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The Torah Is Not a TED Talk

This is a D'var Torah I shared February 11, 2023 for Parashat Yitro, but I'm publishing it now right before Shavuot, when we read the same section of the Torah, Exodus 19-20.

This book -- the Torah -- has been read and encountered by millions of people through so many generations, and changed their lives and changed the world.

Here are some books that have also been read and encountered, by millions of people -- Aristotle’s Ethics, the Harry Potter series. Some by nearly as many generations as the Torah, some by only a few -- and nonethless they too have changed lives and changed the world.

Are they all kind of the same?

A couple days before Rosh Hashanah of 5781, I read an article in Slate magazine online, by Amanda Prahl, and it was about kindness. It was about kindness in the TV show Ted Lasso, and the article was wise and engaging. It had me at “kindness” -- but the whole thing was phenomenal. I thought Ms. Prahl’s observations would make a great D’var Torah. I guess what I really thought was: It’s two days before Rosh Hashanah and this is better than my upcoming D’var Torah, in let me count how many ways!

Had I had more than two days, I might have worked on incorporating Ms. Prahl’s essay into a D’var Torah of my own. I did speak about kindness on the two days of that Rosh Hashanah, but not directly, and without nearly the perfect touch of Ms. Prahl. I might have woven her article into and around some stories from the Torah or midrash, had I had the same. If you’re a Ted Lasso fan just read her article!

What is Torah? Is it one of the many great books? Like Aristotle’s Ethics, which is a longer book about ethics than, say, Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy combined? What is a D’var Torah -- is it in the same category as thoughtful articles and great TED Talks? If I had woven a secular writer’s beautiful essay on kindness into a Rosh Hashanah sermon, would that make it Torah?

Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the medieval scholar who is the greatest of all Jewish philosophers, says essentially: Yes. If it’s wisdom, and if it’s truth, then by definition its source is in the Divine. It’s Torah, and we have to expand our conception of Torah to include it.

And yet. There is more to Torah than really good content.

In the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon said: Woe to the person who says that this Torah has come to present stories in regular words. For if this were so, even in our time we would be able to make a Torah using ordinary words, better than any of the stories in the Torah... even the nobles of the world have among them superior words. We could just go and make a Torah out of those words.

Rabbi Shimon’s point is that the Torah is not unique because it’s one of the great books. And a D’var Torah might sound like a TED Talk, but it’s not just a really good TED Talk, and often it’s not even as good by TED standards.  (Although to be clear, I am always trying to be as good as a good TED Talk!)

It’s not that the Torah isn’t good content well-delivered. That’s just not all it is. The midrash says that the Torah is black fire inscribed on white fire. It is that something different that we need to define. We can’t completely define that something -- we can gesture at it, just as we point at the Torah and reach toward it when we see it in the air and sing V’zot HaTorah, this is the Torah.

So mah zot, what is it?

The introduction to revelation we read today in Exodus 19 begins: Bachodesh hashlishi l’tzaytz b’nai yisrael me-eretz mitzrayim, bayom hazeh -- ba’u midbar Sinai.

On the third new moon after B’nai Yisrael’s Exodus from Egypt,
On this day,
They come to Mt. Sinai.

As our rabbis understand it, the Torah says of itself both that it comes from a particular place and time in the past, and it comes from today, whenever today is. Torah is most Torah when the day you are encountering Torah is new and fresh, and the Torah itself is new and radical to you. This day when you encounter Torah in its fullest dimensions is in the immediate afterglow of the Exodus, even if it’s 2400+ years later. Torah isn’t just the message but what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the event -- a portal not backwards in history but outward, toward the top of the mountain and toward the fellow Israelites next to you.

We say this same thing twice a day in the Shma. V’hayu had’varim ha’eleh asher Anochi m’tzavcha hayom al l’vavecha. These words, which I charge you with today, shall be on your heart.

And the words of Torah themselves -- Heschel calls them prophetic understatement. Prophetic, understatement. I think Heschel’s doing his thing of taking something that seems unbelievable and saying: You think that’s unbelievable? That’s actually the easy one and here’s the hard one.

