I'm Jon Spira-Savett, rabbi at Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire. This website and blog is a resource for Jewish learning and Jewish action. It is a way to share my thoughts beyond my classes and weekly Divrei Torah. You'll find blog posts, standing resource pages with links and things to read, and podcasts as well.
I am probably already getting a late start on my second semester of college review, so here I am bundling all my leftover notes about first term.
I haven't mentioned my Hebrew literature class with Professor Safran. I don't know that I have notes. We read mostly Agnon stories, and talked a lot about his interesting religious concerns and in general his mode of creating characters that were "projections of his own inner life", or I suppose of the dilemmas of modern Jewish intellectuals. Alas, almost everyone else in the course could speak Hebrew; I could understand but hardly say a word at the time.
I haven't said much about Expos (Expository Writing). I am sure my notebook is somewhere, but all I have found so far are a couple of stories and my final paper. I was delighted to see some great phrases here and there in my stories. As a fiction writer, I was heavy on interiority, not so much on plot, a bit on relationships. At least twice there was a character named Sam or Sammy who was not the narrator, obviously a stand-in for me (middle name Samuel), or a kind of idealized version of me or who I wished people saw me as!
My final paper on Malamud was pretty good! I remember how hard it was to really come up with a thesis that was interesting and actually borne out by my examples. I wrote about main characters who were somewhat conventional but also dreamers inside themselves, who were then challenged by unconventional characters who disrupted their equilibrium or their projects in profound ways. It's interesting to see what I was thinking about "conventional" Jews the year before I became more observant myself. It was a nicely written paper, tight and crisp and confidence.
My final psych paper was a stretch, an attempt to crystallize a cognitive+social psychology perspective on moral development. I am sure we were encouraged to stretch. I didn't find the analysis terribly resonant today, it was rooted again in the limits of my own experience, though I stumbled toward a couple of things. One was a good attempt to clarify what it would mean to synthesize a cognitive and a social perspective on development. The other was a nice typology that sort of anticipated the David Riesman types I'd read about a few years later. I liked that whoever graded the paper -- not sure if it was Scott the TA or Professor Demick -- really went over the language. This one was more unruly than the Expos paper.
I haven't conveyed yet just how excited I was to study psychology for the first time. I always had wanted to, to explore more about why people do and say and relate the way they do. The course did not disappoint, and I just ate it up all the time. Professor Demick, as I think I've commented, was a terrific lecturer, engaging and completely information-packed. Even though it was specifically Intro to Development, it was such a great general intro to the field that my next course, Intro to Psych, seemed a lot like I was reviewing.
When the school year ended, our family picked me up and we went out to Rockport for some days before going home. I bought two books from Justice that had been excerpted in the sourcebook -- Walzer's Spheres of Justice and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In my memory I read them both cover to cover while in Rockport; perhaps I only started there but I did absolutely read each one. I was determined to have a more solid, less debater/argumentative hold on both liberalism and conservatism, to take the critiques super seriously. Though Walzer is and was more fun to read, Nozick had his entertaining parts, and I slogged through the parts that had more symbols in them.
I guess I'll leave it there, and start to catch up on second semester!
This was my D'var Torah for Shabbat morning, March 16, 2024, Parashat Pekudei. which fell this year about a week before Purim.
It’s already after the Oscars, but I have a pitch for a new movie -- it could even be a franchise!
It’s about a pair of young friends who travel the world together. Every two years they pick a different spot. There has to be something grand about it -- imperial castles, or gaudy restaurants, or flamboyant festivals. They’re great friends who met in eighth grade and have always been just friends, nothing else going on there -- but each place they go, if anyone asks, they pass themselves off as cousins.
Before each of their travels, they do Wikipedia-level cultural research, giving themselves no more than two days to learn enough to choose new names to go by for the trip. Names that will help them blend in but are also a bit too on the nose. It’s kind of an inside joke between them. In Rome, for instance, they would be Sophia and Cesar, philosophy and empire.
You’re thinking: Entitled, alienated, bored millenials? Far from it. In fact the places they pick all have certain things in common.
They are prosperous places, but complacent. The ruling class is checked out, mildly corrupt, but mainly buffoons. There are latent tensions in society, whispers of racism and nativism, worries that it’s more. But the people who used to want to do something about it are stuck and have drifted away from each other. Nothing awful has happened there for a long time, but you never know. In each place there’s always someone who runs a boutique or a yoga studio or a food truck but used to be a young activist.
