words we say and sing when we daven. This is not something that Beinart talks about at length in the book, but I think the book leads to it. I’ll focus both on the words we have in common with other Jewish traditions and on the ones we’ve altered.
I do have to say something about the moment we’re in. It is of course the moment following the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis, and I hope and imagine, though I do not know, that Muslims are enough shaken by that atrocity that they are asking whether anything in their texts and prayers can be construed as leading to it, and if so how those texts and prayers can be dealt with. It is also the moment in which the government of Israel has killed over 51,000 people in Gaza. (I take these and other statistics and quotations from Haaretz.) It seems right to me, urgent to me, in relation to that murderous war, to ask whether our texts or prayers can be construed as leading to that war, and if so how we should deal with them.
I say that because it’s what I think about pretty much whenever I say a prayer; it’s why I get apprehensive every time I head off from home to shul. But I also say it because so often, in the course of that war, religious texts have been cited in support of it. The most extreme example I know is that of West Bank Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, whose book The King’s Torah justifies the killing of non-Jews on halachic grounds, and goes so far as to say that “there is justification in harming infants if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us” (Haaretz). But it is not the only example, nor are examples hard to find.
The mental exercise I have in mind is one I started thinking about years ago, when I read the 18th-century Quaker diarist and activist John Woolman. In a short treatise called A Plea for the Poor, Woolman argues that we need to look everywhere in our lives for what he calls “the seeds of war,” so that we may uproot them:
Oh, that we who declare against wars . . .may walk in the Light and therein examine our foundation and motives in holding great estates! May we look upon our treasures and the furniture of our houses and the garments in which we array ourselves and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions or not. Holding treasures in the self-pleasing spirit is a strong plant, the fruit whereof ripens fast.
Woolman speaks of estates and treasures. I take the great Jewish estates and treasures to be our texts and prayers. And I think we need to look at them to see whether the seeds of the war in Gaza “have any nourishment in these our possessions or not.” And in that looking, we need the unsparing discernment that Woolman calls for in his reference to walking “in the light,” that perceptive, almost impersonal inner light that is central to Quaker practice.
The remainder of what I have to say is a set of examples – not all the examples that come to mind, but a variegated sample.
I’ll start with the aliyah blessing. The Hav rewrote this in several ways, but the way I want to focus on is the almost inaudible one, the change from mi kol ha’amim to im kol ha’amim, from “chose us from among all nations” to “chose us along with all nations.” Mi vs. im. Almost inaudible, as noted.
But a big deal. I remember hearing the late Everett Gendler, at I think the 50th Hav reunion, when he had just been shown this change; he liked it, and suddenly he was booming out a bass-baritone im with all his might - not surprising in a man whose great book of essays is called Judaism for Universalists, but joyous and emphatic. I also remember an aliyah I had once at the Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel, where I chanted the blessing with im and not mi, and my friend Norman Janis, who was leyning, murmured to me, “esh zarah,” “alien fire.” Everett and Norman were both right, it’s a big deal, like it or dislike it, because chosenness is a big deal, and refusing chosenness, or sharing chosenness rather, is also a big deal. One thing that enables Rabbi Shapira’s horrific comments, and in my view enables Jewish Israelis’ horrific behavior, is a sense of radical difference between Jews and Palestinians. Once you have that difference in mind, once a mind is shaped by that difference, well, maybe it’s not so bad if Palestinians, who are Others, have to suffer a little, or a lot, or die a little, or a lot. (I think in connection with this about two versions of that Talmudic passage that everyone loves to quote these days, that if you save or destroy one person, it is as if you have saved or destroyed a universe. In that passage, the Babylonian Talmud refers to one person miyisrael, one Jew. The Jerusalem Talmud makes no such restriction: one person, of any kind whatever.)
I’m not saying there’s no way of thinking of oneself as chosen that doesn’t lead to thinking of others as being something less than made in the divine image. I am saying it might be hard to find one. That is why, these days, when I come to the moment in the birchot ha-shachar when one blesses God for making one a Jew, she asani yisrael, I hesitate. I mean, a Jew is what I am, by way of one mixed marriage and atheist ancestor after another, and I rejoice in being that, in living that, but why am I blessing God for making me that? How much does saying that blessing contribute to a dangerous sense of chosenness? (That’s a real question, not a rhetorical one.)
What does it mean, these days, to say or sing, in psalm 122, sha’alu sh’lom yirushalayim, “pray for the peace of Jerusalem”? I’d rather have Jerusalem at peace than at war. But what if Jerusalem - meaning not the Jerusalem of psalm 122 but the Jerusalem of the present moment, where the Knesset meets, in Givat Ram - is itself at peace, or at least unbombed, but is also the place from which cruel war emerges and devastates so many lives of those far away? Nina Katz likes to point out that when we sing the song that sets these words, we change the words of the psalm in a small but significant way, making the verse mean, “pray, O Jerusalem, for peace”: sha’alu shalom yirushalayim. I do indeed wish that Jerusalem were praying for peace, though I fear it is not. But the psalm verse isn’t asking it to; it’s we who are doing that, and we are doing it by wrenching the psalm verse away from its plain sense, which is a call to pray for Jerusalem’s peace and not peace elsewhere or everywhere.
What does it mean, these days, to chant psalm 124? - one of Ruth Abrams’s favorite psalms, and for the same reason one of mine, because its grammar is so exhilaratingly conditional, reminding us that prayer needs to be in all the modes and tenses there are, and maybe needs to be in some modes and tenses that haven’t been invented yet:
A song of ascents. Of David.
Were it not for the LORD, who was on our side,
let Israel now declare,
were it not for the LORD, who was on our side
when men assailed us,
they would have swallowed us alive
in their burning rage against us;
the waters would have carried us off,
the torrent would have swept over us;
over us would have swept
the seething waters.
Blessed is the LORD, who did not let us
be ripped apart by their teeth. (Translation from Sefaria)
Exhilarating grammar aside, the psalm imagines Jews as we most like to be imagined, as being existentially threatened by others and enemies yet somehow, by God’s power and providence and love, somehow surviving. And I wish us survival. But imagining ourselves only as those being threatened, and never as those doing the threatening and the avenging, as Jews are doing in Gaza, and on the West Bank, and perhaps in the near future in Iran, is maybe something we should stop doing, and we should invent some prayers that imagine us as the murderous people we are capable of being, and then imagine some way of controlling those murderous impulses once we face them.
We do, of course, have some texts that do that, and they’re part of the liturgy of much of the Jewish world, though not of ours. I praise and delight in almost every change we have made to the traditional liturgy; those changes have made it possible – not just comfortable, possible – for me to chant the aleynu, and to rejoice, as we begin the Torah service, at the thought that God’s enemies will return to God rather than be scattered into exile and privation. But consider psalm 149, which we chant as part of pesukei d’zimra, and which says, “Let the faithful exult in glory, with paeans to God in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to impose retribution upon the nations, punishment upon the peoples. This is the glory of all His faithful.” We got rid of that text, and substituted for it the deeply moving and beautiful prophetic verse, ve lo yishama od chamas be’artsam, “let the noise of violence be heard no more in our land,” which I love and wrote a tune for. But maybe we’re not entirely doing ourselves a service in eliminating that language, because that language encourages us to face head-on our desires for retribution and punishment. As does the still more horrific language of psalm 137, which in other places is chanted or said before Birkat hamazon on weekdays, and in preparation for Tisha B’Av, but we don’t ever say or sing or it through to the end, because what it says in the end is this: “Fair Babylon, you predator,/ a blessing on him who repays you in kind what you have inflicted on us; /a blessing on him who seizes your babies/ and dashes them against the rocks!”
That’s as far as I can go at the moment. I feel this pressure, the pressure to ask where the seeds of war might be in our liturgy, all the time when I’m at davening. I can get past that pressure sometimes, can feel the joy and beauty and comfort of the words we’re speaking or singing. But the pressure is 1there.
In any case, the devar emerges from some experiences I had while reading Peter Beinart's recent book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. It will then be a devar that has to do with the present political moment in Israel-Palestine. It will not, though, principally be a devar about that political moment. Rather I'll be taking that moment, and Beinart's book, as occasions for reflecting on what it means to be Jewish now, after or rather during the destruction of Gaza, and for reflecting in particular on one aspect of being Jewish now, namely, the words we say and sing when we daven. This is not something that Beinart talks about at length in the book, but I think the book leads to it. I’ll focus both on the words we have in common with other Jewish traditions and on the ones we’ve altered.
I do have to say something about the moment we’re in. It is of course the moment following the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis, and I hope and imagine, though I do not know, that Muslims are enough shaken by that atrocity that they are asking whether anything in their texts and prayers can be construed as leading to it, and if so how those texts and prayers can be dealt with. It is also the moment in which the government of Israel has killed over 51,000 people in Gaza. (I take these and other statistics and quotations from Haaretz.) It seems right to me, urgent to me, in relation to that murderous war, to ask whether our texts or prayers can be construed as leading to that war, and if so how we should deal with them.
I say that because it’s what I think about pretty much whenever I say a prayer; it’s why I get apprehensive every time I head off from home to shul. But I also say it because so often, in the course of that war, religious texts have been cited in support of it. The most extreme example I know is that of West Bank Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, whose book The King’s Torah justifies the killing of non-Jews on halachic grounds, and goes so far as to say that “there is justification in harming infants if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us” (Haaretz). But it is not the only example, nor are examples hard to find.
The mental exercise I have in mind is one I started thinking about years ago, when I read the 18th-century Quaker diarist and activist John Woolman. In a short treatise called A Plea for the Poor, Woolman argues that we need to look everywhere in our lives for what he calls “the seeds of war,” so that we may uproot them:
Oh, that we who declare against wars . . .may walk in the Light and therein examine our foundation and motives in holding great estates! May we look upon our treasures and the furniture of our houses and the garments in which we array ourselves and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions or not. Holding treasures in the self-pleasing spirit is a strong plant, the fruit whereof ripens fast.
Woolman speaks of estates and treasures. I take the great Jewish estates and treasures to be our texts and prayers. And I think we need to look at them to see whether the seeds of the war in Gaza “have any nourishment in these our possessions or not.” And in that looking, we need the unsparing discernment that Woolman calls for in his reference to walking “in the light,” that perceptive, almost impersonal inner light that is central to Quaker practice.
The remainder of what I have to say is a set of examples – not all the examples that come to mind, but a variegated sample.
