Rabbi Felix

This week, we read a double portion, Acharey Mot and Kedoshim. The second one, Kedoshim, which begins with the commandment to be holy, as God Himself is, is full to the brim with moral/ethical material, a real treasure chest of beautiful and insightful laws and practices. One of the most famous ones is the commandment to "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Rabbis of the Talmud come up with a long list of interesting actions and behaviors which they feel exemplify and define this mitzvah, and I'd like to focus on one of them.

The Talmud in Tractate Niddah - which deals with the laws of ritual purity pertaining mainly to menstruant women and sexual activity in general - quotes this interesting statement (page 17a):

"Rav Chisda says: It is forbidden for a man to have sexual relations during the day, as it is written 'and you shall love your neighbor as yourself'. How does this verse imply this law? Abayye says: lest he see in her [his wife] an unseemly thing, and she become unattractive to him."

The idea seems to be that in the daytime, as opposed to in the dark of night, one sees things more clearly, and therefore, during the act of sex, one runs the risk of seeing something unattractive, unaesthetic, and being turned off. This risk is lessened in the dark, so making love in the dark (it would seem that Rav Chisda is playing with the word "love" here) would seem to be an expression of loving your neighbor - in this case your wife - as yourself (not sure about that, but we will come back to it) by giving her a break, being nice to her, taking the pressure off of her to always look perfect, and love her even if she has an unseen blemish or two.

Immediately after this statement, the Talmud continues:

"Rav Huna says: The people of Israel are holy, and do not have marital relations during the day. Rava says: If it was in a darkened house it is permitted, and a scholar may make it dark with his cloak and have relations [presumably scholars in particular are to be trusted to get this tricky little maneuver right].''

This rule, that one should have sex only at night, or in the dark, is stated a few more times in the Talmud, and is in fact codified by Maimonides and others. In this formulation, the reason would seem to be that it is brazen and immodest to have sex in the light of day - not holy - and good Jewish men and women are meant to be holy and make love modestly. Rav Chisda's 'love they neighbor as yourself' reason for making love in the dark seems aimed, if not in the opposite direction, then at least in a different one, that of enhancing and encouraging a positive erotic connection between husband and wife; he does not seem to be concerned with modesty. Rather, he seems to focus on the aesthetic aspect of intimate relations: merely seeing something unseemly in one's partner would, it seems, render her (and perhaps him, as well, though that is not the point of view from which the men of the Talmud were operating) undesirable, so, for a happy love life, keep the lights off.

These two statements seem, at first glance, to be somewhat contradictory; the one a kind of marital advice to couples type of thing, the other an expression of a desire to minimize excessive passion in the sex act. Interestingly, however, the Talmud does not in any way see these two positions as adversarial, it just quotes one after the other, as if they go together. Perhaps this is the case. Perhaps the two statements are coming from the same place, and basically expressing the same thing - a desire to improve the quality of intimacy in a relationship. I will try and explain how.

I am sure that all of you have noticed (no matter how hard you have tried not to) that pornography has entered the aesthetic mainstream. The way that women are represented in music videos, Hollywood, fashion, even works of "serious" "art" (have I used enough quotation marks to make my point, Jeff Koons, et al.?) more and more takes its inspiration from pornography, where woman is objectified by the male gaze as a personification of a posed, sleazy, voyeuristic, often fetishized sexuality, divorced from love or even relationship, always available, and, crucially, always on display. In this dynamic, the woman is an object enjoyed visually by the male watcher/lover, who functions primarily as a voyeur, of both his partner and of the very act of sex. Sex, in this aesthetic, is something that is first and foremost watched, rather than engaged in.
(The above has always been true, to some degree, in western art; I am claiming a worsening of the situation, a coarsening of this essentially male, voyeuristic way of representing women and sexuality).

The Talmud, here, in the laws of modesty during intimacy, is polemicizing against this approach, and argues for modesty as a positive and crucial element in an intimate relationship - not only for the sake of modesty, but, more importantly, for the sake of relationship. A sexuality that reveals all, and puts everything (typically everything the woman has) on display, is not only immodest. It also sets up a kind of sexual aesthetic that a woman can almost never live up to, for, in an interaction of this type, the lover/voyeur will inevitably find something unpleasing in the object of his desire, something not quite good-looking enough, and move on. The modesty prescribed in the Talmud calls for a sexuality which is based not primarily on the visual and aesthetic pleasure given by an object of desire to the beholder/enjoyer of that object, but, rather, on a commitment to find something deeper, something beyond an inevitably fleeting aesthetic experience. (The connection between the above and the prohibition against making a graven image, which is essentially about making a divine, rather than sexual, figure, is worth thinking about.)

Perhaps Rav Chisda, with his use of the 'love your neighbor' verse, is asking us to love our closest neighbor - our spouse - the way we love ourselves, which is a love based on who I really am, not on how I look. All of us realize (well, should realize, anyway) that, even when we see a pimple in the mirror, put on a few extra pounds, or notice a receding hairline, we are still us, and we, hopefully, still feel good about ourselves, still know and like who we really are. Rav Chisda in the Talmud reads the 'love your neighbor as yourself' verse as asking us to use modesty to help us achieve and maintain that same kind of love, a love of knowing and experiencing, with our partner, rather than just seeing her - or him - as an object to be enjoyed.

Shabbat Shalom,
Shimon

I'd like to wish the entire BYFI community, along with our families and friends, a Happy Passover, and share with you a thought for the holiday. 

One of the best known sections of the Haggadah is the discussion of the four sons: the wise, the wicked, the simple, and he who is unable to even ask a question. One of the questions often asked about this section is about the order: why is it presented in this way, from the wise son down to the non-asker? One answer sees the four sons as actually one individual, and understands this section as a recapitulation of the growth and development of each and every one of us, from unengaged  toddler, to unfocused but inquisitive child, to rebellious adolescent and, finally, hopefully, maturing into a wise young adult. The order is reversed so that we can tell the story from its happy ending - the wise son - and then move back in time, to recall the stages of our development. 

One can tweak this idea, and view these different personalities not as developmental, but, rather, as co-existing in each and every one of us. The Haggadah starts with the wise, focused, empathetic, engaged questioner, the person who asks intelligently and creatively because he cares and identifies deeply; this is  the person we would all like to be. We then admit that there are times or situations in which we feel angry, disturbed and distanced by our people, their actions and their traditions, and attack, rather than discuss, what the Jews are doing. At  other times we are too tired, or lazy, or uninspired, to ask anything more than a simple question, hoping, at best, for a simple, superficial  answer. Interestingly, this form of almost mechanical semi-engagement would seem to be worse than the anger felt by the evil son, who cares enough to fight. And then, last and worst, there are times when we are so alienated from Jewish life and tradition that we really don't care enough to ask, engage, question,  at all. 

The Haggadah has responses for all four of these attitudes. I wish for all of us, in whatever one of these states we happen to find ourselves, whatever kind of son or daughter we might happen to be at any particular time, that we always find those people - parents, teachers, friends, spouses - who can respond creatively and helpfully to us. And, alternatively,  when faced with one of these questioners, or with someone too alienated to even ask the question, we can perhaps find the words which will help them on their way, supply  the response that will begin to answer their questions, whether actually asked or not.  

Pessach kasher v'sameach,
Shimon    

To the unsuspecting reader: This is about something about which I often speak on BYFI summers, so if it looks like one you've heard already, you can get off the train any time you like.

In this week's parsha, Mishpatim, the Torah repeats - with the wording somewhat changed - the admonition to rest on Shabbat which was in the Ten Commandments, which appeared  in last week's parsha, Yitro:

"Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the slave born in your household, and the stranger as well, may be refreshed."

The Talmud, in Tractate Yevamot, page  48b, says that the slave and the stranger ("ger" in Hebrew) referred to here are non-Jews. The word "ger" could, and in other instances does, mean a convert to Judaism, and there are Jewish slaves, but the Talmud insists that in this version of the commandment, we are expanding the range of those who benefit from the Shabbat beyond what other verses may be referring to, beyond the members of  the Jewish community, to include our non-Jewish slaves and the gentile strangers in our midst. These people, who are not usually the target of the Torah's commandments, must rest as well.

If this is the right reading, and we are referring to non-Jews here, a question arises: the verse seems to make these people the whole point of the Shabbat, the focus of the entire exercise, as we are told to not work on the seventh day "so that" ("l'ma'an" in Hebrew) these non-Jews, as well as our animals, can rest. Surely this is wrong. We keep the Shabbat so that we can rest (and remember the creator of the universe, and do other neat stuff on our day off). The fact that the non-Jews within our community rest as well must only be a fringe benefit. After all, the Mitzvot of the Torah are for the Jewish people: Jews eat matza on Pessach, sit in the Sukkah, and keep kosher, not non-Jews. And yet, this verse clearly says that we rest on the Sabbath so that they can rest - they are the point here. In addition, the Torah seems to be telling us this strange law in an unnecessarily complicated fashion. If, for some reason, it wants these non-Jews to rest, why not just say so? Why say that we have to rest so they they can? Just say that non-Jewish slaves of Jews and non-Jews living in a Jewish society have to rest on Shabbat. Actually, that would make a lot of sense: how are we going to get any peace and quiet on Shabbat if these people are busy working all around us? Surely, the Torah should just directly tell them to rest so that we can, not the other way around.

To understand what is really happening here, we need to look back a few verses, and put this Mitzvah in context. It goes like this: first the Torah says "Do not oppress a stranger; you yourselves know how it feels to be strangers, because you were strangers in Egypt." Then, the Torah, in what looks like a change of topic, starts a section about the calendar, beginning with the seven-year Sabbatical cycle, and then moving on to our verse on Shabbat:

"For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unploughed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove."

And then, after that, the Torah gives us our verse on the Shabbat: "Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the slave born in your household, and the stranger as well, may be refreshed."

Looked at in context, the point of our verse now becomes clear. Just as the law of not working your land during the Sabbatical year is presented here, after the law of not oppressing the stranger, as  social action ("the poor among your people may get food from it"), so, too, the law about Shabbat, which immediately follows, is about a Shabbat of social action as well, part of our ongoing  attempt to learn from our bitter experience in Egypt and treat the stranger well. Though it does want them to rest, the Torah does not tell non-Jews to not work on Saturdays - they are, after all, not members of the Covenant. The Torah does, however, want us to take responsibility for the non-Jews in our society, and arrange it so that they can,unlike the Jewish slaves in Egypt, be free, and have at least one day a week to themselves. From this perspective, we see that we rest on Shabbat not so that we can get the day off - as members of the sovereign Jewish nation to whom this verse is addressed, we can take off any damn day we want. Rather, the Torah is telling us that there is an aspect of Shabbat that is not for us, not about us and our well-being. It is, rather, about running a decent, humane society, in which everyone, even the slave, even the stranger, has some measure of freedom and autonomy. The only way to do that, to not treat the weakest elements in our society like slaves, is to structure our society in such a way that people must get a day off. If we don't work on Saturday, if we are all in shul, if we are all taking a Shabbat nap, studying a little Torah, and eating all that Shabbat food, there is no one to make our non-Jewish minority work on that day. They will, no matter what, get a day off. The Shabbat in this verse is neither an expression of our covenantal relationship with God, nor a day of rest for our sake; it is not about us. It is a demand that we organize our society "so that" even those whom the Torah does not address, but whom the Torah clearly cares about, get this particular benefit - the freedom, denied us in Egypt, to not be a slave, but to be free, autonomous, at least once a week.

For this reason, I am pretty hard-core about Shabbat in Israel. If stores are open, someone will have to work the cash registers (guess who that's going to be. I'll give you a hint: will it be someone rich? Who can afford to take Tuesday off, if he likes? And is choosing to work on Shabbat because it suits her (and it is so often a her)? Or is it someone who probably needs to work all seven days a week, like a slave,  to make ends meet? Go on, take a guess.) If buses are running, someone will have to drive them. If movie theaters operate, someone will have to take the tickets, sell the popcorn. Only by enforcing a universal day off for the people who run the country, can we guarantee a day off for those who don't. Only by "sacrificing" our malls, movies, and mobility, can we truly end the oppression of the slave and the stranger, the weakest, most marginalized among us.  

Shabbat Shalom,
Shimon

This week, in parshat Beshalach, the Israelites leave Egypt, and finally get rid of the Egyptians for good at the splitting of the Reed Sea. The scene is extraordinarily dramatic: the newly-freed slaves are in the desert, with Pharaoh's chariots closing in on them on one side, and the sea on the other. Miraculously, the sea splits, they walk through it, and it then closes in on the pursuing Egyptians, drowning them. This really is the end of the nation's bitter experience of slavery. Seeing the hand of God in the destruction of the Egyptian forces, Moshe and the Israelites respond in this way: "And Israel saw the mighty hand which God had brought down upon Egypt, and the nation feared God, and they believed in his servant, Moshe. And then Moshe and the children of Israel will sing this song to God, and they said: I will sing to God for He is great, horse and rider he cast down in the sea." The song that follows is known as shirat hayam, the song of the sea, and is also known by the first two words of the verse, quoted above, which introduces the song itself "az yashir" - "then will sing". This epic poem, which goes on for a while, is traditionally recited in its entirety every day at morning prayers. After it's over, Miriam the prophetess, sister of Moshe and Aharon, goes out with the women, tambourine in hand, and also sings an apparently abbreviated version of the song.

I'd like to focus on the difficult words which preface the song itself, and by which it is known, "az yashir": "And then Moshe and the children of Israel will sing this song to God...". The grammar is difficult; surely "And then Moshe and the children of Israel sang this song to God" would make more sense. Why is it written "az yashir Moshe"  - "and then Moshe will sing" - in the future tense, and not "az shar Moshe", "and then Moshe sang", in the past?

Some of the commentaries take a grammatical or linguistic approach. The Ibn Ezra says that that's how Hebrew works (I won't go into the details). Nachmanides says that the narrator of the Torah sometimes puts himself in the action, rather than telling it like a story which has already taken place, and therefore often uses the present or future tenses to describe things as they are happening or are about to happen. Famously, the Rabbis of the Talmud see the use of the future tense as the Torah's proof of the existence of the world to come  - the song was not only sung at the splitting of the Sea:  in the future, Moshe, once again, "will sing" this song, that future being the next world. Rashi, however, takes a different approach, and I'd like to look at it. He says that the Torah, with the use of the future tense in the phrase az yashir,  is going beyond a simple description of events. Az yashir tells us what Moshe was feeling, and thinking, before he started singing. This is how Rashi explains it: "and then, when he saw the miracle, he felt in his heart that he should sing a song...his heart told him to sing, and that is what he did."  In other words, az yashir  does not refer to the singing itself, rather, it refers to the inner workings of Moshe's heart, it tells us that his heart told him to sing, and then he starting singing.