Heschel thinks that the problem people think they have is believing that God could reduce all of God’s thoughts for all time to this book, much of which is about animal sacrifice, and that God could somehow reveal God’s entire essential self and message to this small people at one particular point in time.

What Heschel thinks is more unbelievable is that the words in the Torah, however they got there, could possibly carry Divine wisdom and a Divine charge. As Rabbi Shimon said in the Zohar, they are just words, and we’ve seen mere humans make stories and philosophy out of words that are just as amazing if not more. Believe that these Torah words uniquely contain truth? That’s hard to believe, says Heschel.

So Heschel says the Torah is not such a wild leap but a prophetic understatement. The words themselves are not complete. They hint at only a fraction of what they are about. They are the first step on a ladder -- but without them you can’t begin to climb. They are each stone at the foot of Mt. Sinai -- but without standing on them you can’t go anywhere else. Words of Torah are prophetic understatements -- the words themselves are only the beginning.

So of course the Torah has animal sacrifices. And stories and laws, and maps and recipes, and architectural drawings and shopping lists, and poems and songs and sarcasm and comic relief, and if you go out further in the Bible into the prophets you’ve even got a sports section every so often! If you’re going to make something out of human words, you’ve got to use them in every way possible.

What is unique about the Torah is not what is written -- it’s where it can take you, where it can take us together, and where it can take the world as a consequence. The words and verses, one by one and one after another, written in scrolls and books don’t do the job alone, and reading and speaking them and even chanting them are just the start.

We have to recreate the event of Mt. Sinai together -- which is why we re-enact today’s reading every time we read the Torah, calling people up the mountain and sending the words to every single person standing every single place around it.

We have find the Torah together with all our generations. That’s what’s great about the chumash, the book with the Torah text and commentaries. The best chumashim and now the best websites surround you with teachers and translators from every era. As I never tire of saying to our kids when they come of age and hold the Torah, the noise these ornaments make should make you think of everyone who has ever chimed in on any word, trying to find the rung after the rung on the ladder which is that particular word.

We get help to find the Torah from beyond ourselves, somehow. My favorite midrash about the Ten Commandments imagines us standing at the foot of the mountain ready to talk to with our own individual mal’ach, a Divine messenger who wants to engage each of us separately with each one of the Ten Commandments, to explore their ins and outs and our objections and what-if’s and really?-s.

All of that is not a book, and it’s not a TED Talk.

We need not just to read the Ten Commandments as a list of principles, which they are, but to experience them as both so obvious -- I mean really we could come up with every single one of them in a brief meeting -- and also so radical, because look how missing they are in the world. We need to let the words say to us not just implement me, but also: Figure out why I’m necessary, and what is it about you humans that could make this possible, and what it is about you humans that you have to get to the bottom of that is in the way of don’t murder and don’t covet and why aren’t you resting and renewing. That’s the black fire on white fire.

And when we bring the Ten Commandments or any teachings of Torah out into our lives or the wider world, we’re supposed to try to bring those fires.

Imagine if whenever you mentioned or taught words of Torah, or argued about them, you knew they were alive with divinity and humanity more than the other words people use that are just on paper or in air -- and all that divinity and all that humanity were standing with you when you brought up those words.

That’s hard to do, especially when the other words in our conversations are less hot -- words presented in regular essays and stories and books and position papers. Each time we bring down the Torah and cool the fire off enough to use it, we bring something unique to the table, but we risk the Golden Calf -- we risk freezing the fire, making an idol of a single teaching, even a central one like Tzelem Elohim (the image of God), and stopping our own inquiry into the word and into who we people are in relation to what those words are asking.

So that’s why we come back with regularity every Shabbat to recreate the event at Mt. Sinai, to experience the words as fire, together with each other and with our many generations.

I am often guilty of not doing that. I have often treated the Torah even at its best as a position paper, as a really good article. When that works, for you or for people I work with on pressing issues of the day, dayenu, that might be enough for the time being.

