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Diversity as a Tikkun and a Curse: The Tower of Babel

Here is my current draft of a D'var Torah for this coming Shabbat, when we read Parashat Noach and in particular the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.

The story of the Tower of Babel teaches that diversity is both a tikkun and a curse. A tikkun, a fix for some problem of humanity, a repair – and also a curse. And doesn’t that seem like the paradox we are grappling with as America right now.

It was many generations after the Flood, and all the people of the earth had a single language. They gathered in one area. They began to make building materials together, and then used them to set up a city and start construction on a tower with its head reaching the sky. God’s response to that was to interfere with their communication by introducing multiple languages. The people stopped building the city, and the tower as well, and they scattered over the earth. Somebody hung the name Bavel on the place, which is the Hebrew word for the area of Babylon or Babylonia. The Torah says it comes from the word balal, which means “confused” or “mixed up”. Obviously this is the origin of our word “babble”, to talk without being understandable. In Hebrew today something all jumbled up is m’vulbal.

The Torah seems to be saying that unity was the problem and a diversity of languages and groups was the tikkun. But don’t we yearn for human unity? I don’t mean people generally, but even Jews specifically? Bayom hahu yihyeh Adonai echad ushmo echad – don’t we dream daily at the end of every single service, that one day all the world will reflect the unity of the Divine, and all the world will be able to say the Divine name the same way?

The theme of diversity and unity is a defining theme right now for America, so we all need a deep dive into it over time. Regardless of who is elected this week to be our national leaders. Diversity is what we live with every day, but we need more than a practical experience with it; we need some philosophical clarity. It starts with the paradox of Migdal Bavel, that diversity is both a curse and a tikkun. That story is the setup in the Torah for our emergence in the next chapter as one small family within the diversity of humanity.

So what is the unity-diversity issue in the story of Migdal Bavel? Chapter 11 of Bereshit tells us that the people of the world found a place to begin their city and their tower in a valley in the land of Shinar, mi-kedem, which is usually translated “from the east.” In Hebrew the word for “east” has the same shoresh, the same verbal root, as the word for “earlier” – kedem is east, because that’s where the sun appears earliest every day. So in Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, Rabbi Yehuda notices that the Torah says not the people were heading geographically east, la-kedem or ked’ma, but mi-kedem, away “from the Earlier One” with a capital O -- the Old One, meaning God. Away from God.

Rabbi Yehuda says they tried to find a place to accommodate all of humanity away from God, but the only place they could find was this valley. I think this might be a big key to the whole story. If you go back to your earliest world history or world studies class, you know that Mesopotamia is a flood valley. It’s good when it floods moderately each year, to support dependable crops. But humanity at the time is still traumatized by the Flood, capital-F, and according to Rabbi Yehuda they were not about to put their survival in this valley in the hands of God. Rashi says that even though God had promised that a Mabul, a world-destroying Flood, would never happen again, the people were skeptical, or least hedging their bets. That’s what the Tower was for – it was a human-made Mt. Ararat. It was meant to be a place to escape up to in case of a massive flood, and not just for one family. Rashi imagines the people being suspicious of God, thinking next time it wouldn’t be a big flood but a plague sent by God to divide and scatter them. Or maybe, the Maharal of Prague suggests, the regular flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates was just a trigger for them and they felt they couldn’t live in a valley no matter how good it was there, without a tower like this.

So the unity agenda of humanity at the time of the Tower was born out of trauma and out of fear. It was potentially a tikkun, a repair and an advancement of humanity -- because before the Mabul in Noach’s time, when humanity became afraid it had torn itself to pieces. This tower seems like a so-much-better response.

Then why was God not pleased?

One interpretation which permeates the early midrashim is that this unity was a superficial and very tenuous unity. It was built only on survival and on fear, and against a common enemy, which the people or at least the leaders named as God. There was no faith in anything higher, no faith in anything other than themselves. Rabbi Yishmael in the midrash calls it worship of the collective.

And there was no indication that this initial unity project was something the people were building on, so to speak. The only building they were doing was literal and material, with bricks and mortar. They were not building any kind of deeper human unity.

Which means that this unity of all humanity was actually illusory, even on its own terms. If there was (God forbid) another Flood, or a smaller flood or a plague, this tower was never going to be able to shelter everyone. Maybe some groups with common origins would not be preferred over other ones, but surely there would be people who declared themselves superior or more deserving of going up to the top. And the fact that the people all had one language meant that the ones at the top would use language to twist the story, would continue to describe this as unity even while saying you can be saved and you can’t.

So the tikkun was some version of diversity. There are two fascinating pictures of what this diversity tikkun was like that I found for the first time the other day in the midrash in Bereshit Rabbah.

Rabbi Nechemya imagines that everyone came initially to the Valley of Shinar from somewhere specific, in groups from their own city of origin, attracted to this one-world, humanity project. When they were scattered, Rabbi Nechemya says they went back to their earlier place and rediscovered that each place had its own mountain. Not a human-made tower, but a mountain that was big enough to sustain that group. And now, whenever they were fearful of calamity, they would go all together up their mountain. No one would be abandoned or declared unworthy of saving.

From this there would be built a unity, a unity of each place, in their own language, connected to the land and its own mountain. There would be unity and solidarity built on fear, on the need to survive, absolutely -- but also on a shared history; on chesed, mutual care, and on trust. We wouldn’t worship ourselves as builders of the mountain either.

Rabbi Nechemya makes the case for diversity as a tikkun for the dangers of the wrong kind of human unity, the false kind, the superficial kind, the kind that will find someone to throw out. He tells in shorthand the basics of a whole literature that I’ll teach another time, about how it’s within groups with their own mountains that we learn the things that help us stretch toward a more encompassing unity.