And here is the actual caper: The two friends choose these places in order to shake things up, to force the issue and help the people save themselves.
On the way, on the train, they talk through the whole night about all the big things. It’s like Before Sunrise or My Dinner With Andre. An hour before they arrive, they split up on the train so one will see they came together.
Once they arrive they head in different directions. She befriends the regional governor, who is (of course) recently single again. She takes language classes and always ends up starting an English-language book group for the other college students; they teach her colorful idioms and she brings them Shakespeare. He hangs out in the local taverns, figures out who the movers and shakers are, always buys the editor of the newspaper a drink.
For a few months, our gal and our guy don’t see much of each other. They pass in the streets and drop a note in each other’s pocket: Miss you, can’t wait to hang out. Did you catch that play, I think I’m learning enough of the language to get it. I heard the funniest joke, can’t wait to tell you. Dinner when we get back. Occasionally, someone notices these little connections between them and asks: Do you know each other or something? And they say: No -- well kinda. It’s my cousin; I can’t believe he’s here too.
After a few months, they know enough about the texture of the place to provoke the necessary crisis. You can probably fill this part in yourself: Local jerk who’s actually worse; owns a bunch of businesses; was the governor’s best friend back in the day. The jerk keeps selling the governor on changes to laws that one by one aren’t much, but together amount to a massive anti-immigrant crackdown. She gets her book group to raise their consciousness and take to the streets, and the owner of the boutique or yoga studio or food truck calls up her old friends and they group up too and show up together for the kids.
Right before the local jerk can make his final move, she invites him and the governor out to dinner at the gaudy restaurant down the path from the old imperial castle. She calls him out. The guy is run out of town.
Our guy and our gal, Sophia and Cesar or whatever they’re called this time around -- the people of the area finally put two and two together. They did know the other was here! The citizens honor them at a huge festival celebrating what they all achieved together. Speech, speech, the people demand, and you can write it: You people have welcomed us, you stood up for each other more than you ever realized you would because you’ve always loved each other, you just forgot for a time. Don’t forget anymore, tell this story, keep being good to each other. The two of us had to lose each other for most of a year -- don’t you all lose each other.
The people beg them to stay, but they have to move on. You know us as Sophia and Cesar, but that’s not who we really are. (In the film we learn her real name but never his.) Their year is done, and they’ve missed each other. They also need the friendship they saw all these people around them share, in the book group and the tavern and the streets. It’s time to find each other again. To tend to their own friendship for a year... and plan their next caper.
Do you recognize this movie?
If you think you don’t, think again, because the story I’ve told is the Megillah. Megillat Esther as: a buddy film.
I’ve taken a few liberties, of course; it’s my own fan fiction, my own midrash. But did I really? Couldn’t this be the story?To give credit where credit is due, first of all I have to give a shout out to Paul Franks, who some of you know or remember from our community. One year around Purim at our Thursday Torah class, he said something like: The story of Esther and Mordechai is actual a heist; it’s Ocean’s Eleven. Something like that.
I’ve reimagined it instead as a buddy film, and I got the idea via Rabbi Josh Feigelson, who I quote here a lot, currently the leader of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. More on Rabbi Feigelson’s idea in a minute.
If the Megillah were a buddy film, wouldn’t it be great? In my pitch, Esther and Mordechai are old friends in every way. Their friendship is their company, the plays and the jokes they share, and how they want to change the world.
I’ve said before that within the Torah is absolutely one of the oldest buddy films of our culture. Moshe, Miryam, and Aharon -- they are for sure Luke, Leia, and Han Solo; they are Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. Each one in the group has a special power; it takes all of them to defeat the Empire or Voldemort; and they goof around and poke fun at each other, and grow and gather other friends too around them for all of it. Yes, I know in each case there is some kind of family dimension that’s hidden or created -- but really all of these are about friendship first.
Rabbi Feigelson says our parasha, Pekudei, has a buddy thing going too. The construction leaders for the Mishkan (the desert sanctuary) are Betzalel and Oholiav. This is me and not Rabbi Josh but it seems like this could be a classic Odd Couple dramatic situation. Betzalel means “in the shade of the Divine” -- he’s the spiritual free spirit. Oholiav has “my tent” in it -- he’s the quieter homebody. Rabbi Josh wrote this week: “It makes sense to me that the Torah would choose to highlight two friends at the center of the creation of the Mishkan, as the word for friend, chaver, is related to a word the Torah itself uses to describe putting together the Mishkan, l'chaber.”