But that’s not going to work all the time, because there are other books and other articles, and often Torah is meant to be the event of experiencing Torah wisdom, not just the content of that wisdom. It’s meant to be the commitment to what the Torah is teaching and to figuring out why and how that could be and why it’s not already. 

We usually know right and wrong already, and know what we want to say about it. Torah is more.

This dimension of Torah does not require Hebrew and it’s not just Jewish. If we relate to Torah the way I’m gesturing at, then we’ll know if a book or a great article from any source is just really good content, or if it too is Torah.

To know Torah as Torah, we have to be willing to be shaken up often when we encounter it, to know that our commitment is on the line anytime we learn Torah or try to impart it. That doesn’t come from just listening to a D’var Torah or reading one -- it requires you as well as I to be active participants. But Torah is so unique and so good that Torah itself will help us allow ourselves to tremble that way, and to open ourselves.

Because this is what the words of Torah are, according to Heschel, and none of these other books are like it:

No other book so loves and respects the life of man... It has the words that startle the guilty and the promise that upholds the forlorn... It continues to scatter seeds of justice and compassion, to echo God’s cry to the world and to pierce humanity’s armor of callousness....

There are no words more knowing, more disclosing and more indispensible, words both stern and graceful, heart-rending and healing. A truth so universal: God is One. A thought so consoling: God is with us in our distress.... A map of time: from creation to redemption. Guideposts along the way: the Seventh Day: An offering: contrition of the heart. A utopia: Would that all people were prophets... a standard so bold: ye shall be holy. A commandment so daring: Love your neighbor as yourself. A fact so sublime: human and divine pathos can be in accord. And a gift so undeserved: the ability to repent.

If that’s Torah, what soul would not want to be receiving it, every day.

Whenever you hear words this way, or whenever words you read bring you that picture -- then you know what you are engaged in is not just good content, but Torah.

My Love Letter to Hebrew

I gave this as a sermon on Shabbat, April 22, 2023, preceding Israel's 75th anniversary of independence.

What I remember first about Mrs. Nussbaum’s Sunday School class is that everyone learned how to read a whole Hebrew word before I did.

I can remember coming and looking at the book and I saw nothing. I recognized individual letters; we had been learning those for a couple years. But while other kids were sounding out words I could not, I saw just overwhelming Scrabble racks on the page.

Well, the reason I was behind was that I had missed a class or two, being sick at the start of the year. And I can remember exactly how I was sitting in the JCC when suddenly it all snapped into focus. Dani b'veit haknesset, Nira b'veit haknesset... I can picture the table where I was, closer to the door than to the window looking out on St. Paul Avenue. With Dani and Nira, Mrs. Nussbaum, my friends David Glaser and Holly Brod and a few others, it was off to the races. And look at me now -- tistaklu alai achshav!

This is my love letter to the Hebrew language, and my thank you to the people who gave me Hebrew, as we get ready to celebrate Israel’s 75th anniversary this week and launch a season of celebration and learning too I hope from now through our May 21 New Hampshire-wide gathering. 

Mrs. Nussbaum was our teacher at Shaare Shalom, a small group of maybe 50 families at its biggest. (She was the one who in first or second grade let me play the part of God in the paper bag puppet show about the binding of Isaac, so long as I and my bearded God would be hidden under the table.) She set us up to start in third grade at the Talmud Torah of St. Paul, which for a golden few decades from the ‘70s through the ‘90s especially was a city-wide supplementary school that all the Conservative and Reform students attended. 

Again I can remember so much specific about third grade with G'veret Vlodaver. We got right to it with basic grammar so we could read things and write things -- kotev, kotevet, kotvim, kotvot. I remember the first songs we learned with Sh’ulah and her accordion -- yadaim l’ma’alah... mi ohev et hashabbat... The songs were simple and taught us some basic vocabulary and grammar.