It only works, though, if our diverse groups are indeed places where we learn the habits and ideas of love that stretches beyond those who are most similar to us within the group. I like to think that’s also in Rabbi Nechemya’s imagination. At times of fear, when we all head for the hills, at least we notice the other people on their hills, and begin to wonder about them, how they got there, how they learned what we know about taking care of each other. What their story is too. Otherwise, diversity is just a curse.

We cannot put off any longer a deep engagement with the question of diversity within America and our place within that. That will be the case no matter who is elected this coming week. It’s not a fifteen-minute-at-a-time project. There have been some amazing Jewish American intellectuals and social scientists who have reflected on our experience here in this country. We’ll have to ask some questions about the different things that make group identity deep or superficial, part of the tikkun and part of the curse, especially when the group in question is us.

So I’ll leave it where the Torah does for now, as a cliffhanger. We wait for Sarah and Avraham, who live in the new city in the Valley of Shinar, to think their next thoughts and make their next moves. As we wait to see a bit more about the world we live in next week, so we know what our next moves will be as American Jews. May we play our role this week and after, to do our best for both diversity and for unity.

**********
Some links to things to read on this theme, all from Jewish authors:

Horace Kallen, "Democracy Vs. The Melton Pot" -- a dense but important classic essay about ethnic identity in America, written during World War I

Michael Walzer, "What Does It Mean to Be an 'American'?" -- a contemporary take on Kallen

Martha Nussbaum's classic essay on "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism"

Ze'ev Maghen, "Imagine: On Love and Lennon" -- a super-fun exploration of Jewish particularity, among other things taking off on John Lennon's song "Imagine" and saying a huge no!

More to come, and in a separate post all its own.

 

Righteous Enough for the Time

This is my D'var Torah for October 21, 2023, Parashat Noach.

When Noach was born, the human world had only just stopped being young. If you do all the math, you see that Adam had lived to see nine generations including his own. I can imagine that people had begun doubting whether Gan Eden had ever existed, whether the ideal mattered anymore, but there had always been Adam to respond. Noach’s generation was the first one who had no Adam, no one with them who could say I saw it with my own eyes, I was there.

The Torah isn’t clear whether humanity’s spiral into violence and lawlessness began before Noach was born, while Adam was still alive. (The Hebrew word for this situation is actually chamas. The name of the terrorist group is actually not related linguistically to the biblical word, but it’s hard to not hear the similiarity.) Whether or not Adam was there as a presence, things were bad enough that Noach was given a burden the moment he was born. His father Lemech named him: Noach, meaning rest. And also he added more layers of meaning -- Zeh y'nachameinu mi-maaseinu u'mei'itzvon yadeinu, min ha-adamah asher eir'rah Adonai. This one will comfort us, or maybethis one will turn us around, because of our deeds, and the sadness of what our hands have done out of this earth that the Divine has cursed (Genesis 5:29).

Imagine being given that name, that hope, right at birth.

Maybe all of Noach’s life or maybe just some of it, the earth was beyond redemption, except without drastic and unthinkable measures.

When the point of no return had been reached, the Torah tells us this about the adult Noach had become: Noach ish tzadik tamim hayah b'dorotav -- Noach, a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations (Genesis 6:9).

Our medieval guide Rashi says: Some interpret this as praise and some interpret it as an insult. He references this argument in the Talmud about it: Rabbi Yochanan said: Noach was righteous in his generations -- the many generations he overlapped -- but in other generations he wouldn’t have been considered righteous. Resh Lakish says: If Noach could be righteous in the era he was living, when there was not a single other righteous person, how much more so would he have become righteous in any other generation?

Rashi seems to take Rabbi Yochanan’s side, that the Torah is giving Noach faint praise, adding: About Noach the Torah says he walked with God, meaning he needed God’s assistance to be a tzaddik; but about Avraham the Torah says he walked in front of God, by himself. Noach built an ark to save a small number. Avraham argued to save every life in the five most evil cities of the land.

But Resh Lakish stands for the idea that Noach was as righteous as one could be in his time, and that he was righteous enough. You know I don’t use the word “righteous” a lot as a translation for tzaddik, but I think for us today it gets the job done. When you can’t fix everything, or maybe anything, and when there’s nothing to do but gather who you can in an ark -- you gather who you can in an ark, and that’s what it means to be righteous.

As much as we might want to be Avraham, as much as we are sitting today in Beit Avraham  after all -- I think we need to consider whether there’s a time to be okay being Noach the way Resh Lakish sees him.

I think about this every year the week of Parashat Noach -- about being a good-enough parent or a good-enough citizen or a good-enough man -- and all this week I’ve been thinking about what it means at the moment to be a good-enough Jew.

It’s only two weeks since the atrocities of Oct. 7. It’s not really  two weeks in the past, because it is still happening, funerals and hostages and more rockets and our soldiers and our people displaced from their homes. And in the newnes and the overwhelm, there is so much pressure on Jews to be more righteous than our generation, to be righteous against the standard of a time we’re not in. And that pressure comes from the outside world, and from within our community, and inside our own neshamot and our hearts.

It sure seems that the world expects the Jews to be more perfect than our generation, to be the ones to turn us around from sadness and the terrible deeds that human hands have done in the world.

We Jews are expected to be the best universalists, to look out for every human life as much as those of our own people, while we are in mourning and we are shaking and we are physically overwhelmed.

We Jews are expected to take care of Israeli and Jewish lives, and also to take care of another people whose own leaders aren’t taking care of them and have repeatedly betrayed them and even now put them in harm’s way.

