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Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- A Map of Spring and Summer 2021

I've been wanting to get this down for weeks.... I’ve been very affected since March by Torah time – by how the cycle of reading the Torah in synagogue has mapped onto our experience of the pandemic since its one-year anniversary.

The first anniversary of the formal declaration of the pandemic and the massive shut-downs coincided with Jews’ reading the end of the book of Exodus and the start of the book of Leviticus. The Torah itself says that one year passed between the instructions Moshe received for the night of the Exodus, and the final assembly of the mishkan, the desert Sanctuary that would be a focal point for the Divine Presence. During that year in the Torah there had been war and thirst, a complete reorientation of the food distribution system to adjust to (i.e. manna), the new laws and covenant at Mt. Sinai, the in-fighting around the Golden Calf. Then finally a process of calming and reconciliation, and a collective project of building the “tabernacle.” Everyone gave something unique, with its own texture or color, from their life of that year – to be repurposed into a symbol of their unity. When the mishkan was finally assembled, the Divine Presence visibly infused it, with the cloud and fire that was going to lead the people ahead toward their new land and their new life.

That was what we read more or less on the first anniversary of the shut-down, as we were entering a new phase too – the ramping up of Covid-19 vaccination. I expected a turn toward dealing with the new ethical challenges of moving forward, the project of reconnecting and rebuilding a reality better than the one pre-pandemic.

But Leviticus opens with a cloud around the mishkan, and Moshe himself hesitating to approach it to hear these kinds of teachings. The cloud and fire do not in fact move forward. Something is not – was not ready.

Leviticus, the book that was the backdrop of our spring, is not actually a book of moving forward in the desert. And it’s not directly a book of society and ethical teaching, at least not for the first eighty percent or so. Leviticus does open with travel – but it does open with movement. It’s the motion of individuals coming one by one mostly, in a process the Torah calls korban or coming-closer, with offerings. People coming in closer, walking into the center, toward the cloud, with their offerings. Toward the cloudy place, with offerings occasioned by basic emotions – wellbeing, gratitude, guilt. Getting out and coming toward, to eat a sacred meal with a Kohen, to cleanse themselves of something, to burn up something completely and leave it behind.

Something got my attention in March, when I looked at the Torah and realized that it was telling me not to expect people to be ready to plunge ahead. Especially I shouldn’t expect people to be ready to engage in discussion about ethics and society fully just yet.

For a while, the Torah says n Leviticus, moving is just getting used to back and forth. It’s not one direction, from alone to together, from isolated to the Divine. It’s back and forth. Leviticus doesn’t command offerings from everyone on the same schedule. Yes, there’s some paying attention to right and wrong, sometimes you have to bring something in because of that. But mostly, we’re guided by ourselves, we know when to try moving. Closer and back out. The cloud and the fire are in the center and draw our eyes even when we’re still alone, to help us remember that there is something common even on the days we don’t bring anything. Do it like this for a while, move in your own directions, says the Torah for eighteen chapters, and then we’ll get back to ethics, and then we’ll try moving on together.

The commentaries on the opening verse of Leviticus focus on the last letter of its first word Vayikra. In the Torah scroll, the last letter alef is written as a small superscript. That alef has two dimensions. Its presence or absence changes the word from calling to happenstance. The letter alef signifies ani or anochi, “I” – which can stand for the ego in a strong sense or the Divine, “I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Leviticus opens with a cloud around the tabernacle and a spiritual teetering between calling and being just tossed around, between a sense of our own “I” and not having it. Reclaiming what “I” feel like, who “I” am, is what a lot of us were doing as the pandemic hit its first year and we contemplated the next phase ahead. We were, and surely still are, disoriented. Leviticus gives that spiritual state a name and a picture and a pacing.

That was most of Leviticus, and it turned out to be not just accurate but for me soothing.

By the time the book of Leviticus turned to its code of ethics in chapter 19, and its social vision in chapter 25, things had in fact changed around us quite profoundly. The accelerating progress of vaccination in many places led just at this time to the CDC’s revision of its mask guidelines for fully vaccinated people. It was time to open the book of Numbers – the book of the march forward, the organization of people toward the battle for the new land, and the conflicts and delays along the way. But at least it’s the book of moving together, even if together is starting and stopping, and quarreling among ourselves.