And for me Hebrew was always simple for some reason. I don’t have a natural ear for language generally. I think for me it was partly because I’m a nerd and the structure was appealing to me. Three letter shorashim, roots, easy to plug into a chart. I may still have the blue mimeograph sheet from 3rd or 4th grade with the past tense -- katavti, katavta, katavt, I wrote you wrote... Even the irregular verbs in Hebrew have patterns, all the verbs that start with nun or yod. We had a Ben Yehuda small Hebrew English dictionary at home and a snapshot of me in fifth grade or so would be me studying the charts of the seven verb conjugations. I learned the terminology of subject and object, direct and indirect, active and passive, long before we learned grammar terms in public school. Somehow grammar was what I really wanted to get.

My parents were of course a big factor, and I have to ask them how much intention they had in setting up our home. My dad would be the doctor for a week at Herzl Camp, and we would be with the whole camp in what they called the chadar, the dining hall -- camp has its own Hebrew with its sometimes questionable relationship to actual Hebrew -- and that’s where we heard all the Israel songs, the Zionist songs, Bashanah Ha’ba’ah, which today are standards but back then were brand new. Dad would always steal some copies of the shiron, the song book, and we’d try to replicate those camp Shabbat meals on Friday nights just the four of us. A lot from transliteration, mangling the words I am sure. Later, Mom and Dad would play Hebrew records after Shabbat dinner -- from Debbie Friedman, or the Israeli Chasidic Song festival that had rolled into St. Paul when I was about ten.

I remember in those years especially, later in grade school and junior high, this sense that the songs’ meanings were on the tip of my tongue. I knew something like half the words, and for some reason didn’t apply myself to learning the other ones, I wonder why. But that tip of my tongue kept me going.

In my early Hebrew education, there was no sense of division between modern Hebrew, the Torah, and the Siddur (prayerbook). But apart from one or two rules about verbs, we could just as easily read and translate a verse of the Torah as a poem about a nad'nedah, a see-saw at a playground, with a basic lexicon of verbs and some basic grammar and a dictionary. I mean really, in the Torah what do people do other than talk, omer or daber, or eat, ochel, or give and go, ten and lech?

The revival of Hebrew as a living and creative language, of modern society and culture, came about in the past two hundred years and it was possible because of the unique story of the Hebrew language over the past three thousand years.

We know that Hebrew was the language of the Land of Israel during biblical times, and there were other languages in the land and in surrounding lands that were related Hebrew the way that Spanish and Italian are related. We know that there were dialects and accents even in ancient Israel. The English word “shibboleth” comes from a story in the book of Judges, where a group of Jews from the Gil’ad region were fighting a group from the tribal area of Ephraim, and the Ephramites were trying to pass through after losing the battle. The Gil'adim asked each one to say the word shibolet, which means the head of a stalk of grain, but the Ephramites could only say si-bolet, and let’s just say it didn’t end well for them.

As Jews were exiled to Mesopotamia, and then restored to Eretz Yisrael under imperial rule -- Persian, Hellenistic, Roman -- Hebrew itself was transformed, it took in so many words from the imperial languages, and Hebrew became less and less the spoken language of Judea, even though it continued to be a language of writing and accounts and sacred literature. The typical Jew in Roman Judea or Palestine would not have been monolingual in Hebrew, and probably spoke more Greek or Aramaic. 

When the Temple was destroyed, Hebrew was concentrated by the early rabbis, who produced their work in a simple Hebrew style with a straightforward grammar of subject, verb, object. They took advantage of the basic patterns of Hebrew to pass along their teachings in very simplified and rhythmic Hebrew, one that could be spoken and repeated easily by students who weren’t speaking Hebrew in daily life. During the Middle Ages, some poets and composers took a kind of Rococo, almost Shakespearean path leading to some of the most complicated works in our prayerbook. But for even the typical literate person it was the simplified Hebrew of the Mishnah that they knew, with its labels for things of religious significance and mundane life. It was a slimmed down language for centuries, a kind of hibernation or preservation strategy in retrospect.