I’ll start with the aliyah blessing. The Hav rewrote this in several ways, but the way I want to focus on is the almost inaudible one, the change from mi kol ha’amim to im kol ha’amim, from “chose us from among all nations” to “chose us along with all nations.” Mi vs. im. Almost inaudible, as noted.
But a big deal. I remember hearing the late Everett Gendler, at I think the 50th Hav reunion, when he had just been shown this change; he liked it, and suddenly he was booming out a bass-baritone im with all his might - not surprising in a man whose great book of essays is called Judaism for Universalists, but joyous and emphatic. I also remember an aliyah I had once at the Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel, where I chanted the blessing with im and not mi, and my friend Norman Janis, who was leyning, murmured to me, “esh zarah,” “alien fire.” Everett and Norman were both right, it’s a big deal, like it or dislike it, because chosenness is a big deal, and refusing chosenness, or sharing chosenness rather, is also a big deal. One thing that enables Rabbi Shapira’s horrific comments, and in my view enables Jewish Israelis’ horrific behavior, is a sense of radical difference between Jews and Palestinians. Once you have that difference in mind, once a mind is shaped by that difference, well, maybe it’s not so bad if Palestinians, who are Others, have to suffer a little, or a lot, or die a little, or a lot. (I think in connection with this about two versions of that Talmudic passage that everyone loves to quote these days, that if you save or destroy one person, it is as if you have saved or destroyed a universe. In that passage, the Babylonian Talmud refers to one person miyisrael, one Jew. The Jerusalem Talmud makes no such restriction: one person, of any kind whatever.)
I’m not saying there’s no way of thinking of oneself as chosen that doesn’t lead to thinking of others as being something less than made in the divine image. I am saying it might be hard to find one. That is why, these days, when I come to the moment in the birchot ha-shachar when one blesses God for making one a Jew, she asani yisrael, I hesitate. I mean, a Jew is what I am, by way of one mixed marriage and atheist ancestor after another, and I rejoice in being that, in living that, but why am I blessing God for making me that? How much does saying that blessing contribute to a dangerous sense of chosenness? (That’s a real question, not a rhetorical one.)
What does it mean, these days, to say or sing, in psalm 122, sha’alu sh’lom yirushalayim, “pray for the peace of Jerusalem”? I’d rather have Jerusalem at peace than at war. But what if Jerusalem - meaning not the Jerusalem of psalm 122 but the Jerusalem of the present moment, where the Knesset meets, in Givat Ram - is itself at peace, or at least unbombed, but is also the place from which cruel war emerges and devastates so many lives of those far away? Nina Katz likes to point out that when we sing the song that sets these words, we change the words of the psalm in a small but significant way, making the verse mean, “pray, O Jerusalem, for peace”: sha’alu shalom yirushalayim. I do indeed wish that Jerusalem were praying for peace, though I fear it is not. But the psalm verse isn’t asking it to; it’s we who are doing that, and we are doing it by wrenching the psalm verse away from its plain sense, which is a call to pray for Jerusalem’s peace and not peace elsewhere or everywhere.
What does it mean, these days, to chant psalm 124? - one of Ruth Abrams’s favorite psalms, and for the same reason one of mine, because its grammar is so exhilaratingly conditional, reminding us that prayer needs to be in all the modes and tenses there are, and maybe needs to be in some modes and tenses that haven’t been invented yet:
A song of ascents. Of David.
Were it not for the LORD, who was on our side,
let Israel now declare,
were it not for the LORD, who was on our side
when men assailed us,
they would have swallowed us alive
in their burning rage against us;
the waters would have carried us off,
the torrent would have swept over us;
over us would have swept
the seething waters.
Blessed is the LORD, who did not let us
be ripped apart by their teeth. (Translation from Sefaria)
Exhilarating grammar aside, the psalm imagines Jews as we most like to be imagined, as being existentially threatened by others and enemies yet somehow, by God’s power and providence and love, somehow surviving. And I wish us survival. But imagining ourselves only as those being threatened, and never as those doing the threatening and the avenging, as Jews are doing in Gaza, and on the West Bank, and perhaps in the near future in Iran, is maybe something we should stop doing, and we should invent some prayers that imagine us as the murderous people we are capable of being, and then imagine some way of controlling those murderous impulses once we face them.
We do, of course, have some texts that do that, and they’re part of the liturgy of much of the Jewish world, though not of ours. I praise and delight in almost every change we have made to the traditional liturgy; those changes have made it possible – not just comfortable, possible – for me to chant the aleynu, and to rejoice, as we begin the Torah service, at the thought that God’s enemies will return to God rather than be scattered into exile and privation. But consider psalm 149, which we chant as part of pesukei d’zimra, and which says, “Let the faithful exult in glory, with paeans to God in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to impose retribution upon the nations, punishment upon the peoples. This is the glory of all His faithful.” We got rid of that text, and substituted for it the deeply moving and beautiful prophetic verse, ve lo yishama od chamas be’artsam, “let the noise of violence be heard no more in our land,” which I love and wrote a tune for. But maybe we’re not entirely doing ourselves a service in eliminating that language, because that language encourages us to face head-on our desires for retribution and punishment. As does the still more horrific language of psalm 137, which in other places is chanted or said before Birkat hamazon on weekdays, and in preparation for Tisha B’Av, but we don’t ever say or sing or it through to the end, because what it says in the end is this: “Fair Babylon, you predator,/ a blessing on him who repays you in kind what you have inflicted on us; /a blessing on him who seizes your babies/ and dashes them against the rocks!”
That’s as far as I can go at the moment. I feel this pressure, the pressure to ask where the seeds of war might be in our liturgy, all the time when I’m at davening. I can get past that pressure sometimes, can feel the joy and beauty and comfort of the words we’re speaking or singing. But the pressure is 1there.
On the Book of Jonah in Trump’s America
Given by Larry Rosenwald 2017
Play
Mincha and the reading of Jonah that is at the heart of Mincha are a moment of play; the story of Jonah, whatever its deep meanings, is as irresistibly theatrical as the Book of Esther – one of the similarities underlying the idea that yom hakippurim, the day of atonements, is to be understood as meaning yom ha-ki-purim, the day that is like Purim. (An anecdote illustrating that similarity: I own a vast, dark blue, French naval surplus cape. I have worn it to play the King of the Goblins in Eric Kimmel’s Hershl and the Hanukkah Goblins; I have worn it to play homen harashe, Haman the Terrible; and when our kids were growing up, and on Yom Kippur on our sun porch we would stage the play of Jonah, Purim-like, I wore the cape to impersonate the whale.)
Teshuvah
Seldom in Jewish tradition and practice is playfulness at odds with deep meaning, of course. So at this playful moment, which is also this late and meaning-saturated moment, whose lateness in the sequence of the days of awe intensifies the meanings it is saturated with, we talk about Jonah and the work of teshuvah.
The focus of such talk has to be on Jonah himself. The rulers and citizens of Nineveh do teshuvah so decisively and swiftly and unanimously and un-self-reversingly that I at any rate can only admire them, not take them as a usable model. The sailors aboard Jonah’s ship do teshuvah – at any rate they ask for forgiveness – but there is so little transgression in what they have done, and so much of whole-hearted repentance in how they speak of it, that they too are for me inimitable. It is only Jonah, who sins, repents, acts rightly the second time round, sins again, is rebuked, perhaps repents and perhaps does not, who feels like a useful model, who feels imitable.
We don’t all get to live in the belly of the whale, to be sure, where ‘the eyes of the whale served Jonah as windows, and besides, there was a diamond, which shone as brilliantly as the sun at midday, so that Jonah could see all things in the sea down to its very bottom” (Ginzberg). But when we sin and repent, we do so in Jonah’s way: imperfectly, inconsistently, but genuinely. In spite of our imperfections and inconsistencies, we can, as Jonah does, find the courage and wisdom to acknowledge our transgressions – not so eloquently as Jonah does in the belly of the whale, perhaps, but as openly and unguardedly. We can, as Jonah does, when we are given a second chance to do what we failed to do the first time, seize that chance and act rightly. As with Jonah, acting rightly that second time will not transform us utterly; we will backslide, we will remain the imperfect people we were before. But we will nonetheless have acted rightly and such right action will be as much a part of us as our imperfections are.
Rebuking
So much for the psychological and moral style of Jonah’s teshuvah. But something needs to be said, more precisely I need to say something, about the nature of the right action he takes when he finally get around to taking it. I need to say this for myself, as a personal matter, but also as a political matter, in the United States of America in 2017.
In that situation, I notice with special vividness that the particular action which Jonah avoids doing, but later repents avoiding and nerves himself to do, is an action of rebuke. He was commanded to call out upon Nineveh that its wickedness had come before the face of God, and instead fled to Tarshish. He repents, returns, and rebukes, calling out, “forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown.” What in this year, in this place, is the use of his rebuke for us?
Jonah’s failure, in relation to God’s first command, is that he remains silent and does not rebuke. This part of his story suggests that silence can be a sin. That is worth pondering.
Unsurprisingly, our tradition has various views of silence. At the end of the amidah, we say, velimkalelay nafshi tidom, may my soul be silent to those who curse me; previously, though, at the end of psalm 30, we have said, lema’an yezamrech chavod velo yidom, “that my soul might sing to you and not be silenced.” Where between these two ideas should we situate ourselves?
In the liturgy for Yom Kippur in particular, there is a curious asymmetry. In the al heyt we confess to sins of speech: [bevitui sefatayim, b’dibur peh, b’tume’at sefatayim, b’tipshut peh, bilshon hara,] the sin we have sinned before you in idle chatter and the way we talk, in foul speech and foolish discourse, in speaking badly of others. Neither there nor in the ashamnu, though, do we confess to sins of silence. Let me propose some: for the sin that we have committed before you by keeping silent out of fear, by keeping silent out of civility and deference, by keeping silent out of excessive self-doubt or humility, excessive desire to be liked or thought well of. It would be good to add such sins to our catalogue; they are real. “Silence is death,” we know the truth of that claim all too well. (And adding sins of silence to our catalogues would give them the just symmetry of Benjamin Franklin’s quasi-Talmudic remark, that as we must account for every idle word, so we must account for every idle silence.)
