Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

So What Exactly Is The Torah?

We start the annual cycle of reading and studying Torah once again this week! So, what is the Torah when you zoom out and think about it as a whole, and not just story by story or teaching by teaching?

 

Integrating America: What I Hope To Get From This Year

 

Assignment: Complete this thought -- "I am about to begin a year of study about America..."

 

This is the final bit of preliminaries, before delving into history and literature. I wanted to put down a few of my own goals in taking a sustained, hopefully deep survey of American history since colonial times.

 

I used to think of history, sort of, as a series of case studies where people faced social-ethics dilemmas like the ones we do, and we can see various approaches and arguments from the standpoint of completed episodes. In a certain sense, people in the past are like us, minus some technologies and mostly minus the idea that women and men are equal.

 

I guess that approach owes something to John Dewey's decidedly non-industrial, non-training-only view of education from the Progressive Era. Now I know that every period, even of the history I have lived in my own life, has a texture of its own and you can't easily analogize or extrapolate. If you want to, you have to make a case for the analogy.

 

I still hope to learn some in that analogy vein. But maybe more so, I want to understand better that we live in a different part of the American story, and I live in a different part of the story than when I had my formative American education. So I should look not just for parallels, but for things that my current experience would otherwise miss. Some of those things may have clues to what I miss about America today.

 

At the same time, I am looking for a thread of ideals and the story of challenges, stress-tests, and refinements of those ideals. The citizen as "connected critic" that I articulated already on this thread. I have always thought the challenges were about expanding who is included, and the blindnesses that impaired or prevented that. I'm looking to test that idea as well. I want to believe in American ideals -- freedom, equality, pluralism, diversity -- I have a rooting interest. I hope I'll look with a critical spirit and that people here will join me in learning and helping test my own reflections.

Integrating America: Lame Deer and the Native American Critic

 

Summer reading assignment:

Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions: by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes

 

Before year 1 of the course, Leslie thought this book would pair well with my Michael Walzer, “connected critic” idea, since Lame Deer was a Native American, an outside observer. I was skeptical but now I’m glad we did it. It got me to thinking about what a “connected critic” does with criticism from the outside or from a group who you would think couldn’t possibly be made integrated into the main American narrative, the way I can. I’m a member of a group persecuted in other lands throughout history and intermittently discriminated against here, but clearly eligible to be an American partner. Much different from a Native American living here.

 

It’s easy for a connected critic to romanticize a Native American critic – to fantasize about being able to say things one can say without the responsibility of being part of the group. It’s easy to nod at Lame Deer’s anti-Horatio Alger diagnosis of our materialism, our destructive individualism, our superficial approach to learning, which is packaged in this particular book with a smile. But I realize as I write this that I’ve been constructing my own account of a Native American critic, to serve my own critical posture. To make it easier to defend myself to the critics-of-my-criticism by pointing to my own connection. At the same time, reading a Native American critic forces me to take responsibility for my involvement – I don’t have the right to hurl at others or deflect from myself critiques that I am implicated in.

 

I experienced something really thought-provoking a few months ago, at a community rally called in response to some local hate activities. The first people invited to the stage were Native Americans, and I expected to hear about ethnic cleansing and genocide, and a reminder not to forget about that part of the American story while standing up for Latinos, African-Americans, and Jews. But the representatives welcomed us and blessed us, and invited us to live well and peacefully and with integrity on this land, in the name of the people who were once entrusted with it and the spirits who are still present. It was incredibly gracious, it wasn’t at all cramped, and it did not force any of us to renounce our Americanness, our white-ness for those of us who are white, or our hope. I am still sitting with this.

 

Integrating America: The Original Horatio Alger Story

Assignment: Horatio Alger's novel Ragged Dick

 

What motivates Dick when he faces key decisions? Who are his mentors and role models? What kinds of characters come across as "bad guys" and bad influences? Is America a place that really works the way Alger presents?

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We started the course at least once with a look at a classic American myth, the self-made man, typified in the original Horatio Alger stories just after the end of the Civil War. Ragged Dick was originally written for children.

 

I reread the first and last pages of Ragged Dick today, so others correct me if I'm getting the basics wrong. What struck me as good is the appeal to hard work coupled with an acknowledgement that people who don't "rise" aren't to be looked down on unless they are deliberately, willfully thieving or working to keep others down. Ragged Dick himself does not crave high levels of weatlth except to the extent he might pay it forward.