The idea of Hebrew as a primary language emerged during the Jewish Enlightenment, especially in the 1800s. First there was literature, a conscious effort to breathe life into Jews by escaping Talmudic Aramaic and shtetl Yiddish. Then came Zionism and the idea of speaking Hebrew as a primary language, as a way to be a new Jew. My favorite story about this relates to Eliezer Ben Yehudah, who was raised a traditional Jew in Belarus and made aliyah in the first modern wave in 1881 at the age of about 23. He lived in Jerusalem and dedicated himself to creating a fully functioning modern Hebrew. One day a religious Jew heard him giving instructions to his dog in Hebrew. This struck him as a sacrilige, how could you use the Lashon Hakodesh this way, the holy language of the Torah? And they killed Eliezer’s dog. But the dogs and their owners got the last word.

The Hebrew of today makes it easy to read the Hebrew of Maimonides from the Middle Ages, or the Torah itself, even as Hebrew has stretched to incorporate modern words from other languages, sometimes even into the classic three-consonant root form. I remember staring at a milk carton in Israel trying to figure about what m’hum’gan meant -- it’s "homogenized", in its exactly appropriate one of the seven verb conjugations.

For me, when I went to Camp Ramah in Wisconsin just before 9th grade, the placement test put me in the same group as kids from the Solomon Schechter Day School in suburban Chicago. I could understand everything they could learning Hebrew every day, about Maimonides’ teachings about tzedakah in the original or in our modern Hebrew class. But for the first time in my life, the sessions were ivrit b’ivrit, Hebrew learned by speaking Hebrew, and I hardly spoke a word all summer unlike the day school kids. That would be my mission eventually, to be able to speak.

Through junior high and high school the head of the Talmud Torah was Rabbi Yosi Gordon. Yosi was from Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Jewish cheese-head, and he was the one American we knew who both loved Hebrew and really knew it. He told us this story, about being a student at the Hebrew University on his year-abroad and really wanting to develop an Israeli accent. So he went to a tutor, worked on his r’esh’es and vowels, and the test was for him to go to this particular Jerusalem barber. You’d get your hair cut and talk, and the barber would try to figure out where you were from. The first time Yosi went the barber was challenged, and said he had narrowed it down to Romania or somewhere. Yosi said nothing, went back for more lessons, and eventually passed the barber test as Israeli.

Yosi was the one person in shul who davvened out loud. Even in high school, most of the right side of the Siddur was just overwhelming gibberish; I couldn’t just scan it. But I got the idea that you try maybe to recite something out loud, something you know, maybe something you don’t. At some point in high school I had that instant that had happened in Mrs. Nussbaum's classroom, where suddenly the page was phrases and sentences.

I came back from my trip to Israel the summer after eleventh grade and all I could think of was going back. I had this one cassette of songs by Naomi Shemer -- it went with me in the car everywhere, I am surprised I didn’t destroy it. Al kol eileh, etleynu bechatzer.... I had that tip of my tongue feeling that I sort of understood them, and I was in the car so couldn’t pull out my dictionary. But again it kept me motivated that one day, I’d be able to sing the songs and understand them one hundred percent.

Meanwhile for those of us who stuck it out in Hebrew High, twelve grade meant no more textbooks. We read poems by Yehuda Amichai and stories by Shai Agnon, with just our knowledge and dictionaries. I placed into third year Hebrew when I got to college, without spending a day in a day school or an ulpan. Granted, the X factor was me; not everyone in my cohort has the same story. But this is why I believe we can teach our kids read Hebrew right here where we are.

Finally I spent a whole year in Israel as a junior in college, and I made myself talk past my shyness and my uncertainty -- to get a kartisiya on the bus, a discount punch ticket; to haggle in a monit, a taxi. I developed occasionally this other persona, Israeli Jonatan, who might say things with a sharpness that Jon doesn’t usually have. I am ever grateful to the Israelis here -- to Ruti, to Sara, to Eitan, to Moshe and Etti -- who speak Hebrew slowly not just to me, and who seem to savor every word they form.