Am I just messing around here, or does this have something to do with Purim and Shabbat?
I would love for the Megillah to be a buddy story between two people who come to Shushan calling themselves Esther and Mordechai. But regardless, Purim is a friendship chag. There is a specific mitzvah that I don’t think has a parallel anywhere else in Torah, the mitzvah of mishloach manot ish l’rei-eihu, of friends sending portions to each other. I can’t think of any otheraffirmative mitzvah that is about friendship.
In the story of the defeat of Haman and the rescue of a whole people, part of the story is friends. A pair of friends, small groups of friends, even devious friends. In the aftermath of this violent self-defense, there is a charge to do something sweet for your friends. Something about friendship itself is a tikkun at this time of year, a repairing thing.A tikkun for the large-scale brokenness of the Purim story.
As I was reimagining the Megillah as a buddy film, I was thinking about the interplay between our purposes and our friends, and all the forms that takes. I was thinking how the small joys of friendship and the big things we contemplate in life interweave, and how some friendships come out of meeting people around a collective purpose. Or sometimes it’s with our existing friends that we just find ourselves talking about the big world things on our minds and our place in their tikkun, as we drift into and out of those conversations even in the midst of a casual dinner or a gathering for fun.
In buddy movies there are all kinds of these friendships with all kinds of rhythms. From the intensity of Thelma and Louise or Butch and Sundance, to the quieter friendships, the once in a year or once in a reunion cycle reconnections. The friendships of extroverts and introverts. Maybe that’s why I imagine Esther and Mordechai as two people who pal around a lot, and also as two people who don’t see each other for a long time.
As we don’t live on bread alone, we also don’t live our dreams on ideas alone, or accomplish big things on meetings alone, or enjoy our lives on family alone.
The Purim practice of mishloach manot ish l’rei’eihu is a way to acknowlege that, to lift up the sweetness of the people we are friends with on any and all of those levels. Our tradition says a hearty treat is what we exchange, and it can be hearty food or even a hearty book!
And on Shabbat, we call the same kind of thing Shabbat dinner, or Shabbat lunch, or Kiddush at the synagogue. A day of friendship, with food made by friends and served by friends. We don’t go out on adventures, like in the buddy pics, but bring the stories of those adventures here, and as they project in the background we reconnect and talk.
There isn’t any aspect of our lives, any meaningful caper, that isn’t better as a buddy film. So on this Shabbat half an hour before Kiddush, and a week before Purim: May we send each other the blessings of Betzalel and Oholiav, of Moshe and Miryam and Aharon, of Esther and Mordechai.
This is a slightly revised version of a D'var Torah I gave on the Shabbat that was the last day of Pesach in 5782 (2022).
Right before Pesach in 2022, a bunch of people mentioned to me an article they had seen from the New York Times by Rabbi Sharon Brous. Her piece referenced a book known as the Slave Bible, or as its inside title page says “Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West India Islands.” This version of the Bible was published in 1807, and it was used in the Caribbean islands under British rule at that time to teach slaves to read and to teach them Christianity. As Rabbi Brous writes, this Bible is unique in that it has deleted the entire story of the Exodus. It jumps from Joseph’s uniting with his brothers all the way to the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, and then from there to the sternest and most warning parts of Deuteronomy, and that’s it for the Torah.
There are in the Deuteronomy section brief references to having been brought out of Egypt but no mention at all of being slaves there. So this was truly a Bible without an Exodus, and a Bible suffused in fact with justifications of slavery from various points in Genesis, as well as other parts of the Old Testament and New.
Rabbi Brous asks us to imagine how it’s possible to have a text without Exodus, without slavery and oppression and liberation, and call it a Bible. What kind of biblical religion could really be true to the Bible without that story -- it’s absurd. Yet that was the Bible and the biblical religion, quote-unquote, being fed to slaves in at least part of the English-speaking world into the 1800s.
After the third person mentioned this Bible to me, I found myself putting into focus an idea that’s been eating slowly at me for a while. I found myself thinking that there is a mirror-image Bible, not exactly a Bible but a book based on the Bible, and in this particular Bible the Israelites are continually being redeemed, over and over.
In this Bible, every mention of slavery and Pharaoh disappears quickly into a celebration of rescue and protection from not just oppression but hunger and pain and disilusionment.
In this version, God operates the world in every moment with compassion for every last creature, and has in every moment since the beginning of time, and God never naps from this concern and care for a moment, and never lets any creature fail to find at least a word to say or sing to describe this world.