Leviticus and Numbers share the perception that not everyone is spiritually ready to move in the same direction at the same time. But at some point, there is something you could call movement of the group, catalyzed by leaders or critical mass. Numbers acknowledges that deciding to move is hardly all there is. You’ve got plenty of opportunities to grind to a halt. In the Torah, these include questioning leaders and their motivations; people getting focused on immediate ease vs. longer-term goals; issues of justice and inclusion; people defining the end of the road in different ways. This last particularly struck me when we read about the tribes of Reuven and Gad who wanted not to go all the way to the new land with the other tribes, but settle where they were. To declare the journey and the fight were over. They and Moshe had it out, and eventually figured out a way for the tribes to work on setting up the common future together, even though tribe by tribe they would separate and live differently both economically and culturally. We should be so fortunate. In Numbers, some 38 years pass and if you read the book you can’t see where they went.

That’s more or less where we got in the Torah by early/mid-July. Now it’s time for Deuteronomy. What’s coming is preparation for the new year – the Jewish new year which starts this year in early September, as does the new school year. The new Torah year starts a few weeks later. Deuteronomy is about getting to the cusp of the new land, the future. It is a book of review of the teachings, going over them for the first time in a long time. At long last, Moshe gets to focus on the ethics and laws and teachings. He gets to talk about them, and also to remind people to continue to learn and study and talk about them from the moment they enter the new land. The time for putting that off – for delaying our ethical conversations, or pushing them to the side or to a small group of interested people – we’re being asked to consider that time over. To be fully human, ready to live, is also to be accountable ethically and intellectually and spiritually. That is what the Jewish new year is all about, and the intellectual explorations in Deuteronomy coincide in the Jewish year with weeks of spiritual introspection. And since this is hard any year, and especially this year, the rabbis of our tradition long ago paired Deuteronomy with (Second) Isaiah, with words of comfort and encouragement, with a welcome of people back to the Divine, back from exile toward home and each other.

I’m waiting to see how Deuteronomy maps onto the end of the summer. But I wanted to get this spiritual journal of the Torah cycle down now, because I am so grateful I had the Torah in this way these past few months. I’ve had more than the Torah’s specific teachings, each verse or each week – I’ve had this structure. It has helped pace me, and see the moment I’m in and some weeks ahead. I have always paid attention to the seasonal flow of the Torah readings, but this year I have seen in the Torah’s pacing through the desert so much I hadn’t seen before. I am grateful, and hope I’ll be attentive to the same things in the weeks and months ahead.

Getting Up Close -- Advocacy, Daughters of Tzelophechad-Style

This was my Dvar Torah on Parashat Pinchas from July 3, 2021.

ותקרבנה בנות צלפחד -- Vatikravna Bnot Tzelophechad, they came up close, the daughters of Tzelophechad son of Chefer son of Gilad son of Machir son of Menashe of the families of Menashe son of Yaakov, and these are the names of his daughters: Machlah, Noah, Choglah and Milkah and Tirtzah. Va’ta’amodna, and they stood in front of Moshe and in front of Elazar and in front of the tribal leaders and in front of the community at the entrace of the tent of meeting, and said...

ותקרבנה, ותעמדנה Vatikravna va’ta’amodna -- it’s important that they came up close and that they stood together, and it’s important to know their names and their back story even though the Torah is leave them and focus on a specific issue. I want to explore ותקרבנה ותעמדנה vatikravna v’ta’amodna, they came up close and they stood.

A few weeks ago, Marsha Feder and I spent an hour at the Bronstein Apartments, which is public housing a few blocks west of Main Street in Nashua. This is in the middle of my city and I drive there all the time now that there’s the Broad Street Parkway. I should say, I drive past there; I can’t really say I drive through there. Bronstein is on my way to my daughter’s middle school and it’s along my shortcut to the Court Street Theater or anywhere downtown south of the Riverwalk Cafe. But in thirteen years I don’t think I had ever walked the neighborhood there until now.

ותקרבנה vatikravna-- they came up close. The reason we were there, with Aron DiBacco of the Granite State Organizing Project, is because the Bronstein Apartments are going to be replaced with even more affordable apartments on the same site. About 50 are there now and about 200 will be there. 200 is more than 50, so that part is great.