This is, it seems to me, remarkable. Although various bits of the Bible do seem to be written by an omniscient narrator, who tells us what people are thinking, here, the point is not the narrator's omniscience, but, rather, the Torah's decision to report in this roundabout way the seemingly simple and straightforward act of singing a song of praise and thanksgiving. The Torah goes out of its way to write the verse in this strange fashion - "then Moshe will sing", rather than "then Moshe sang" - just to let us know about the moment before the singing, when Moshe, in his heart, was moved to sing. Surely, just about every act we do, other than jerking our knee in response to the doctor's little hammer, is preceded by a moment or two of thought - we want to or are moved to do something, and then we do it. But who, when reporting an action, bothers to point out that first we were moved to do it?  Just say "and then he kissed her", or "and then he strangled him" and we will understand that, just before doing those things, our hero was moved to do so. Why point out to us that Moshe was first moved to sing - just tell us he started singing. All the motivation we need to know about is already clear in the narrative itself: the sea, the miracle, the dead Egyptians. What more are we taught by this awkward phrase, whose only message is that Moshe was motivated to sing and then sang - what else would we have thought?

It would seem that the point of the "az yashir"  is to tell us about the importance of motivation, here, and in general. By motivation I don't simply mean that the song was sung as a result of the miraculous events which preceded it. That would have been clear without "az yashir", az shar would have been enough: "and then Moshe and the Israelites sang this song", and we would certainly, based on the story itself, know the reason behind the singing. The point of az yashir is to tell us that Moshe and the Israelites acted here out of a deep, inner, personal feeling, from the heart, rather than from some sense of external pressure, commandedness, tradition, or obligation. Their hearts told them what to do, what to say and sing, and the result is the poem we have in the Torah.

This understanding certainly seems to underscore the value of the deeply felt inner emotion, as opposed to a sense of obligation, as motivation for a religious expression (or an artistic one - this is, after all, a poem. Perhaps, by extension, the same is true for moral and ethical acts as well.). It is as if the Torah is saying: "hey, get this, this song is the real thing, it is special, because it came directly from the heart, from an emotional compulsion to sing it. this, therefore, is really worth paying attention to."

Here in Israel, we have just received the applications for the 2010 Amitim. I read many of them. One of the things I noticed in the essays about "your Jewish identity" is that, especially among those who identified themselves as secular, acting out of a sense of religious obligation is seen as a bad thing. Many of these kids were careful to point out that what religious or Jewish behavior they do engage in is done out of an inner desire and conviction, a sense that this is what they personally wanted to do, rather than out of a sense of duty or obligation. Although Kant would probably take exception to this view, Rashi's take on az yashir would seem to agree: what's special about the Song of the Sea is that it came from the heart, from a deeply felt emotion. The expression of that inner compulsion, the Song of the Sea, is given a very special place indeed, in the Torah and in our liturgy, thereby emphasizing the value and strength of such autonomous, personal feelings and their expression.

It's also worth noting that these emotions, rather than being articulated in the Torah's usual prose, are presented as a song, a poem, with, at least in the case of Miriam and the women, some musical accompaniment. Today, in the synagogue, there is even a special tune to which the entire Song of the Sea is read, different from the usual one. It may be that, in trying to give voice to his inner feelings, Moshe was moved to use a more artistic mode; the only way to describe his feelings, and to express them to others, to get this particularly personal message  across, was to use a language and style different from those used to describe more mundane matters, things which are less heartfelt. When what needs to be said is personal, overwhelming ("his heart told him to sing"), and deeply felt, an artistic, poetic expression is called for, in order to fully and truly give it expression. Prose will not do.

There is a poem by Billy Collins which, I think, describes the power of art - song, poetry, music - and the insufficiency of every-day speech, to express that which we most deeply feel and want to communicate.

The Blues

Much of what is said here
must be said twice,
a reminder that no one
takes an immediate interest in the pain of others.

Nobody will listen, it would seem,
if you simply admit
your baby left you early this morning
she didn't even stop to say goodbye.

But if you sing it again
with the help of the band
which will now lift you to a higher,
more ardent and beseeching key,

people will not only listen;
they will shift to the sympathetic
edges of their chairs,
moved to such acute anticipation

by that chord and the delay that follows,
they will not be able to sleep
unless you release with one finger
a scream from the throat of your guitar

and turn your head back to the microphone
to let them know
you're a hard-hearted man
but that woman's sure going to make you cry.     


Shabbat shalom,
Shimon

This week, in parshat Bo, the Jewish people leave Egypt. Besides the ten plagues, the last three of which occur in this week's portion, there is also a fairly long and involved process which much be gone through before the Jews can be free: the first Passover Seder. Moshe is commanded by God to tell the people to prepare for the big night by choosing sheep, and getting ready for a fairly complicated feast. The sheep are slaughtered, symbolizing, variously, the defeat of the Egyptians whom, we are told earlier in the Torah, worship sheep in some way, or the ascendancy of God over fate and the power of the stars, as the sign of the Zodiac at that time of the year is Aries, the ram. Its blood is put on the doorpost of each Israelite home, and then it is roasted and eaten in a highly ritualized way: "...with matzot and bitter herbs you shall eat it. Do not eat it undercooked or boiled in water...do not leave any of it over until the morning...and eat it thus: with your loins girded and your shoes on your feet and your staffs in your hands, and you shall eat it quickly, it is a Passover unto God." Now, the bit about the girded loins, staffs and shoes makes sense - they are in a hurry, about to dramatically leave Egypt as the Egyptian first born are dying, and they need to be ready. But the rest of it is strange. First of all, if you are in a hurry, why all the rigmarole with the sheep, the blood on the doorpost, the specificity of the roasting (which takes more time), and eating the matzo and marror (bitter herbs)? Get a move on! Get ready, if you're hungry eat something, and go! Furthermore, what purpose do these dishes serve at this time? The bitter herbs commemorate a bitter, oppressive time in Egypt. Surely that food will make sense as a side-dish at the Seder in a few generations, as a remembrance of our ancestors' experience; it is not necessary now, in Egypt. These people have been working as slaves and feeling the bitterness of that experience all their lives, up until the that very day. They don't need the herbs to commemorate what they are living through right now. Similarly, the matzo. Understood as both the bread of affliction - the cheap, filling, crummy food the Egyptians gave their slaves - and the culinary result of the speed in which the Israelites left Egypt, leaving no time for their dough to rise, this commemorative food also, surely, will be needed only in a few years, as an act of remembering and celebrating. The people experiencing the Exodus just had matzo for lunch, and breakfast, and will eat it tomorrow morning for breakfast again, as they hurry out of Egypt. Why, if they are in such a rush to leave, do they need to eat it, ritually, now? Would it not make more sense for them to leave all this unnecessary symbolism aside, just act naturally, eat their real matzo, rather than the symbolic matzo at the meal, experience the real bitterness of slavery, rather than the symbolic bitterness of the herbs, hurry up and leave Egypt? Let's worry about the symbolic commemoration of these events later, when they need to be recreated and remembered. Why do the people who are leaving Egypt need to symbolically ritualize what they are actually doing? To put the question a bit differently, I'd like borrow categories first introduced by Professor Yosef Chayim Yerushalmi, who passed away just over a month ago: history and memory. The Passover Seder and its rituals are acts which Jews do to create and pass on memory, the memory of an event, the Exodus from Egypt, whose historicity may be challenged, but whose conceptual, communal, and emotional reality are alive and well, thanks to these and other rememberances. But the generation of the Exodus needs no such observance. According the story told to us by the Torah, they are living the actual events, as they happen. They are in the actual historical moment of the Exodus. Why, then, do they need to ritualize these events, and experience them as symbolic as well as real? Surely only we, the rememberers, need to do that, to observe the rituals in order to make an ancient historical moment real for us. I think the answer lies in the nature, meaning, and purpose of symbolism. The later generations who want to remember the Exodus, along with its meanings, morals, and lessons, are not the only ones who need to explain to themselves what the Exodus is all about. The actors in that story, the people who lived through and experienced it, also need symbolic acts and objects, to help them more deeply and fully understand and articulate to themselves what they are experiencing. Simply living through a historical moment in no way guarantees that one will fully, or even partially, understand its import, its moral freight, its message and its implications. The first Passover Seder, celebrating events which were happening simultaneously with their being celebrated, was meant to give the participants an opportunity to think about and more fully understand what they were experiencing, to more profoundly appreciate what was happening to them. The first Seder enabled them to see and articulate, if only for themselves, the events occurring around them in a richer context, with a greater depth of understanding. Without the Passover Seder in Egypt, the Israelites may well have missed some or all of the points of the Exodus, may not have fully understood the implications of God's demand for His people's freedom from an oppressive, totalitarian empire, nor fully grasped the import of His intervention in history. Those Seder rituals underscored for them the deeper conceptual messages of that intervention, and of their freedom. This is the purpose of symbolic acts: to allow us to stop a moment, even (especially) when, like the Jews in Egypt, we are in a hurry, in the middle of sometimes tumultuous events, and think more clearly and deeply about who we are, what we are doing, what is happening to us, and what it all means. Living in a modern world (I refuse to live in the post-modern one; anyway, it's not a world at all, just a bad attitude), which, by and large, eschews the symbolic in favor of the functional, practical, and necessary, we need, more than ever, to create symbolic, ritualized ways with which to better understand the present, as well as observing the time honored rituals we have inherited to try and fathom our past. Shabbat Shalom, Shimon

This week, we begin the book of Exodus. The Israelites are in Egypt, where they have been brutally enslaved. Moshe has emerged as a would-be savior, killing an Egyptian taskmaster, and failing to break up a fight between two Israelites (a sure sign of a real Jewish leader). Because of his having killed the Egyptian, he is forced to flee the country, and takes refuge in the Land of Midian, where he marries, and herds sheep for his father-in-law. While doing so, he is visited by an angel of God, who gets his attention, so that God can then tell Moshe to return to Egypt and finish the job he started - free the Jewish people, take them out of Egypt, give them the Torah, and bring them to the promised land.

The angel appeared to Moshe "in a flame of fire, in the bush. And Moshe saw, and behold, the bush was burning with fire but was not consumed. And Moshe said, I will go, and see this great vision, why is the bush not burning up?" At that point, once he begins to approach the bush, God speaks to him, informing him of the plan to free the Israelites and bring them back Io the Land of Israel.
Nowhere in the Torah is the symbolism, if there is any, of the burning bush elucidated. On a simple level, it would seem that the bush contains no information, and is just a call of some sort to Moshe to pay attention and come over to see what's happening so that God can talk to him, with no intrinsic message or meaning of its own. However, the Italian commentator, Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno (1475-1550), feels that there is a message, a statement from God, which is communicated by the bush's burning but not being consumed. The bush, in his thinking, represents Egypt, and the fire is the punishment, the ten plagues, which God will bring upon the Egyptians in order to free His people. So far so good - Moshe is being shown that the wrath of God, the fire, will come down on the Egyptians, the bush, for the sake of the Israelites. Great. What, however, we might ask the Sforno, is the message of the most salient and fascinating feature of this vision: the fact that the bush is not consumed? After all, a little fire in the desert may be rare, but is not such a big deal, it is not miraculous. It is the bush's not being burnt up which seems to be the main event here, the real message. What is the bush's survival saying to Moshe, and to us, in the Sforno's understanding?
The Sforno explains that this is the message that God was communicating by not allowing the bush to be consumed: "Even though I saw the oppression of My people in Egypt, as indicated by the presence of the [burning] angel in the bush [Egypt], and even though I will raise My hand against their suffering, as the fire in the bush indicates, in any event, the Egyptians, who are oppressing them, will not be destroyed by all the plagues I will bring upon them, as is taught by the fact that 'the bush was not consumed', for it is certainly not My intent with these plagues which I shall visit upon them to wipe them out, and settle Israel in their place, but, rather, to save Israel from their hand and settle them elsewhere."
Is it not remarkable that the real weight, the thrust, of the prophetic vision - the fact that the burning bush is not consumed - is all about God's concern for the Egyptians? God's concern, and assurance, that His response to their inhuman treatment of the Israelites be measured, fair and reasonable? And that the Israelites - that God Himself - take no unfair advantage of them, but simply demand and receive the freedom which is theirs by right, and not take any vengeance or retribution from the Egyptians? Remarkable.

Shabbat Shalom,
Shimon

PS - Back in 2002, I seem to have written a much longer piece, which, among other things, includes a different approach to the question of the message and function of the burning bush. If you are interested and have the patience - http://byfi.org/news/?q=node/47

This week the portion we read is Vayishlach, in which Yaakov returns to the Land of Canaan after twenty years of exile, an exile which was necessitated by his need to escape his brother Esav's murderous anger at having been cheated out of his birthright. Upon his return, the first thing Yaakov must do is face Esav, who is approaching Yaakov and his family with four hundred men. Yaakov takes the necessary steps - he defensively divides his family into two camps, he prays to God, and he sends a gift to Esav, in an attempt to placate him.

Just before he does these three things, the Torah tells us his state of mind: "And Yaakov was very afraid, and upset." The obvious textual difficulty is the double language: what is indicated by his being both "very afraid" and "upset"? Rashi, quoting the Midrash, supplies a well-known answer: Yaakov was afraid that he might be killed by Esav, and upset at the possibility of his killing others in the fight with his brother.

This midrash is often used as a model for and example of Jewish morality in war-time: we not only worry about our own safety, we are also concerned about the moral dimension of how we wage war: the safety of others, the lives we will take. Although, perhaps, there are some who would not agree, here in Israel we tend to pat ourselves on the back for our morality in war time, our reluctance to take human life, the care we take to avoid it, and the real distress we feel when forced to do so (not all of us feel this way, but I think I can safely say most of us do). Famously, Golda Meir, Israel's Prime Minister during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, said to Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt:"We can forgive you for killing our sons. We can never forgive you for making our sons kill yours."

At least one of the Rabbis of the Talmud, however, did not like what Yaakov what thinking in this verse. Rabbi Yaakov Bar Idi, in Tractate Brachot asked: Why should Yaakov be afraid? After all, God had already, years earlier, promised him that He would protect and watch over him, wherever he may go. He should have faith, believe. Why is he nervous about Esav now? The answer he gives is that Yaakov was afraid that he might have sinned during the intervening years after God's original promise to protect him, and his sin, or sins, may, perhaps, cause him to lose his position as God's favorite, and, along with that, His protection.