In this version, the Sea is not a dangerous thing to try and cross, but a gushing out of gratitude.
In this version of the Bible, even our bones -- the least articulate part of our body, the part of us that can’t see out into the word at all -- even our bones proclaim Mi Chamocha, the words of the Song we sang at the Sea -- "Adonai Mi Chamocha, Who is like you, who rescues the powerless from the one who is stronger."
This Bible, where the liberation from slavery in Egypt is amplified and exaggerated -- it is the Siddur. It is our prayerbook. I’ve just been paraphraising for you most of pages 104-105 in our version of the Siddur, the prayer we call Nishmat Kol Chai after its first words, “the breath of all that lives.”
In recent years with all that has been happening in the world, I have been especially fascinated by what I will call the Nishmat Bible, which is the opposite of the Slave Bible. Part of my fascination is the flat-out contradiction between some of the words of the Nishmat prayers and what’s in our Torah. I mean the Torah is very clear that while Shifrah and Puah and Miryam and Yocheved were saving the lives of babies one by one, and while Moshe was taking matters into his own hands quite literally, God had to be reminded of the Israelites after some long period of time, finally snapping into action and setting a bush to burning. I mean: Is that the God who, in the words of the Nishmat prayer, “does not sleep and does not slumber”?
But that’s not even what fascinates me; it’s not a point of theology. What I’m amazed at is our ancestors of the year 1550, or pick another year like that, who sang these words in a medieval world where they had been oppressed for hundreds of years, who had a tradition of singing these words for least six or seven centuries and possibly more than a thousand years, when most Pharaohs in that time were not defeated and the many Jewish exits were not to promised lands.
The Jews of 1550 sang these words every Shabbat against all evidence to the contrary. What was that like? What did it feel like? What kinds of thoughts were they thinking about these words? Even as late as 1550, Jews had no idea that within a hundred years there might be the beginning of some kind of liberation in this world, in Amsterdam or Brazil or the North American colonies. And for most Jews in most places even in 1650 or 1750 or 1850 this was still the case. And yet they sang this Bible where “from the beginning of time to the end” without exception every moment God is taking care of them and “besides You we have no God who redeems and saves.”
I’m just gobsmacked. I can see in 1947 naming a ship Exodus, with Jews in peril still in Europe and in Palestine but it seems like a time that you could feel is those first chapters of the book of Exodus, where something may be coming and you’re in that fight.
I can see in churches in the 1950s and 1960s telling and singing about the Exodus, with protests and actions gaining energy if not always gaining momentum. I can see how in the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s we made “let my people” go a real watchword in solidarity with our people in the Soviet Union, when there was already liberation for Jews in this country and the State of Israel.
It’s easy to see how you make the Exodus a present story when the moves are happening and it’s more than a midwife here and an upstander there but history itself seems in the making.
It’s easier to see how you tell this story after we relocated to America, not only a land of freedom but a land that sees itself as another version of the Exodus story.
But for centuries and centuries our ancestors sang these songs, and made the already Exodus-filled Torah into a turbocharged Exodus Bible through the Siddur. Especially on Shabbat when they sang Nishmat, but also every regular day morning and night. Twice a day Mi Chamocha, the Song of the first moment of freedom. In the morning every weekday it’s “protector and savior for their children in every generation”; in the evening every night it’s the power “Who redeems us from the hand of every earthly power.”
What was it like to sing the Nishmat Bible? How did they do it? When there was no end in sight to oppressions, to crimes against humanity; when there was no debate and no media to show anyone else what was happening to us -- our ancestors kept being the stewards of the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus. Against all the evidence of the actual world. There was no way anyone could have pulled a Slave Bible over them. The Siddur is even more Exodus than the Torah itself.
(And of course, the Slave Bible was no match for the people over whom it was lorded in the 1800s.)
It is those centuries and centuries of stewarding this story, protecting it and retelling it and sometimes adding to it and exaggerating it in profound ways and just crazy ways, that have made other Exodus stories and realities possible in the past centuries. We talk about the power of stories, but it’s more than the story and its content. A story stored up and charged with spiritual energy for that long becomes more powerful at some point than any powerful tyrant or tyranny. That’s what I mean each time I hand the Torah scroll to a BMitzvah and say: You can feel all the noise and energy of our ancestors talking about it; their energy is in here and when you add that up it’s just so much power. Enough to power our liberations in Israel and here, the first modern revolutions, and lest we forget the dramatic fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse three decades ago of the longest and widest single brutal system of oppression in human history. So many have understood these as Exodus stories.