To my surprise I have come to love Hebrew not just for its system and not just for its concepts, but for its art. I love the rhythm, the same rhythm that locked down the language for safekeeping in the second century, the ah and oh-ness. Ahavah, love -- ahavah rabbah, boundless love. Glidah is so much more beautiful than ice cream. Sometimes Hebrew translations are even better than the original -- barad yarad bidrom Sfarad ba’erev -- the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!

I have come to think of each Hebrew shoresh, each root, as a kind of atomic field, with a nucleus of meaning but like any small particle in physics you can’t quite pin it down. Chesed means lovingkindness, but it also means loyalty, doing your duty, and love in the most unbounded sense.  Tzedek, tzedakah, is more than legal justice and charity, it’s giving with understanding and with a bigger picture, it’s relational and not just formal. One of my favorite ways to keep learning Hebrew is a podcast called Streetwise Hebrew, which takes what’s often a root or a word that’s familiar to you if you know some Hebrew, and shows how it’s stretched idiomatically in Israel today.

I want to celebrate Hebrew as we celebrate Israel’s 75th anniversary. It unites us across everything, and it’s the key that unlocks everything from Torah to prayer to Israel. So in the weeks that come we’ll share Beth Abraham’s 75 favorite Hebrew words -- if you have one to nominate I’ll tell you how to record yourself or I’ll come and do that. If you learn just a bit of grammar and maybe 150 words, you’ll be amazed what you can read. Even if you’re not a language person, you’ll be astonished what you can internalize. And please make me speak and teach more, me and Sarit as well.

And as for me, I can’t thank enough Alice and Dalia and Yosi and Ruti and Yechiel and Earl and Sari and Aya and Anne and Roger and Jon-Jay and and and, and Mom and Dad, for bringing me the gift of Hebrew. It can be your gift, whether you’re just starting today or whether you have a story like mine which I’d love to hear. Who knows what the coming decades are bringing, to Israel, to Jewish life everywhere. Whatever it is, it will be coming in Hebrew.

Israel's Declaration of Independence

 

 

I am posting this on the eve of Israel's 75th anniversary of independence. The translation is based on what I found on the Israeli Knesset website with my own revisions to bring the words closer to the Hebrew at the sacrifice occasionally of an equivalent English idiom. I have chosen to translate the term "Eretz Yisrael" throughout as "The Land of Israel", though there might be room to understand the term at the same time as "Palestine" in the sense it was understood in 1948, as that territory in question over which the British Mandate applied.

 

 

In Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) the Jewish nation arose. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first lived as a polity, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Out of this historic and traditional connection, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent generations they returned in their masses. Pioneers, immigrants in defiance of restrictive legislation and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which gave specific international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to establish anew its national home.

The Holocaust which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – proved anew the imperative of solving the problem of its homelessness and statelessness by re-establishing in the Land of Israel the Jewish State, which would open wide the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a full and equal member of the community of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi slaughter in Europe, as well as Jews from other lands, did not stop migrating to the Land of Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of the Land of Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.

Accordingly we have assembled, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish community of the Land of Israel and of the Zionist movement, on the day of the conclusion of the British Mandate over Palestine, and by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the basis of the decision of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel: the State of Israel.

We declare that beginning at the moment of the conclusion of the Mandate tonight, the eve of Shabbat, 6 Iyar 5708 (May 15, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the constitution which shall be adopted by the elected constituent assembly not later than the October 1, 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish state, to be called "Israel".

The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ingathering of the exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

The State of Israel is ready to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of November 29, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of the Land of Israel.

We call on the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building of its state and to receive the State of Israel into the family of nations.

We call – even in the midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and take part in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend a hand in peace and neighborliness to all neighboring states and their peoples, and appeal to them for cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people in its land. The State of Israel is prepared to contribute its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

We call to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of the Land of Israel through immigration and upbuilding and to stand by its side in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream of the redemption of Israel.

With trust in the Rock of Israel, we hereby affix our signatures in witness to this declaration, at this session of the Provisional Council of State on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, this day, the Eve of Shabbat, 5 Iyyar 5708, May 14, 1948.