If you work a few blocks away from Bronstein at City Hall, 200 affordable apartments is more than 50, and that’s great. I imagine that’s how it looks at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in DC, and it’s easy to see it that way if you are informed enough to read the local newspaper, or even attend a meeting of the Board of Aldermen or the Nashua Housing Authority.

But for the 48 families living there now, the project with the good numbers also means uprooting and dispersing a community. Disrupting patterns of getting kids to school, and relationships of helping each other out. Separating people from others you’ve gotten to know in a city or a country that for some is still new to you, who you can communicate with maybe if you don’t speak English well yet. It means finding a place to live, yes with assistance from the authorities which is being provided -- but it’s not easy to find a place in Nashua that’s right for a large multigenerational family, for instance.

So we went to talk to people up close, ותקרבנה vatikravna, to find out if people are getting what they need from the government. You can’t do this just by letter, or e-mail; it really requires one-to-one contact, up close, and even why would would I assume that someone would see me, a stranger, and open if I knock on the door? But going there and knocking is better than not doing that at all.

I won’t speak for Marsha, but in addition to talking to people, and for the most part being reassured by what I heard, I also saw a lot more by being up close. I met a mother of young kids, who said sure the city has helped them find a new place, but the prospect of packing and relocating the kids is daunting, and she was grateful someone heard that, even though none of us can do anything about it. Or perhaps we can; maybe the Interfaith Council should be there to help pack or schlep of keep the kids entertained on moving days. I don’t know.

I saw what the green area between buildings looks like, how bare it seems. It’s hard to put my finger on the difference between a nice patch of grass and one that’s not so inviting, but it’s there. There’s little flavor to Bronstein as it exists now; it doesn’t look like a place that’s home-y but I didn’t ask so who am I to say. One hour doesn’t really make for getting up close. You think of downtown Nashua as a place people walk around and walk through, but there are little physical suggestions like the black fence along Central Street that don’t exactly say walk through here if you don’t live here, on your way to the Allegro Dance Studio or the Crossway Church. Bronstein is just a few blocks from the river, but you really don’t feel like that walking through there on their way to the riverfront paths.

Somebody has to get up close and stand there, ותקרבנה ותעמדנה vatikravna vata’amodna, for a lot more time. You can’t make good policy if no one does that; you miss a lot of the picture that makes not just affordable housing but an affordable community. You end up saying 200 units is more than 50 full stop, and you don’t take account of the fact that living is neighborhood and relationships and culture, and those things have value. They have concrete civic value, public health value, economic value. You can’t just count on those values being maintained when the community is scattered for a time, and bouncing back when they return. Those values have to be integrated into the numeric equation of 50 becoming 200. To improve that policy, to make an increase on more than a numeric dimension at the same time, requires getting up close.

I have to find a way to get up close more, because for almost three years I’ve been working with other local clergy on affordable housing and even we have been largely about numbers --  adding 2,000 more units over a decade that a typical working person could live in without paying more than 30% of their income, and developing a city capital fund to spark more building on the order of five million dollars. I’ve been at a lot of meetings, some of them a few blocks from Bronstein, but none of them right there.

The part of our parasha with the five daughters of Tzelophechad is about an economic problem, related to land ownership and inheritance, a structural problem of discrimination against women. So Machlah, Tirtzah, Milkah, Choglah, and Noah come close and stand in front,  ותקרבנה ותעמדנה vatikravna vata’amodna, and they present their story. Moshe had just right then learned about the distribution of property among families in the new land and the laws of inheritance. As a result of this up-close advocacy at that moment, Moshe went to God and God told Moshe to adjust the law because the five daughters had spoken honesty and correctly -- כֵּ֗ן בְּנ֣וֹת צְלׇפְחָד֮ דֹּבְרֹת֒ נָתֹ֨ן תִּתֵּ֤ן לָהֶם֙ -- give them what they are asking. The midrash imagines that God says to Moshe: the law was not ready to be completed until they came up close to you and you saw up close what was missing.