 

What's not appealing is the entirely instrumental treatment of friends and mentors, and the people you have the good fortune to meet who help you launch economically. The only virtues are within, not between. There's no adult perspective, only a narrow childish view of "success." I'm struck by the move of Dick from shining others' shoes to the counting-house -- moving up means moving away from direct service.

 

Putting aside whether Alger originally had narrow goals -- to teach children about hard work -- the myth has of course spread way farther and taken on a life of its own. That's the problem, not really anything in Ragged Dick itself.

 

So does America work like Horatio Alger described? Even if social mobility were only a matter of will, which it certainly isn't, the picture of flourishing is very constricted. I'll be thinking more though about what a more complete philosophy of hard work would be, as we head ahead and back to Benjamin Franklin very soon (who decidedly wrote for adults).

 

Integrating America: The Connected Critic

Leslie and I experimented with the readings for a short opening unit on how to study America. I advocated the first year for excerpts from the political philosopher Michael Walzer's Interpretation and Social Criticism. Walzer articulated the idea of the "connected critic", someone who was inside a society enough to be committed to its people and its narrative and its articulated values, and able to criticize in the name of those values and out of shared commitment. It's when Rev. King said that his dream was "deeply rooted in the American dream", even as he called out America. For Walzer, the alternative is the disconnected critic who might not care enough about fellow citizens and/or who speaks a language entirely foreign to the society the critic hopes to change or improve. Another alternative of course is someone so identified with things as is that they cannot criticize at all.

I wanted our students to see themselves as connected critics of America. It was a bit easier to articulate for American Jewish students, for whom inside-outside is already set up.

"Connected critic" is always a position of built-in tension. It's a challenge to nurture your own connection and your critical outlook. Particularly when you are just learning about your own history, and the history of your own society.

In the past few years, the "connected critic" view of founding American ideals has been called into question, and I am hoping for a way to vindicate it nonetheless. Does Thomas Jefferson's slaveholding mean that "created equal.... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are bankrupt? I accept the challenge of those who answer yes. I have to consider the alternative, and/or come up with an account of the citizen as connected critic that does not whitewash anything.

Integrating America: An Artifact That Represents America

#integratingamerica

Assignment: Choose an artifact that to you represents America, American society, or American culture. Feel free to share an image and/or explanation in the comments here or in your own post.

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When I began co-teaching the course, the artifact I chose was the book and album “Free to Be You and Me.” It’s a 1972 project created by Marlo Thomas. For the younger people here, that’s Rachel’s mother from “Friends”, and this project is one reason why that casting is so amazing in a counter-to-type way (read on).

“Free to Be You and Me” was a series of songs and stories for kids aimed at breaking down gender stereotypes. What a boy and a girl has to be like, want to be when they grow up, etc.

I chose this as my artifact for three reasons.

1. The really interesting take on the ideas of freedom and equality and how they intertwine. Not being limited by preconceived gender roles is presented as freedom; this is the era of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment)!
2. The interplay between self-expression and banding together. My favorite piece is called “Atalanta”, a princess who enters the footrace with all the male suitors who wants her hand. In the end, it’s tie between Atalanta and Young John, who wants to be her friend, and they spend a day together before going off on their own explorations of the world.
3. The money line in the title song: “There’s a land that I see where the children are free/and I say it ain’t far to that land from where we are.” The vision of freedom, the awareness the land of freedom isn’t completely here yet, but it’s not far and we could get there together.

This last point in particular is what I want to interrogate through the course of this year. That assumption, and whatever knowledge I need to gain and reflect on in order to assess how far it is.

This Week's Catastrophe in Afghanistan

I have specific memories from the newspapers of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and of exactly where I was when the U.S. campaign against the Taliban began after 9/11, parking my car after dropping off the rest of the family as we met some friends for an outdoor festival in New York as things were just seeming to get back to a routine. I have less specific but still vivid recollection of the Today show too from farther back as the Vietnam War came to an end; I was 8 then.

 

Back in the early 2000s I was a supporter of the Afghan war and, I’m sure you’ll be surprised about this, the Iraq invasion as well, and I wasn’t quiet about it. I can’t imagine I thought that the U.S. would have any success in stabilizing these countries as democracies. We all knew we lacked the skill or frankly the respect for others to pull that off. My position was that the self-defense and humanitarian rationales for dramatic, extended but not time-unlimited interventions were solid, even knowing that the local democratic and civil society allies we wanted to help gain ground were weak. It wouldn’t be worse than not acting. That was my position, not identical for the two interventions but based on similar principles. I stuck to it even as the early attempts to constitute an Afghan regime after the Taliban’s defeat were not going great.