David Ben-Gurion
Daniel Auster
Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi
Eliyahu Berligne
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Eliyahu Dobkin
Meir Wilner-Kovner

Zerach Wahrhaftig
Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen
Rabbi Kalman Kahana
Saadia Kobashi
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria
Golda Myerson
Nachum Nir
Zvi Segal
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman
David Zvi Pinkas

 

 

 

Aharon Zisling
Moshe Kolodny
Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson
Felix Rosenblueth
David Remez
Berl Repetur
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Bekhor Shitreet
Moshe Shapira
Moshe Shertok

 

A Lot of Tov! Podcasts to Share

I've gotten so behind on posting each new Tov! podcast here!

So here's a way to find all the ones you haven't heard yet. The most recent one features two college students, Sadie Meltzer and Lela Spira-Savett!

 

Being One, Being Two, Being Seven, Being Eight

My D'var Torah for Shabbat Chanukkah 5783 (December 24, 2022).

A question I often get around Chanukkah is: Is it true that all the candle hae to be at the same level, other than the shamash? Usually the question comes from creativity -- someone who wants to repurpose another item as a chanukkiah, or who has a new vision of the candles and their combination visually or symbolically or both. So for example, artists have asked me if they can make a thing with a spiral or a certain kind of zigzag and still call it a kosher chanukkiah. Growing up I never learned that this was an issue, but you hear the question a few times and you start to think it must be a thing.

Well, as a matter of principle in halacha (Jewish law) the answer is yes, you can have these kinds of chanukkiot! Though if you think you heard that Jewish law says “no” you’re not wrong, and I’ll get to that.  The Jewish law books say first that you have to be able to differentiate each flame when you are looking at the chanukkiah. This is the opposite of a medurah, which in modern Hebrew is a campfire or a bonfire. Medurah in itself is cool, and in a medurah like a chanukkiah because you have a lot of flames, but with a medurah or a campfire they are jumbled up together and you can’t perceive each one because they are mixed up and move around. Anyway, one easy way to make sure you have a sert of distinct burning wicks, and not have it appear like a medurah, is to space them out in a sequence on the same level. That’s what the books of Jewish law actually say about the straight line. Personally I don’t really get the same level part, because if you follow the logic of the Talmud out each night representing another level of holiness, you should be able to set up the candles like a staircase or an upward ramp. The Ashkenazi tradition is to stick to the straight line but to me it’s like eating legumes on Pesach, so be Sephardi if you like and spread your candles out however you find intriguing!

What is this all about, the difference between a line of flames and a campfire? Why shold we care?

In the Torah in the Mishkan (desert tabernacle), and in the Beit Hamikdash (the Temple in Jerusalem), there were oil lamps and a wood fire, both of which were always going day and night. Oil lamps we think of in connection with Chanukkah because of the ancient seven-branched menorah, and the Temple also had the ner tamid, the eternal light fueled by olive oil.

The fire on the altar reminds me of the burning bush, fire weaving and moving around through the scraggly scrub. One midrash says that the burning bush represents the suffering and the prayers of all the Israelites, and the presence of the Divine with them -- but as a whole, undifferentiated, all of their pain and groans and prayers jumbled together. Vast but trapped in place. In contrast to all that stood Moshe, a single person in that moment, not yet a leader; and the Divine, also singular, not yet in action to save them.

These ancient fires and lamps got me thinking again about this halacha about the differentiated lights. It’s not just about what you see on any given day: six candles, rather than a blazing fire pit with six or more sticks or branches somewhere in there. I think the law is also about perception across eight nights. It’s about the ability on the first night of Chanukkah to say this is one candle, the next night to perceive that these are two candles, and so on all the way to eight.

There is a difference between each candle, and there is a also a difference between perceiving one candle, and five, and eight.

Do you experience something different about the chanukkiah on different nights?