As real as the Slave Bible was in its time, it is really no match. At an interfaith gathering during Pesach one year, our congregation’s friend Olga Tines, the music minister at the New Fellowship Baptist Church, talked about the power of the Exodus in her own legacy as an African-American. She reminded us that Christianity was not the religion that her people brought with them from Africa to North America, but once the white slaveholders began to use Christianity they couldn’t keep those Exodus parts quiet. And like us, the slaves created a hyper-Exodus-Bible of song and prayer, in spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and in sermons. And things happened in the real world because of that, and when other things happened they had faith already because the liberation of slaves was a real thing.
I know it seems like we have discharged some of the energy in the Exodus story. There is so much Pharoah, isn’t there; he keeps coming back. I don’t have to recite the topical litany. A couple of years ago I was working with one of our BMitzvah kids, Benjamin, and we were studying another part of the Torah, the story of Noach, and Benjamin’s view was that we have not advanced at all since the time of the biblical Flood.
And I tried to come back to him with the scholar Steven Pinker and his objective, statistical study The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I don’t know if Ukraine or Burma or Afghanistan changes the calculus but Pinker said the world is less violent and more peaceful than ever before. Benjamin was having none of it.
I’m not blaming him. To make the world more free takes empirical things but it doesn’t happen without stories and without being captured back into those stories. That’s why we need more Exodus even when we might not entirely be feeling it.
If our ancestors for hundreds and hundreds of years, in their situation that was more like Israelite slaves than like anyone else in the story -- if they could keep singing the Nishmat Bible and studying the Exodus story, we certainly can from our position on the other side of the Sea as modern Jews. We can --with our memories of the past century or two in our own lives and the lives of our families. This is not a time to go mellow on Exodus, but to crank it higher. And not just talk about Pharoah and not just about midwives and sprouts, but the splitting Sea and the full-on redemption out ahead.
That’s why we’re here as Jews. You can’t cut those things out of the Bible, and if anything as a Jew you have to multiply them. Somehow, we were the first people who had this story of the Exodus, of Yetziat Mitzrayim. We’ve had it the longest, it changed us and it’s changed the world already. It’s our job in the world to be stewards of this story, pour our energy into it no matter what is happening, and keep bringing it out over and over. And, as we say at the Seder, everyone who uses the Exodus to tell more and more stories is to be praised.
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’sactually 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.
I testified at two committees of the New Hampshire legislature on bills to change or repeal our new "divisive concepts" law -- Senate Judiciary and House Education. I said essentially the same things at both hearings. Here it is, video and my written statement (they are the same).
Mr. Chairman and Honored Representatives: Thank you for your service and for this opportunity to address you. I am Rabbi Jonathan Spira-Savett. I live and work in Nashua, and I am the father of three children who are students and grads of our Nashua public schools. I myself have been a high school teacher of American history and literature, and I currently serve on our state’s Commission for Holocaust and Genocide Education. I come to speak to you in strong support of HB 1576.
This country saved the life of my family and my wife’s family, from the tyranny of the czar and the genocide of Hitler. I am a proud American and a religious person who says a blessing over freedom whenever I vote – and on voting days and occasions like today, I wear those commitments together on my body, above my head. I feel that my own group’s history obligates me in gratitude to be a civic leader in this country, and I carry responsibilities as a member of both a religious minority and the white majority.
Earlier in my career I had the opportunity to create from scratch a course for juniors about America in place of the usual AP history and literature out of that sense of obligation. I was working at a private Jewish high school, and together with a colleague, we set out to give our students interdisciplinary tools to look at American history and culture, and to look at themselves as critical citizens -- connected critics, to use the terminology of the political philosopher Michael Walzer. Perhaps this was natural for us as Jews, a group of whom so many have lived the “American Dream” and a group so often the targets of violence and discrimination even in this country. But what we did in that school was to prototype a concept with application far beyond our specific group and private school setting.
I am proud that the alums of that course have become those connected and critical citizens – doing work in everything from our national defense and intelligence, to representing the underrepresented before our Supreme Court. Facing all of our story as a nation, in an honest and questioning spirit, only fueled their engagement and their intense dedication to our country, their resilience to keep working on problems especially in times of crisis from 9/11 through now.