 

My touchstone on these issues since the mid-1980s has been Michael Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars, along with his subsequent published articles since 2001. His analyses are how I have framed the questions, and it’s worth Googling Walzer and Afghanistan together for articles other than this one (which is somewhat but not entirely moot today). I’m not saying he’s right on every point but he’s always worth engaging with.

 

One of the things that he writes about in the book, with reference to Vietnam, is democratic accountability, at least morally speaking even if none of us citizens will be held personally responsible anywhere for the death and suffering of people in the far-away places we sent our forces. For someone like me who does not reject American power overseas, the onus was on me and people like me not to let our elected representatives cede all decisions to the executive branch on this one. Looking back, the best you could say is, well we bought 20 years of extra breathing room in Afghanistan for women and girls, for the people whom Taliban rule will harm the most, and that counts for something even with the upcoming catastrophe. That seems like the best case I can think of for continuing to invest in a war that was clearly going to lead to what happened this week. There wasn’t any doubt that once we left the Taliban would take over again. We should have made our representatives better supervisors. We should have asked what it means to our soldiers and prospective soldiers to be sent to a war where they could lose life, limb, or wellbeing in service of at best a holding action, and what would we owe those who survived or who went again and again or the families of those who died or who lived. We should have asked long ago how we would make good on our obligations to those whose lives would be worse when we would leave, who didn’t have a say in our timing or our strategy.

 

So there’s more mulling to do – for me it’s knowing that our Jewish high holy days and season of reflection come around the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Would welcome thoughtful thoughts. There are concentric circles of people in Afghanistan we are still responsible for even as we are leaving.

Figuring Out the Talmud's Last Page on Pesach

Here is a Passover puzzle I was trying to solve today at our siyyum (completion of a section of Torah study) to undo the fast of the first-born (that’s a whole other story). It is the last teaching of Massechet Pesachim, the Talmudic book about Passover.

 

Rav Simlai attended a pidyon ha-ben, the ceremony for “redeeming” a 30-day-old first-born baby boy from a kohen (priest). Background: First-born Jewish boys are considered to have a special obligation to the Divine, because their lives were in danger on the night of the first Passover, the prelude to the escape from Egypt, when the tenth plague struck and killed all Egyptian first-born. Their survival having been a special gift and mystery, they are presumed to belong to the Divine, and the priests are entitled to draft them into religious service in the Temple. The Torah says that in practice, members of the tribe of Levi are substituted for the first-born, but as part of this the father of each first-born has to redeem the baby from the Levite priests. We actually still have this custom, of paying a few symbolic coins to a kohen in a special ritual, even though there is no Temple where the boy would grow up to serve.

 

So back to Rav Simlai, who is a guest at a pidyon ha-ben, and the other guests recognize that there’s a rabbi in the house so he is asked a question. There are two blessings recited at the ceremony. One goes with fulfilling the mitzvah, the obligation, and is said by the father. The other is the She-he-chayanu, a blessing of gratitude to the Divine for “giving us life, keeping us alive, and bringing us to this day.” Rav Simlai is asked who should say this – the father because he’s doing a mitzvah, or the kohen because he’s getting some money in his pocket for probably not a hard day’s work (that part is my editorializing).

 

Well Rav Simlai didn’t have a ready answer, and like I imagine many a rabbi at a party, didn’t have all his books with him, not realizing he’d be on the clock. So he excused himself (or maybe he waited until the party was over) and headed over the House of Study, where he got an answer: The father says the blessing. The Talmud concludes that such is the law – and that’s it, the end of Tractate Pesachim.

 

So I wonder why this is the last word about Passover and what it means. Well one easy equation is that redeeming each child is a microcosm of the redemption of all Israel. Just as the father buys back the child’s freedom, so too God bought us back into freedom. God had told Moses, after all, to tell Pharaoh that “Israel is My first-born son.” So this father, as he starts his family, is being reminded not to take his son’s freedom for granted, nor really his life, because after all the first-born experienced even more danger the night of the first Passover than everyone else. This is a way to bring the idea that each of us left Egypt to a very personal level; it’s not just history and it’s also not just political and social in scale.

 

The only problem with that is: If father=God and child=Israelites, who does the priest stand for? Surely the priest is not like Pharaoh! Surely if the boy were to be unredeemed and left at the service of the kohen, this would a life completely unlike slavery to Pharaoh.