I really noticed this year on days 4 and 5 how different the chanukkiot looked by my window, compared to day 1 and 2. I mean Captain Obvious, I know -- but it’s gotten me to challenge myself about not looking at one as a means to two, not always looking at a couple candles in order to be excited about seven or eight. In my home, the effect is especially pronounced because we have several chanukkiot going each night; the effect of the change from night to night is dramatic. For me the meaning of these teachings about perceiving one, perceiving two, etc. is not to see two people in our community primarily as a strategy for connecting with a third one. How do we get ourselves toward appreciating each of the groupings in the Chanukkah story? Really appreciating just Judith or Matityahu in action; or just Yehudah Ha-Maccabee and his brothers; and just their small band; and their large force. I know I sometimes need to remind myself not to see small numbers of people just as inferior or miniative versions of larger numbers.

My colleague and classmate Rabbi Sue Fendrick once gave a talk in which she mentioned the distinctness of different numbers of people in Judaism.

Two people together are a chavruta, a study pair. There’s something unique about two people facing each other over words of Torah, with no one else to hide behind when your partner expresses and idea or asks a question. You experience Torah differently in a pair, differently than in a Torah service and even a small discussion group.

Three people make a beit din, a court of law. They can rule on a conflict over money and property; they can proclaim officially that someone has become Jewish. Three are enough to call each other formally after a meal in gratitude -- chaverai, n’varech! -- to say the blessing called Birkat Hamazon.

Ten of course are a minyan, enabling us to have a Torah service or say the Mourners’ Kaddish and respond. Ten defines a public according to Jewish law. If you do an act that is seen in the presence of ten or more and is particularly ethical and does honor to the Divine and our people -- a Kiddush Hashem -- that’s a bigger deal than if fewer were around to see it. And the same for Chillul Hashem, if in the presence of ten one does something particularly unethical and shames us or the name of God.

I think about the 208 delegates at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 -- that’s far fewer than make up this congregation today. So too the 23 on the ship that landed the first formal Jewish community in North America in 1654, in New Amsterdam.

Seven, I learned in group psychology, might be the ideal size of a committee or task force -- the point where the chemistry of introverts and extroverts, creatives and analyticals, has the best chance of combining a good end product with good feeling about the experience.

Eight is the extra on top of that seven -- it’s the number of covenant, the leap from the best of what people can accomplish together in our reality to something we might deem messianic.

Even one, in Judaism, is a kind of group. You may be solitary, but you are never alone. Moshe, alone at the burning bush, was with the Divine, and the singular Divine, Adonai Echad, had Moshe. The first candle of Chanukkah has the shamash, the fire that links them to someone else who stored the oil and planned for you to arrive, waited for you to make them less alone.

Jews today are conditioned in a good way to think of how the people in any given “here” can spread what we have -- but our weakness is to get caught up too much on who is missing. The Chanukkah miracle of the oil was meant to reframe scarcity as not just sufficiency, but abundance and overflowing. So too we should see whoever is in the room or around the table, in any number, as abundant and overflowing. You may by now be thinking of Margaret Mead, who could have been talking about each night’s chanukkiah when she famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

So part of the sweetness of the Chanukkiah is the chance to appreciate all the numbers we find ourselves in, the partnerships and discussions and services and protests and parties. The unique and distinct character of each group where we act and learn and reflect and grow. Each day of Chanukkah is a unique festival of lights.

My colleague Rabbi Fendrick closed the talk I mentioned with this beautiful last part from a poem by Marge Piercy called “The Low Road”, and it’s a perfect kavvanah (intention) as we look at our candles each night:

Two people can keep each other sane
can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation
a cell, a wedge.
With four you can play games
and start a collective.
With six you can rent a whole house
have pie for dinner with no seconds
and make your own music.

Thirteen makes a circle,
a hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity
and your own newsletter;
ten thousand community
and your own papers;
a hundred thousand,
a network of communities;
a million our own world.

It goes one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again
after they say no.
It starts when you say We
and know who you mean;
and each day you mean
one more.

Shabbat Shalom, Chodesh Tov and Chag Urim Sameach!
A Good New Month and a Joyous Festival of Lights!