In trying to understand exactly what sins Yaakov may have committed during this time, some of the Rabbis hypothesize a very specific one: during the years he was away from home, he, obviously, failed to carry out the mitzvah of honoring his parents. To further complicate things, Esav, who stayed at home, is seen by the Rabbis, based on his behavior in the Torah, as an exemplary son, always honoring and caring for his father, a model, in fact, of a dutiful child. Esav, during the twenty years of Yaakov's absence, actually did do this mitzvah; in fact, he did it very well. This is what creates the disadvantage which Yaakov now feels.

I think this additional wrinkle not only clarifies the notion of Yaakov's worrying being killed and killing others, it takes it a crucial step further. As Yaakov thinks about his upcoming meeting with Esav, which may well end in violence, he realizes that he, Yaakov, may not only be about to shed blood. Worse than that: he really might not have the right to shed that blood at all, as he might not even be the good guy in this interaction, he might not even deserve to beat Esav, from a moral/ethical perspective. Their relationship with their father Yitzchak was what Yaakov and Esav's negative interactions were all about, it defined who they were: who is the real heir, who is his chosen son, whom will he bless? Yaakov has always acted under the assumption that he was the proper heir to his father's legacy, not Esav. Now, twenty years later, he is no longer so sure, no longer able to state with certainty that he has behaved better than Esav, is a better and more loving son than him, and therefore deserves not only his father's blessing but God's help and protection as well. He is no longer certain that he has God on his side.

Except for the Canadians, everyone reading this is a citizen of a country at war, a country which is, almost on a daily basis, killing people whom we define as bad guys. Worrying about being responsible for this killing is certainly the moral position we all need to take. Wondering if we are really the good guys, if God is really on our side, is, apparently, a question our tradition wants us to ask as well.

Shabbat Shalom,
Shimon

In this week's portion, Va'yetze, Yaakov, fleeing from his brother Esav, leaves home and goes to Charan, the ancestral home of Abraham. There he marries Rachel, whom he loves, and is tricked into marrying her older sister Leah, whom he does not. Rachel, we are told, is barren, whereas God takes pity on Leah, and blesses with children. Her first three sons are given names which indicate that: God saw her suffering and now caused her husband to love her by giving her a son - Reuven; He heard that she was unloved and therefore gave her another child, Shimon; and, with the birth of this third child, Levi, Yaakov will now come to love her.

The fourth son she names Yehuda, saying: "This time I will give thanks (odeh) to God". The obvious question is why she thanked God only now, after the birth of her fourth son. The earlier sons were named for the kindness God had shown her by blessing her with children, but only now, with the fourth birth, does she actually thank Him. Why?

Rashi answers in this way: as the Torah tells us, there were four wives involved here - Rachel and Leah, and their two servant girls, Bilha and Zilpah, who also bore Yaakov sons. The four wives prophetically assumed that each one would bear three children, adding up to the grand total of twelve tribes. When Leah bore a fourth son, she thanked God for privileging her above the other wives. The Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, Provence, 1160-1235) seems to agree, and adds that thanks were appropriate as Leah, with the birth of a fourth son, received more than she had ever asked for, and the Ibn Ezra (Spain, 12th century) adds that she now, therefore, will stop asking, as she has more than enough, so the thank is like a 'that's enough, my plate (or my crib, in this case) is full'.

An interesting understanding of the dynamics of thanksgiving emerges from all of this: Leah, until she had Yehuda, was glad that God was answering her prayers, and, with the names she gave her first three sons, she recognized and celebrated the good He was bestowing upon her. However, she pointedly was not moved at that stage to actually thank Him. It would seem that Leah fully expected a just God to give her the three children she 'deserved', her fair share of the twelve tribes. She fully expected a just God to have pity on an unloved wife, and give her both her fair share of offspring as well as her fair share of love. Only the birth of the 'extra' son, Yehuda, which was more than she expected, moved her to thank Him.

This could be an interesting way for us to look at issues of justice, equality, and fairness. As Leah felt she deserved her first three children, and the love of her husband, we all deserve our fair share of things. We all deserve to be treated equally, and with love. We do not owe anyone, not even God, a thank you for being dealt with reasonably; God, or man, owes us that - we are supposed to be treated with kindness, mercy, and fairness. When this happens, we recognize it, even celebrate it, but it's no big deal, we don't need to go out of our way to thank God, or anyone else, for it. And, if and when we are in a position to give these things to others - to treat someone fairly, to supply them with what they need (and actually deserve anyway) - we should not expect to be thanked for doing so, they are, after all, owed it, and we should be giving it to them.

This basic expectation of a fair and decent world, in which we all assume we will get what we deserve, for which no thanks are in order, may not be realistic, but it certainly make an assumption which would be a healthy and productive one for all of us to make, about ourselves and others; namely, that we all deserve our fair share. We all deserve to be treated equally. And we all deserve to be loved.

Shabbat shalom, and enjoy the turkey,
Shimon

This week we are introduced to Yaakov and Esav, twin brothers, children of Isaac and Rebecca, who are already at odds in their mother's womb. The Torah tells us that Rebecca suffered from their strange in utero hijinks - the Rabbis posit a fetal Esav trying to get out of the womb in order to go and worship idols, while Yaakov wanted to go learn Torah in a Yeshiva. Immediately after their birth, we are told that Esav, the first-born, was a man who knew how to hunt, a man of the outdoors, while Yaakov was a simple man, a stay-at-home, "dwelling in tents". The Rabbis see Esav as being more than just your run-of-the-mill hunter: he in fact 'hunts' Isaac, his father, taking every opportunity to trick and mislead him about who he, Esav, really is. The Rabbis tell us that Esav would act as if he were extremely religious, asking his father how one tithes salt and straw (items which are actually exempt from the law of tithing - Esav is thus shown as both a phony and a halachic ignoramus), in order to mislead him about his true personality and behavior. Later on, the Torah tells us that, at the age of 40, Esav married two Canaanite women, much to the displeasure of his parents. The Rabbis point out that Isaac also married at the age of 40, and posit that here, again, Esav was trying to imitate his father in order to produce a false, positive, picture of who he really was. Again, as with the salt and straw question, he seems to fool Isaac, but the reader knows that he has actually failed, marrying at the right age, but the wrong people.

A pattern emerges: Esav, by his nature, is not Isaac-like: he is wild, aggressive, very physical, (the Rabbis describe him as a lascivious murderer, but they have already decided that he is not one of us), not a natural candidate to succeed his father as the man of God. His solution to this obvious failing of his is to imitate his father, to try and behave just as he thinks his father would, to be like him. Although he does seem to fool his father, (though, interestingly, not his mother), and Isaac does want to bless him, and not Yaakov, as his successor, he ultimately fails, and Yaakov takes the birthright and blessing away from him.

Why? What's wrong with Esav's plan? In a way, he really is trying, by doing what his father before him had done, to do the right thing, to be dutiful, to go in the right path, his father's path. And he almost succeeds - it does seem to work on his father, who accepts him as his rightful heir - but, of course, he ultimately fails, as Yaakov manages to take everything from him, and the Jewish tradition sees him as almost irretrievably other. Why can he not build a successful, acceptable 'Jewish' personality this way? Why is he doomed to not be accepted as a real heir, a real son of Abraham and Isaac, as his brother Yaakov is?

Perhaps what's wrong with Esav is precisely the fact that his behavior is so consciously imitative, so unnatural to him, so not his own. Esav fails to figure out how to express Isaac's values in his own way (whatever that would have been). He does not work through the very real differences he has with his parents' world view. Instead, he remains who he is, with his own values, and fails totally to integrate his parents' values. Instead, when trying to live up to their standards, he engages in fruitless, pointless, imitative behavior. To ask how one tithes salt is to miss the point - every halachist knows that salt is not subject to these laws, (salt is also, suggestively, the opposite of fruitful - salt in the ground makes the soil barren). Esav's attempt to be like his father by marrying at forty again misses the point, as he marries two idol-worshipping women, which is completely at odds with the wishes of his parents. Rather than taking his father's legacy and really living it, he fails to make Isaac's values his own, and all his imitative Isaac-like behavior rings hollow, false, ridiculous.

Yaakov, on the other hand, really is like Isaac, in that he tries in his own way to claim for himself his father's relationship with God. He outwits Esav, first by buying the position of first-born (the one who inherits) from him for a bowl of soup when Esav was very hungry, and famously, by tricking Isaac into thinking he is Esav and thereby receiving the blessing Isaac meant to give to his oldest son. Even when Yaakov is going against his father's wishes, he is more like him than Esav is, more in tune with his values and goals, in that he truly wants to become the heir to the covenant. Yaakov is an appropriate heir to Isaac precisely because he is not exactly like his father - he does it his way. He is a good son because he acts independently and authentically, making his parents' values his own. Esav, with his empty, unintegrated imitation of his father's actions, ends up being no son to him at all.

Sadly, Isaac (unlike Rebecca, who does distinguish between Yaakov's real behavior and Esav's empty posturing), doesn't see this, and wants to privilege and bless Esav as his true heir; he seems, after all, so like him in so many ways. It's not easy for Isaac, or any parent, to let go of his natural desire for his kids to be like him, to believe and act and think just like him, and, instead, encourage them to integrate the values he has given them into something honest, something real, something that's truly their own.

When discussing the holiday of Purim, people (and by people I mean the kind of people who discuss Purim and things like Purim for a living, not much of as living, but a living) often focus on two verses. The first tells us how Haman suggests to King Ahashverosh that he kill all the Jews in his empire:
 
"And Haman said to King Ahashverosh, There is one nation dispersed and divided among the nations in all the provinces of your kingdom and their laws are different from those of all other nations and they do not keep the king's laws, and it is of no benefit to the king to tolerate them."
 
This verse is often seen as a clever and correct assessment by Haman of the weakness of the Jewish people: they are "dispersed and divided" throughout the kingdom. It is precisely this lack of unity, the lack of a central place or position within Persian society, which is what makes the Jews so vulnerable, and such an inviting and easy target.
 
Later on in the Megillah, when Esther decides to try to save her people and plead their case to the King, she gives Mordechai  the following instructions:   
 
"Go, gather together all the Jews who are to be found in Shushan and fast for me; don't eat and don't drink for three days..."
 
Esther's instructions are often seen to be in dialogue with Haman's speech, as a kind of 'tikkun' or corrective to the Jewish problem that he so correctly points out, the fatal weakness of being divided and dispersed among the nations. Go and gather together all the Jews, she demands, unite them, put an end to the differences which divide them, and make them one nation. With that done, I will feel able to go to bat for them with Ahashverosh. Typically, this verse, juxtaposed with what Haman said to the king, is used as a plea for Jewish unity, pointing out the danger of being divided, and the strength in being united.
 
It seems to me, however, that Haman's words to the king should be understood differently. Although he does point out that the Jews are "dispersed and divided",  he also calls them "one nation" ("am echad") and ascribes to them a unique and separate legal system, which sets them apart from the other nations. Perhaps a more correct reading of Haman's analysis of the Jewish condition is this: they are a nation which manages to be dispersed and divided and yet, at the same time, unified and distinct. Haman may, in fact, be pointing not to their weakness but, rather, to their strength: their ability to be a single nation while at the same time being multi-faceted, holding different opinions, living in different places and doing different things. Perhaps he is actually pointing to something strange and powerful in the Jewish people, that they are one, but are not monolithic. In fact, perhaps they are one by virtue of being dispersed and divided, by being flexible enough and open enough to include all kinds of Jews from all kinds of places together in one Jewish nation. It is precisely this duality, this ability to be "one nation...[whose] laws are different from those of all other nations", while at the same time being "dispersed and divided" that gives us the ability to defeat a Haman, and which so frightened him. Haman understood that, paradoxically, our unity derives from our differences.
 
Purim sameach,
Rabbi Shimon Felix
The Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel

During this time of year, the period before and during the High Holidays, there is a custom in some Jewish communities to ask forgiveness from everyone you know for any wrong you may have done them. The formula goes something like this: 'if I have done anything to harm you, will you please forgive me'. The notion of asking for forgiveness from someone you have wronged, either physically, financially, or through insult or slight, is an ancient one. It appears in the Talmud and is enshrined in all the great halachic codes, from Maimonides to the Shulchan Aruch. What does NOT appear in these texts, however, is what I described above, in the opening sentences. These codes do NOT tell us to ubiquitously ask all of our friends and acquaintances to forgive us for anything untoward we might have done to them. Rather, we are told that if we know we have wronged someone we must, when appropriate, make restitution, and appease them. The material in the codes is very clear: "...sins between a man and his fellow man, such as injuring your friend, or cursing your friend, or robbing him or anything like that, are not ever forgiven until one gives his friend what is owed him, and appeases him. Even if he returned the money he owes him, he must appease him and ask him to forgive him. Even if he only disturbed his friend with words, he must appease him and ask his forgiveness until he grants it to him." (Maimonides, the Laws of Repentance, chapter 2, halacha 9).       
 
When I was a young wise guy I was very critical of the practice of general forgiveness-asking. I would argue that one does not need to go around annoying all of one's friends by asking them to be pardoned  for unnamed and unknown slights, just to be sure that you don't miss any. The halacha says that you need to ask forgiveness if you know that you wronged someone, it does not recommend asking for blanket forgiveness from everyone in your neighborhood or on your Face Book.
 
Now that I'm a middle-aged wise guy, I think I have come to understand the wisdom of this custom. In interpersonal interactions, it really is hard to know whether something we have said or not said, done or not done, may have hurt someone. The custom of universally asking to be pardoned for any wrongs one may have committed is based on the understanding that we really don't stand in other people's shoes, we really don't know how the things we have said and done may have affected them. Asking everyone we know to forgive us is not a kind of halachic playing-it-safe, not a covering of all possible bases. Rather, it is a profound recognition of the subjectivity of human experience, and of our basic inability to ever really completely understand or appreciate the way someone else feels. With some hesitation, and sadness, I would add that this practice seems to also express the understanding that, given the basic "otherness" of other people's emotional experience, and our inability to really feel what they are feeling, it is inevitable that we will, one way or another, hurt their feelings in our interactions with them. This being the case, it is perfectly appropriate, even necessary, to ask forgiveness of everyone we know.  
 
It is in this spirit, and with this understanding,  that I would like to personally, and, insofar as I am able to do so, in the name of BYFI, ask you all to forgive me for any harm or insult you may have suffered at my hands. I assure you it was unintentional, and a result of my inability to feel what you feel.   
 
May you and yours be inscribed in the book of life,
 
Shimon Felix

One of the central themes of Rosh Hashanah is, of course, the blowing of the shofar. Although the Torah is not that clear about what instrument we are actually meant to  use to sound a blast on this day, tradition mandates a ram's horn. The reason for this is that we are thereby reminded, and, at the same time, we remind God, of the akedah - the binding of Isaac - in which Abraham fulfills God's commandment to offer up his beloved son as a sacrifice, only to be stopped at the last moment, and have a  ram substituted in his son's stead. For this reason, we not only blow the shofar, but also read the story of the akedah in the synagogue: Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Judgment, is when we want to focus on Abraham's loyalty and dedication, both as a kind of plea to God for our sakes, as well as a model for us of religious devotion.  
 