The work of ותקרבנה ותעמדנה vatikravna vata’amodna, of seeing up close, and advocating face to face with authorities, and standing, confidently and respectfully and together -- it’s hard work. Hard for those who have to ask for things they shouldn’t have to ask for, and hard for allies who want to stand by them. But without doing as the Bnot Tzelophechad did you can’t have good policy and good law. You can do the numbers but you can’t do community and you can’t do covenant that way, and then even the numbers will end up not working out right.

And I think our parasha heightens this insight by contrast with the opening story of Pinchas. Pinchas sees a problem, a crisis of idolatry and sexual immorality, and he jumps up, ויקם vayakom, and he takes matters into his own hands and he kills the people at the center of the injustice. He seems to be rewarded from God -- with a ברית  שלום brit shalom, a covenant of peace, and a ברית כהונת עולם brit k’hunat olam, a covenant that his descendents will always be priests.

The midrash says two kinds of things about him. One is that the rabbis envy Pinchas, for being able to turn his outrage into effective activism that works in an instant. It actually seems to work. Pinchas is their secret fantasy. Especially as they were under the thumb of the Romans and other empires. 

The other thing is that the rabbis are terrified of Pinchas. He needs a covenant of peace because he’s not any good at covenant. He needs to be forced to be a priest because otherwise he’ll be a dangerous, violent loose cannon and think every problem in society or Torah can be solved with force based on his own read of the situation in the moment. So the rabbis look at Pinchas and say: individual action, or violent action out of outrage, is a card you can play at most once in your lifetime. Then you require a covenantal approach even to what’s difficult and unjust in the here and now.

The rest of the time it’s the daughters of Tzelophechad, ותקרבנה  ותעמדנה vatikravna vata’amodna. That’s not about settling for gradualism vs complete solutions, but about hanging together, working together, exploring up close and telling stories and histories. It’s about trusting what happens when you come up close to people who disagree or to people haven’t seen it right yet, who have power. It’s about timing; the five women had a sense of when Moshe was ripe for their pressure, when he was starting to think about what they needed him to do more on. 

And the impact of their work was broader than one law of inheritance. They weren’t actually just gradualists -- it is right after this passage that God tells Moshe his tenure as leader is up, and it’s time to find someone else. Moshe gets it, and he pleads with God to find the people a shepherd who cares for every sheep, who can account for every person. A leader who would know what the laws of property should have been even before the five daughters came to tell him.

So many of the hero stories we tell about change and activism are more Pinchas than Bnot Tzelophechad. But when we really look into those stories -- whether it’s the American Revolution, the Zionist movement, the civil rights movement -- it’s the daughters of Tzelophechad pattern we see everywhere. Let’s see and lift up those kinds of leaders. Let’s be leaders like that, on whatever plane we operate in. Let’s do that so we make better public choices together, and grow close and stand with each other as citizens in that process of ותקרבנה ותעמדנה vatikravna vata’amodna.

Parashat Chukkat -- Is Judaism More Red Heifer or #SelfCare?

This was my D'var Torah for Saturday, June 19, 2021, Parashat Chukkat. The article I reference at the start is really good, in ways that somewhat connect to my theme and also jump off in another important direction.

I was in the middle of thinking about the parah adumah -- the red heifer with its potpouri of potion parts that would be very at home in a Harry Potter book -- when I came across an e-mail from The Forward titled, “Has Shabbat become just another form of #self-care?” In one corner is the idea that Jewish practices are good for us in a self-care sense, on secular terms -- we need rest, we need to unplug, we need not to let seven days go by without calming and resetting. In the opposite corner is the red heifer, the most inscrutable practice in all of Torah.

In Midrash B’midbar Rabbah, we learn that a Roman pagan asked Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai specifically about the parah adumah: "These rituals you do, they seem like witchcraft! You bring a heifer, burn it, crush it up, and take its ashes. If one of you is impure by the dead, two or three drops are sprinkled on him, and you declare him pure?!" Rabban Yochanan said to the pagan, "Has a restless spirit ever entered you?" He said to him, "No!" "Have you ever seen a man where a restless spirit entered him?" He said to him, "Yes!" ..."And what did you do for him?" He said to him, "We brought roots and made them smoke beneath him, and poured water and the spirit fled." Rabban Yochanan said to him, "Your ears should hear what leaves from your mouth! The same thing is true for this spirit, the spirit of impurity...They sprinkle upon him purifying waters, and the spirit of impurity flees." After he left the rabbi's students said, "You got rid of him with a skimpy response, a thin reed. What will you say to us?" Rabban Yochanan said to them, "By your lives, a dead person doesn't make things impure, and the water doesn't make things pure. Rather, God said, 'I have engraved a rule, a chok -- I have decreed a decree and you have no permission to transgress what I decreed, as the parasha begins: ‘This is a chok [rule] of the Torah.’