 

Best I can do is this: In Egypt, the choice was stark between slavery and freedom. For this father, there is a true choice between two destinies of service: one in direct official service to God, and one is some other holy way that this father and family will have responsibility to work out. That’s what freedom means. It’s more than an alternative to the horror of slavery. It’s the opportunity and responsibility to provide multiple paths of goodness and holiness for our children, to see in our own lives that there are multiple paths. If a path that comes with some label of goodness – “follow this arrow toward the priest who will guide you to a life of service” – if that isn’t your path, it’s not enough to say I can’t do that, I can’t be that. The duty of the parent, and of the generation more generally who welcomes any child into the world, is to help them look over the other paths, the ones that aren’t so obviously labeled as “service.”

 

So indeed, the father says the blessing of She-hechaynau, thank you for bringing us to this point, where it’s my responsibility to help this child learn how to choose freely among the many good choices, to find the path that’s right. I gladly pay a few coins for that privilege, for having the power of creating freedom for this child, the way the Divine did and does for all of us.

 

A zissen Pesach – a sweet Passover to all who are celebrating!

The Beginning of Exodus and the Events of the Week

The Torah contemplates something parallel to the national leadership dynamics situation we are judging right now, about the relationship between the president’s words and acts and the actions of the rioters. Thanks to Rabbi Aryeh Klapper for directing my attention to a source on this. I’m linking his shiur (lesson) on the text, but I haven’t listened to it yet (I will, but it’s an hour!). So the take on the text here is mine and we’ll see how it tracks Rav Klapper’s.

This week’s Torah reading in Jewish communities is the beginning of the book of Exodus. Chapters 1-2 are about the progression from Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites to slavery to the murder of baby boys, and then about resistance. Rabbi Moses Nachmanides (medieval Spanish commentator) lays out an interpretation of what the Torah text presents us.

Nachamides taught that Pharaoh had the whole project of enslavement and murder in mind at the start. But he did not begin that way specifically because his people would have recoiled at that, and Pharaoh was constrained by the willingness of his people at a given moment. So first he proposed a corvee, a small forced-labor tax, because his people would have regarded that as common and acceptable behavior toward foreigners.

Then according to Nachmanides, Pharaoh approached the midwives serving Israelite mothers behind closed doors about killing newborn boys, so that even mothers giving birth and arranging for a midwife wouldn’t know what might happen. When that didn’t work, Pharaoh next move was to say to his whole people that they should throw baby boys into the Nile. The Torah says Pharaoh commanded, and Nachmanides says Pharaoh spoke in a more common way, because he didn’t want to assign the task to any specific official. He did not want the act to be associated with his regime specifically, but with the people as a whole. By now they were willing to do things publicly they were not willing to do at first. Nachmanides posits that Pharaoh was also preserving his right to disavow any specific act. If an Israelite father would come to a local official about his own baby, Pharaoh would invite the father to offer proof and then punish the killer himself.

But Nachmanides says that eventually this set of winks became impossible and Egyptian mobs began to storm Israelite homes in search of babies. That was the situation in which Moses’ mother Yocheved knew to give birth in secret and hide the birth and the child, and that’s what led eventually to the acts of resistance involving midwives, Moses’ sister Miriam, and Pharaoh’s own daughter.

Nachmanides is pointing out that there is more to leadership responsibility than accountability for explicit orders. There is more than what is said out loud, clearly, or publicly. There is a complex feedback dynamic between the leader and the group. The group sometimes constrains the leader; the group can amplify the leader’s general direction in ways of its own that are sometimes predictable and sometimes not; the group has its own reality that is not the same as the regime; there are resisters both inside and outside. It’s worth sitting with the Torah’s story and this kind of interpretation on its own, and then thinking and talking about how it might speak to us right now.

What is the moral responsibility of the leader? Is the group responsible only for its own actions, or for anything about its leader as well? These moral responsibilities of leader and group aren’t identifical but overlap in some way. These are what we should be thinking about, from each of our positions as Americans, partial or substantial supporters or opponents of the president, citizen-judges of what happened this week and what ought to happen going forward.

Disrupting Texts is a Tradition -- My Hosea Story

A Facebook post by a congregant highlighted a controversy around an initiative called #DisruptTexts, and my response to it was going to be much longer than a typical FB comment. #DisruptTexts as a specific project isn't something I had heard of, but as I skimmed the website the other day it certainly doesn't seem brand new. This is an initiative for literature education in schools that aims to "challenge the traditional canon" both by bringing in more representative texts and by putting new texts and perspectives into dialogue with "traditional" ones. I'm posting partly because the congregant said she wanted all her child's teachers to be involved in this kind of pedagogy, and I am/hope to be one of those teachers.

