divrei torah by Havurat Shalom members
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 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 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.
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.
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.