After Jonah repents, he breaks his silence and speaks. Reading his words, I see not only what he does but also what he does not do. What he says to the Ninevites is simple and direct: “forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown,” nothing more than that, nothing less than that. He does not speak harshly, hurtfully, viciously, he does not make ad hominem attacks. Nor, however, does he speak in humility; he seeks no dialogue. He does not say, I see your point of view, I see where you’re coming from, I confess that I may be wrong, I imagine that the truth lies somewhere between us. His judgment is absolute. (Hence what I imagine to be his fear of being disbelieved, rejected, stoned, slaughtered. But he spoke what he was given to speak.)
What is the lesson here for me, for you, for us? By temperament, by a fervent commitment to Gandhian nonviolence and an equally fervent commitment to a Buberian I-Thou relationship with all sentient beings, I shy away from expressing such uncompromising judgments. I doubt I’m the only person in this room, in this house, in this community, with such a temperament and commitments. But when I turn from my temperament to what Gandhi’s associate J. P. Narayan called “the needs of the hour,” I sense that my temperament may be getting in the way of justice, may be keeping me from saying what needs to be said.
What deferential language can one find, after all, to speak to those who turn away refugees from the golden door? (I am of course alluding to Emma Lazarus’s great poem on the right reception of refugees, more melodious than Jonah’s prophecy but no less uncompromising.) What deferential, dialogic language can one find to address those who would deny health care to those most in need of it and least able to pay for it, who cannot hear the cry that Simone Weil said was the beginning of all justice, on me fait du mal, someone is hurting me, which cry Weil said was an infallible guide to right action?[1] What civil language for those who cannot hear the groaning of the earth itself in its storms of air and water and fire? One might instead need to say something like what Jonah says: your wickedness has come before the countenance of heaven, yet forty days and your rule will be overthrown.
When Yom Kippur is over, I shall for the most part go back to being the person I was before it, as Jonah goes back to being Jonah after his action of rebuke. But only for the most part, I hope. I hope to bear in mind that sometimes we are called to rebuke and not only to listen.
I keep thinking in this connection of some of the last sentences of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which seem to me a guide to distinguishing between moments for listening and moments for rebuking. “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience,” he writes, “I beg you to forgive me.” But then he writes, “If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.” Not quite my language, but it teaches us this, that if sometimes we need forgiveness for overstatement and impatience, at other times we need forgiveness for understatement and patience. If sometimes our speech is not temperate enough, at other times it is not intemperate enough, not prophetic enough.
In this new year, may we have the wisdom to discern when we need to be temperate and when we need not to, and the courage to act in accord with the instructions our wisdom provides.
[1] http://www.in-limine.eu/2017/02/justice-verite-beaute-par-simone-weil.html
Mincha and the reading of Jonah that is at the heart of Mincha are a moment of play; the story of Jonah, whatever its deep meanings, is as irresistibly theatrical as the Book of Esther – one of the similarities underlying the idea that yom hakippurim, the day of atonements, is to be understood as meaning yom ha-ki-purim, the day that is like Purim. (An anecdote illustrating that similarity: I own a vast, dark blue, French naval surplus cape. I have worn it to play the King of the Goblins in Eric Kimmel’s Hershl and the Hanukkah Goblins; I have worn it to play homen harashe, Haman the Terrible; and when our kids were growing up, and on Yom Kippur on our sun porch we would stage the play of Jonah, Purim-like, I wore the cape to impersonate the whale.)
Teshuvah
Seldom in Jewish tradition and practice is playfulness at odds with deep meaning, of course. So at this playful moment, which is also this late and meaning-saturated moment, whose lateness in the sequence of the days of awe intensifies the meanings it is saturated with, we talk about Jonah and the work of teshuvah.
The focus of such talk has to be on Jonah himself. The rulers and citizens of Nineveh do teshuvah so decisively and swiftly and unanimously and un-self-reversingly that I at any rate can only admire them, not take them as a usable model. The sailors aboard Jonah’s ship do teshuvah – at any rate they ask for forgiveness – but there is so little transgression in what they have done, and so much of whole-hearted repentance in how they speak of it, that they too are for me inimitable. It is only Jonah, who sins, repents, acts rightly the second time round, sins again, is rebuked, perhaps repents and perhaps does not, who feels like a useful model, who feels imitable.
We don’t all get to live in the belly of the whale, to be sure, where ‘the eyes of the whale served Jonah as windows, and besides, there was a diamond, which shone as brilliantly as the sun at midday, so that Jonah could see all things in the sea down to its very bottom” (Ginzberg). But when we sin and repent, we do so in Jonah’s way: imperfectly, inconsistently, but genuinely. In spite of our imperfections and inconsistencies, we can, as Jonah does, find the courage and wisdom to acknowledge our transgressions – not so eloquently as Jonah does in the belly of the whale, perhaps, but as openly and unguardedly. We can, as Jonah does, when we are given a second chance to do what we failed to do the first time, seize that chance and act rightly. As with Jonah, acting rightly that second time will not transform us utterly; we will backslide, we will remain the imperfect people we were before. But we will nonetheless have acted rightly and such right action will be as much a part of us as our imperfections are.
Rebuking
So much for the psychological and moral style of Jonah’s teshuvah. But something needs to be said, more precisely I need to say something, about the nature of the right action he takes when he finally get around to taking it. I need to say this for myself, as a personal matter, but also as a political matter, in the United States of America in 2017.
In that situation, I notice with special vividness that the particular action which Jonah avoids doing, but later repents avoiding and nerves himself to do, is an action of rebuke. He was commanded to call out upon Nineveh that its wickedness had come before the face of God, and instead fled to Tarshish. He repents, returns, and rebukes, calling out, “forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown.” What in this year, in this place, is the use of his rebuke for us?
Jonah’s failure, in relation to God’s first command, is that he remains silent and does not rebuke. This part of his story suggests that silence can be a sin. That is worth pondering.
Unsurprisingly, our tradition has various views of silence. At the end of the amidah, we say, velimkalelay nafshi tidom, may my soul be silent to those who curse me; previously, though, at the end of psalm 30, we have said, lema’an yezamrech chavod velo yidom, “that my soul might sing to you and not be silenced.” Where between these two ideas should we situate ourselves?
In the liturgy for Yom Kippur in particular, there is a curious asymmetry. In the al heyt we confess to sins of speech: [bevitui sefatayim, b’dibur peh, b’tume’at sefatayim, b’tipshut peh, bilshon hara,] the sin we have sinned before you in idle chatter and the way we talk, in foul speech and foolish discourse, in speaking badly of others. Neither there nor in the ashamnu, though, do we confess to sins of silence. Let me propose some: for the sin that we have committed before you by keeping silent out of fear, by keeping silent out of civility and deference, by keeping silent out of excessive self-doubt or humility, excessive desire to be liked or thought well of. It would be good to add such sins to our catalogue; they are real. “Silence is death,” we know the truth of that claim all too well. (And adding sins of silence to our catalogues would give them the just symmetry of Benjamin Franklin’s quasi-Talmudic remark, that as we must account for every idle word, so we must account for every idle silence.)
After Jonah repents, he breaks his silence and speaks. Reading his words, I see not only what he does but also what he does not do. What he says to the Ninevites is simple and direct: “forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown,” nothing more than that, nothing less than that. He does not speak harshly, hurtfully, viciously, he does not make ad hominem attacks. Nor, however, does he speak in humility; he seeks no dialogue. He does not say, I see your point of view, I see where you’re coming from, I confess that I may be wrong, I imagine that the truth lies somewhere between us. His judgment is absolute. (Hence what I imagine to be his fear of being disbelieved, rejected, stoned, slaughtered. But he spoke what he was given to speak.)
What is the lesson here for me, for you, for us? By temperament, by a fervent commitment to Gandhian nonviolence and an equally fervent commitment to a Buberian I-Thou relationship with all sentient beings, I shy away from expressing such uncompromising judgments. I doubt I’m the only person in this room, in this house, in this community, with such a temperament and commitments. But when I turn from my temperament to what Gandhi’s associate J. P. Narayan called “the needs of the hour,” I sense that my temperament may be getting in the way of justice, may be keeping me from saying what needs to be said.
What deferential language can one find, after all, to speak to those who turn away refugees from the golden door? (I am of course alluding to Emma Lazarus’s great poem on the right reception of refugees, more melodious than Jonah’s prophecy but no less uncompromising.) What deferential, dialogic language can one find to address those who would deny health care to those most in need of it and least able to pay for it, who cannot hear the cry that Simone Weil said was the beginning of all justice, on me fait du mal, someone is hurting me, which cry Weil said was an infallible guide to right action?[1] What civil language for those who cannot hear the groaning of the earth itself in its storms of air and water and fire? One might instead need to say something like what Jonah says: your wickedness has come before the countenance of heaven, yet forty days and your rule will be overthrown.
When Yom Kippur is over, I shall for the most part go back to being the person I was before it, as Jonah goes back to being Jonah after his action of rebuke. But only for the most part, I hope. I hope to bear in mind that sometimes we are called to rebuke and not only to listen.
I keep thinking in this connection of some of the last sentences of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which seem to me a guide to distinguishing between moments for listening and moments for rebuking. “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience,” he writes, “I beg you to forgive me.” But then he writes, “If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.” Not quite my language, but it teaches us this, that if sometimes we need forgiveness for overstatement and impatience, at other times we need forgiveness for understatement and patience. If sometimes our speech is not temperate enough, at other times it is not intemperate enough, not prophetic enough.
In this new year, may we have the wisdom to discern when we need to be temperate and when we need not to, and the courage to act in accord with the instructions our wisdom provides.
[1] http://www.in-limine.eu/2017/02/justice-verite-beaute-par-simone-weil.html
On Teshuvah and the Book of Jonah
Given by Larry Rosenwald Yom Kippur 5770
I’d like to talk about teshuvah and the book of Jonah. That’s not a surprise, I’m sure. But one thought about that theme came as a surprise at least to me, namely, that what the book offers us is several models of doing teshuvah, and more generally of being a moral person in the world, that are distant from our own ordinary experience. We need these models, we can learn from them, but we have to supplement them from that ordinary experience and capacity that the book, as I read it this year at least, doesn’t much dwell on.
Instead, the book as I read it this year offers us a whole gallery of people – of sentient beings rather, since this is brilliantly a book both about people and about the rest of the world, whales and cattle and sheep and plants – of sentient beings who either don’t need to do teshuvah at all, because they are acting entirely in accord with the highest moral standard, or who do teshuvah perfectly once they become aware of their need to do it in the first place. I admire them all, I’m in wonder and awe at their nobility and obedience, but I’m not usually up to their standard.