The akedah is, famously, one of the most difficult stories of the Torah. Why did God demand this horrific sacrifice? Did He really mean it at first, and then changed His mind? Why did Abraham acquiesce? What was Isaac thinking? The medieval commentator on the Bible, Rashi, tries to solve at least one of these problems. In his commentary, he tells us - twice, once at the beginning of the story and once at the end - that God never meant for Abraham to actually kill Isaac. If you read the Biblical text carefully, Rashi claims, you will see that all God said was to "raise him up there as an offering". He never actually says to slaughter  him. Once you take him up to Mount Moriah, bind him, and place him on the altar, you have done what  I commanded you to, "raise him up as an offering", and not kill him; you've done that, now bring him down.
 
This clever reading is all well and good, in as much as it saves God from being a liar, or inconsistent: he always meant one thing, offer Isaac, don't slaughter him. But what about Abraham? What was he meant to be thinking? Clearly, if he had been as clever as Rashi, and read God's commandment as ending with just raising Isaac up, the entire exercise would have been a joke: Abraham, with a nod and a wink, going through the motions of sacrificing his son, while knowing full well how it would all end. Surely, for the akedah to have any meaning, he must have read the commandment incorrectly (from Rashi's point of view), and thought that he was really meant to slaughter Isaac. What then, is the point of Rashi's clever reading of the mitzvah? Is it just to get God off the hook from the charge of being false and inconsistent with Abraham, on a technicality (no,no, pay attention, look at the text more carefully, I didn't really say that)? Is Rashi like some clever lawyer with a contact he's trying to wriggle his client out of (sorry, lawyers)?
 
It seems to me that we, and not God, are the actual focus, and the beneficiaries, of Rashi's tricky literal reading of the text. Rashi shows us that once we know the whole akedah story, including how it ends, with God teaching Abraham that He does not want this human sacrifice, we then can go back and see that, if read carefully, the happy ending was clearly there from the beginning, in the words of God, if we only know how to read His words properly. This going back and re-reading the original divine commandment, based on the story's denouement, teaches me, the reader, that if I know that something in the Torah can NOT be so, can NOT be what God is really saying to or demanding of me - just as the slaughter of Isaac, we learn at the end of the story,  could not possibly have been what God really wanted - then I must find a way to read the Torah accordingly. I must find a way to read the words of God so that they match what I know to be moral, decent, and true. Just as Rashi, at the end of the story, learns a lesson in morality, and then goes back and finds that lesson embedded in the initial commandment -"I said raise him up, I never said to slaughter him" - we, too, must read the Torah so that it contains the moral positions we know to be true. Any other reading of the Torah would be as wrong as Abraham's initial misunderstand of God's commandment, when he thought, impossibly, that God could really ask him to kill his son.
 
I'd like to wish you all, with your families and loved ones, a happy and healthy new year, l'shana tova tikatevu v'taychatemu - may you be written and sealed for a good year.
Shimon

It is customary during the period of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to ask forgiveness of friends and acquaintances - either because you know you have wronged them, or simply on the off-chance that you might have. The halacha teaches us that although sins between man and God are forgiven, once repented, on Yom Kippur, sins between you and your fellow man or woman are only forgiven if you make restitution, when relevant, and ask - and receive - forgiveness. Here in Israel there is currently a cute example of this: over the past couple of weeks, a cell-phone ad campaign has been touting the many cheap minutes you can get with their plan - so cheap that you will want to call people in places like London and New York and apologize to them for long-forgotten wrongs.
 
I want to take this opportunity today, the day before Yom Kippur, to ask you to forgive me if I have in any way wronged or hurt you - during your Fellowship summer perhaps, at an alumni event, by e mail, or due to any insensitivity I may have been guilty of at any time. The BYFI community is a big and busy one, I talk too much, and if I have hurt anyone's feelings at any stage, I am sorry.
 
I'd like to share a story my daughter Talia brought home from school the other day. A couple is at home. There is a knock on the door. When the man of the house gets to the door, three old men are standing there. "Who are you?" he asks. "We are success, happiness, and love", they answered. "You may, at the start of the New Year, invite one, but only one, of us to stay with you for the year." The husband went back in and consulted with his wife. After a few moments they made their decision, went to the door, and invited love in. He entered the house, and was followed by success and happiness. "But we thought only one of you would be able to come in and be with us this year", the surprised couple said. "When there is love in the home, success and happiness are sure to follow", the old men responded. When my daughter told us this story at the Shabbat dinner table this past Friday night, we all rolled our eyes. Then we thought about it for a second and stopped rolling our eyes.
 
I hope you are all inscribed and sealed, with all your loved ones, in the Book of Life, love, happiness, and success.

According to Rabbinic tradition, the holiday of Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The commandments are prefaced by the following simple verse: "And God spoke all of these words, saying:" This is exactly what one would have by way of introduction to the words dictated by God to Moshe and the Jewish people. However, the commentaries notice an unnecessary word: had the verse left out the word "all", and just said "And God spoke these words, saying:", we would have assumed that he spoke all of them. After all,  "these words" means these words, all the words that follow. Why does the Torah need to emphasize that he spoke all of them?
 
A simple answer might be that the Torah wants to disabuse readers of the notion that Moshe, or someone else, was actually the author of the Ten Commandments, or of some of them, and so the word all emphasizes the divine source of the entire text. However, Rashi (France, 11th century), does not bring us this straightforward explanation. Rather, he says this: the word 'all' indicates that the first communication from God at Mount Sinai, heard by the Jewish people, consisted of all of the words of the ten Commandments, spoken together, as one sound; "all" means all at once. Now, this is something which, Rashi points out, no human being could do, it is a clearly divine, albeit incomprehensible, communication. Rashi then explains that the word-for-word, sentence-by-sentence version of the commandments written in the Torah - "I am the Lord your God" and the nine others that follow - is what God said next, after the strange, mashed together, all-at-once version.
 
Well, the obvious question is, why? What is God, a comedian? What is this first communication of all the words of the Ten Commandments spoken at once meant to convey? If God will immediately afterwards speak the commandments normally, one word at a time, what is the message of the jumbled up commandments? Why did God do this strange little parlor trick, and why did the Torah need, with the word 'all', to tell us about it, before telling us the actual content of the commandments?
 
Perhaps we can understand this first, incomprehensible communication as teaching us this: by prefacing the normal text of the commandments with their all-together-at-once version, perhaps God is modeling for us the nature of Torah study. Just as the Israelites experienced it on Mount Sinai on Shavuot, the first time the Torah was given, as an incomprehensible text, which was only subsequently elucidated, so, too,  the Torah must always be experienced as a text whose essential meaning is divine and yet (therefore?) always obscure, not-yet-understood, which challenges us to interpret and elucidate it. The mashed-together version is a model for all of our interactions with the text of the Torah, an interaction which we do not understand,  and which demands of us an effort to clarify, make sense, interpret, and explain.
 
How true or relevant this dynamic is in terms of other, non-Torah texts, be it Shakespeare, a Seinfeld episode or a comic book, is an interesting question, one which is much dealt with by postmodern literary theorists. I'd like to suggest that the greater the text is - the more it is like Torah, the more it is 'divine' - the closer to infinite are its implications, and, therefore, the more it can successfully and meaningfully inspire and bear the endless inferences and interpretations of its creative and active readers.  Shavuot, as the holiday of the interpretation of the Torah, is an excellent opportunity for us to rededicate ourselves to being those kinds of readers to those kinds of texts - or to comic books, if that's where your personal literary theory takes you.  
 
Chag sameach,
 
Rabbi Shimon Felix

Since Hegel introduced it, the concept of the "Other"  - the notion that individuals and groups are, to a large degree, defined by their interaction with and understanding of those outside of and unlike themselves - the Other - has been central to the work of many philosophers (including many Jewish ones, such as Buber and Levinas), psychologists, social scientists, and ethicists. In Hegel's original presentation of the notion of the Other, he used a kind of parable, in which two people ("self-conciousnesses") meet. This meeting is complicated, and I will not discuss most of what Hegel has to say about it, other than to point out the negative nature of the interaction, which is, at first, seen as a kind of struggle to the death, and which then progresses to an unsatisfactory Master-Slave relationship. In subsequent, mostly socio-political treatments of the Other, it is the way one is oppressed, marginalized, or denied, that gives one that status.
 
In this week's parsha, Bereshit (Genesis), the world is, as we know, created by God. There is a well-known and much-discussed question connected with the creation, one which especially interested the later (16th-17th century) Kabbalists: Why? Why did God create the world? What need could have possibly motivated or compelled Him to move beyond His perfect, solitary, all-inclusive existence, and create something outside of, Other than, Himself?
 
There is an equally well-known answer, supplied by, among others, Rav Chaim Vital, a student of the Ari, who lived in Zfat, in the Galilee, in the 16th-17th centuries: God created the world in order to "do good for his creatures". In this understanding,  God really was perfect in His pre-creation all-encompassing aloneness, but something was missing: the opportunity for God to do good, to show kindness, to do kindness, to another being. As Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzato puts it in his book Sefer Hadrachim: "Behold, the goal of creation was to do good with His goodness, to those other than Him."
 
The contrast with Hegel's description of the initial fraught encounter with the Other, and with the normative understanding of social scientists of the Other as the oppressed and marginalized, could not be more pronounced. According to the Kabbalists, the original Other - the entire created universe, which stands outside of God, the Creator - exists solely as an opportunity for God to do good; to help and sustain beings other than Himself. The Other - the universe - is that which gives God the opportunity to express and actualize an attribute of His - goodness - which He could not actualize in isolation.
 
If, as the Rabbis encourage us to do with the mitzvah (commandment) of l'hidamot b'drachav (to be imitative of God and His attributes),  we are meant to understand God and act like Him, then we should emulate God in this as well: The Other should be seen as an opportunity to fully actualize ourselves, to express that which exists within us potentially and make it real - to act on all that is good within us, and bestow it upon others. This is the most basic, elemental way in which we can imitate God, whose first act as God was to create an entire universe, just so that he could take that which was good within Him and make it actual by sharing it with the Others Her created.   
 
I write a lot of stuff about the Torah, and who knows when I'm right, but I know that the above is true. My granddaughter Atara, who is five, was absolutely wonderful from the day she was born. However, when her brother Ido was born, we began to see a goodness in her that we always knew was there, but which could not really exist in the world until she had someone to share it with, someone to give it to. She has taught me how the existence of the Other - a baby brother, about as Other as it gets -  gives us the opportunity to make real the best that is within us: to take our potential for good, create a positive interaction with an Other, and thereby make the good within us, and ourselves, fully real. (My own kids were wonderful when they were little, too, but the first five were boys, so they didn't show it so transparently, and the last, our daughter, was our last, and had to struggle with five older brothers, so she needed to find other arenas in which to be wonderful, which she has.)   
 
Shabbat Shalom,
Shimon

In the first of the two portions we will read this week, Nitzavim, we find a section which is known as the parsha of teshuva - repentance. Although not all commentators agree (Rashi, Maimonides), Nachmanides (also known as the Ramban; Spain, Israel, 1194-1270) sees the verses as a commandment, demanding of us that we repent. I use the word "we" purposely, as the kind of repentance discussed here is not that of the individual but, rather, that of the nation, and takes place on the national  level:

"So it shall be when all of these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you shall turn to your hearts, there among all nations where the Lord your God has banished you, and you shall return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul according to all that I command you today, you and your sons. Then the Lord your God will return [with] you from captivity, and have compassion on you, and will return and gather you from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. If your outcasts are at the ends of the earth, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you back. The Lord your God will bring you into the land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will prosper you and multiply you more than your fathers. And the Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, to love the Lord your God...And you shall repent and obey the Lord, and observe all His commandments which I command you today..."

The process of teshuva - penitence - is presented here in the broadest possible historical terms. Rather than simply focusing on the penitence of the individual, in terms of his or her personal shortcomings (as we typically do around the time of the High Holidays), the Ramban sees this section as a commandment to the entire nation, to see itself, while in exile, as being in need of repentance, and repent. This must be a communal returning, a national teshuva, to our own hearts, to God and His commandments, to the land of Israel, and to our former status. 

I'd like to focus on the Ramban's understanding of what this restored status is. Rather than simply seeing it as a return to political and cultural autonomy, along the lines of the thousand years of  Jewish national sovereignty in Israel (roughly between 1000 BCE and 70 CE), he takes it much further: "...And mankind will, at that time, return to what it was like before the sin of Adam, that he would naturally do that which it is right to do, and he would not desire something and its opposite..."

The Ramban goes on to explain that, in the Garden of Eden, before the Fall, man naturally did that which was good, and fitting,  and did not have to struggle with his base nature to do the right thing. It is to this remarkable state, in which, the Ramban tells us, man had the free will to do whatever he wanted, but was naturally inclined to do good, that we, the Jewish people, along with all of mankind, will ultimately return. This is, of course, nothing  less than a radical, universal, Messianic state, and, according to the Ramban, we are commanded to achieve it!

I have always found this to be a very powerful idea. That we are meant to - according to Nachmanides, commanded to - return to Eden is, if taken seriously, a revolutionary notion, one which allows for, in fact demands, some far reaching changes in our thinking and behavior. For example: if, in the Garden, Adam and Eve were equals, and it is only after their sin that Eve is cursed and made subservient to Adam, then feminism is a messianic movement, one which attempts, according to the Ramban, to take us forward in the journey back to our original, egalitarian, Edenic state. Surely, if we pretend we are already in the garden, and suspend for a moment our evil inclinations, we must see that a world of equality, without subservience, is "that which it is right to do". Furthermore, if this is meant to become the state of all mankind (as Adam and Eve were, in their day, all of mankind),  then we are also looking at a universalistic position, one which sees the world as one, and erases distinctions between peoples. In a way that is both ironic and challenging, this universalizing process begins with a return to our national home in Israel. Ultimately, however, the goal is to transcend that value, and achieve a world order which is even closer to perfection, closer to the Garden of Eden. 

One can view many modern developments  - from employees'  rights and a shorter work week, to automation and the internet - as bringing us back to a before-the-Fall world, a world which is one, and in which work is not onerous or exploitive (the "sweat of the brow" thing was part of the curse). It is interesting that the advantages of automation which we were promised when I was growing  up have not panned out, and the advances made in the struggle for workers' rights have, in many areas, been rolled back: since 1973, "families now work longer hours - about two and a half or three months a year more of work on average", according to Jeff Madrick in "The Case for Big Government". This, surely, is the wrong direction, and should be seen as such from a Jewish perspective.   