To the Roman pagan, Rabban Yochanan says: You and I know that certain things work, and maybe what Jews are doing seems like magic to you but we’ve all got a common language of self-help. The red heifer is a kind of medicine; it makes us better. But to his own students, he says: There’s no explanation in this case, but we have to do it anyway. It is one of the chukkim, one of the inscrutable laws that are mitzvot just because the Divine has commanded, no other reason.

I do not think that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai believed that everything in Torah is like the red heifer, the parah adumah. Not everything is one of the chukkim, the impenetrable laws. But I admit I like his answer to the Roman. Not the outdated medicine part, but the idea that there’s a function to the practice that we could figure out, and it’s good for a person. In fact, in spite of what Rabban Yochanan says to his own students, Jewish tradition does try to interpret the elements of parah adumah potion -- the cedar, the hyssop, the scarlet -- to try to find a purpose for each element. Something for us to meditate on that will help us heal our souls or something that symbolizes how to become better people. 

But at the same time, we have this phrase that is familiar from many prayers and the Torah -- chukkim u’mishpatim. In Jewish thought, chukkim are those practices that are or seem beyond our comprehension, while mishpatim are practices or rules that are socially valuable or valuable to our personal lives. Chukkim come first in this phrase -- the irrational laws before the functional ones. Some would say it's the chukkim that define religion as religion.

But trying to make most things in Judaism like the red heifer, something we do to prove that we can serve something other than ourselves -- that can lead in absurd directions and dangerous directions too. We here wouldn’t buy that. The Torah itself says later that other peoples look at Israel and our ways and say that only a wise and understanding nation could live in such a way. Wisdom, meaning wisdom to apply to life -- not just awe and obedience.

So, some Jewish philosophers have suggested that the Torah of revelation is a short-cut, because most of us don’t have the time or energy or wisdom to figure out for ourselves what is good for us.

And yet -- the problem with Shabbat as #self-care is that if we can explain Jewish practices always in terms of a purpose, is that really Judaism? Isn't that just looking back at ourselves? Surely we could design from scratch a weekly rest and even some rituals that give us rest, build community, and even move us toward kindness and justice that are more direct and easier, without the mumbo-jumbo and the details we don't get.

So where does that leave us, as far as chukkum u'mishpatim? Can we have both the red heifer and #Shabbat-as-self-care?

A big part of me thinks that if Judaism can be taught in terms of self-care -- dayenu. We certainly don’t suffer from a lack of self-care and grounding in our lives and this current world. If Judaism can be a vehicle for that, even if it’s for reasons that aren’t completely coherent intellectually, that’s not bad at all.

But my real answer comes sort of from the red heifer. It comes from magic -- specifically, the magic of Harry Potter world.

To me the genius of Harry Potter is not that it takes place in an alternative universe, although it’s true that Muggles can’t go to Hogwarts. To me, the big khap is that the magical world is layered on top of our world. If you are fortunate enough to have inherited the capacity for magic, you can see things others in London don’t see, and you have special powers too.

And my favorite locale in the universe of Harry Potter is Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross Station. To get from the regular city onto the train to Hogwarts, you have to run into a brick pillar. It really is a brick wall, and you run at it and into it. It looks impenetrable -- like trying to understand the red heifer. But your propensity for magic, even before you are well-trained in it, allows you to get through it, to the train that will take you to the special school, where you learn where you fit into the magic world layered on top of the world most people see. Where you struggle with how to make the potions that work and rescue, and you complain about the teachers, and you wonder whether it all makes sense.