We Jews are expected by the world to be the ones to figure out the solution to complexities of nationalism and democracy, group solidarity and minority rights. Or some people expect us Jews even right now to go first and transcend the nation as the basis for a state, to give that up and be a pilot project in binational democracy, even at the risk of our lives.

We Jews are expected to know how to go from powerlessness to the kind of power we’ve had in the world for maybe half a century, maybe that long, without being affected by the collective trauma of centuries that fifty years does not erase. 

We Jews are expected to be the best in the world at wielding ethical power. To figure out how to fight an asymmetric war both successfully and ethically, and not fight until we've figured it out. Or else to decide not to fight a war necessary to defend lives and defend the state, to choose instead to leave in place a group that would do what Hamas did, who would do it again, because somehow the alternative is worse.

And right now it’s just not possible to be expected to be all of these things. I don’t know if you feel those expectations but even if you haven’t articulated them, I think you do feel them. It is exhausting to carry that weight anytime, as we often do, and it’s particularly exhausting right now.

And I think we experience these as impossible pressures because in our neshama we do want to be much of that list. Along with our current agony and along with our collective generational trauma, we have generational idealism, and we don’t want to put in a position right now where it feels like we have to lose it or to have it taken from us by Hamas, or by the harsh hearts of some in the world around us.

I think it’s all right to be Noach as Resh Lakish sees him, and not Avraham, in the context of the current war. Maybe for a week or two, or maybe at moments ahead of us off and on as the war goes on, or maybe through the whole time of this mabul, this Flood.

Some of this pressure to be more righteous than our generation comes from within our group also. I’ve been registering how people seem in conversations the past week or so. It’s dawned on me that we may be putting certain pressures on each other unintentionally.

I’ve noticed that my question to people about who you have right now in Israel and how are they can also be taken as a kind of pressure. Like if you don’t have someone directly who you know, who you’re WhatsApping with regularly, or if you don’t have the name of a hostage that you know, then maybe you don’t have the same right to speak among peole who do. 

If you do post something about Israel or Gaza on social media, you have to know the perfect way to say that your concern for Israelis is paramount, otherwise you’re not entitled to speak or raise a question. You have to know the perfectly convincing response to an outrageous post, informed and ethically airtight.

I’m concerned that these kinds of expectations, intentional or unintentional, push some of us away from each other and from the synagogue community. So to everyone within our community I want to say it’s all right as a Jew to be Noach, and to show up to take care of people any way you can.

It’s okay to be Noach, sometimes and more than sometimes. It’s impossible right now to be zen y'nachameinu, the one who will turn everything around. Pirkei Avot 5:2 teaches that there were ten generations from Noah to Avraham, to teach us how patient is the Kadosh Baruch Hu, how patient was the Divine, for as much as the world was infuriating during those times, there would be a generation where Avraham could start to make a difference, and then everything that happened before would not be in vain.

It’s hard to be that patient with ourselves.

And it’s hard to be that patient with others. On Monday and Tuesday I was very off -- I mean we’re all off, but just in my particular way I was off. But the more I tried to take Resh Lakish to heart, the more I could also release my need for all my non-Jewish friends and colleagues to be at the level of Avraham. I started to see and appreciate the Noach-ish things as righteous enough for right now.

I see all the mutual support people are giving here. One parent last Sunday, with very close ties in Israel to Kibbutz Re'im, said how grateful she was just to sit in a room with other Jews for the first time since it all began.

I sat with a Muslim acquaintance over coffee and we exchanged concerns for each other’s safety in our places of worship, and offered to help protect each other’s communities and to come and teach.

I heard from and had my usual get-togethers with Christian colleagues whose denominations have published statements that sicken me, in underplaying what Hamas has done. I realized that people here didn’t write those, and they are listening to what we say because they know us, and they are reading what I write, and they are worried for us and are not abandoning us.

We learn from the Torah too that there is a certain basic level of righteousness that goes with being a Noach. After the Flood, the Divine says even though the nature of people’s hearts includes harm from when we are young, nonetheless there will be a covenant which our tradition says includes a basic code of seven mitzvot.

So I think we each have to define what it means to be like Noach, righteous for the time we are in and the generations we have been a part of. We have to find a few certainties that we cling to no matter what.

One certainty is chesed. Each of us needs to bind our hearts to a mitzvah of caring, for people here  in our Jewish community and in Israel, for anyone at all. Zeh y'nachameinu -- if Noach’s name means  simply “this one will comfort us”, we can be a comfort by our presence and our mitzvot. We need to infuse our spiritual bloodstream with chesed; we need that even physically to steady ourselves.

Another certainly is that all people are created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has pointed out that the Torah reteaches this after the Flood, and that the first meaning is that when lives are taken by human hands, they demand justice in response. So lives taken by Hamas require response; it is a moral obligation.

And being a people who believe in Tzelem Elohim means we recognize that when Israelis kill enemies in a just war, it is still a spiritual burden, and it lasts far longer than the war itself. Which is why that burden is shared across society in Israel. It is too much for only a small group to live with.

And Tzelem Elohim means that when innocent civlians are killed in the course of a just war, sometimes their death is not a crime and sometimes their death is a crime, and we remain accountable for the difference, but always their death is a tragedy. When Golda Meir z”l famously said that when peace comes at last, she could forgive the Arabs for killng our children but she could not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children, I think all this is what she was trying to say.

And these kinds of minimal things we can in fact expect from others, to do and to understand. Too many university leaders, by and large, are not doing the minimum for our kids -- not taking care of them, not standing up for a principled understanding of Tzelem Elohim, whatever language they would use for that.

Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b'dorotav -- Noach was a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations. I know this community well enough to know that we want to be righteous and we have done so much the past two weeks in that spirit. Thank you. And whatever it is for you to be in this mini-Mabul, flooded emotionally or spiritually or physically, some of the time or all of the time, I hope you’ll let yourself in those moments just be as good as Noach. Get yourself into an ark, take someone in or let someone see you and take you in. That what it means to be righteous in this time.

Shabbat Shalom.

Righteous Enough for the Time

This is what I think will be my words in the synagogue tomorrow, October 21, 2023, for Parashat Noach.

When Noach was born, the human world had only just stopped being young. If you do all the math, you see that Adam had lived to see nine generations including his own. I can imagine that people had begun doubting whether Gan Eden had ever existed, whether the ideal mattered anymore, but there had always been Adam to respond. Noach’s generation was the first one who had no Adam, no one with them who could say I saw it with my own eyes, I was there.

The Torah isn’t clear whether humanity’s spiral into violence and lawlessness began before Noach was born, while Adam was still alive. (The Hebrew word for this situation is actually chamas. The name of the terrorist group is actually not related linguistically to the biblical word, but it’s hard to not hear the similiarity.) Whether or not Adam was there as a presence, things were bad enough that Noach was given a burden the moment he was born. His father Lemech named him: Noach, meaning rest. And also he added more layers of meaning -- Zeh y'nachameinu mi-maaseinu u'mei'itzvon yadeinu, min ha-adamah asher eir'rah Adonai. This one will comfort us, or maybethis one will turn us around, because of our deeds, and the sadness of what our hands have done out of this earth that the Divine has cursed (Genesis 5:29).

Imagine being given that name, that hope, right at birth.

Maybe all of Noach’s life or maybe just some of it, the earth was beyond redemption, except without drastic and unthinkable measures.

When the point of no return had been reached, the Torah tells us this about the adult Noach had become: Noach ish tzadik tamim hayah b'dorotav -- Noach, a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations (Genesis 6:9).

Our medieval guide Rashi says: Some interpret this as praise and some interpret it as an insult. He references this argument in the Talmud about it: Rabbi Yochanan said: Noach was righteous in his generations -- the many generations he overlapped -- but in other generations he wouldn’t have been considered righteous. Resh Lakish says: If Noach could be righteous in the era he was living, when there was not a single other righteous person, how much more so would he have become righteous in any other generation?

Rashi seems to take Rabbi Yochanan’s side, that the Torah is giving Noach faint praise, adding: About Noach the Torah says he walked with God, meaning he needed God’s assistance to be a tzaddik; but about Avraham the Torah says he walked in front of God, by himself. Noach built an ark to save a small number. Avraham argued to save every life in the five most evil cities of the land.

But Resh Lakish stands for the idea that Noach was as righteous as one could be in his time, and that he was righteous enough. You know I don’t use the word “righteous” a lot as a translation for tzaddik, but I think for us today it gets the job done. When you can’t fix everything, or maybe anything, and when there’s nothing to do but gather who you can in an ark -- you gather who you can in an ark, and that’s what it means to be righteous.

As much as we might want to be Avraham, as much as we are sitting today in Beit Avraham  after all -- I think we need to consider whether there’s a time to be okay being Noach the way Resh Lakish sees him.

I think about this every year the week of Parashat Noach -- about being a good-enough parent or a good-enough citizen or a good-enough man -- and all this week I’ve been thinking about what it means at the moment to be a good-enough Jew.

It’s only two weeks since the atrocities of Oct. 7. It’s not really  two weeks in the past, because it is still happening, funerals and hostages and more rockets and our soldiers and our people displaced from their homes. And in the newnes and the overwhelm, there is so much pressure on Jews to be more righteous than our generation, to be righteous against the standard of a time we’re not in. And that pressure comes from the outside world, and from within our community, and inside our own neshamot and our hearts.

It sure seems that the world expects the Jews to be more perfect than our generation, to be the ones to turn us around from sadness and the terrible deeds that human hands have done in the world.

We Jews are expected to be the best universalists, to look out for every human life as much as those of our own people, while we are in mourning and we are shaking and we are physically overwhelmed.

We Jews are expected to take care of Israeli and Jewish lives, and also to take care of another people whose own leaders aren’t taking care of them and have repeatedly betrayed them and even now put them in harm’s way.

We Jews are expected by the world to be the ones to figure out the solution to complexities of nationalism and democracy, group solidarity and minority rights. Or some people expect us Jews even right now to go first and transcend the nation as the basis for a state, to give that up and be a pilot project in multiethnic democracy, even at the risk of our lives.

We Jews are expected to know how to go from powerlessness to the kind of power we’ve had in the world for maybe half a century, maybe that long, without being affected by the collective trauma of centuries that fifty years does not erase. 

We Jews are expected to be the best in the world at wielding ethical power. To decide not to fight a war necessary to defend lives and defend the state, to choose instead to leave in place a group that would do what Hamas did because we might not do it right, or to figure out how to fight a war where innocents on the other side are almost never killed and not fight at all until we’ve figured out how to do that.

And right now it’s just not possible to be expected to be all of these things. I don’t know if you feel those expectations but even if you haven’t articulated them, I think you do feel them. It is exhausting to carry that weight anytime, as we often do, and it’s particularly exhausting right now.

And I think we experience these as impossible pressures because in our neshama we do want to be much of that list. Along with our current agony and along with our collective generational trauma, we have generational idealism, and we don’t want to put in a position right now where it feels like we have to lose it or to have it taken from us by Hamas, or by the harsh hearts of some in the world around us.