The Ramban's notion that the Messianic era is essentially a return to the Garden of Eden, and is at the same time a process of reassessment and repentance in which we are commanded to engage, places upon us the dual responsibility to establish, by careful examination of the Eden story, what our real, ultimate values might be, and then, as a society, act  to achieve them, no matter how revolutionary and far-reaching the changes demanded of us might be, no matter how many out-of-Eden values we may have to rethink along the way back to the Garden. 

When I was a kid, back in the sixties, there were two great, popular, anarchistic, anti-capitalist slogans: "Steal This Book", the title of a work by Abbie Hoffman which, not surprisingly, didn't sell so well, and the subject of this e mail: "Property is Theft". Coined (if you'll pardon the expression) by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840 (thank you, Wikipedia), in the sixties we understood it as a protest against the very notion of ownership, its inherent and historical inequalities and excesses. I remember it often being conflated with what we believed to be a Native American idea that land can not be owned by anyone (True? A legend? Anybody know?).

I am engaging in this bout of hippie-wanna-be nostalgia (I was a bit too young and way too Orthodox to really be a hippie) not because of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock (no, I didn't go, it's a short, sad story: I was a waiter in an Orthodox summer camp, not far from Woodstock, actually, and we had arranged to go to the festival as our official waiters' outing for the summer (pretty clever, huh?), until the powers that be figured it out (drugs, sex, rock and roll) and locked the camp down for the weekend. Three of us (not me) snuck out and went, and they've never been the same), but because of a few verses in Ki Tetse, this week's parsha: "If you enter your neighbor's vineyard, you may eat all the grapes you want, but do not put any in your basket. If you enter your neighbor's grain field, you may pick kernels with your hands, but you must not put a sickle to his standing grain."

Now, read in a straightforward manner, the Torah is clearly saying that when walking through someone's field we are allowed, within reason (don't fill your basket with the stuff, or harvest his whole field), to eat from the crops growing there. The message seems clear - property is theft, the land and its produce belong to everyone, the "owner" of the field doesn't really own its fruit, anyone can just come and take it. In other words, Steal This Fruit! Now, you could argue that, once again, I've gone too far, and that, by limiting how much the passer-by can take to essentially only what he can eat right then and there, the Torah is actually affirming the owner's ultimate claim to the field and its produce, and you would be right. However, the right of every passing stranger to at least some of field's fruit does limit the extent of ownership, and should make us pause, and rethink, perhaps, what we believe about property, and theft, and how we are all meant to share the earth and its bounty, rather than hoard it for ourselves.

The fact is, however, that the Talmud rejects this reading, as clear and direct as it would seem to be, and decides that the verses only refer to someone who is working for the owner, in his fields, and not to anyone else: simple passersby have no right to take fruit from someone else's field. As the Talmudic discussion goes: "'Issi ben Yehuda says: "If you enter your neighbor's vineyard..." the verse is talking about anyone who comes into it'. And Rav says: 'Issi has left people with no way to live!'" (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Matzia, 92a). In other words, ownership, and its attendant rights, makes possible the social order needed to guarantee an orderly distribution of food, perhaps not the fairest, most equitable distribution, but one that enables just about all of us to eat. Allow anyone to just grab what they want, Rav says to Issi, and we will have chaos, anarchy, and no one will eat. The verse is therefore understood as only referring to agricultural workers, the idea being that it is mean to make people work around food and prevent them from eating (my son Sruli, who has a wedding band, is really ticked off when the band isn't given food from the wedding and the opportunity to eat it, and is usually sure to include this arrangement in the contract). But the simple reading, giving everyone a basic right to take some food as they walk through another's property, is rejected: what's mine is mine, and you can't have it.

So, the Rabbis read these verses not as a challenge to ownership (even if only a somewhat limited one), which would give everyone some claim on other people's 'property', but, rather, as a simple, reasonable kindness which the landowner should show his workers (this dvar Torah would have made more sense next week, erev Labor Day, but that's not a Jewish holiday, is it?). With this reading, they opt for an orderly, capitalist society, in which property is respected and ownership affirmed, but in which, at the same time, the Torah demands that ownership be enlightened, thoughtful, and sensitive, and that we do have to share what is ours, when necessary, with those who have some particular claim to it, like the field worker. However, we need not go beyond that, and subvert the rights of ownership, as that would be dangerously anarchic. I gotta tell you, hippie or not, I am a little disappointed. Are you?

Shabbat Shalom,

The parsha, called Shoftim - Judges - has a lot of material about government: judges, court cases, rules of testimony, etc. One of the really fascinating sections deals with the executive branch of government - the king. The relevant verses go like this:

When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, "Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us," be sure to appoint over you the king the Lord your God chooses. He must be from among your own brothers. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite. The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them, for the Lord has told you, "You are not to go back that way again." He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold. When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law... It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees, and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel. Now, anyone thinking about being the King of Israel, upon reading these verses, would really have to think again: "If I can't have lots of horses, women, gold and silver, what, precisely, is the point? That is so why I want to be king - for those perks. What kind of deal is this, anyway, if I can't 'consider myself better than my brothers'? And, on top of everything else, I have to schlep a Sefer Torah around with me all the time? Who needs it? I'm better off going to law school".

In fact, the commentaries are divided on the question of whether we really need a king at all. Maimonides understands these verses as a mitzvah - we are commanded to appoint a king. Others - Rav Saadia Gaon, Sforno, the Ibn Ezra - see it as an option, something we have permission to do but are not commanded to do. The phrase "Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us," does sound like a bad idea - Israel leaving behind its beliefs and traditions in order to imitate other nations, and when this actually happened, in the days of the prophet Samuel, he really got angry at the people for wanting a king, chillingly describing the excesses that he would no doubt commit: "He will take your sons...he will take your daughters...you will be slaves to him, and cry out... " (Samuel I, 8). Ultimately, he acquiesces to the nation's demand for a ruler, but he really thinks it's a very bad idea. I'm writing this on Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first day of the Jewish month of Elul, exactly 30 days before Rosh Hashanah. Traditionally, on Rosh Hashanah, we crown God as King of the Universe: many of the high holiday prayers speak of God as king, and the blowing of the Shofar is seen as an act of coronation - trumpets announcing the crowning of God as King. With the idea of God as king in mind, we can understand the Torah's negative attitude toward the institution of monarchy: if there already is a king of the universe, who else can rightly call himself a monarch? It makes perfect sense for the Torah to see the notion of monarchy as a bad one, one which the Torah actually subverts at the same time that it, reluctantly, acquiesces to it. For most of human history, monarchy in one form or another was an almost universal system of government. As in other cases, most notably sacrifices (and, as I've pointed out on occasion, the status of women), the Torah, rather than demanding a revolution which would turn the world order upside down ('Go ahead, have a religion, worship God, but, unlike everyone else, no sacrifices, OK?'), the Torah chooses an evolutionary approach, and gradually weans us away from monarchy to democracy.

Therefore, rather than simply saying: 'Don't you get it? The notion of one God, who created the universe, clearly implies equality for all, and demands that no man consider himself "better than his brothers", so could you please have elections next Tuesday', the Torah accepts that monarchy has a very strong hold on the human imagination (the Sefer Hachuinuch (13th century) writes on our parsha of the "good that accrues to a nation when one man is above them as a head and leader, for a nation cannot dwell in peace without this...it is a curse for a group of men to rule together as one"), and that centuries would pass before democracy would become acceptable to most people (we are not actually there yet). So, the Torah establishes the conceptual foundation: there is only one King, God. Anyone else who acts as a king will, invariably, be tempted to oppress rather than serve his people, and therefore, since we do need someone to run things for now, we must try to limit his power. Ultimately, however, the notion of a human king is unacceptable, and a democratic system, one which stresses and insures equality for all, under God, is to be preferred. That is why the Torah, in our parsha, actually subverts the very notion of monarchy that it allows for (or mandates), in the hopes that we will learn to evolve past it to a more democratic system, one that recognizes the Creator as our only true king.

Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix

In this week's parsha, we are told that, once out of Egypt and in the desert, the Israelites kept the Passover holiday, offering the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb, as commanded, on the anniversary of the Exodus, the afternoon of the 14th day of the month of Nissan, the first month of the Jewish ritual year. Then this happened:

"But there were certain men, who were unclean by the dead body of a man, so that they could not keep the Passover on that day; and they came before Moses and before Aaron on that day. And those men said unto him: 'We are unclean by the dead body of a man; why should we be disadvantaged, and not bring the offering of the Lord in its appointed season among the children of Israel?' And Moses said unto them: 'Stay ye, that I may hear what the Lord will command concerning you.' And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying: 'Speak unto the children of Israel, saying: If any man of you or of your generations shall be unclean by reason of a dead body, or be on a journey afar off, yet he shall keep the Passover unto the Lord; in the second month on the fourteenth day at dusk they shall keep it; they shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs; they shall leave none of it unto the morning, nor break a bone thereof; according to all the statute of the Passover they shall keep it.

Those Israelites who had been made ritually impure by having come into contact with a dead body are unwilling to accept the halachic principal that only those who are ritually pure may offer the Passover sacrifice. Although legally exempted from this practice, forbidden, in fact, from entering the Tabernacle area, they petition Moshe and demand their right to serve God along with the rest of the people.

Moshe, apparently not having been told beforehand what to do in this situation, turns to God, who responds by giving them a second chance, exactly one month later, to make the offering. God makes this a permanent law, and also takes this opportunity to add that someone who missed his chance to offer the sacrifice on Passover because he was "on a journey far off" can also take advantage of what is today called "Pessach Sheni", the second Passover, one month after the first one, and offer it then.

The commentator Rashi is bothered by a fairly obvious question: why didn't Moshe know what to do in this case? Why, in fact, wasn't the case of those who, for whatever reason, missed the Passover sacrifice, originally taught to Moshe by God, along with the rest of the laws of Passover? What kind of dynamic is this, in which the Torah, as taught by Moshe, seems to not have taken this fairly common eventuality into account, leaving it to the aggrieved parties, those effected by the lacuna, to right this wrong?

Rashi explains that Moshe should have and would have been the one to teach the law of the second Passover as an original part of the Torah, but he was prevented from doing so in order to give these worthy people (the ritually impure Israelites) the chance to add this worthwhile piece of legal information to the Torah. In other words, God purposely kept this law from Moshe, so that these "worthy people" could be the ones to introduce it.

It would seem that the impure Israelites somehow have more of a stake in this law, giving them the right to be the ones to introduce it, rather than Moshe, who only has a theoretical, objective, 'professional' interest in it. This would seem to tell us something about the relationship of those who seem to be disadvantaged by the laws of the Torah to the Torah itself: those whom the laws of the Torah discriminate against, are, in fact, challenged to rise to the occasion, to show their "worthiness" - their desire to take part in the life which the Torah mandates - and force the Torah to accommodate them. It's like having legal standing in a court of law: those who have some sort of real grievance have a right to make a claim on the law, to demand justice from it.

This points to an openness, a dynamism, a permeability, in the Torah's legal system. Like any legal system, the Torah begins and ends somewhere - it can not be an infinite list of all possible cases and situations. Like any legal system, the Torah also often says "no" to people: you may not, you are forbidden to, you are disqualified from. This story tells us that God purposely kept the law of the second Passover from Moshe in order to set a precedent. Those disenfranchised by the law - in this case, the ritually impure - have an intrinsic right to challenge the law. Those whom the Torah excludes have the right, and the ability, to step up and demand to be included. The fact that God not only accommodates them by inventing the second Passover, but also adds those on a far away journey to the list of who can take advantage of this second chance, indicates the dynamic nature of the law's inclusiveness: once the doors are opened, more and more people will come in.

The impure but worthy Israelites showed us that although the Torah, as a legal system, often excludes, those who are excluded, if they are worthy (i.e., want to be included) can demand that a way be found for the parameters of the Torah's law be expanded ( a good thing, a worthy thing) so that they, and others like them, may be a part of the life it calls upon us to live. God's positive response shows us that a way can be found to open that seemingly locked legal door, davka through the efforts of those who seem to be locked out.

Shabbat Shalom, Shimon

According to Rabbinic tradition, the holiday of Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The commandments are prefaced by the following simple verse: "And God spoke all of these words, saying:" This is exactly what one would have by way of introduction to the words dictated by God to Moshe and the Jewish people. However, the commentaries notice an unnecessary word: had the verse left out the word "all", and just said "And God spoke these words, saying:", we would have assumed that he spoke all of them. After all, "these words" means these words, all the words that follow. Why does the Torah need to emphasize that he spoke all of them?

A simple answer might be that the Torah wants to disabuse readers of the notion that Moshe, or someone else, was actually the author of the Ten Commandments, or of some of them, and so the word all emphasizes the divine source of the entire text. However, Rashi (France, 11th century), does not bring us this straightforward explanation. Rather, he says this: the word 'all' indicates that the first communication from God at Mount Sinai, heard by the Jewish people, consisted of all of the words of the ten Commandments, spoken together, as one sound; "all" means all at once. Now, this is something which, Rashi points out, no human being could do, it is a clearly divine, albeit incomprehensible, communication. Rashi then explains that the word-for-word, sentence-by-sentence version of the commandments written in the Torah - "I am the Lord your God" and the nine others that follow - is what God said next, after the strange, mashed together, all-at-once version.

Well, the obvious question is, why? What is God, a comedian? What is this first communication of all the words of the Ten Commandments spoken at once meant to convey? If God will immediately afterwards speak the commandments normally, one word at a time, what is the message of the jumbled up commandments? Why did God do this strange little parlor trick, and why did the Torah need, with the word 'all', to tell us about it, before telling us the actual content of the commandments?

Perhaps we can understand this first, incomprehensible communication as teaching us this: by prefacing the normal text of the commandments with their all-together-at-once version, perhaps God is modeling for us the nature of Torah study. Just as the Israelites experienced it on Mount Sinai on Shavuot, the first time the Torah was given, as an incomprehensible text, which was only subsequently elucidated, so, too, the Torah must always be experienced as a text whose essential meaning is divine and yet (therefore?) always obscure, not-yet-understood, which challenges us to interpret and elucidate it. The mashed-together version is a model for all of our interactions with the text of the Torah, an interaction which we do not understand, and which demands of us an effort to clarify, make sense, interpret, and explain.

How true or relevant this dynamic is in terms of other, non-Torah texts, be it Shakespeare, a Seinfeld episode or a comic book, is an interesting question, one which is much dealt with by postmodern literary theorists. I'd like to suggest that the greater the text is - the more it is like Torah, the more it is 'divine' - the closer to infinite are its implications, and, therefore, the more it can successfully and meaningfully inspire and bear the endless inferences and interpretations of its creative and active readers. Shavuot, as the holiday of the interpretation of the Torah, is an excellent opportunity for us to rededicate ourselves to being those kinds of readers to those kinds of texts - or to comic books, if that's where your personal literary theory takes you.