How will we motivate our public school students to locate themselves as creators of a more perfect union? How is it possible to draw lessons about the dynamics between one’s ideals and group pressure, if you don’t learn about three-fifths compromise and sit in shame and embarrassment, as well as understanding of political strategy? How is it possible for our students to learn about the inner challenges of actual leadership, what it’s like to sit where you sit where we hope they will one day -- unless they can probe Thomas Jefferson in both his idealism and his cowardice? Why bother reading Thoreau if we don’t allow students to take seriously his indictments of the nation and even of his own friends? How can we study Twain without asking whether he was lampooning the racism of his time or swept up in it?
Sometimes as teachers we have to make sure that a perspective that was or is in our history, that is so opposite of what a patriot teachr like me would ever want to entertain or say out loud, is made vivid and alive in class so students know what’s at stake – slaveholder, or Stalinist -- so it can be addressed in the safe and trusting container of our classrooms.
If the creators of divisive concepts laws such at the existing one are concerned about America lapsing into an unpatriotic socialism – well it is the hallmark of socialist dictatorships to write laws that hide their implications behind innocent sounding words, in order to sow doubt about whether you or someone else is breaking the law, and to create a situation where an official or another citizen can take legal action against you or just threaten to do so. Which is exactly what is happening in New Hampshire and elsewhere with such laws.
Members of my Jewish community have lived under such laws in our lifetimes in other lands, and that’s why they came here. I have had conversations with people running for school board or attending meetings – they are at my kid’s school, in my American neighborhood -- and there is never any actual incident of a teacher declaring that someone is “inherently racist” or that America is. There is only “I have heard of a few times”; “no, I can’t tell you the name of a school” and “I’m just trying to make sure it doesn’t happen here.” That is what the current law is, and it sure doesn’t sound like the American Constitution to me.
If that is not how you intended the current law, then consider my remarks to be teacher comments on an essay whose thesis was confusing and needs a rewrite. If you are serious about education for a proud and patriotic American citizenship, not just for diversity but for a difficult unity -- and I hope that you are, then show you are serious, by getting engaged with the fine work of our social studies leaders and our civic education thinkers. Pump more substantive standards into our system and invest in the resources and training for our educators around critical citizenship and a true patriotism. And in the meantime, get these words out of our current laws and pass HB 1576. Thank you for your time and I am happy to respond to any questions.
I wrote this midrash on the 5th of Sheva 5782 (January 8, 2022) as my Dvar Torah for Parashat Bo, and in particular chapters 11-12 of Exodus, which introduce and lead into and through the last of the ten plagues in Egypt. I was thinking about issues of collective accountability and responsibility, which are the ethical and spiritual dilemmas of the plague narrative. And I was thinking about how to tie this part of the Torah to everything going on right now, the pandemic and politics. This is what emerged. I could have written more and better, but was working on a deadline and also wanted to keep this particular version to less than 15 minutes (it's about 13m30s). It's a bit clunky in all kinds of ways, but it is certainly better than the expository Dvar Torah I had in mind. If anyone wants to take this and rework it, make it your own, you have my complete permission -- all I'd love is some reference to "from an idea by Rabbi Jon Spira-Savett."
Sabba and Savta are Hebrew/Aramaic for grandma and grandpa, which is a bit anachronistic. Rechavia is the name of one of Moshe's grandsons, reference once in the Torah as having many children. I had never known his name, much less thought about him, until I needed another character for this midrash.
Here's a video of me reading it (recorded not on Shabbat), and my text follows.
Sabba! Sabba!
Rechavia was standing in the doorway of his grandfather Moshe’s home. It was night time in Goshen, and quiet -- more quiet than usual for a night with a moon that was almost full. Even in the worst of slavery, bright spring nights were when children wandered the alleys of Goshen with their littlest lambs and sang songs -- Peh Peh, Hashem Ayeh? Poh, Poh, Hayom Yavo. Rechavia was forty when he had to learn these songs for the first time for his grandchildren, starting a year ago when Sabba Moshe announced that the whole family was leaving Midyan and going to Goshen to rescue their people. Peh Peh, Hashem Ayeh -- it was a kids’ song about Yosef’s bones and the secret code that would lead back to them, on the day Hashem would come out of hiding and lead them out of Egypt -- Poh Poh Yavo Hayom; here, here, it’s coming today.
But no singing tonight. Going out was not safe, not a day before everyone would be slaughtering the sheep or goat they were keeping, and every home would be in danger, Egyptian and Israelite, from the plague of death that Sabba had announced two weeks before. Rechavia was full of thoughts, but his house was full of kids, twelve of them! So he snuck out to go see the one person who was always willing to talk with him. Or, brood with him.