The sailors on the ship, for example. When the terrible storm comes they call out to their gods, they fling the ship’s cargo overboard, they nobly resist the temptation to blame the stranger; when they cast lots and the lot falls on Jonah, they do not throw him overboard, but only ask him who he is, they then ask him, rather than telling him – an I-thou relationship if there ever was one – what they must do to him to make the sea grow calm. Jonah tells them to throw him overboard, but even then they do not, they only row harder. But the storm grows more intense, they finally do throw Jonah overboard, they pray not to be held guilty of the act genuinely imposed on them, vayiru ha’anashim yirah gedolah et hashem, and they experience that fear of God which our tradition tells us is the beginning of wisdom. There’s everything to admire in what they do, but they have done nothing wrong, their conduct is perfect. They are a model to us but not of doing teshuvah.
As are many of the non-human sentient beings in the story. The whale is in perfect obedience to God’s will, swallows Jonah as God intends, releases Jonah when spoken to – “spoken to” is the Bible’s phrase, not my anthropomorphic imposition, vayomer hashem ladag vayake et yonah. The gourd or ricinus plant, the kikayon, as well, which grows at God’s provision or apportioning, is attacked by a worm that God also provides and apportions; even the sultry east wind is provided, is, we might say, providential. All in perfect obedience, playing the roles God assigns them.
Some sentient beings in the book do sin, of course, and therefore need to do teshuvah, but often their teshuvah is hard to imitate. I have in mind the king and the citizens of Nineveh, and the beasts of Nineveh as well, “flock and herd,” habakar vehatzon. Jonah arrives in Nineveh, proclaims – at last – what God has told him to proclaim. And the people of Nineveh doubted, were skeptical, vaunted their own righteousness, stoned the crazed zealot marching through their streets and yelling at them – except that of course they did none of these things. Instead, vaya’aminu anshey ninveh belohim, the people of Nineveh believed God or believed in God, and immediately, or at least with no text intervening, they proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth – all of them, big and small, the guilty and the guiltless, those who can tell their right hand from their left and those who can’t. The King of Nineveh as well; he is not, as kings tend to be, attached to his own sovereign authority and righteousness, rather he rises from his throne, takes off his robe, puts on sackcloth, sits in ashes, gives commands to the people to do what they’re doing already, adds only a phantasmagoric command that the animals too shall participate in repentance, they are not to eat, they shall not graze, they shall not drink, they shall be covered with sackcloth and shall cry mightily to God.
I admit there’s something almost perverse about this, some troubling manifestation of the way in which human beings think that non-human sentient beings are their instruments, and something absurd if also wonderful about the vision of sackcloth-clad sheep and cows parading up and down the streets of the city, vayikeru el elohim bechazekah, crying loudly to God. I prefer – this is a bit of a digression – the vision suggested in a heartwarming Yom Kippur story I used to read my kids on the holiday, Yussel’s Prayer, about an ignorant shepherd boy whose sincerely meant playing on a reed pipe opens the gates of repentance that remain closed to the hypocritical or unmindful prayers of the town’s men standing in shul. Yussel asks his employer Reb Meir whether he can take the day of Yom Kippur off from pasturing the cows, and Reb Meir answers, not unkindly, that no, he can’t, because, he says, “the cows don’t know it’s Yom Kippur.” And then Yussel leads the cows to pasture. (And of course it’s a beautiful pasture and day, and everything is idyllic, and the illustrations are great.) It’s a wonderful moment, a recognition that sin is a human invention and practice, that animals have their own different ways of being. In the book of Jonah, though, cows and sheep do indeed know that it’s Yom Kippur, or at least are made to act in the service of that knowledge; and to be fair, who can say what they do or don’t know, or what sort of midrash we might write about their suddenly coming into a human or bovine consciousness of sin and an immediate desire to do penance for it?
In any case: the Nineveh model of teshuvah is challenging because it’s too perfect, too little in ordinary experience corresponds to it. All in Nineveh hear the word proclaimed, they believe, they act, they repent, nothing intervenes to slow or compromise the process, and that is not, in my experience, what doing teshuvah is like.
Imperfect teshuvah in the book of Jonah is of course chiefly associated with Jonah himself. He evades God’s command, seeks to flee to Tarshish, is swallowed by the whale. He repents wonderfully while in the whale’s belly, accepts God’s command the second time, but his teshuvah is unsustainable, it’s not enough for him to do it once, his new self is unstable, he breaks out in a self-obsessed, absurdly petty denunciation of God’s mercy – as if a prophet, to be a prophet, needed prophecy to lead to cataclysm and destruction. He stalks out of the reformed city and pouts, takes comfort in the shade God has provided him, whines – there’s really no other word – when that shade is taken away from him, and to God’s irresistible question – if you care about the plant, shouldn’t I care about the people? – has no answer. Does God’s question reach him? A midrash tells us that he responded, “O God, guide the world according to thy goodness.” But the biblical text leaves the question unanswered, and the possibilities for further imperfection wide open.
So one problem with Jonah as a model that he’s too imperfect, just not good enough. Another, though, is that the whole story is taking place at a level of experience that most of us mostly don’t live at. Vayhi devar hashem el yonah ben-amitay leymor, and the word of God happened to Jonah son of Amittai – we are being asked to enter a world we can hardly grasp. We are not, most of us, those to whom God’s word happens in this way, so only with difficulty can we imagine what it would be like to be spoken to as Jonah is spoken to, and then to sin as Jonah sins. When we sin, God does not send a storm to chastise us, nor a whale to swallow us up – and certainly not a whale so large, as the midrash tells us, “that the prophet was as comfortable inside of him as in a spacious synagogue. The eyes of the whale served Jonah as windows, and besides, there was a diamond, which shone as brilliantly as the sun at midday, so that Jonah could see all things in the sea down to its very bottom” (4:249). We are not as eloquent as Jonah is at the moment of his greatest eloquence, we are not given so generous a second chance to do what we failed to do the first time around, our words of rebuke to others are not so utopianly effective, plants are neither provided for our well-being nor made to wither for our instruction.
We need all these models I’ve been describing, challenging or troubling as they are. We need to strive to be like the sailors (and perhaps like the obedient beasts and plants), to act with such courage and generosity and submission to our sense of right action that sometimes we won’t need to do teshuvah at all. We need to strive to be like the sovereign and citizens and sheep and cattle of Nineveh, our response to rebuke as generous as theirs, our repentance as swift and undefensive and complete. We need to be open to the articulated voice of the Eyn Sof if we happen to hear it or the movements of the universe if they seem shaped for our instruction. We need to be as passionate and eloquent in our repentance as Jonah is. We need, learning both from negative example and from positive, not to be so craven or fearful as Jonah, not to let our repentance be so short-lived or our self-love so petty or unashamed.
But we need one thing more, a thing not in the book of Jonah but to which we are led by reflecting on it. We need to do teshuvah in all the boring, imperfect, unglamorous ways in our power. We need to make incomplete lists of our transgressions, offer partial and halting and half-sincere apologies, reform halfway. If we backslide by a step after two steps forward we are still a step ahead. Our glory as ordinary human beings, and I mean that word, is that though we are fallible and imperfect, sin more than we would like, do teshuvah less quickly and completely than we would like, we also do teshuvah in spite of all that, better imperfectly than not at all. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, we all know that. And it begins even if the single step is a stumble, even if the next step is in the opposite direction, even if three steps further on we fall into the mud and the mud clings to us for a while.
I wish for us all, in this new year, on this Yom Kippur, the impeccable character of the sailors, the immediate and entire teshuvah of the people of Nineveh, the openness to high experience of Jonah. But these things failing, and some of the time they will indeed fail, I wish for us all the capacity to do teshuvah as we mostly actually do it, imperfectly and heroically.
Instead, the book as I read it this year offers us a whole gallery of people – of sentient beings rather, since this is brilliantly a book both about people and about the rest of the world, whales and cattle and sheep and plants – of sentient beings who either don’t need to do teshuvah at all, because they are acting entirely in accord with the highest moral standard, or who do teshuvah perfectly once they become aware of their need to do it in the first place. I admire them all, I’m in wonder and awe at their nobility and obedience, but I’m not usually up to their standard.
The sailors on the ship, for example. When the terrible storm comes they call out to their gods, they fling the ship’s cargo overboard, they nobly resist the temptation to blame the stranger; when they cast lots and the lot falls on Jonah, they do not throw him overboard, but only ask him who he is, they then ask him, rather than telling him – an I-thou relationship if there ever was one – what they must do to him to make the sea grow calm. Jonah tells them to throw him overboard, but even then they do not, they only row harder. But the storm grows more intense, they finally do throw Jonah overboard, they pray not to be held guilty of the act genuinely imposed on them, vayiru ha’anashim yirah gedolah et hashem, and they experience that fear of God which our tradition tells us is the beginning of wisdom. There’s everything to admire in what they do, but they have done nothing wrong, their conduct is perfect. They are a model to us but not of doing teshuvah.
As are many of the non-human sentient beings in the story. The whale is in perfect obedience to God’s will, swallows Jonah as God intends, releases Jonah when spoken to – “spoken to” is the Bible’s phrase, not my anthropomorphic imposition, vayomer hashem ladag vayake et yonah. The gourd or ricinus plant, the kikayon, as well, which grows at God’s provision or apportioning, is attacked by a worm that God also provides and apportions; even the sultry east wind is provided, is, we might say, providential. All in perfect obedience, playing the roles God assigns them.
Some sentient beings in the book do sin, of course, and therefore need to do teshuvah, but often their teshuvah is hard to imitate. I have in mind the king and the citizens of Nineveh, and the beasts of Nineveh as well, “flock and herd,” habakar vehatzon. Jonah arrives in Nineveh, proclaims – at last – what God has told him to proclaim. And the people of Nineveh doubted, were skeptical, vaunted their own righteousness, stoned the crazed zealot marching through their streets and yelling at them – except that of course they did none of these things. Instead, vaya’aminu anshey ninveh belohim, the people of Nineveh believed God or believed in God, and immediately, or at least with no text intervening, they proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth – all of them, big and small, the guilty and the guiltless, those who can tell their right hand from their left and those who can’t. The King of Nineveh as well; he is not, as kings tend to be, attached to his own sovereign authority and righteousness, rather he rises from his throne, takes off his robe, puts on sackcloth, sits in ashes, gives commands to the people to do what they’re doing already, adds only a phantasmagoric command that the animals too shall participate in repentance, they are not to eat, they shall not graze, they shall not drink, they shall be covered with sackcloth and shall cry mightily to God.