I think it’s all right to be Noach as Resh Lakish sees him, and not Avraham, in the context of the current war. Maybe for a week or two, or maybe at moments ahead of us off and on as the war goes on, or maybe through the whole time of this mabul, this Flood.

Some of this pressure to be more righteous than our generation comes from within our group also. I’ve been registering how people seem in conversations the past week or so. It’s dawned on me that we may be putting certain pressures on each other unintentionally.

I’ve noticed that my question to people about who you have right now in Israel and how are they can also be taken as a kind of pressure. Like if you don’t have someone directly who you know, who you’re WhatsApping with regularly, or if you don’t have the name of a hostage that you know, then maybe you don’t have the same right to speak among peole who do. 

If you do post something about Israel or Gaza on social media, you have to know the perfect way to say that your concern for Israelis is paramount, otherwise you’re not entitled to speak or raise a question. You have to know the perfectly convincing response to an outrageous post, informed and ethically airtight.

I’m concerned that these kinds of expectations, intentional or unintentional, push some of us away from each other and from the synagogue community. So to everyone within our community I want to say it’s all right as a Jew to be Noach, and to show up to take care of people any way you can.

It’s okay to be Noach, sometimes and more than sometimes. It’s impossible right now to be zen y'nachameinu, the one who will turn everything around. Pirkei Avot 5:2 teaches that there were ten generations from Noah to Avraham, to teach us how patient is the Kadosh Baruch Hu, how patient was the Divine, for as much as the world was infuriating during those times, there would be a generation where Avraham could start to make a difference, and then everything that happened before would not be in vain.

It’s hard to be that patient with ourselves.

And it’s hard to be that patient with others. On Monday and Tuesday I was very off -- I mean we’re all off, but just in my particular way I was off. But the more I tried to take Resh Lakish to heart, the more I could also release my need for all my non-Jewish friends and colleagues to be at the level of Avraham. I started to see and appreciate the Noach-ish things as righteous enough for right now.

I see all the mutual support people are giving here. One parent last Sunday, with very close ties in Israel to Kibbutz Be'eri, said how grateful she was just to sit in a room with other Jews for the first time since it all began.

I sat with a Muslim acquaintance over coffee and we exchanged concerns for each other’s safety in our places of worship, and offered to help protect each other’s communities and to come and teach.

I heard from and had my usual get-togethers with Christian colleagues whose denominations have published statements that sicken me, in underplaying what Hamas has done. I realized that people here didn’t write those, and they are listening to what we say because they know us, and they are reading what I write, and they are worried for us and are not abandoning us.

We learn from the Torah too that there is a certain basic level of righteousness that goes with being a Noach. After the Flood, the Divine says even though the nature of people’s hearts includes harm from when we are young, nonetheless there will be a covenant which our tradition says includes a basic code of seven mitzvot.

So I think we each have to define what it means to be like Noach, righteous for the time we are in and the generations we have been a part of. We have to find a few certainties that we cling to no matter what.

One certainty is chesed. Each of us needs to bind our hearts to a mitzvah of caring, for people here  in our Jewish community and in Israel, for anyone at all. Zeh y'nachameinu -- if Noach’s name means  simply “this one will comfort us”, we can be a comfort by our presence and our mitzvot. We need to infuse our spiritual bloodstream with chesed; we need that even physically to steady ourselves.

Another certainly is that all people are created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has pointed out that the Torah reteaches this after the Flood, and that the first meaning is that when lives are taken by human hands, they demand justice in response. So lives taken by Hamas require response; it is a moral obligation.

And being a people who believe in Tzelem Elohim means we recognize that when Israelis kill enemies in a just war, it is still a spiritual burden, and it lasts far longer than the war itself. Which is why that burden is shared across society in Israel. It is too much for only a small group to live with.

And Tzelem Elohim means that when innocent civlians are killed in the course of a just war, sometimes their death is not a crime and sometimes their death is a crime, and we remain accountable for the difference, but always their death is a tragedy. When Golda Meir z”l famously said that when peace comes at last, she could forgive the Arabs for killng our children but she could not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children, I think all this is what she was trying to say.

And these kinds of minimal things we can in fact expect from others, to do and to understand. Too many university leaders, by and large, are not doing the minimum for our kids -- not taking care of them, not standing up for a principled understanding of Tzelem Elohim, whatever language they would use for that.

Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b'dorotav -- Noach was a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations. I know this community well enough to know that we want to be righteous and we have done so much the past two weeks in that spirit. Thank you. And whatever it is for you to be in this mini-Mabul, flooded emotionally or spiritually or physically, some of the time or all of the time, I hope you’ll let yourself in those moments just be as good as Noach. Get yourself into an ark, take someone in or let someone see you and take you in. That what it means to be righteous in this time.

Shabbat Shalom.

Two Kinds of Darkness, Two Kinds of Light, Two Kinds of Torah

This is (I think) the D'var Torah I have for services this Shabbat tomorrow. The Torah reading begins with the very beginning of the Torah. It's one week since the Hamas atrocities began. Thank you to Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal and Rabbi Aryeh Klapper for helping me unlock this, though if anything is off it's on me and not them.

*****

Last week on Simchat Torah, as we tried our hardest to celebrate especially for our youngest kids, knowing what we already knew, there was a verse I was chanting in the Torah that just gutted me even more. It’s the very last line attributed to Moshe in the Torah, his last words. The final line of Moshe’s blessing to the people said:

 

Happy are you, fortunate are you, people Israel, who is like you,

a nation saved by the Divine

your helping shield, whose sword is your pride.

Your enemies shall recant themselves to you

and you on their high places will tread.