Chag sameach,

Rabbi Shimon Felix

This week, we read the portion of Shmini, which means "the eighth". It refers to the eighth day of the opening of the Tabernacle in the desert, which was actually its first day of regular activity, after seven days of inaugural rituals and sacrifices performed by Moshe, Aharon, and the other priests. On this official 'opening day', we are told that the following tragic event took place: "Now Aharon's sons, Nadav and Avihu, each took his pan and placed in it fire, and placed on it incense, and brought it before the Lord; a strange fire which he had not commanded them. And a fire went out from before the Lord and consumed them and they died before God. And Moshe said to Aharon: this is what God was referring to when he said 'with those close to me I will be sanctified, and before the entire nation I will be honored', and Aharon was silent."

The story is a terribly difficult one, and Moshe's consolation to Aharon, in which he seems to say that the deaths of his sons had been predicted by God, and are in some way a sanctification of God and His Tabernacle, is hard to make sense of. I would like to focus on Aharon's reaction to the tragedy and to his brother's somewhat opaque words of explanation and comfort: "...and Aharon was silent." Although it is obviously difficult to interpret silence, I would like to suggest that his non-response may be telling us something not only about God, the Temple, and sacrifices, but also about parents and children in general.

It is remarkably and famously unclear precisely what Nadav and Avihu did wrong when they offered their 'strange fire' before the Lord - there are many hypotheses about what their sin or mistake was. I would suggest, however, that Aharon's silence is a function of his role as parent, not as high priest, and tells us this: ultimately, there are things that one's children do about which parents have nothing to say, decisions that children make that are beyond a parent's ability to intelligently or productively comment on, explain, judge, influence, or take responsibility for.

In Jewish tradition, when a child turns bar or bat mitzvah, there is a somewhat strange blessing for the parents to recite - "Blessed be He who has exempted me from being punished for this one." The idea is that our children, when small, are our responsibility; they are our responsibility to such a degree that we deserve to be punished for anything they may do wrong. Once they reach adulthood, however, this is no longer the case, and parents are no longer liable for the acts of their children. At the age of 12 or 13 (maybe a little later than that nowadays, I'll grant you), parents need to begin to understand that children must, and will, go their own way, whether they like it or not; the "Blessed be He who has exempted me" blessing tells us that.

I think that Aharon's silence is a similar expression of distance from the acts of his adult children. At some point, Aharon's silence tells us, parents need to understand that they ultimately have nothing to say about the decisions made by their children, for better or worse. Whatever it was that his sons were doing in the Tabernacle, whatever place it was that they had arrived at in their lives, Aharon, their father, was not there, it was not his place, and, therefore, as a father, he had nothing to say about it. His silence is the only possible response to the fact that his children had, on their own, come to a very strange, for him, religious decision, one that he could not agree with, appreciate, accept, or even comment on. Whether this is a good thing - as Moshe seems to argue - or not, is beside the point. For Aharon, the point is that he understood that his sons had acted as children ultimately must: independently, and there is nothing a father or mother can say or do to change that.

Shabbat Shalom, Shimon

 

 Hello, all. This week we are going to approach the parshat hashavua [weekly portion] - actually a double one, Acharey Mot and Kedoshim (we will just look at Kedoshim) - a bit differently than usual. First, we will begin with a bonus: an op-ed from the NY Times which, at no little personal expense, and through the magic of the internet, I have made available to you, right here. Just click, read (or skim, it's not that complicated), and then please don't forget to close the article and come back to me!

OPINION   | April 28, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors:  Fund Government With Dirty Money
By CHARLES A. INTRIAGO and ROBERT A. BUTTERWORTH
The government should enforce asset forfeiture laws and take back the wealth that criminals have stolen from taxpayers.
You back yet? You didn't click to some other stuff in the Times and forget about me and, more importantly, the parsha, did you? Good. Now, here are some verses from Kedoshim, which, by the way, is a beautiful portion, containing, among many greatest hits, "Love thy neighbor as thyself", and other important moral-ethical principles. Look at this: When you gather in the harvest of your land, you must not completely harvest the corner of your field, and you must not gather up the gleanings of your harvest. You must not pick your vineyard bare, and you must not gather up the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You must leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God. You must not steal, you must not tell lies, and you must not deal falsely with your fellow citizen.  You must not swear falsely in my name, so that you do not profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.  You must not oppress your neighbor or commit robbery against him. You must not withhold the wages of the hired laborer overnight until morning.  You must not curse a deaf person or put a stumbling block in front of a blind person. You must fear your God; I am the Lord.

We have here an interesting mix of socially conscious commandments, starting with the act of charity which the landowner must do by leaving some food behind for the poor when he harvests his field, prohibitions against stealing, lying, swearing falsely, robbery, withholding wages, cursing or tricking the afflicted, etc. Frankly, if the entire Torah was reduced to this, and we managed to obey it, we would be living in paradise, but that's another story.  What I want to point out is this: the Torah includes prohibitions against stealing and robbing (there is a difference, cf. The Beatles, Abbey Road; She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, but we will not go into it), together with other mitzvot dealing with our behavior towards our fellow man, all of which demand of us to be truthful, charitable, sensitive, fair, and honest with one another, especially with society's victims: the poor, the stranger, the handicapped. By placing the prohibitions against stealing and robbing here, the Torah is teaching us that theft is, first and foremost, a crime against my neighbor, a social crime, akin to lying, withholding wages, cheating or hurting someone; it is a social crime. 

In line with this thinking, the Torah, in a number of places, mandates basically one punishment for crimes of theft: restitution. The thief must return what he stole. In certain circumstances he is also fined, and must pay the victim more than the value of the stolen item, usually double, but in some cases as much as four or five times its worth. These fines serve as both deterrence and full restitution: in many cases - for example, if the stolen item is a farm animal, or a tool - the victim incurs a loss during the absence of the stolen item, and the fine pays him or her back for that. 

Clearly, the Torah, by including theft together with lying, cursing, and other crimes against the individual, and by mandating restitution rather than incarceration or some other punishment, is telling us that  theft is, first and foremost, a crime against the victim, and, accordingly, what you must do is repair the damage done to him or her. With this in mind,  I found the article from the Times especially interesting, in that the US justice system seems to have a totally different approach, one in which deterrence and punishment are the only goals, and restitution is not really a concern. In addition, there is no real attempt to, at the very least, not allow the thief to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, which, to my mind, weakens tremendously any deterrence which a jail sentence might achieve.

It seems to me that the Torah's focus on the wrong which the criminal has done to his victim, and the Torah's determination to force the criminal,  before anything else, to right that wrong, correctly places our personal obligations to one another at the center of the criminal justice system, making for a healthier, more just society. By making restitution to the victim the focus of  our concern, rather than concentrating on punishing the thief for having broken the law, a somewhat more amorphous concept, we reaffirm the importance of our relationship to and responsibility for the other, the person we have harmed,  rather than our obligations to "the law",  thereby reinforcing our personal responsibility to care for and give justice to all.

Shabbat Shalom,

Shimon

I'd like to wish our alumni community a happy and healthy Passover. I'd also like to share a thought with  you all about the Seder. As many of you already know, the asking of questions is a central element of the Passover Seder. Typically, the youngest children at the meal ask the four questions. Prompted by the strangeness of the Seder table - matza instead of challah, weird vegetables and dips, way too much wine, pillows at everyone's seat - the children ask the adults what it's all about, and get answers. This dynamic is seen as classically and crucially Jewish: we must pay attention, things must be noticed, questions must be asked, answers are demanded, and we must try to supply them, as best we can.  The Talmud in the tractate Pesachim, which is our basic source for the laws and customs of the Seder, contains a strange halacha (law). What if there are no children present at the Seder? What if it is a Seder attended only by knowledgeable adults? Must the questions still be asked? The Talmud says yes: the classic Jewish dynamic of asking and answering must be preserved. Well, OK, but what if it is a one-man Seder? What if someone is making the Seder on his or her own, what then? The Talmud insists that even in this case, the lone Seder-maker must ask himself the four questions, and then answer them. Now, one could explain this law by pointing out that this strange monologue does serve to keep the tradition of question and response alive, even though it would seem to lack the true dynamic of a real question and answer - after all, if you know the answers, what kind of questions are you asking yourself?  But, I have a different, hopefully more satisfying, explanation. Some months ago, a few Fellows from 2007 gave me a lovely and, I am sure, quite expensive  gift: a bumper sticker (thanks again, Dalia, Julie, and Hannah). It reads: "Don't Believe Everything You Think". Pondering this message as I hide down in my office during the final, crucial, critical hours of  Pessach cleaning, it occurs to me that the law which demands  that the solo Seder-maker ask himself the questions is NOT simply a formal nod to the importance of the question/answer format. Rather, it may well be teaching us what the deepest, hardest, most important Jewish question is. Telling your four-year-old son or granddaughter the story of the Exodus is a pleasure, a piece of Kosher for Passover cake (and my wife makes a Passover apple cake that you can not believe is Kosher for Pessach, but I digress).  Challenging yourself  to really explain what it all means, trying to figure out what your connection is to the Jewish past and present, and what your part in the Jewish story really is, is a lot trickier. Asking yourself the four questions, forcing yourself to think deeply about the things you claim to believe in, pondering what the ritual and rhythm of Jewish life really have to say to you, really demand of you, these, perhaps, are the most important questions of all, and the hardest ones to answer. When we sit alone at the Passover table - and, ultimately, we all must do that - we are asked by the halacha to challenge what we think, and discover what it is we really believe.

In this week's portion, we are told that Moshe, up on Mount Sinai for forty days receiving the Torah, is delayed in returning to the people of Israel, who are waiting for him at the foot of the mountain. The Israelites get nervous, and fear that he is gone for good, so they ask his brother Aharon, the high priest, to supply them with a new leader. Aharon responds to their demand and says to them: "Remove the golden rings which are in the ears of your women, sons, and daughters, and bring them to me." We are told that immediately after he makes this request, "the entire nation removed the golden rings which were in their ears, and brought them to Aharon." The rest is history: Aharon takes the earrings, melts them down, and fashions a golden calf, which the people worship.

Rashi, the 11th century commentator on the Torah, obviously wondering what Aharon thought he was doing, tells us the following: "Aharon thought to himself: 'the women and children care about their jewelry, perhaps this will delay things, and Moshe will arrive in time'. However, they did not delay, and voluntarily removed them themselves".

Rashi is clearly trying to defend Aharon, and therefore understands the earring thing as a ploy, a delaying tactic, which, unfortunately, didn't work - rather than dithering about their jewelry, the Israelites rose to the challenge and unhesitatingly coughed up all their gold earrings, the calf was made, and the people worshiped it just before Moshe arrived. 

According to this story, Aharon was counting on the Israelites to behave in a certain way, which, had they done so, would have saved them from the sin of the Golden Calf. He assumed that the Israelites, though apparently desperate for religious leadership, and demanding, in Moshe's absence, a God or God-like figure to take them through the desert, would still have enough self-interest to pause, at least for a few moments, before parting with their gold earrings. Had they done so, and behaved normally, with a bit of vanity and selfishness, all would have been well, as Moshe would have returned in time to prevent the calamity. Instead, they went along with Aharon's demand, and didn't give a second thought to donating their gold jewelry to the cause.

I would like to suggest that this self-interested behavior which Aharon was counting on to delay and ultimately prevent the sin of the Golden Calf is good behavior - after all, it would have prevented idol worship - and, as such, I'd like to think about it with you for a bit. It would seem that the ability to stop and consider one's personal good, one's self-interest, one's self - how I look, what I wear, what belongs to me - even when one is swept up in a religious fervor, perhaps especially when one is swept up in a religious fervor,  is a good thing.  The sin of the Golden Calf, seen through the lens of the earring story, can be understood precisely as a loss of that normal self-regard, of that natural self-interest. It would have been healthier for the Israelites to retain, as Aharon thought and hoped they would, a degree of distance, a measure of concern for their personal needs and wishes, and not so readily lose their sense of self,  even in the name of a larger, all-consuming, religious passion.  Forgetting, erasing, losing your self, is not the way to give yourself to a value, or a belief system; you are meant to come to it with your self - as who you really are, along with your sensibilities, interests, and concerns - earrings and all.

Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix
Executive Director, BYFI
Tel. - In Israel - 972-2-566-1194
In US - 518-475-7202
Fax- 972-2-563-1872
shimon.felix@byfi.org
www.bronfman.org Support the BYFI Alumni Venture Fund: www.byfi.org/venturefund - but hang on to your earrings!

This week's portion is called Tetzaveh, which means 'you should command'. The word appears in the first verse of the parsha - "And you shall command the children of Israel, and they shall bring to you pure olive oil, beaten, for light, to place as an eternal light." The Rabbis take notice of the word "command" here (and in a handful of other places in the Torah), and point out that the phrase  "speak to" or "tell" the children of Israel is much more common when God tells Moshe to communicate something to the Jewish people. Why is this specific request, to donate olive oil to be used in the menorah in the Temple, prefaced by the phrase "command the children of Israel", rather than the more usual "tell them"? A  number of solutions are offered, and I'd like to focus on one, suggested by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the midrash. 

 Shimon bar Yochai says that the word "tetzaveh", which is, by the way, a form of the word mitzvah - commandment, is used when the commandment being discussed entails an expense, a loss of money - when it will cost you something to do the particular mitzvah being taught; in this case, the price of the olive oil. In such cases, people need to be especially encouraged, motivated, in short, commanded, to perform the act, as reaching into one's pocket to perform a religious obligation is especially onerous. Unless they are clearly commanded, people will easily ignore these expensive mitzvot, and not do them.

With this explanation, Shimon bar Yochai sets up an interesting tension between the demand to do God's commandments on the one hand, and concern for one's financial situation on the other. It would seem that people who would otherwise be perfectly happy to do whatever God tells them to do, and fulfill the mitzvot of the Torah, find it hard to do so when it gets a bit too expensive. When you think about it, this almost borders on the anti-Semitic: the Jewish people can be counted on to do God's will, as long as it doesn't cost them anything. When it does - buying olive oil, or animals to sacrifice - they need to be cajoled, threatened, ordered, into obeying. 

In The Merchant of Venice, in the climactic courtroom scene, when Shylock realizes that all his money and property are about to be taken from him, he says:

 

Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.