I admit there’s something almost perverse about this, some troubling manifestation of the way in which human beings think that non-human sentient beings are their instruments, and something absurd if also wonderful about the vision of sackcloth-clad sheep and cows parading up and down the streets of the city, vayikeru el elohim bechazekah, crying loudly to God. I prefer – this is a bit of a digression – the vision suggested in a heartwarming Yom Kippur story I used to read my kids on the holiday, Yussel’s Prayer, about an ignorant shepherd boy whose sincerely meant playing on a reed pipe opens the gates of repentance that remain closed to the hypocritical or unmindful prayers of the town’s men standing in shul. Yussel asks his employer Reb Meir whether he can take the day of Yom Kippur off from pasturing the cows, and Reb Meir answers, not unkindly, that no, he can’t, because, he says, “the cows don’t know it’s Yom Kippur.” And then Yussel leads the cows to pasture. (And of course it’s a beautiful pasture and day, and everything is idyllic, and the illustrations are great.) It’s a wonderful moment, a recognition that sin is a human invention and practice, that animals have their own different ways of being. In the book of Jonah, though, cows and sheep do indeed know that it’s Yom Kippur, or at least are made to act in the service of that knowledge; and to be fair, who can say what they do or don’t know, or what sort of midrash we might write about their suddenly coming into a human or bovine consciousness of sin and an immediate desire to do penance for it?
In any case: the Nineveh model of teshuvah is challenging because it’s too perfect, too little in ordinary experience corresponds to it. All in Nineveh hear the word proclaimed, they believe, they act, they repent, nothing intervenes to slow or compromise the process, and that is not, in my experience, what doing teshuvah is like.
Imperfect teshuvah in the book of Jonah is of course chiefly associated with Jonah himself. He evades God’s command, seeks to flee to Tarshish, is swallowed by the whale. He repents wonderfully while in the whale’s belly, accepts God’s command the second time, but his teshuvah is unsustainable, it’s not enough for him to do it once, his new self is unstable, he breaks out in a self-obsessed, absurdly petty denunciation of God’s mercy – as if a prophet, to be a prophet, needed prophecy to lead to cataclysm and destruction. He stalks out of the reformed city and pouts, takes comfort in the shade God has provided him, whines – there’s really no other word – when that shade is taken away from him, and to God’s irresistible question – if you care about the plant, shouldn’t I care about the people? – has no answer. Does God’s question reach him? A midrash tells us that he responded, “O God, guide the world according to thy goodness.” But the biblical text leaves the question unanswered, and the possibilities for further imperfection wide open.
So one problem with Jonah as a model that he’s too imperfect, just not good enough. Another, though, is that the whole story is taking place at a level of experience that most of us mostly don’t live at. Vayhi devar hashem el yonah ben-amitay leymor, and the word of God happened to Jonah son of Amittai – we are being asked to enter a world we can hardly grasp. We are not, most of us, those to whom God’s word happens in this way, so only with difficulty can we imagine what it would be like to be spoken to as Jonah is spoken to, and then to sin as Jonah sins. When we sin, God does not send a storm to chastise us, nor a whale to swallow us up – and certainly not a whale so large, as the midrash tells us, “that the prophet was as comfortable inside of him as in a spacious synagogue. The eyes of the whale served Jonah as windows, and besides, there was a diamond, which shone as brilliantly as the sun at midday, so that Jonah could see all things in the sea down to its very bottom” (4:249). We are not as eloquent as Jonah is at the moment of his greatest eloquence, we are not given so generous a second chance to do what we failed to do the first time around, our words of rebuke to others are not so utopianly effective, plants are neither provided for our well-being nor made to wither for our instruction.
We need all these models I’ve been describing, challenging or troubling as they are. We need to strive to be like the sailors (and perhaps like the obedient beasts and plants), to act with such courage and generosity and submission to our sense of right action that sometimes we won’t need to do teshuvah at all. We need to strive to be like the sovereign and citizens and sheep and cattle of Nineveh, our response to rebuke as generous as theirs, our repentance as swift and undefensive and complete. We need to be open to the articulated voice of the Eyn Sof if we happen to hear it or the movements of the universe if they seem shaped for our instruction. We need to be as passionate and eloquent in our repentance as Jonah is. We need, learning both from negative example and from positive, not to be so craven or fearful as Jonah, not to let our repentance be so short-lived or our self-love so petty or unashamed.
But we need one thing more, a thing not in the book of Jonah but to which we are led by reflecting on it. We need to do teshuvah in all the boring, imperfect, unglamorous ways in our power. We need to make incomplete lists of our transgressions, offer partial and halting and half-sincere apologies, reform halfway. If we backslide by a step after two steps forward we are still a step ahead. Our glory as ordinary human beings, and I mean that word, is that though we are fallible and imperfect, sin more than we would like, do teshuvah less quickly and completely than we would like, we also do teshuvah in spite of all that, better imperfectly than not at all. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, we all know that. And it begins even if the single step is a stumble, even if the next step is in the opposite direction, even if three steps further on we fall into the mud and the mud clings to us for a while.
I wish for us all, in this new year, on this Yom Kippur, the impeccable character of the sailors, the immediate and entire teshuvah of the people of Nineveh, the openness to high experience of Jonah. But these things failing, and some of the time they will indeed fail, I wish for us all the capacity to do teshuvah as we mostly actually do it, imperfectly and heroically.
Devar Torah on Jonah
Given by Heidi Friedman 2023
As some of the folks here know, I do not like text study. Either as a cause or a consequence of not liking text study, I have always felt alienated from Jonah’s story. His responses seemed so outsized – running away from his responsibilities, sleeping through a terrifying storm, having a pity party because a plant died. What’s his damage? Then I took a class on the Five Hindrances in Buddhism, and all of a sudden, I found Jonah’s story completely relatable. In fact, with the exception of God talking to him, the things that happened to Jonah happen to all of us on a regular basis.
This is the Buddhist framework through which I see Jonah’s common humanity:
The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism are that there is suffering, suffering has a cause, suffering can be alleviated, and that the cure for suffering is the Eight-Fold Path. The cure for suffering, the Eight-Fold Path, involves a lot of mindfulness.
The Five Hindrances to mindfulness are desire, or wanting things, the flip side of the desire coin, aversion, or not wanting things, sloth and torpor, the flip side of slot and torpor, restlessness, and lastly, doubt. These hindrances are such common human experiences that the Buddha expected everyone to have them.
Now, let’s look at Jonah’s story. I’m going to examine Jonah’s story through the Buddhist lens of mindfulness and the 5 hindrances to mindfulness. When God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh to prophesy, Jonah runs away. Why? Why does Jonah try to run away from God? Because of what I would call anticipatory anxiety: he’s imagining how bad he’ll feel in the future if, after he prophesies doom, God relents and spares Niniveh. He’ll feel embarrassed.
Well, we all try to shirk our responsibilities sometimes. And running away is an example of aversion, the second hindrance – Jonah’s trying to avoid having a certain feeling state. This is also something we all do sometimes. From the Buddhist perspective, Jonah is increasing his own suffering by not being mindful. He’s not experiencing the present moment – he’s acting on a story that he’s made up in his mind about the future. In cognitive behavior therapy, that’s the cognitive distortion of fortune telling. No one can know what the future will bring. But at times we are each convinced that we do know what the future will be.
In running away, Jonah manages to sleep through a terrifying storm at sea. Sleeping through such a storm while the ship may sink at any moment and your shipmates are freaking out is an extreme example of lethargy and torpor, the third hindrance. My father didn’t like his parents. When I was little and we would go visit my grandparents, my dad would lie down on the couch and go to sleep for basically the whole visit. While Dad’s experience of lethargy didn’t endanger anyone else’s life, my stepmother used to complain about it quite a bit! Even if we haven’t all slept through a crisis, or a stressful family visit, we all do experience tiredness or slowness of mind sometimes in response to life’s challenges.
Jonah becomes so attached to the plant that God grew to shade him, that when it dies, he wants to die along with it. This is an extreme example of attachment, the first hindrance. Hopefully none of us wants to die in response to losing a plant, but we all experience suffering from our various attachments.
And God uses the plant to try to teach Jonah the value of God’s compassion: God feels toward Nineveh as Jonah felt toward the plant. Compassion is very important in Buddhism, and I believe, in life. I see this as God saying to Jonah, compassion is worth tolerating uncomfortable feelings for. God is saying, ‘To save Nineveh, it’s worth it for you, Jonah, to feel embarrassed that your prophesy appears false.’ What could each of us tolerate in order to be more compassionate to others in our lives?
The brief life of the plant also illustrates the Buddhist law of impermanence: everything that arises will pass away.
The last Buddhist hindrance is doubt. Jonah’s story illustrates strong self-doubt. He believes that God will spare the people of Nineveh if they repent, but doubts that he can withstand the feelings of being seen as wrong in his prophesying so firmly that he tries to run away from God.
We don’t know whether at the end of his story Jonah has less suffering. The things that Jonah feared, happened: his prophesy was wrong, the plant died. Once the bad things happened, did Jonah learn how to tolerate his own feelings in order to be more present in the moment? Did he overcome the 5 hindrances and become less attached, less averse, more awake, more calm, less doubtful? Given how some of the interactions between God and people in the Torah go, this one was feels pretty gentle and caring to me. I like to think that Jonah was eventually comforted by the way God spoke to him. Maybe the next time God told Jonah to prophesy, Jonah handled it so well that it was completely unremarkable and so we have no record of it today.
We have time for a comment or two.
This is the Buddhist framework through which I see Jonah’s common humanity:
The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism are that there is suffering, suffering has a cause, suffering can be alleviated, and that the cure for suffering is the Eight-Fold Path. The cure for suffering, the Eight-Fold Path, involves a lot of mindfulness.
The Five Hindrances to mindfulness are desire, or wanting things, the flip side of the desire coin, aversion, or not wanting things, sloth and torpor, the flip side of slot and torpor, restlessness, and lastly, doubt. These hindrances are such common human experiences that the Buddha expected everyone to have them.