 

Ashrecha Yisrael, mi chamocha, am nosha b’Adonai

magen ezrecha, asher cherev ga’avatecha

v’yika-chashu oyvecha lach,

v’atah al bamoteimo tidroch

 

And I thought in that moment, is it possible that not a single word or phrase of that Torah is true?

 

Not happy, not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. No Mi chamoacha, no callback to the moment of escape from Egypt, from danger into freedom, An enemy far from recanting, from going back on its essence -- and who is treading on whom today.

 

Was even our own Torah going to be turned on us, to mock us, and on our holy day no less and in the presence of our sweet little ones. Or was this some kind of invitation toward even more faith, a faith that Torah can be as powerful as the weapons and mutated imaginations that define our reality right now.

 

And with those wonderings ringing in my soul we turned on Simchat Torah to the very first verses of the Torah, the first words of our parasha today, and they too seemed unreal: the creation of light in a reality hitherto dark and formless all the way down.

 

This is the week we are starting the Torah again. Against the backdrop of murder and kidnapping and mobilizing and bomb shelters, mourning and fearing for our loved ones and our people, this is the week we start again fresh. Each year when we get to Parashat Bereshit we’re supposed to have become better prepared by the chagim (fall holy days) for a new year of Torah, to be more receptive to it than ever before. Yet we know ahead of us is for certain a week of more death, and certainly weeks and who knows how much of 5784. What kind of strength will Torah have, this week and beyond, and what kind of strength and wisdom can it give us?

 

Parashat Bereshit begins with perfection, everything in its orderly place, and humans created in the Divine image, b’tzelem Elohim, and the first humans, placed in a perfect garden -- with closeness to the Divine, the end of loneliness, and a charge simply to work and to protect their beautiful place.

 

Everything about the opening chapter was a revolution in human consciousness in its time, and I usually say in our time as well. But so quickly it all falls apart, and the parasha descends into exile, violence between brothers, and then violence enveloping the world. Until the parasha ends with only a single glimpse of hope, the birth of Noach: -- zeh v’nachameinu, this one will comfort us, will turn us around, mi-ma-aseinu ume-itzvon yadeinu, from our actions and the sadness our hands have wrought, min ha-adadmah asher erera Adonai, what we’ve made out of this earth that the Divine has cursed.

 

This is not an easy parasha to begin with, a parasha about new beginnings and immediate troubles. I thought about going to other Torah this Shabbat for the comforting we all need. But maybe it is the parasha we need nonetheless.

 

On the first day, darkness hovers over the face of the deep seas and chasms, and God says let there be light, y’hi or -- and there is. Vayehi or, light was, all of a sudden. And God saw the light, that it was good, ki tov, and immediately God separated the light from the darkness.

 

God wants light. And then God makes a decision to name the darkness. In the ancient world prior to the Torah, even in parts of the Bible composed earlier than the first chapter of Genesis, the creations stories would tell of realms beyond the reach of the gods, symbolized by deep and vanquishing waters and by endless darkness. But in our Torah God stakes a claim even to darkness. Gives it a name: laila.

 

Why would God want in on that? Especially if the light of the first verses is considered not physical light but Torah. Why would God want there to be something that is so profoundly opposite to Torah, as one of the first things in creation?

 

I can only think that there are two kinds of darkness. There is a darkness that says there is nothing in the world but violence, and even seeming goodness is just self-interest, or huddling together for safety and nothing more. Darkness is believing that is all there is, not just from time to time as we all do, but fundamentally all the time.

 

The Torah claims, I think, that darkness is something else. Some of it and maybe all of the moral darkness is made out of imagination and language and even out of connection, out of the capacity for organization and sustained effort -- twisted for sure, and encased in the hardest and thickest klippot, cases of iron and hatred.

This kind of darkness is made of the same things as its opposite -- as goodness, as light, as Torah. So God has no choice but to claim this darkness. And our hearts, connected as they are to all hearts with their roots in the Divine Heart, have no choice but to acknowledge it too.

 

And God is ambitious, and ambitious for the power of Torah against this darkness. Even knowing that it’s only through us, Divine image that we are but earthy nonetheless, that Torah will show its energy in the world.

 

So we have been taugh each day to say this blessing precisely when it’s actually light outside: Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech Ha-Olam, Yotzer Or u’Voray Choshech, Oseh Shalom u’Voray et Hakol. We thank God for fashioning light and creating darkness, making peace and creating everything.

 

On the fourth day, God comes back to work more on light, and God creates the sun and the moon. According to the midrash -- and thank you to my friend and colleague Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal for pointing me to this Torah this week -- the sun and the moon were originally made the same brightness, and both were charged to shine all the time. The moon approached God and said: Is it possible for two kings to serve with only one crown? And God said: Then go and make yourself smaller. The moon said: I raised a valid point, so why should I shrink myself? And God said: Go and share the day with the sun, and also rule the night by yourself. The moon said: What good am I that way, as a candle during the day that no one sees? And God said: Then go and let Israel count its days and years by you. And let people see that sometimes you are small, and sometimes you disappear, and sometimes there is no other light but yours.

 

As there are two kinds of darkness, there are two kinds of light. A bright and certain light, so obviously guiding and warming the world, at times of peaceful unity and justice -- yes that is the light of the sun. But there is also moonlight, and Rabbi Rosenthal quotes a teaching from Rabbi Sharon Brous: That we Jews are moon people. “[T]he moon, like our spirits, is an object in motion. It will always come back around. For moon people, that is the essence of our spiritual mobility. ... the moon teaches us that even when no light is visible at all, even in the deepest darkness, our hearts trust and remember that the light will shine once again. Maybe even tomorrow. And—though it seems impossible to imagine today—it will even eventually reemerge in its fullness. Orienting our calendar around the moon means that hope is a muscle we practice month after month, year after year, generation after generation. It is a muscle that gets stronger as we use it.” We Jews have had long experience exercising that muscle, and now we need to build it even more.