Shylock understands that money, especially for a landless Jew in the middle ages, was necessary to sustain and guarantee life. Of course, this attitude is not specifically Jewish - everybody needs to make a living - though one could argue that some Jews, living under the kind of pressure Shylock experienced, got very good at accumulating money. People must work hard to earn money, as money is the way we acquire food, shelter, clothing, the basic necessities of life, and, of course, all kinds of other good things. So, when Shimon Bar Yochai tells us that we need some extra pushing whenever a mitzvah costs money, he's not being cynical about Jews (or people in general) and money. Rather, he is pointing out the very real strain that a religious commitment can put on one's basic need to earn a living. He is also telling us that the Torah wants us to privilege our religious commitment, and buy that fine olive oil for the Temple, even if it costs more than we think we can afford or would like to pay. This position would clearly seem to argue for a set of values which sees our religious commitments as more important than our material and financial well-being: we are meant, to some degree, to sacrifice one for the other, to reach into our pockets and place our religious and communal responsibilities above our financial bottom line.  

I can not help but think about something Rabbi Avi Orlow (BYFI '91) said to me a while back (this is not an exact quote): being a fully functioning modern Orthodox Jew today - with the relatively large family, school tuition, camp costs, synagogue dues, the demands to give charity, high cost of kosher food, etc. - essentially means that being orthodox equals being wealthy. Now, if this is the case, it would seem that part of the Jewish world (and I think the Orthodox do not have a monopoly on this mind-set at all) has taken the message of Tetzaveh - mitzvot cost money, and you must sometimes make  financial sacrifices to do God's will - very much to heart, but, rather than using it as a reason to develop a less materialistic world view, it has used it as a way to encourage people to become wealthy, to make being wealthy a value, because, after all, it really does cost a lot of money to be a good Jew. 

I also can not help but think about the recent reverses many Jewish - and non-Jewish - not-for-profits have  experienced, and what that will mean for the Jewish and general communities; it does not bode well for the health of our community and it's institutions. As the parsha understands, money, and lots of it, is absolutely necessary to do all kinds of mitzvot, and money is disappearing at a remarkable rate.

I don't really have a 'big finish' here. The issues of materialism, and the place of wealth in our world, are complicated, and, as I have pointed out above, one could argue that Tetzaveh both encourages and discourages placing a premium on material wealth - we need to have the money that we are willing to give  away for a mitzvah. When I began writing this I was not thinking about BYFI's fundraising campaign for our Alumni Venture Fund (I promise), but I can't help but mention, at this stage, how important alumni support has been for a wide range of fantastic projects in which Fellows are involved, how much good has been done with the money donated, and how important it is for that support to continue. If you haven't already done so, you can donate by going to    http://www.bronfman.org/campaign01.htm  Now, was that materialistic of me, or just the opposite? 

In this week's Parsha, called Yitro (Jethro, in English), the Israelites receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai. It has often been noted that this is not the name that we might have expected for what is, after all, the most important portion of the Torah. Yitro was Moshe's father-in-law, and was, as we are told at the beginning of the parsha, a priest of Midian - an idol worshipper. Why is this crucial portion of the Torah, containing the Ten Commandments, named after a relatively minor figure, who only came to the Jewish people late in life, after a long career in practical paganism?

Not only the name of the parsha, but Yitro's subsequent actions in the parsha as well, raise some difficult questions. The day after Yitro's arrival, Moshe sits in judgment of the people, who, all day long, approach him, demanding solutions to their arguments, litigations, and problems. He is inundated, "from morning until night", with people seeking justice from him. Yitro, seeing this, approaches Moshe and, speaking just like a father-in-law, says: "This is not good, this thing you are doing. You will surely be worn out, you and the nation with you, for this is too great a burden for you, you can not do it by yourself". Yitro goes on to outline a brilliant solution: he suggests that Moshe recruit suitable men - God-fearing, honest - appoint them as judges, and establish a system of upper and lower courts, with Moshe at the top of the pyramid. Moshe goes along with the idea, and the system is put into place, with only the most difficult cases being referred to Moshe. At this point, knowing when to make an exit, Yitro returns home, to Midian.

The strangeness of this story is obvious. For one, there is the naming of this auspicious parsha after a retired idolatrous priest. In addition, why is it Yitro, the stranger, the outsider, who comes up with a solution for this very basic problem; a judicial system which will more efficiently bring Torah and justice to the people? How can it be that this stranger makes such a seminal contribution to Jewish life and thought?

Well, let me tell you a story. Last night, I went to an engagement party for the son of one of my friends. The young man is a student at a Charedi (ultra-Orthodox) Yeshiva, most of the guests were his friends, and the event was run along Charedi lines, the most obvious feature of which was a very impressive mechitza - divider - which separated the men from the women. In fact, during the course of the evening, some vigilant fellow noticed that the panels of the mechitza had small openings in them, just about at eye level, and so a few of the waiters were dispatched to bring paper towels from the bathrooms and scotch-tape them across the offending openings, just in case. I kid you not.

A major feature of these events is the speakers, and the first one to address us was the venerable Rosh Yeshiva (head of the Yeshiva) of the well-known school that the groom-to-be attends. During his peroration, as he was summarizing 15 minutes of blessings and praises for the young couple, the Rabbi said "this is really a wonderful match: a real ben Torah (literally 'son of the Torah', a common phrase used to refer to a truly worthy and God-fearing scholar) together with a real bas Torah (the feminine equivalent, literally 'a daughter of the Torah)". Now, this 'bas Torah' is not a phrase one commonly hears, as in Charedi circles women are not seen as Torah scholars. As he finished the sentence, the Rabbi paused, apparently abashed at his slip of the tongue - in his world, you do not call a girl a bas Torah. After a moment, he seemed to gather his courage and continued: "Yes, that's right, that's a new phrase, we've innovated something new here, the concept of a bas Torah!"

It was all I could do to stop myself from laughing out loud. Here we were, in the very epicenter of pre-Feminist, anti-Feminist Judaism, the men and women physically separated by six-foot high dividers, with only the men allowed to speak in public, and yet, somehow, feminism had managed to sneak in. Even in this ultra-Orthodox setting, the Rosh Yeshiva, influenced, I believe, by an egalitarian zeitgeist which somehow managed to leap high mechitzas at a single bound, couldn't help but present the couple as equals, both sharing the essential quality of being b'nay Torah. He couldn't deny this girl her equal rights!

The Torah stresses the fact that it is Yitro, the Midianite, the outsider, with a background in idol worship, who brings a great new idea to the way the Torah is disseminated to the Jewish people, in order to teach us, at the crucial moment of the giving of the Torah, that, once we receive it, we are not meant to lock it up and throw away the key. The story of Yitro's contribution teaches us that the Torah is not, and cannot be, a hermetic, self-contained, inviolate system. Rather, this story is an illustration, right from the start, of the inevitable and inexorable permeability of the Torah. The Torah is meant to be influenced by outside ideas; it is in the world, part of the world, and will be influenced by the world. It is meant to be added to and improved by interactions with other cultures and civilizations. It is meant to be looked at by your father-in-law and criticized. It is not a closed book, it is an open, ongoing, living experience, waiting to be looked at with fresh eyes and willing to accept and integrate new ideas. No walls we build, no mechitzas we erect, should, or can, keep these new ideas out.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix The Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel www.bronfman.org For more parsha discussions - http://weeklyportion.byfi.org

There is a remarkable story in the Talmud, in Tractate Avodah Zara (Idol Worship - it deals with the laws of idolatry) about Onkelos the son of Kalonymus (c.35-120) - it's on page 11a if you'd like to see it. Onkelos lived in Rome. He was a nephew of the Emperor Titus, who defeated the Jewish Revolt and destroyed the Second Temple; he celebrated these events back in Rome, by building the Arch of Titus and the Coliseum. Onkelos converted to Judaism (a story in itself), which the Roman establishment did not like. The emperor (not Titus, he was dead already) sent a legion to arrest Onkelos and bring him before him. When they got there, Onkeles, using Biblical verses, convinced them all to convert to Judaism (sadly, which verses he used is not recorded). Caesar then sent another legion to arrest him, instructing them this time to not talk with Onkelos. While they were taking him into custody, he asked if he might speak to them of every-day matters, not Torah. They agreed, and he asked them the following question: "The torchbearer carries a torch before the elder, who carries a torch before the duke, who carries a torch before the governor, who carries a torch before the king. Does the king carry a torch before anyone?" They answered him - "No". He said to them, "And yet the Holy One, Blessed be He, carried a torch before Israel, as it says [in this week's parsha, B'shalach, just after the exodus from Egypt]: 'And God walked before them during the day in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way, and at night in a pillar of fire as a light for them...'". When they heard this, they all converted to Judaism as well. The Emperor then sent yet another legion, and told them not to converse with Onkeleos at all. As they were taking him to the emperor, he saw a mezuzah on the door, touched it, and asked the soldiers if they knew what it was. They said they did not, and asked him to tell them. He said: "It is the way of the world for a flesh and blood king to sit indoors, while his servants guard him from without, but the Holy One, Blessed be He, is different; His servants are inside while he guards them from without, as it is written, 'God will protect your comings and goings from now and forever'" [a verse from Psalms understood here as a reference to the mezuzah as a symbol of God's protection when one exits or enters one's home]. They all also converted, and the emperor stopped sending his men to arrest Onkelos.

This really is some story. Since it is, ultimately, about mass conversion, I think it should be understood as presenting us with a central concept of Judaism, as if to say: this is why one should be Jewish, this is what Judaism is all about. Looked at that way, the central message is inescapable, and remarkable. Onkelos is talking to a Roman legion, a quintessential symbol and instrument of Roman order, rank, privilege, and military and political power. Why the Emperor is so put off by Onkelos's conversion that he sends a brigade to arrest him may not be clear at the start of the story, but it certainly becomes obvious once Onkelos starts talking: his description of a highly stratified Roman society, in which there is a clear hierarchy of who serves whom, each with his title and concomitant entitlement, is vividly played off against a Jewish world of democracy, equality, and egalitarianism, under the benevolent protection of the one God. This perspective subverts the values which are the very foundation of Roman life, and which, we now understand, the Roman Emperor sent his legions to uphold - hierarchy, title, rank, service, and order. The remarkable and revolutionary point Onkelos makes with his two examples - the Pillars of cloud and fire in the desert and the mezuzah on the doorposts of Jewish homes - is that Judaism takes a position against the normal order of things, in which the weak and the poor naturally and inexorably serve the strong and powerful, who, in turn, serve those who are even stronger and more powerful. Instead, it substitutes a value system wherein God himself, the King of Kings - or, perhaps more correctly, the only king - serves His people, upending the hierarchical world view of Rome. In the Jewish worldview, high rank, truly possessed only by God, is a burden, in that it seems to demand an ethic of service towards those less fortunate, less powerful, and less able to take care of themselves. Instead of a world where it is understood as right and proper for the strong, the rich, and the well-born to take advantage of the weak, and deserve, as something taken for granted, their service, Onkelos presents a world turned upside down, in which God Himself serves His subjects.

The fact that, once they convert, the soldiers seem to go AWOL, and disappear into the Jewish community, is remarkable. It is as if the story is saying that becoming a Jew will free one of the burden of servitude which is the norm in Roman life - become Jewish and free yourself from the weight of service to Rome and its hierarchies. By joining the egalitarian Jewish society, one escapes the hierarchical Roman one - an offer that no Roman Legionnaire, it would seem, could resist.

The implications for the way we order our societies, the way those of us with wealth and power behave towards those without, and our attitudes towards Roman-style hierarchies of rank and privilege, are profound.

Shabbat Shalom, Shimon

This week, Yaakov blesses his sons before he dies. Well, he blesses some of them; for others, he has some pretty harsh words:

"Shimon and Levi are brothers, the weapons of treachery are their possessions. May my soul not enter their counsel, to their assembly let my honor not be joined, for in their anger they killed a man, and in their desire they lamed an ox. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath for it was cruel, I will divide them in Yaakov and scatter them in Israel."

Harsh words, indeed. The commentaries are fairly unanimous in seeing this as a reference to the time when Shimon and Levi led their brothers in massacring the people of Shechem. Their sister Dinah had been raped and kidnapped by Shechem, the prince of the city, (think Wales and Prince of Wales). Shimon and Levi, after negotiating an arrangement according to which the men of Shechem would undergo circumcision and Shechem and Dinah would marry, reneged, killed all the men of the city (while they were still recuperating from their circumcisions - ouch!), and took their women and possessions. When Yaakov rebuked them for this, saying that it was both shameful and impolitic to act as they did - "You have made me look awful, made me odious among the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Prizzites, and I am small in number, and they will gather against me, and attack me, and I will be destroyed, me and my household" - they answered with the question: "Should our sister be made into a harlot? " Yaakov did not answer them then; his deathbed curse would seem to be his final response to their challenge, and his last word on their violent response to what Shechem did to their sister.

In an attempt to soften Yaakov's harsh words, many commentaries point out that Yaakov never actually curses his two hotheaded sons - it is their anger that he curses - "Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath for it was cruel". Now, this is really a nice idea, in that it separates a person from his negative traits and actions: by cursing their anger rather than them, it is as if Yaakov were saying - "I know that essentially you are good people, and mean well, it is your anger that is the problem, and that is what I object to." Putting it this way leaves Shimon and Levi intact and un-cursed as people, and as Yaakov's sons, albeit with a serious anger management problem.

The problem is that this criticism of their anger fails to answer the question they asked years earlier, when Yaakov first rebuked them for killing the men of Shechem - "Should our sister be made into a harlot?" To understand Yaakov's words as a final response to this challenge his sons throw up at him, I would like to look at his words a bit differently. Perhaps, when Yaakov curses Shimon and Levi's anger, the point is not only to criticize their behavior while leaving room for an essentially positive assessment of who they really are underneath this specific character flaw. Rather, what we have here is Yaakov's response to the moral challenge thrown up by his sons when he first questioned what they did. By focusing on their anger, perhaps Yaakov is admitting that they had a solid moral-ethical reason for attacking the men of Shechem - their crime against Dinah, and the very real need to set her free - but there is a problem with what they did: their anger. If they had dispassionately (or at least less passionately) dealt with the problem of Shechem and their sister, there may well have been a more reasonable, less violent way of saving and even avenging her -some sort of compromise, some sort of arrangement, perhaps some sort of punishment, short of killing everyone even remotely involved (it is this remote involvement, the tacit complicity of all the townspeople, that some commentators see as their justification for the mass killings). But once anger became the motivating force - rather than justice, or Dinah's well-being - then we have a problem. Yaakov curses their anger because it is their anger that subverted the correctness of their cause, and led them to an ultimately incorrect - and disproportionate - solution to a very real problem.