Judaism, all its practices and rhythms and even the ethics that you could pick up elsewhere, are a magical world layered onto our world. To get there does require flinging yourself at brick walls -- red heifers,  practices that aren’t obvious, Hebrew words, sometimes Aramaic -- but when we do go at them full speed, we see that we are connected to a bigger story. Our daily lives, our friendships, our rivalries even, our powers are all connected to a bigger story -- the Torah story, the Exodus, the story of redeeming and completing this world. Every Shabbat is part of that story, every word of our Siddur is, every specific ritual is. They don’t all make sense one by one; yet each is a piece that whole tapestry.

Being part of that story involves taking care of ourselves. Because being the person or the people who deserve care and rest and joy is itself one of the main points of the story and of Jewish history. Because Shabbat rest and ritual celebration are what allow us to glimpse where the story is heading. Our individual acts and each piece of the Torah, even the strange parts, are part of a much larger book we are playing a part in.

So whether it’s the parah adumah, the red heifer, or Kashrut or Shabbat or the Hebrew language, fling yourself at the brick walls of Judaism. Believe that the grape juice at kiddush is a magic potion, more than just the sugary chemicals in it, and enjoy the sweetness too. Keep flinging yourself, and don’t settle for easy but incomplete explanations on this side of the wall. It’s not bruises or intellectual brick walls ahead, but a deep care for you, and special powers for you and us together. It’s not just sensible; it’s magic.

 

Disrupting Texts is a Tradition -- My Hosea Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Rubik's Cubes and Cities of Refuge

This is my D'var Torah for Parashiyot Mattot-Mas'ei, on July 18, 2020.

This is a Rubik’s Cube:

The Rubik’s Cube starts all jumbled up, with random colors mixed together all over each side. The goal is to get every one of the six sides to be entirely one single color. This is tricky because whenever you move one thing toward one side, you move another thing off its place somewhere else. 

Sometimes it’s possible to work the Rubik’s Cube by solving a whole side and then moving on to the next one. Even if you do it this way, you still have to dislodge something from that side temporarily while you are fixing up another side. You have to make the perfect side imperfect again for a bit in the process of tackling another side of the cube. Everything is connected, so moving something into place also involves moving something out of place for a moment. If you’re really good, you can move it back.

I think of an ethical life as a Rubik’s Cube that is partially solved, maybe one or two or even four sides solved but others stubbornly not. Moral dilemmas are usually like this too. You have a number of ideas that make sense, several sides of the picture are solved, but the whole thing isn’t, and something is completely messed up elsewhere,. Part of what makes it right on this side is making it wrong on that side.

So we have a partially solved Rubik’s Cube in the parasha. It’s the case of the accidental killer and the city of refuge. The situation is that someone has killed another person -- God forbid, chas v’challilah -- and no one questions that A killed B. It might have been a flying axe blade, or even a push because A didn’t know B was there. It happened. That’s clear.

It’s also true that A is not an enemy to B. There’s no specific motivation anyone suggests, no grudge between them. This is attested by other people in a court. That side is clear.

There is the family of B, who have suffered a terrible loss. They are bereft, and they are considered by the Torah in its time to be justified in seeking the death of A. It’s more than understandable; things can’t just be let go. And tthe Torah believes that the community as a whole is in danger whenever blood is spilled and nothing is resolved. Members of thefamily of B are given the name of go’el ha-dam, “redeemer of blood” or “redeemer of life.” It’s sometimes translated as “avenger”, but in the Torah it’s not a negative name. They are considered to be standing up and acting for the value of life. Another side that’s clear.

There is a lot of clarity here, many sides of the ethical Rubik’s Cube lined up, but there is no way to get the last side in place. If A, the killer, is put to death, that’s an unjust punishment. If A pays money to the family of B, that is considered an insult to the life of B and the idea that human life is beyond all value. If nothing happens, that’s also not just and does not respect human life.

The Torah feels both that the family of B is entitled to try to kill A, and that A should not be killed.

So the Torah instructs the people to set up cities of refuge, arei miklat, where A can safely escape the family of B. There has to be a city in every region of the land and every region just outside the land where some of the tribes live. The cities are supervised by the Levi’im, a special group of leaders. Person A stays there until the death of the current kohen gadol, the high priest, and only then can go free.