 

Sometimes Torah is a light powerful like the sun. Twelve years ago, the week of this parasha, Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier it had held captive for more than five years. It was among other things a testimony to the idea from our parasha that what Tzelem Elohim means is that we are accountable for the life of even a single individual, and the State of Israel did not break that faith with Gilad Shalit. That’s actually the Torah I taught for Parashat Bereshit right here on Shabbat twelve years ago.

 

Today, the light of Torah we need is more like the light of the moon. To continue to believe that the sanctity of human life is a powerful and guiding Torah, even during the weeks we are seeing more and more pictures of those who are captive and those being buried and more bombs. There is no Torah we can learn and go out and fix this with right now, even if we brought it to every minister and general and world leader. There is no Torah as that absolute a light. Still there is a Torah like the crescent moon that will help us locate ourselves, as I am trying to do right now with this Torah I am teaching, and Torah that will help us take a few steps in the right direction, even in the dark time we’re in.

 

In a few minutes we will bench Rosh Chodesh. We will anticipate the day this week when the moon disappears entirely and a new month commences, and we will beg God to give us a new month of blessing for us and for all the people Israel. How hard that prayer will be.

 

The name of the new month is Marcheshvan, which means “the eighth moon.” Eight is a special number. Marcheshvan is the only month of the Jewish year with no holy day at all beyong the new moon itself and Shabbat-- no celebrations, major or minor, not even a minor fast. Tradition says this particular new moon coming this week, the sky left only with stars, will some year launch the month when the Mashiach comes, when the messianic era begins. The month is beyond saved for the biggest festival that could ever be, the light that doesn’t ever end.

 

It won’t be this month. I pray that with as much darkness as already grips our souls, with as much fear as we have, that we will help each other perceive the light of the moon, even as a sliver, and not lose all hope even as we acknowledge the power of the darkness, the darkness still claimed by God. I pray that we will find a Torah of moonlight to guide us, and remain committed to finding it. May our loved ones be safe, may our mitzvot be powerful in the days ahead, for ourselves and for them.

 

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov

 

Parashat Noach: God Doesn't Destroy the World

I think that the story of the Mabul, the flood story of Noah, is a profound and challenging story about the extent of good and evil in the world.  I say all the time that there is no part of the human experience, no matter how difficult or dark, that the Torah shies away from.  We're not meant to feel comfortable when we read a story like Noah's.

But in order even to begin to interpret it, I can't start with belief in a God who would choose to destroy the world, all its humans of any age, all of its creatures.  I can't read this literally as one of my God's actions.  Even though at the end of the story, God pledges as a covenant never again to destroy the earth, I haven't found a way to talk about a God with this in the divine past.

So this is a post about theology, and "hermeneutics" -- a mode of interpretation.  Maybe you'll find it too conceptual or convoluted.  It's in blog form, not an artlcle or perfect essay.

But here goes. I approach the Noah story in a couple of different ways as a thought experiment.

One thought-experiment:  Suppose the world were truly so full of evil that there was only a single human being left who had any good in him.  What would have to happen?  What would that person be like?  Would there be any way forward other than a complete, violent, destructive collapse?

This approach to the Noah story is in the tradition of Maimonides.  In the Exodus story, Maimonides interpreted the phrase "God hardened Pharaoh's heart" in a metaphoric way.  He explains that sometimes, actions are attributed to God as a way of expressing an extreme situation, beyond human capacities.  Pharaoh was so stubborn, beyond all human experience of stubbornness, that the only way to express it is to say Pharaoh's stubbornness was equivalent to a force of God.  So too, I would say that "God destroyed the world" is a way of saying that the world was so corrupt that an act of extreme collapse was necessary, comparable only to a force of God.  Comparable -- but not authored by God.

A second thought-experiment that intrigues me is:  Suppose God created the world, decided to create human beings a certain way, and then has to work out over a period of time how to partner with these special beings who are like God but also very unlike God.

That's the overall story of the first part of Genesis.  There's the Adam-Eve experiment, the first try in the perfect garden, which faltered over a command.  There's the Cain-Abel problem, the first competition, and now the generation of Noah, when a large population of people descended into violence and chaos.  Finally, God will settle on Avram and Sarai, and things take a big leap forward but only with a small family at first.

It's a given that people are learning and changing over these stories, at least some of them for the better.  Is it possible that God too learns or adapts?  Could that still be our teacher and guide, still be the source not only of life but of wisdom for the universe?

As difficult as those questions are, I prefer them to the questions that a traditional reading of Noah raises.  If God really did destroy the earth then, why did God not intercede during the Shoah?

In the Kabbalah, there is a distinction between God as portrayed through all of our stories, and the true essence of God, the unknowable Ayn Sof or Undefined One.  In that kind of reading, it's not that God is changing from before Noah to after.  Instead, a kabbalistic interpretation takes the Noah story as a study of how the flows of divine justice and love struggle to be directed when the human community is off-center, corrupt, violent, far for a long time from our divine nature.  "God" in the story is a name for these dimensions of divine energy working in our universe.  The Torah personifies them, gives them form and voice, as a way of getting our attention.  As a way of saying that these forces are alive and real, and we can address them, and they are in relationship with us.

So it's not that "God destroyed the world in a flood."  Instead, the world was in a state where the force of divine love and generosity could no longer reach people to affect them.  The reality of divine justice and an orderly universe was all that remained, and the end of human society was simply the result -- the consequence that flows.  The failure was collectively human, at some point.  God weeps, as we do, when we read of a world so far gone.