Well, if you think I am going to go on to talk about the relevance of this lesson today, as the fighting in Gaza continues, you are 100% right. As I listen to and watch the news, zapping back and forth from Israeli to foreign news channels, read the papers and talk with friends, relatives, and neighbors, I am impressed with the relative lack of anger with which Israel has gone about its defense of its citizens. The very strong feeling I get, the mood one senses and the message one hears again and again, is of frustration at Hamas's duplicity, intransigence, and insensitivity to human life, real sadness at the mutual loss of life, and a determination to do what needs to be done. After eight years of rocket fire, escalating since the pull-out from Gaza to as many as 70 rockets a day, causing death, dismemberment, destruction, and generation-wide trauma, Israelis really do feel that enough is enough, and have gone to war with a sense of having tried everything else first, and with a determination to do what is necessary to defend ourselves; no more, no less.

I do have to tell you though, that while I was very positive about Israel's initial air attacks against Hamas, as a possible - and proportionate - way to end the years of violence against the residents of southern Israel and stop the growing and very real threat of even worse attacks, I was not so sure about the ground attack, for Yaakov-like reasons. It was inevitable that more civilians would be caught in the fire (Hamas terrorists regularly ask kids to accompany them when they move from place to place, as protection, and the rumor is that the Hamas leadership is hiding in a hospital in Gaza City), and that world opinion would turn against us. As Yaakov pointed out to Shimon and Levi, we always need to think about the moral and practical limits to what we have a right to do. I was hoping that Israel would not send its ground forces in - unlike in Lebanon, which is much larger and more complicated topographically than Gaza, I think we could have made a real dent in Hamas's will and ability to continue to attack us with a concerted air attack, which would have resulted in fewer casualties all around and may well have brought a better diplomatic result. I have the feeling that, by going in to Gaza, we may have let our anger - however real and justifiable - get the better of us, in that we may have failed to fully think through the consequences.

I hope I'm wrong. Most of my friends and family tell me that I am, and insist that without a ground attack the job would simply not get done, and we would be facing a much deadlier threat, all over the country, in a very short time. They may well be right. I do feel that we here in Israel have been extremely patient and long-suffering, and are motivated by necessity, and the simple desire for self-preservation, and have not let our anger take over; I just hope that we are making the most level-headed and thoughtful decisions we possibly can.

I'd like to add my very best wishes to all the soldiers out there, especially BYFI's Michael Grumer and Yitz Landes, as well as all the Amitim in uniform - may they all come home safely soon.

Hello everyone. It has been a while since I've sent out a piece on the parsha; the last few weeks have been very busy, with the Follow-up seminar for the 2008 Fellows, a very successful Collegiate Shabbaton at Yale, the Fall Forum in New York (many thanks to alumni presenters Dan Kurtz Phelan, Dara Horn, Sheila Jelen, and Itamar Moses), the publication of our alumni magazine (thanks to fabulous work by Director of Alumni Engagement Becky Voorwinde), a visit to Israel from Edgar and Adam Bronfman which included meetings with American and Israeli alumni and the 2008 Amitim, and the UJC's General Assembly in Jerusalem, which included a Next Generation Day sponsored by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation and was attended by a large number of Fellows and Amitim. Luckily, some of the above events brought me to the US for the elections, and I am very happy to have been there for the historical and very moving time it was. So, with all that going on (and taking time to hang out with my grandchildren), I missed a lot of good parshas, but I am now ready to roll! This week's parsha, Chaye Sarah (the Life of Sarah), is essentially about the death of Abraham's wife, her burial, and the search for a wife for her son, Isaac. The Torah does not elaborate on the cause of her death - she was, after all, 127 years old - but the Rabbis notice the fact that her demise comes immediately after the story of the Binding of Isaac, in which Sarah's husband Abraham almost sacrifices their son, only to be stopped at the last moment by divine intervention. The Rabbis see a connection, and tell us that the Akedah - the binding of Isaac - was actually what killed Sarah. The full Rabbinic story appears in a number of variations, and I'd like to look at the one in Midrashic work Pirkei d'Rebbe Eliezer. It goes like this: "When Abraham left Mt. Moriah [after the binding of Isaac] Satan was upset, having not achieved his desire of preventing Abraham from offering up his son. What did he do? He went and said to Sarah, hey, Sarah, haven't you heard what's going on in the world? She said to him, no. He said to her, your old man took the boy Isaac and offered him as a sacrifice, and the boy is weeping and moaning, for he can not be saved. Immediately, she began to weep and moan...and her soul flew off and she died." Abraham then comes home and finds her dead, a tragic coda to an otherwise successful test of Abraham's and Isaac's faith. This midrashic elaboration of the Biblical text raises a number of questions. Was Abraham hiding the fact of the Akedah from his wife, and if so, why? Was he embarrassed of his decision to go along with God's demand, or did he doubt Sarah's commitment? Why exactly does the news kill her? Was her faith, in fact, not as strong as Abraham's? Should her reaction be understood in a classically pre-feminist way, that she was simply weaker than Abraham, and therefore unable to face the unbelievably difficult and strange demand of the sacrifice of Isaac? Or is her death perhaps something other than a simple lack of fortitude? Five years ago, in November, 2003, I wrote a piece on this parsha which saw Sarah's death as a conscious act of protest, a statement to God about the limits of what we, as human beings, are willing to suffer. Unlike Abraham, who accepted, and actually seems to embrace the commandment to sacrifice Isaac, Sarah's death is actually a rebellion, a walking away from a God who is so demanding, so unreasonable, so difficult to serve. (You can see that piece at http://byfi.org/news/?q=node/106 - the site for all the portions is ttp://weeklyportion.byfi.org). This year, I think I have been influenced by the excellent discussion on the BYFI list serve about Jews and God to look at it a bit differently. My attention was drawn to one element of the story, Satan's opening question to Sarah: "Haven't you heard what's going on in the world?" This strange preface to his report of the binding of Isaac places the Akedah in "the world" and takes Sarah out of it. As a modest woman, usually found in her tent, this is not strange; traditional women are not "in the world", they are at home, in the tent, in the kitchen. But, perhaps, there is more to this "in the world" than that. Perhaps it is "the world" where the problem lies, it is "the world" from which Sarah, in fact, removes herself, by dying. Satan, by placing the Akedah in "the world", teaches us that the Akedah is not only an act demanded by a jealous God - it is the way of the world. It is not exactly God who asks terrible things of us, who asks fathers to sacrifice sons for ideals, beliefs, truths - it is the world, life itself, that often places impossible choices before us. (I would note that one of the names of God is Hamakom, 'the place', traditionally understood as 'the place of the world'. This connects to the list serve's discussion in that it sees God not so much as a discreet being, but as the very universe itself, or, rather, that which bring the universe into existence and sustains it, a very Maimonidean way of seeing God, one which is very far from a personalized, anthropomorphic view of him, and which makes it extraordinarily hard to discuss or relate to God directly, and also makes things that happen to us 'less personal'.) If this is the case, then, though one can certainly respect Sarah's protest against the cruel world about which Satan informs her, one also sees more clearly that Sarah's death is, in fact, a victory for Satan, for she has proven unable to live up to the demands which a sometimes cruel world places upon us. Satan knows that it is the world, rather than a jealous God, which generates tragic and impossible challenges for us all, and he dares Sarah to face up to them, as her husband did. Her death, though certainly containing a measure of nobility, is a failure to rise to that challenge, a failure to accept, live in, and embrace a world in which it sometimes seems impossible to live.

This week's parsha, Ekev, is the third in the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy). In this, the last book of the Torah, Moshe delivers a farewell address to the Jewish people, who are about to enter the Land of Israel without him. He reviews the events of the past 40 years, focusing on the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, the sins of the golden calf and the spies, and in general tries to teach the people the lessons they should have learned from the Exodus from Egypt and their years in the desert. This week, Moshe focuses on the sin of the golden calf, and recounts how, some 40 years earlier, he received the Ten Commandments, broke them when he saw the people worshipping the calf, went back up to Mt. Sinai to ask God to forgive the people, and then received the commandments a second time. This is how Moshe tells the last part of the story: At that time God said to me: 'carve out for yourself two tablets of stone, like the first ones, and come up to me to the mountain, and make for yourself an ark of wood. And I will write on the tablets the words which were on the first tablets which you broke, and you shall put them in the ark.' And I made an ark of wood, and I carved two tablets of stone like the first ones, and I went up the mountain with the two tablets in my hands. And He wrote on the tablets like the first writing, the ten commandments...and I turned and went down from the mountain and I placed the tablets in the ark which I had made, and they were there, as God had commanded me. The commentators all scratch their heads over this wooden ark. Is it the same one as Indiana Jones's, the golden Ark of the Covenant, which Moshe, back in Exodus 40 years ago, when he originally came down from Mt. Sinai with the second tablets, commanded the Jewish people to make as part of the Tabernacle, and into which the Tablets were placed? If so, why, in this retelling, does the ark seem to go up with Moshe to Mt. Sinai? In the original story, Moshe brings the tablets down, commands the building of the golden ark, and then places them into it, once it is finished. Here, Moshe seems to make an ark himself, just out of wood (no gold, as in the other, more famous ark) and brings it up to Mt. Sinai , in order to immediately place the tablets inside it. This would seem to be a different ark. If so, what is its purpose? Some of the commentaries resist the notion that this is a different ark, and understand the verses above to be referring to the same gold-covered Ark of the Covenant in the tabernacle, built after Moshe comes down from the mountain, even though the text doesn't easily read that way. Rashi (France, 11th century), however, reads the verses as they seem to present themselves: this is a different ark, one made out of wood by Moshe, separate from the other, more photogenic one. Rashi further stipulates that the two arks served different purposes: The gold-covered one never left the Tabernacle, and was the permanent resting place of the Ten Commandments. Moshe's little wooden one accompanied the Israelites when they went out to war. It is not clear if Rashi thinks that the tablets would then be taken out of the golden ark, placed in Moshe's wooden one, and carried into battle, or if only the broken pieces of the first tablets were in the wooden ark. There is even a theory that Rashi meant that the wooden ark went out to war empty , while both sets of Ten Commandments, the broken and the whole, remained behind in the Ark of the Covenant (see below). Furthermore, Rashi says that the one time the Israelites failed to switch arks in this way, in a war against the Philistines which was going badly, and took the real, golden ark with them, they were punished, and the golden ark, with the tablets in it, was captured by the Philistines for a while. It would seem that the distinction between the two arks, the one being for regular use in the Tabernacle, and the other, wooden one, made by Moshe, for battle, is a sharply drawn and important one. As I said earlier, other commentaries disagree with Rashi. Nachmanides (Spain and Israel, 1194-1267) assumes that Rashi meant that the tablets would stay in the Golden Ark of the Covenant, and the wooden one went to battle empty, or, perhaps, with only the broken first tablets inside. He questions the point of such a procedure: why go to war with an empty ark, or with the broken tablets.? What good could that do? Nachmanides, and others, therefore postulate that if the wooden ark was, in fact, a different ark, and not the golden one, then it was only a temporary one, meant to be used to carry the tablets down the mountain and hold them until the real golden ark was ready, and was then disposed of. (The Chizkuni (13th century), in a remarkable comment, stipulates that this was necessary in order to make sure that Moshe didn't lose his temper over something the Israelites might do while the tablets were in his hands and break them, as he did with the first ones - the wooden ark was meant to protect them from Moshe's anger, and keep them safe until they were placed in the golden one!) Taken together, these commentators do not accept Rashi's idea that the wooden ark played a permanent role as the ark that went into battle, and either read the verses as referring, though somewhat obliquely, to the one, golden ark, or to another, temporary, wooden one, simply used to store the second tablets until the real ark was ready. I, however, like Rashi's idea. The wooden ark is distinct from the golden Ark of the Covenant, and was retained as the ark to which the tablets - or perhaps the broken first tablets (or perhaps it went out empty) - were transferred when the Israelites went out into battle. The golden ark, holding the ten commandments, is not meant to ever be taken out to war. In fact, the one time the Israelites deviated from this practice, they were punished, and the ark was taken away from them for a while. The ark of the covenant, the ark, the golden Indiana Jones one, is too holy to be used in battle. That is not its primary use, it is not even an acceptable one. When the Israelites go to war they take a more humble ark, containing the broken first tablets or, even more radically, containing nothing at all. That is what accompanies them into battle. This seems to me to be a clear communication about the Torah's attitude towards war, one that I'd like to think about with you. A few weeks ago, during one of the last days of the BYFI summer Fellowship program (the summer was great by the way, thanks for asking) we were in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Fellows were doing some last minute shopping and site-seeing in the Jewish Quarter, and I was with a few Fellows and Michael Grumer ('04), who is currently in the Israeli army. Michael had some time off, and was with us for the day, in uniform, wearing a kippah (Kotel, Old City), and carrying his M16. As we were talking, in English, we were approached by an obviously ultra-Orthodox American Jewish family. Hearing Michael talking English, they immediately stopped in their tracks, and asked him, behaving not very differently from the way people do when they meet a rock star, if he was, in fact, an American, why he was in the army, and where he was from originally. After getting his details, they went on to ask him, breathlessly and at some length, about what he did in the army, the gun he was carrying, and had he ever used it (!). I don't want to sound nasty, but it seemed to me that the mother of the family had to hold herself back from asking if she could touch it. Seeing Michael was clearly a transcendent religious and cultural moment for these New York Jews, one of the most important and moving things they would do in their trip to Israel. After they left (it was a while), Michael told us that, when in uniform, he gets that kind of reaction all the time - Americans of all types stopping him excitedly when they realize he's an American and treating him like a superstar - a combination Rambo, Ari ben Canaan (from Exodus, played in the movie by Paul Newman), and righteous avenger of all wrongs ever done to the Jewish people. According to Rashi, the Israelites are never meant to take the Ark of the Covenant, containing the Ten Commandments, into battle. Wars are, at times, necessary, and, at times, they are just, and it is a Mitzvah, at times, to fight them. And those who wage these just wars are often heroes, putting themselves on the line for the sake of their people, and certainly deserve our respect, admiration, and support, especially after 2000 years of relative Jewish powerlessness. War, however, is not what the Jewish people are about. Our most important cultural artifact, the most potent symbol of who we are as a nation - the Ark of the Covenant, containing the word of God as spoken to the Jewish people - is not meant to take part in a war. We do not enter battle saying 'this is who we are, this fight is the ultimate expression of our Jewishness, and therefore we take the ultimate Jewish symbol with us into war'. We go to war with a substitute symbol, a second-best ark, containing, perhaps, the broken tablets (!), or, more suggestively, no tablets at all (!!), because war is not some sort of ultimate expression of our Jewish selves, it is dysfunction, a necessary evil. It is not what we, as Jews, ultimately aspire to. It is simply what we, all too often, have to do.