Now, let’s look at Jonah’s story. I’m going to examine Jonah’s story through the Buddhist lens of mindfulness and the 5 hindrances to mindfulness. When God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh to prophesy, Jonah runs away. Why? Why does Jonah try to run away from God? Because of what I would call anticipatory anxiety: he’s imagining how bad he’ll feel in the future if, after he prophesies doom, God relents and spares Niniveh. He’ll feel embarrassed.
Well, we all try to shirk our responsibilities sometimes. And running away is an example of aversion, the second hindrance – Jonah’s trying to avoid having a certain feeling state. This is also something we all do sometimes. From the Buddhist perspective, Jonah is increasing his own suffering by not being mindful. He’s not experiencing the present moment – he’s acting on a story that he’s made up in his mind about the future. In cognitive behavior therapy, that’s the cognitive distortion of fortune telling. No one can know what the future will bring. But at times we are each convinced that we do know what the future will be.
In running away, Jonah manages to sleep through a terrifying storm at sea. Sleeping through such a storm while the ship may sink at any moment and your shipmates are freaking out is an extreme example of lethargy and torpor, the third hindrance. My father didn’t like his parents. When I was little and we would go visit my grandparents, my dad would lie down on the couch and go to sleep for basically the whole visit. While Dad’s experience of lethargy didn’t endanger anyone else’s life, my stepmother used to complain about it quite a bit! Even if we haven’t all slept through a crisis, or a stressful family visit, we all do experience tiredness or slowness of mind sometimes in response to life’s challenges.
Jonah becomes so attached to the plant that God grew to shade him, that when it dies, he wants to die along with it. This is an extreme example of attachment, the first hindrance. Hopefully none of us wants to die in response to losing a plant, but we all experience suffering from our various attachments.
And God uses the plant to try to teach Jonah the value of God’s compassion: God feels toward Nineveh as Jonah felt toward the plant. Compassion is very important in Buddhism, and I believe, in life. I see this as God saying to Jonah, compassion is worth tolerating uncomfortable feelings for. God is saying, ‘To save Nineveh, it’s worth it for you, Jonah, to feel embarrassed that your prophesy appears false.’ What could each of us tolerate in order to be more compassionate to others in our lives?
The brief life of the plant also illustrates the Buddhist law of impermanence: everything that arises will pass away.
The last Buddhist hindrance is doubt. Jonah’s story illustrates strong self-doubt. He believes that God will spare the people of Nineveh if they repent, but doubts that he can withstand the feelings of being seen as wrong in his prophesying so firmly that he tries to run away from God.
We don’t know whether at the end of his story Jonah has less suffering. The things that Jonah feared, happened: his prophesy was wrong, the plant died. Once the bad things happened, did Jonah learn how to tolerate his own feelings in order to be more present in the moment? Did he overcome the 5 hindrances and become less attached, less averse, more awake, more calm, less doubtful? Given how some of the interactions between God and people in the Torah go, this one was feels pretty gentle and caring to me. I like to think that Jonah was eventually comforted by the way God spoke to him. Maybe the next time God told Jonah to prophesy, Jonah handled it so well that it was completely unremarkable and so we have no record of it today.
We have time for a comment or two.
On the Feminism of the Havurah Liturgy
Given by Larry Rosenwald September 2017
One of the important, challenging, quietly revolutionary aspects of our liturgy is its feminism, by which I mean chiefly the fact that both God and human beings are referred to sometimes in the feminine and sometimes in the masculine. This is true in the English and still more frequently and more strikingly true in the Hebrew, where so much is gendered, not just pronouns but nouns, verbs, and adjectives as well. All of this may well be disorienting to people not familiar with it, as it was to me when I began coming here in 2003 – I kept expecting one word and getting another, and I felt as if I were riding some especially unpredictable roller-coaster.
I’ve been to services at other congregations, some of them politically progressive ones and self-declaredly feminist ones (those being the ones I like to attend), and in my experience our liturgy is unique. Other congregations add the matriarchs to the patriarchs, other congregations have women leading services and leyning the torah portion. Some other congregations have English translations of their liturgy that diminish the degree of masculine domination in the traditional Hebrew text – e.g., the Purple Valley Siddur produced by students at Williams College. But even there, if you turn from the English to the Hebrew, you find God referred to exclusively in the masculine, and human beings almost exclusively so.
I’ve thought a lot about this gulf, this asymmetry, I’ve talked about our liturgy recently with friends both sympathetic and critical. I’m no less supportive of it than I was before those conversations, no less inspired by it, no less in need of it. But I have a better sense of what’s radical about it.
Theologically, it seems to me, we’re on firmer ground than supporters of an exclusively masculine God-language can be. God transcends gender, that seems axiomatic. It follows that it cannot be just, cannot be adequately capacious, to speak of God exclusively in the masculine, because doing so constrains God within a single human gender category. Speaking of God sometimes in the feminine and sometimes in the masculine does better justice, however imperfect, to the ein sof, the one without end or limit.
We are also on firmer ground than those who argue, the focus here being on the language used to describe people rather than the language used to describe God, that of course “he” means “he and she,” “man” means “man and woman,” ish means “ish and ishah.” I was taught such ideas when I was a grammar school student, I was taught the notion of the generic he, I’m familiar with the notion. But that was a long time ago, and if it was ever true – and I’m not sure that it was – it’s surely not true now (nor do I teach it now to my students). One fruitful consequence of feminism has been to challenge what used to be taught, even at the level of grammar, to change the ways in which we actually speak and write. If someone today were writing a Declaration of Independence, would that person write “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”? (Angelica Schuyler’s response in Hamilton is on the mark: “And when I meet Thomas Jefferson/ I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel!”) And no translator today, I think, would render the title of Viktor Frankl’s concentration camp memoir as Man’s Search for Meaning; too much is excluded, too much is distorted. (And it’s a fanciful translation, which a strict literalist of my sort has to reject on other grounds as well, the original title being, in strict translation, “Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp.’) And the English of the prayerbook needs to be our English, the English of this moment. Not, to be sure, the slang or perishable colloquial idiom of this moment – nothing goes out of fashion more quickly - but the English we write at this moment to formulate prayer.
All of this seems straightforward enough, to me at any rate, and justifies our liturgy on grounds both of theology and of feminism-inspired living English usage in the 21st century. I would make that argument anywhere, to anyone.
But then we come back to the fact that these commonsensical arguments seem to persuade only us, or almost only us, that elsewhere than at Havurat Shalom the Hebrew liturgy remains, with the very moderate exception of the addition of the matriarchs, a masculinist one. (This is true even in siddurim and machzorim where other aspects of the liturgy are changed for what one might call political reasons, e.g., in the Reconstructionist siddur Kol Haneshama, which alters the Hebrew of aleynu prayer to eliminate its invidious comparisons between Jews and non-Jews but leaves God and the worshipper in the masculine.)
Why?
For two reasons, I think. (I exclude sexism as a reason, not because it plays no role, but because, as noted, even self-declared feminist congregations retain a masculinist liturgy.) First, because of the desire, the principled desire, to be in accord with tradition. Al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur, “do not separate from the community,” that is a real desire and a real principle, and I respect it. It is wonderful to think that the words one is saying or singing in prayer on Friday night or Saturday morning are the words being said or sung all over the Jewish world. Changes are made when necessary – few congregations I have visited retain the blessing thanking God “for not making me a woman” – but these are minimal, the goal being not to separate, to have all of us together saying or singing sh’ma yisra’el.
A second reason: because it seems so khutspedik, so insolent, so whipper-snapperish, in oneself or in others, to alter a liturgy established so long ago, by people of great authority and wisdom, who created beautiful and meaningful poems prayers. We should be hesitant, the argument might run, to put ourselves forward as empowered to alter what others of greater authority have constituted. Who are we, anyway?
I feel the force of both these reasons; but they are in my judgment not so much reasons to refrain from altering the liturgy as reasons to alter it in some ways and not in others.
Regarding the first reason, I would quote Joel Rosenberg’s colloquial and wise extension of it: “al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur except when you have to.” Necessity, that is, should be our guide, not caprice. We should change the liturgy not when we casually dislike it, when we have a problem with, when it’s not to our taste; we should change it when we must, when the language makes the prayer an obstacle to praying, a diminishing of ourselves, of the persons and energies we bring to davening, when the prayer as written sticks in our throat, and I mean that almost literally, when we cannot breathe it out. And for me, and for the long train, di goldene keyt, the golden chain, of our liturgy-makers, the exclusively masculine characterization of God and the worshipper has exactly those effects. We change the liturgy so that we can breathe it. Nishmat kol chay tevarech et shemech we sing, the breath of every living thing will praise your (feminine) name, and for that to be true, we too have to be able to breathe.
Regarding the second reason, I would say that it should stimulate us to think about our relation to the authority of the past. I might not go as far as Emerson does, lover of Emerson as I am: “meek young persons grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero . . . Locke . . . Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young persons in libraries when they wrote these books.”[1] I would go as far as Mordecai Kaplan did, who said often and in various forms, “the past has a vote, but not a veto.” I would also go so far as to say that it is intellectually and emotionally unhealthy to think that all wisdom is in the past, is in those who happened to come first, is in those men who happened to come first. Mayn neshome iz nit keyn rozhinke, my soul is also no raisin – or, more colloquially, and shifting the metaphor from fruit to meat, “what am I, chopped liver?”
We should in remaking the liturgy certainly hold ourselves to a high standard, philologically and literarily. We should not presume that replacing old formulations with new ones is easy, that Hebrew can be easily made to say with authenticity what we wish to say. We should look with humility as well as pride on the new liturgy we have made, and change it when we need to.
But if those are the criteria - acting from necessity not from caprice, rewriting with a judicious mixture of philological humility and human self-reliance – then the liturgy we make new, our mutkan liturgy, fixed and healed and restored, will be an essential element in the fruitful multiplicity of Judaisms, the seventy faces of Torah. Or rather it already is.
[1] http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar, accessed September 26th, 2017.
I’ve been to services at other congregations, some of them politically progressive ones and self-declaredly feminist ones (those being the ones I like to attend), and in my experience our liturgy is unique. Other congregations add the matriarchs to the patriarchs, other congregations have women leading services and leyning the torah portion. Some other congregations have English translations of their liturgy that diminish the degree of masculine domination in the traditional Hebrew text – e.g., the Purple Valley Siddur produced by students at Williams College. But even there, if you turn from the English to the Hebrew, you find God referred to exclusively in the masculine, and human beings almost exclusively so.