Sabba? Rechavia called out again, quietly on this quiet night, but in his firm voice. For a few seconds Rechavia stood by himself in the entrance, a hand on each doorpost. His right hand could feel a spot that was smoother than the rest, it was about a third of the way down from the lintel. He knew his Sabba had smoothed it, probably stood there for an hour each day since the new moon, contemplating this spot where the blood would be tomorrow, which later they would all remember by putting a scroll of Torah in such a place in their desert tents and their eventual homes.
Savta Tzippora saw him standing there. Rechavia, what are you doing here?
I’m looking for Sabba. I wanted to ta.... I think he wants to talk.
You think he wants to talk? No, Sabba is all talked out. To me, to you, to Pharaoh. He just wants to be out of here. He’s hardly said a word the past week. That’s not true, I heard him the other day muttering -- keep the lamb from the tenth day until the fourteenth day and then slaughter it, why five days’ waiting inside? Wouldn’t two or three have been enough? Oh well, once a shepherd, always a shepherd, your Sabba. And me too, I’m named for the birds after all. And you Rechavia -- your name means wide open space. Look at you, standing in that cramped doorway of all places, what kind of a place for a man with such a name?
Rechavia tapped his hand. I like the doorway. I like to look in, and out. It’s important what we do in here, what we say inside. It’s all perfectly clear when we can talk ,and ask all our questions, and address all points of view. Everything makes sense. Everyone knows what they’re accountable for. If only that were good enough, to get it right in here. But we’re connected to what’s going on out there. The other families in Goshen, the homes in the rest of Egypt. I wish I could be in all of their conversations and not have to wonder what they’re thinking and planning.... When I’m out I need to come in and when I’m in I need to go out. So, I like standing in the doorway.
Rechavia closed his lips and bobbed his head, down once and back. End of speech. Then he tilted his head, gave a little shrug. Tzippora smiled at him.
Ah, this is why you are such a blessing to us, Rechavia, she said. Sometimes I think your Sabba is still trapped in that little box his mother saved him in, even when we was roaming the hills in Midian with my father’s sheep for all those years.
I can see you need to talk and so does your Sabba. Go out and find him. He also couldn’t stay inside tonight. I’d have gone out with him, but someone had to watch this lamb, Hashem forbid she escapes! How would it look if this was the one house without blood on our doorpost and lintel tomorrow. I saw him go out and head left, just after sunset. Stay safe, Rechavia. See you when we’re free.
Rechavia blew her a kiss, turned around, held his hand one more second on the smooth of the doorpost -- then out and to the left. It wasn’t hard to find Sabba Moshe, at the end of their alley on a small hill looking out toward the Nile.
Sabba...
Oh, Rechavia! You shouldn’t be out. I shouldn’t be out. Ha -- of course we all should be out! I can’t wait until we are out, tomorrow night finally.
But something tells me Sabba you’re not quite ready.
.... No, I’m ready. But I just keep asking myself: Does it have to be like this? Is this how we get our freedom -- someone in every one of their homes dies? Someone in Goshen forgets and maybe one of us dies too?
I know Sabba. I’ve been thinking about that too. I don’t know many Egyptians -- we’ve only been here the year. I know the taskmasters but it’s hard to believe that’s all they are.
Moshe gestured toward the Nile -- the shimmer of the moon over the wide waters. See Rechavia, right below the hill here, that’s where my Imma put me in the water, in a basket. And just over there is where Pharaoh’s daughter found me, and it wasn’t just her but the girls with her. You’ve heard the story. They decided together to save me. They knew it was right. They knew it together.
And Rechavia, so manyhated us, or went along. I never knew until I turned thirteen. But from the start I always judged them one by one. You know this, I taught you about this when you were little.
That’s right Sabba. When you killed the Egyptian it was one man, threatening the life of another. You made me repeat it: No one shall die for the sins of his father, but only for his own sin.
Yes Rechavia. So why not that way tomorrow? Why can’t Hashem just punish the homes of the taskmasters, or the magicians advising Pharoah, and the king himself? I ask Hashem. I ask the one known to Avraham, and I get no answer.