I don't know why this approach would be controversial at all. I mean I do, of course. But I would think even people with suspicion ought to be cheered by the idea of critical thinking about texts and literature, and by the idea of pairings and conversations centered around both traditional and new literary texts.

Anyway my mind went immediately to an experience I had as a first-year rabbinical student in just this kind of pedagogy at an adult level. As a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I had access to the Protestant institution across the street, Union Theological Seminary. I enrolled there in a course about the book of Hosea taught by Professor Phyllis Trible, one of the pioneering feminist critics of the Hebrew Bible. I had read from a couple of Professor Trible's books. One of them was called Texts of Terror, to give you a sense of her work. Her scholarship there was about women such as Hagar, Tamar, and the brutalized concubine of Gibeah in the book of Judges. Professor Trible was looking both to document the treatment of women by the (male) authors and editors of the Bible and to listen for women's voices somehow in the same texts.

I had studied the opening chapters of Hosea in religious school during high school with my terrific teacher Earl Schwartz. Hosea takes to heart the prophetic metaphor that images Israel's straying from God as an unfaithful wife. So he marries a prostitute and his book opens with a graphic revenge fantasy put in God's mouth/mind, leading to reconciliation. It's pretty horrifying.

That's where Professor Trible opened the course. I figured, based on what I knew of her, that the course would critique Hosea and unearth all the factors behind taking an already-problematic metaphor too far back in his time. Instead, she opened by saying even so, she wanted to see whether there was a way to reclaim Hosea and to have his book in the canon. It was a generous and tentative opening -- Professor Trible presented this as an open question. We would work through the text of the book and see.

The students were paired off and each group had to prepare a particular section in depth to present to the class -- to translate, analyze, and suggest issues and interpretations. I asked for or ended up with a passage that is read traditionally in the synagogue as a haftarah, a section of the prophets paired with the week's Torah reading. My partner was a Southern female Protestant seminarian who was also lesbian and married (this was the first half of 1991).

I am sure we compared Hosea to other places in the Torah and prophets that talk about Israel's unfaithfulness or betrayals, straight up or in metaphor. Hosea was also an innovator in the idea of teshuvah or "repentance"/personal change in Jewish thought. How do we hold both sets of his words?

My engagement with Hosea continued. A number of years ago, I was in the synagogue and listening to the chanting of the first couple chapters of Hosea by a thirteen-year-old girl on the occasion of her Bat Mitzvah. I was horrified. How had I let that happen? Somewhere in between that moment and Professor Trible, I had sat in horror while the students in the Jewish day high school I worked at presented "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" as the school play. So much leering at women in the play, being staged by young girls being watched by young guys, and we the faculty had somehow let that happen. Here it was again, and just as bad even though I'm sure relatively few people were paying close attention to the English translation of Hosea in front of us in the synagogue.

I resolved that one way or another, no girl would chant this passage in the synagogue again. I thought about this for a few months and learned that the haftarah readings were not as fixed as our Bibles in the pews would lead us to think. Then I remembered too a section of the Mishnah, the early code of Jewish law that is the foundation of the Talmud, that lays out a series of texts that are not to be publicly read and/or not to be publicly translated in the synagogue, even though they can be encountered in a process of Torah study. (Before print, during services biblical readings were in some places translated out loud into the vernacular.)

I proposed not just that young girls would not read this for Bat Mitzvah, but that no one should hear this passage read out loud in the synagogue. We would substitute another reading for the opening of Hosea. The first year, I took time the week before to explain what I was doing and why. I taught a bit about Hosea, and both Earl Schwartz and Professor Trible. The next week I gave out xeroxes of an alternative text. In succeeding years, I make note of what we are doing and why. This is how I keep Hosea in the canon. He's there, not as loud as he once was, and always now framed by and along with other voices including new ones, including my own.

This is hardly the only example of its kind in my own life of texts and canons and teaching literatures. A whole section of my very first education course at the Seminary was about "difficult texts." But I describe all of this about Hosea to say that there are many dimensions to encountering texts, and all kinds of ways of staging or framing those encounters. We read privately or with others; we listen or we debate; we study intimately or we share ritually. There is more than canon-or-cancel. #DisruptTexts is about the classroom, the place where students and teachers read together and learn how to read. It's part of what we should be doing as teachers and parents, sharing stories and literature with our students and children.