I’ve thought a lot about this gulf, this asymmetry, I’ve talked about our liturgy recently with friends both sympathetic and critical. I’m no less supportive of it than I was before those conversations, no less inspired by it, no less in need of it. But I have a better sense of what’s radical about it.
Theologically, it seems to me, we’re on firmer ground than supporters of an exclusively masculine God-language can be. God transcends gender, that seems axiomatic. It follows that it cannot be just, cannot be adequately capacious, to speak of God exclusively in the masculine, because doing so constrains God within a single human gender category. Speaking of God sometimes in the feminine and sometimes in the masculine does better justice, however imperfect, to the ein sof, the one without end or limit.
We are also on firmer ground than those who argue, the focus here being on the language used to describe people rather than the language used to describe God, that of course “he” means “he and she,” “man” means “man and woman,” ish means “ish and ishah.” I was taught such ideas when I was a grammar school student, I was taught the notion of the generic he, I’m familiar with the notion. But that was a long time ago, and if it was ever true – and I’m not sure that it was – it’s surely not true now (nor do I teach it now to my students). One fruitful consequence of feminism has been to challenge what used to be taught, even at the level of grammar, to change the ways in which we actually speak and write. If someone today were writing a Declaration of Independence, would that person write “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”? (Angelica Schuyler’s response in Hamilton is on the mark: “And when I meet Thomas Jefferson/ I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel!”) And no translator today, I think, would render the title of Viktor Frankl’s concentration camp memoir as Man’s Search for Meaning; too much is excluded, too much is distorted. (And it’s a fanciful translation, which a strict literalist of my sort has to reject on other grounds as well, the original title being, in strict translation, “Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp.’) And the English of the prayerbook needs to be our English, the English of this moment. Not, to be sure, the slang or perishable colloquial idiom of this moment – nothing goes out of fashion more quickly - but the English we write at this moment to formulate prayer.
All of this seems straightforward enough, to me at any rate, and justifies our liturgy on grounds both of theology and of feminism-inspired living English usage in the 21st century. I would make that argument anywhere, to anyone.
But then we come back to the fact that these commonsensical arguments seem to persuade only us, or almost only us, that elsewhere than at Havurat Shalom the Hebrew liturgy remains, with the very moderate exception of the addition of the matriarchs, a masculinist one. (This is true even in siddurim and machzorim where other aspects of the liturgy are changed for what one might call political reasons, e.g., in the Reconstructionist siddur Kol Haneshama, which alters the Hebrew of aleynu prayer to eliminate its invidious comparisons between Jews and non-Jews but leaves God and the worshipper in the masculine.)
Why?
For two reasons, I think. (I exclude sexism as a reason, not because it plays no role, but because, as noted, even self-declared feminist congregations retain a masculinist liturgy.) First, because of the desire, the principled desire, to be in accord with tradition. Al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur, “do not separate from the community,” that is a real desire and a real principle, and I respect it. It is wonderful to think that the words one is saying or singing in prayer on Friday night or Saturday morning are the words being said or sung all over the Jewish world. Changes are made when necessary – few congregations I have visited retain the blessing thanking God “for not making me a woman” – but these are minimal, the goal being not to separate, to have all of us together saying or singing sh’ma yisra’el.
A second reason: because it seems so khutspedik, so insolent, so whipper-snapperish, in oneself or in others, to alter a liturgy established so long ago, by people of great authority and wisdom, who created beautiful and meaningful poems prayers. We should be hesitant, the argument might run, to put ourselves forward as empowered to alter what others of greater authority have constituted. Who are we, anyway?
I feel the force of both these reasons; but they are in my judgment not so much reasons to refrain from altering the liturgy as reasons to alter it in some ways and not in others.
Regarding the first reason, I would quote Joel Rosenberg’s colloquial and wise extension of it: “al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur except when you have to.” Necessity, that is, should be our guide, not caprice. We should change the liturgy not when we casually dislike it, when we have a problem with, when it’s not to our taste; we should change it when we must, when the language makes the prayer an obstacle to praying, a diminishing of ourselves, of the persons and energies we bring to davening, when the prayer as written sticks in our throat, and I mean that almost literally, when we cannot breathe it out. And for me, and for the long train, di goldene keyt, the golden chain, of our liturgy-makers, the exclusively masculine characterization of God and the worshipper has exactly those effects. We change the liturgy so that we can breathe it. Nishmat kol chay tevarech et shemech we sing, the breath of every living thing will praise your (feminine) name, and for that to be true, we too have to be able to breathe.
Regarding the second reason, I would say that it should stimulate us to think about our relation to the authority of the past. I might not go as far as Emerson does, lover of Emerson as I am: “meek young persons grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero . . . Locke . . . Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young persons in libraries when they wrote these books.”[1] I would go as far as Mordecai Kaplan did, who said often and in various forms, “the past has a vote, but not a veto.” I would also go so far as to say that it is intellectually and emotionally unhealthy to think that all wisdom is in the past, is in those who happened to come first, is in those men who happened to come first. Mayn neshome iz nit keyn rozhinke, my soul is also no raisin – or, more colloquially, and shifting the metaphor from fruit to meat, “what am I, chopped liver?”
We should in remaking the liturgy certainly hold ourselves to a high standard, philologically and literarily. We should not presume that replacing old formulations with new ones is easy, that Hebrew can be easily made to say with authenticity what we wish to say. We should look with humility as well as pride on the new liturgy we have made, and change it when we need to.
But if those are the criteria - acting from necessity not from caprice, rewriting with a judicious mixture of philological humility and human self-reliance – then the liturgy we make new, our mutkan liturgy, fixed and healed and restored, will be an essential element in the fruitful multiplicity of Judaisms, the seventy faces of Torah. Or rather it already is.
[1] http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar, accessed September 26th, 2017.
A Letter from a Letter, or,
the letter Yod remonstrates with the Master of the Universe
the letter Yod remonstrates with the Master of the Universe
Give by Larry Rosenwald
Reboyne shel oylem!
There is, O One Without End, a story told about me by great sages.
I was, says the story, distraught at being cast out of Sarah’s name, and went about heaven wailing and lamenting. I asked, “is it perchance because I am the smallest among the letters that Thou hast taken me away from the name of the pious Sarah?” And you consoled me by saying, “formerly thou wert in a woman’s name, and, moreover, at the end. I will now affix thee to a man’s name, and, moreover, at the beginning.” This promise you fulfilled, the story concludes, when you added me to Hosea’s name and made him Joshua, before the spies went into the land of Canaan. (Legends 3:266)
I do not know who wrote this story, but do not believe it can have come from your inexhaustible and ineffable Self. It is a misrepresentation of my character and my needs, and a denial of my importance.
To begin with, I held it no indignity to be in a woman’s name. Do letters have gender, after all? Did you, did the writer of the story, have any reason to think I was male, or female? And whether male or female, what reason could there be for supposing I would share in whatever prejudices that story, no doubt falsely, attributes to you?
As for the difference between the beginning and the end – surely you who are both beginning and end, the Aleph and the Tav, who were before the beginning and who are without end, understand that this is a difference of little importance. Both beginning and end are places of honor, and the end, after all, has the last word – or, in this case, the last letter. And there are enough hierarchies in your book without adding to them the hierarchy of beginnings and endings! (In any case, if there is honor in beginnings, surely I had honor enough already, beginning as I do not only the name of Judah, who gives his name to our people and his lineage to our Messiah, may he or she come soon, but also your own name of names, the numinous and unspoken tetragrammaton.)
I did, in truth, weep at leaving Sarah’s name; how noble a character to be connected to, with all her fits of generous temper, her astonishing laughter, her zeal for her family and her people. But that you – or rather, forgive me, that the writer of the story - should think to console me by placing me at the beginning of Joshua’s name astonishes me. It is written, in another story, that in being added to Joshua’s name I made him more divine, having the honor as I do to be the letter with which your most sacred name begins. May I speak frankly? Joshua – humble Hosea as he was before – did not, really did not, need the balance of human and divine in him tilted towards the divine. When I read of what he did later, fueled by the divine zeal strengthened in him by my presence in his name – when I read of his implacable hostility towards all the Canaanites and their works – I wish only that he had been left more human, more humane, less possessed by the zeal that I, all unwittingly, may have contributed to augmenting. Perhaps, O Ruler of the universe, you would have done better then, and would do better now, to leave the letters in peace.
Or perhaps you should have asked me what sort of honor I actually desired! I would, I assure you, have proposed something quite different. I would have said, for example, that to honor me, you should have chosen to honor more greatly the woman whose name embraces me, the prophet Miriam, where I am, happily, in the middle, finding that too a place of distinction. (Perhaps it is because whatever I represent is, in Miriam’s name, in such intimate relation to the other letters and their meanings, that Miriam had so great a gift in dealing with those unlike her. Perhaps – though I leave this to your divine judgment – there is something masculine in the fascination with beginnings and endings, something feminine in seeing the virtues of middles?)
And had you done greater honor to Miriam, in token of doing greater honor to me, what good results could have come about! That destructive quarrel between Miriam and her noble brother, Miriam’s leprosy, the corruption and weakening of authority among the children of Israel generally – all this might have been avoided, Miriam’s strength enhanced and her time increased, and with her guidance, perhaps, the spies her brother sent into Canaan – including, perhaps, some women! – would have been less dubious, less affected by the weakening of the community, bolder in encountering the Canaanite wonders they beheld, and the living community might have proceeded into Canaan.
Perhaps, O Inexhaustible Spring, you might learn in this regard from how human beings treat me in that most human of all Jewish languages, namely, Yiddish – which I know you must speak, since otherwise you would be denying yourself the pleasure of conversing with Tevye the Dairyman! There, indeed, my place of honor is assured. For there they call me dos pintele yid, the essential dot of Jewishness, what remains Jewish when all else seems gone. And they honor me, too, not only when they write me, but also when they speak my unmistakeable and plaintive sound. The greatest of prophets, the greatest of kings and poets, whom the sacred tongue calls Mosheh and Shelomo – these great eminences receive an admixture of humanity and ordinariness through me when they are spoken of, and become the more accessible, less dogmatically zealous Moyshe Rabeynu and Shloyme Hemeylekh. What greater honor could I have than this, what greater contribution could I make?