Sabba, do you remember the day I turned thirteen? You said: Today you come out to the sheep with me, just like your father and uncle when they were your age. You said: I want you to watch carefully and understand. Sometimes a sheep runs away, and even if you can’t remember ever noticing a special streak of color in their wool, you know it is this one sheep, this particular sheep, whom you love and you do anything to bring it back. Then there are other times, when the sheep move together to water or pasture, it’s so miraculous-- how they change the shapeof the flock to grip the hills so no one falls, protecting and nurturing each other, and in those moments there is no such thing as a single sheep, there is only a flock. In those moments no one sheep would ever consider running away. And a shepherd learns to know ahead of time the moment just before a flock becomes sheep or sheep become a flock again.
That is what you taught me Sabba. I think this is why Hashem chose you. You always knew long before the moment a flock turns into sheep and long before the moment sheep become a flock. All I ever wanted was to know this as you do.
But Rechavia, tonight I am having trouble with the difference. I know the Egyptians are like a flock of evil sheep -- they lose themselves as they oppress us, they are responsible together. They won’t save each other’s lives let alone ours. We gave them so many chances to run away and I, I myself would have taken any of them in, even if I couldn’t have recognized a single streak in them from before. None of them did. They are responsible, every one of them. So why am I still troubled? Why do I sit like a shepherd on a hill under the moon and look at them still?
The other night, Rechavia, I dreamed of a day I am even older, and we are far along out of this place, and our people are thirsty and I help them find water. And all of a sudden I am sitting right here looking down at this Nile and I am seeing the girls lifting a baby up out of a basket -- and then I hear their cries at the death of their firstborn. In the dream it is too much for me, and I shriek and lash out with this staff and then everything disappears.
Rechavia looked out toward the Nile for a long moment. Then he gestured with his head back, toward the houses, and said: Come on. I have something to show you. They stood up and Rechavia led them back to Moshe’s home.
Rechavia stood in the door frame, felt the smooth part of the post on his right, then moved inside and said: Sabba, stand here. Stand here, and feel this right here.
Moshe took his spot, and Rechavia held his hand and placed it so it touched the part that Moshe had made smooth.
I like the doorway, Rechavia said. What happens inside is important. We talk in here about all the things you asked outside. Who is responsible, for their own actions and for the actions of their nation or their friends, when are you responsible for your own sins and when for the sins of your fathers, and we address all points of view. We decide in here how we will act if this is the truth or if that is the truth. In here, we figure out how to hold each other accountable.
Now Sabba, keep your hand where it is, and turn around. Moshe turned carefully, holding his hand against the doorpost and looking out.
We look outside, Rechavia said, and we hope that inside other doorways it’s the same as in here. But we know it’s not. Not in too many Egyptians homes, and not even in all Israelite homes. It’s all right to wish that other homes would be like ours. When they aren’t, people die. The wrong people are punished.
If we only look out, all we will see is that the wrong people die, how they are all responsible and they are never accountable. We’ll think that is all there is. So each time we look out, we have to look back in here.
Sabba, we have to stand right here, and look both ways. How did you tell it to me once -- when you are sitting in your home and when you are out on your way. A doorpost that shows blood, a doorpost with Hashem.
It was midnight now. Moshe held his arms against the posts. How did you know, Rechavia, that I have been standing here an hour every day since the new moon, feeling this spot over and over, trying to smooth what won’t ever be smooth enough.
He looked at Tzippora, with her hand on the lamb. Moshe thought: Today each of us is a precious lamb, and I do know the moment in twenty-four hours exactly when we will become a flock, losing ourselves as we protect each other on the way out of here.
You know, said Sabba Moshe, I still have my sources still down the Nile. There are Egyptians who today want to come with us, and I have heard that on their doorposts they put up a sign, in our own language as a code to find each other: V’erev rav alah itam. I sent them a message today -- take down the note and put up blood instead and meet us tomorrow after midnight.
Maybe it’s the grandchildren of the women who fished you out, Sabba.
Maybe so.
Do you think their homes will be spared from the plague?
I hope they will, Rechavia. When we talk of these things in the future, to your grandchildren -- that’s how we should want them to remember it. It was good to talk, Rechavia. I needed to talk before we left.
Not talk, said Rechavia. Teach. You just needed to teach. See you when we’re free.
Rechavia walked out, under the almost full moon. And without realizing it, he was humming a child’s song, peh peh Hashem ayeh, about the secret hiding place of Yosef’s bones and the day coming when Hashem would no longer hide but redeem them, and if not everyone in Egypt at least many more would be free tomorrow -- poh poh, yavo hayom.
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?
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.
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.