We know too well of parts of the world where this has been real.  Not only the Shoah, but the other places of genocide and mass murder in our world.  To a lesser extent, pockets of hopelessness and violence even in our American cities.  We -- groups of people -- have to change and have to act, or the flood results again.

The world as a whole is not like this, but we know that parts of it are, and more of it has been not long ago.  We also know that humans do rise up and put an end to "floods", as Noah did.  So we have to keep the Noah story with us, as a description and a goad, so we know such a world when we see it.  A world flooded and destroyed is still part of humanity's legacy, and we have to face it continually as we read the Noah story.

I could have written this just as a drash, a story with a moral without all the philosophical and kabbalistic to-do.  But I find that people ask me about the theology often, and it's important for me to try and work it out too, so I know what God I am serving when the story of Noah calls.

Parashat Noach: Too Many Towers Today

Two contradictory teachings from the Torah:

Last week, we learned that human beings are created in the image of God, and charged with overseeing all the rest of Creation.  This week, in Parashat Noach, we have the story of the Tower of Babel -- a tower to reach and perhaps storm the heavens, thwarted by God.

What does God want?  That we use our minds and creativity to the full extent of their power?  That we set limits on the designs of human beings?

The answer we need will be different at different times.  When the BP oil spill began this spring, I immediately thought of the Tower of Babel.  This incredibly complex process of drilling under the pressure of the sea; these ridiculous, failed improvisations to cap the bleeding well....we think we have the design and the fix for everything.  But we don't.

It's not just about physical structures, "towers" into the air or beneath the ocean.  The financial system is another Tower of Babel.  More and more arcane derivatives, complex trading by computers, pieces of debt and insurance broken up and distributed around the world -- the financial markets are a dangerous Babel.

The Tower story begins with the motivations of the people, motivations that are good.  They want to preserve their unity as they are growing again after the Flood.  They want to deserve God's attention again, for something better than the corruption and violence of their ancestors.  They tap into their ingenuity, to design and build this structure to serve both purposes.

But they take it one step too far.  They want to claim the vision that God has.  They want to say that when they work together, they will equal God in creativity, and be suited to supervise everything they see.

The Torah teaches that such arrogance is a great danger.  When we think we can engineer absolutely anything to soak the energy we need out of the earth, we are wrong.  When we think we can build an economic system more around mathematical models and fiber optic wire, than around the things that people actually use and need -- we are wrong.

I can't say for sure where the line is between acting as the "image of God" and building Towers of Babel.  I'm pretty sure that iPads and constitutions are on one side, credit default swaps and biological weapons on the other.  Some think that we are destined to go through the Babel cycle over and over, to build and watch things crumble, and only to learn after the fact.

I hope not.  I say:  let's try to find the line.  If we've crossed it already, let's find where those figurative Towers are and try to remove them ourselves.  Before they come down on us in destruction, before more people have to suffer for the arrogance of us all.

Parashat Noach: Really Good or Good Enough?

Noach was a righteous man (ish tzaddik) in his generation; with God did Noach walk (Genesis 6:9).  The classic Jewish commentators pay close attention to the wording of this characterization.  Noach's generation was of course so evil, so full of violence, that God decided to destroy the world and start over.

So the commentators debate two interpretations of this verse at the very beginning of this week's reading.  One reading is:  Noach was a righteous man for his generation -- but in a different generation, we might not think of him so highly.  The other reading is:  Noach was a righteous man, which was particularly noteworthy since in his generation being righteous was especially difficult.

The first reading sounds like damning with faint praise.  There's some basis for it in a comparison of Noach with Avraham.  While Noach walked with God, God instructs Avraham "Walk before (literally: in front of) Me" (Genesis 17:1).  Avraham argued with God when he learned that God intended to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of their evil.  Noach did not push back against God when he learned about the fate of all humanity.  So there's merit to the interpretation that Noach may have the best of a bad lot in his time, but compared to Avraham would not really stack up.

But there's another way of understanding the interpretation that interests me.  It relates to a concept familiar in psychology and other areas, the notion of good enough.

The psychologist D. W. Winnicott coined the concept "good-enough mother" to describe a certain style of parenting by a mother for an infant.  A good-enough mother is attuned to her baby's desires and development; knows how to respond to the hungry baby, and how to withhold a response just long enough to let the baby learn to experience separation without the feeling of abandonment.

The expectation is not that the mother responds instantly at all times to whatever the baby wants.  In other words, the mother is not supposed to be a "good mother" all the time in the stereotypical sense.  Nor is it that the mother does things exactly right all the time.  The overall attitude and approach are what is important, rather than whether the baby is content at all times.

Good enough, in this sense, sounds pretty good.  A mother (a parent) can't guarantee that life is perfect all the time, nor should she.  Indeed, to be too "good" would be to overfunction, to not give space for the baby to experience things and grow.

There's a similar concept in computer science, of all things.  In software development, the "Principle of Good Enough" favors the simple, workable solution to a programming program.  Get it out there and start using it, and improvements can follow.

We are not all able to be absolutely good as people, or to be the best possible parent, friend, relative, or professional.  Sometimes the "bests" come into conflict -- it's probably impossible to be the best doctor or the best plumber and at the same time the best spouse or parent.  But good enough in each of these aspects of life is always attainable.

And good enough isn't about a particular moment, but the longer view.  Everyone has a bad day at home or at work, but over time "good enough" is apparent.

Noach may not have been Avraham, but he got his important job done.  He did enough to be God's partner in recreating the world.  While we could imagine Noach having done other things, or doing more, he was good enough.  And sometimes that is even enough to earn you the rank, for a time, of tzaddik.