We are all your creations, O founder of good and of all, and who am I, who is any letter, to reproach you? And yet, did you not make us so we could speak?
In humble recognition, in joyful celebration, of the gulf between us,
I, the letter yud, smallest and most essential of the letters,
wish you and our people a speedy coming of the longed-for age of peace.
Tikkun Olam: War Tax Resistance
Given by Larry Rosenwald
The mode of tikkun olam work that I’ll talk about, the mode of political activism I’ve chiefly devoted myself to, is war tax resistance (wtr). I’ll set out what it is, I’ll say something about my personal and political motives for undertaking it, I’ll suggest some connections between war tax resistance and Jewish traditions, and I’ll be done in 8-9 minutes.
Two prefatory notes. First: war tax resistance as I do it is civil disobedience, is illegal, and anyone contemplating doing it should know that and be willing, or for that matter eager, to accept the consequences of breaking the laws in question. Second: my wife, Cynthia Schwan, and I do our wtr jointly, so sometimes I’ll use plural pronouns; the perspective I’ll set out, though, is my own.
Here are the nuts and bolts. We have our taxes prepared by H. R. Block, and inevitably find that we owe the government some money, because of the income we make that hasn’t had taxes withheld from it. We get from the War Resisters League a calculation of how much of the federal discretionary budget is used for current military expenses (this year that’s 27%); we take 27% of the tax we owe and refuse to pay it, sending the refused money to a progressive escrow fund; we send the remaining 73% to the IRS, with an explanation of what we’ve done and why. Then we wait. Usually, though not always, the IRS – [i.e., the automated collection service, the last time I met with an IRS agent face to face was in 1974] – sends us a series of increasingly threatening computer-generated letters, then seizes the refused sum of money from our bank or my workplace [(sometimes, by error or malice, from both simultaneously)], collecting not only the refused sum but also interest and penalties. (Doing wtr the way we do it is a lousy way of keeping money out of the hands of the government.) Then we tell our friends and our communities what’s happened, see what discussions that leads to, and on or around the following April 15th the sequence of events begins again.
I had two motives when we began refusing, in 1987. The first was a moral feeling, a matter of conscience: as a pacifist, I was uneasy and worse at the thought of freely paying taxes for war. Refusing taxes felt messy, self-absorbed, tedious, moderately risky (not very; I have a tenured job that’s not jeopardized by my being a wtr); paying them felt worse. The second was a utopian political belief, namely, that if enough people openly refused to pay war taxes, the government’s ability to wage wars would be diminished. A friend of mine, a writer and editor named Askold Melnyczuk, used to refer to me as “the most dangerous man in Massachusetts.” That’s nonsense, but what he meant was in accord with that utopian belief of mine.
I’m skeptical now about the belief; I think war tax resistance as I practice it might not have a future at all, let alone a future of political power, though I hope it will. I’m not at all skeptical about the feeling; I test it every year, and every year the result is the same, the feeling that it’s better – for me – to refuse than to pay remains strong and indeed is strengthened. Randy Kehler, a noted draft and war tax resister, likes to refer to wtr as a spiritual practice; I think maybe that’s what I’m doing.
As for wtr and Jewish traditions - well, first I should note that wtr is really three positions or actions linked together. The first is pacifism. The second is a disinclination to regard the moral views of one’s fellow citizens as outweighing one’s own. The third is harder to describe: it’s both a need for moral consistency and an ethos of direct action. The wtr says, “if I’m in conscience opposed to war, then I cannot in conscience pay for it, and the most direct way of acting on that belief is to refuse payment” – as opposed, say, to writing one’s congressperson and asking that person to sponsor legislation to create a war-tax-exempt legal status for pacifists. Writing letters is a fine thing to do, but it’s asking someone else to deal with the problem.
Judaism has some pacifist traditions –there’s a book about them by Evelyn Wilcock, there are occasional Talmudic and biblical passages, e.g., the one saying that, as the Talmud puts it, one’s enemy’s blood may be as red as one’s own. Some pacifists, myself among them, derive support and inspiration from the great principle that we are all created in God’s image. But I’d be lying or dopey if I were to say that Jewish tradition is preponderantly pacifist; it just isn’t. I can live with that. The principle is important enough to me that I’d live by it even if Jewish tradition were unanimously against it; I’m glad that it’s not.
Jewish tradition is much more supportive of holding to one’s one judgment even against the judgments of one’s fellows, and of acting directly in accord with it. I’ll cite a deliberately surprising example, that of Pinchas, who in Numbers 25 is said to slaughter an Israeli man and a Midianite woman lest they commit “”harlotry,” worship the Baal of Pe’or, and bring a plague upon the Israelites He’s a murderous zealot. But I’m a non-murderous zealot, and I have in common with him that I can’t bring myself to submit my deepest judgments to the judgments of others, and also, and more crucially, that having arrived at a judgment, I can’t without difficulty bring myself not to act on it.
I don’t want that surprising affinity to be where I end; instead I’ll quote that great Jewish poet and sage Allen Ginsberg on wtr, and then stop, with a sincerely meant invitation to anyone interested to discuss this further with me by whatever means suit you best. Here’s what Ginsberg wrote in 1969:
Two prefatory notes. First: war tax resistance as I do it is civil disobedience, is illegal, and anyone contemplating doing it should know that and be willing, or for that matter eager, to accept the consequences of breaking the laws in question. Second: my wife, Cynthia Schwan, and I do our wtr jointly, so sometimes I’ll use plural pronouns; the perspective I’ll set out, though, is my own.
Here are the nuts and bolts. We have our taxes prepared by H. R. Block, and inevitably find that we owe the government some money, because of the income we make that hasn’t had taxes withheld from it. We get from the War Resisters League a calculation of how much of the federal discretionary budget is used for current military expenses (this year that’s 27%); we take 27% of the tax we owe and refuse to pay it, sending the refused money to a progressive escrow fund; we send the remaining 73% to the IRS, with an explanation of what we’ve done and why. Then we wait. Usually, though not always, the IRS – [i.e., the automated collection service, the last time I met with an IRS agent face to face was in 1974] – sends us a series of increasingly threatening computer-generated letters, then seizes the refused sum of money from our bank or my workplace [(sometimes, by error or malice, from both simultaneously)], collecting not only the refused sum but also interest and penalties. (Doing wtr the way we do it is a lousy way of keeping money out of the hands of the government.) Then we tell our friends and our communities what’s happened, see what discussions that leads to, and on or around the following April 15th the sequence of events begins again.
I had two motives when we began refusing, in 1987. The first was a moral feeling, a matter of conscience: as a pacifist, I was uneasy and worse at the thought of freely paying taxes for war. Refusing taxes felt messy, self-absorbed, tedious, moderately risky (not very; I have a tenured job that’s not jeopardized by my being a wtr); paying them felt worse. The second was a utopian political belief, namely, that if enough people openly refused to pay war taxes, the government’s ability to wage wars would be diminished. A friend of mine, a writer and editor named Askold Melnyczuk, used to refer to me as “the most dangerous man in Massachusetts.” That’s nonsense, but what he meant was in accord with that utopian belief of mine.
I’m skeptical now about the belief; I think war tax resistance as I practice it might not have a future at all, let alone a future of political power, though I hope it will. I’m not at all skeptical about the feeling; I test it every year, and every year the result is the same, the feeling that it’s better – for me – to refuse than to pay remains strong and indeed is strengthened. Randy Kehler, a noted draft and war tax resister, likes to refer to wtr as a spiritual practice; I think maybe that’s what I’m doing.
As for wtr and Jewish traditions - well, first I should note that wtr is really three positions or actions linked together. The first is pacifism. The second is a disinclination to regard the moral views of one’s fellow citizens as outweighing one’s own. The third is harder to describe: it’s both a need for moral consistency and an ethos of direct action. The wtr says, “if I’m in conscience opposed to war, then I cannot in conscience pay for it, and the most direct way of acting on that belief is to refuse payment” – as opposed, say, to writing one’s congressperson and asking that person to sponsor legislation to create a war-tax-exempt legal status for pacifists. Writing letters is a fine thing to do, but it’s asking someone else to deal with the problem.
Judaism has some pacifist traditions –there’s a book about them by Evelyn Wilcock, there are occasional Talmudic and biblical passages, e.g., the one saying that, as the Talmud puts it, one’s enemy’s blood may be as red as one’s own. Some pacifists, myself among them, derive support and inspiration from the great principle that we are all created in God’s image. But I’d be lying or dopey if I were to say that Jewish tradition is preponderantly pacifist; it just isn’t. I can live with that. The principle is important enough to me that I’d live by it even if Jewish tradition were unanimously against it; I’m glad that it’s not.
Jewish tradition is much more supportive of holding to one’s one judgment even against the judgments of one’s fellows, and of acting directly in accord with it. I’ll cite a deliberately surprising example, that of Pinchas, who in Numbers 25 is said to slaughter an Israeli man and a Midianite woman lest they commit “”harlotry,” worship the Baal of Pe’or, and bring a plague upon the Israelites He’s a murderous zealot. But I’m a non-murderous zealot, and I have in common with him that I can’t bring myself to submit my deepest judgments to the judgments of others, and also, and more crucially, that having arrived at a judgment, I can’t without difficulty bring myself not to act on it.
I don’t want that surprising affinity to be where I end; instead I’ll quote that great Jewish poet and sage Allen Ginsberg on wtr, and then stop, with a sincerely meant invitation to anyone interested to discuss this further with me by whatever means suit you best. Here’s what Ginsberg wrote in 1969:
No Money, No War
Government Anarchy prolongs illegal
planet-war over decades in Viet-nam. Federal
Anarchy plunges U. S. cities into violent Chaos.
Conscientious objection to War tax payment
subsidizing Mass Murder abroad and
consequent ecological disaster at home will
save lives & labor and is the gentlest
way of Political revolution in America.
If money talks, several hundred
thousand citizens refusing payments
to our War Government will short-
circuit the Nerve system of our
electronic bureaucracy.
Government Anarchy prolongs illegal
planet-war over decades in Viet-nam. Federal
Anarchy plunges U. S. cities into violent Chaos.
Conscientious objection to War tax payment
subsidizing Mass Murder abroad and
consequent ecological disaster at home will
save lives & labor and is the gentlest
way of Political revolution in America.
If money talks, several hundred
thousand citizens refusing payments
to our War Government will short-
circuit the Nerve system of our
electronic bureaucracy.