Again God forbid that anyone be killed at the hand of another, whether intentionally or unintentionally. I have been trying to think about the law of ir miklat as a response to all the unsolved Rubik’s Cubes in our social life.  Situations where life and death have been at stake. Every motivation on each side is right, every suggestion for what to do is right at least in its own terms, but there is no picture as a whole that is right. Or at least it’s not as right as each of the pieces of it.

And in that situation the Torah institutes miklat -- refuge, shelter. It’s an end to killing, a suspension of the violence, and it’s not proposed as a solution. Everyone is frozen in their current imperfect situation, no one forgets what originally happened, and everyone is prevented from making it worse.

This doesn’t happen all by itself. The Levites are involved. They are leaders with a special spiritual role, who live not with their own tribes but linked across all the other tribes throughout the land. And the high priest is somehow involved. He is a leader whose job each year is to restore the community to spiritual balance, to cleanse the Temple and the community from all the wrongs that have happened in the past year every Yom Kippur.

Two of the life-and-death realities that are ongoing right now are the pandemic and the question of school in the fall, and the racial justice issues around policing and incarceration. Two really challenging Rubik’s Cubes. This week as I’ve had the parasha in mind I’ve been particularly attuned to how some sides are solved and clear, and yet the whole is not solved at all.

In my world as a parent, there are a whole bunch of statements that are clear about keeping students safe and keeping teachers safe, about the importance of learning and of schools for the overall wellbeing of kids and of families.... and yet it does not look anything like the Rubik’s Cube as a whole is any more solved than before. Some people think that it’s enough to solve one side and stop, and others think it’s enough to solve a different side.

Over the past two weeks, while criminal justice reform work in legislatures and agencies has not been the major news, we’ve had very visible conflicts in print and digital media, with statements about the importance of keeping the claims of people of color in the center, and with statements about the importance of open inquiry and critial investigation around proposed solutions. Some people think it’s enough to solve one side and stop, and other think it’s enough to solve a different side. The Rubik’s Cube as a whole looks very disarranged.

So what would the ir miklat, the city of refuge, look like today? I have been thinking that people are exhausted by the efforts of trying to solve even a single side, to reach some moral clarity on either of these issues. This exhaustion itself creates a heightened possibility that we will harm each other more, even by accident, that we will harm ourselves. A summertime ir miklat doesn’t require anyone to let go of the clarity they have achieved. It’s a pause, with a commitment to being careful, a promise not to make anything worse.

Just as each region in the land had its own city of refuge, maybe each ethical “region” where there is conflict and violence needs it own way and time of refuge right now.

Maybe we could take turns. I said in my e-mail yesterday that I think all of our educational leaders and all of our racial justice leaders and all of our police leader should take a week or two away, to find a city of refuge. I think we all deserve a miklat as well, a safe refuge for a time, because we’ve all been pried open and exposed for months now.

And I know I have been looking for Levi’im, for leaders to oversee these dilemmas who are especially grounded in service to us, and who connect the many tribe. I have been looking for the Kohen Gadol. A purifying figure or a purifying group, who are willing to put maybe not their lives at stake, but at least their reputations on the line. Leaders who will say: We know these things seem impossibly complex. But we want to be in this game; we want to solve these Rubik’s Cubes. We want people to stand around us and cheer us on. We don’t want fear of death and fear of killing and fear of harming to be all there is to say with certainty. We want to hope to be more certain, and we want to attack the Rubik’s Cube with creative problem solving, and we want people to value the magical things in our schools and our society, in every beautiful color. We want to be inspired, and we want to be inspiring.

We don’t know how to solve the Rubik’s Cube of racial justice yet, nor do we know how to solve the Rubik’s Cube of school this fall. We have a lot of sides worked out, but we aren’t going to get the rest of them by running ourselves past exhaustion, with times and places of refuge, guided by the right people.

You who have heard me speak know that slow down is not my usual message, and “just do a mitzvah and another and it will all work out” is not my philosophy. Miklat should be a very specific kind of pause. The Torah tells us every year to seek cities and places of refuge, starting in this mid-summer portion and over the nex six weeks. It will come up in the Torah every couple of weeks -- and then the Torah will say it’s time to head toward the promised land,. Time to finish wandering. But we can’t march if we don’t have the refuge we need. I hope you will find some in the next weeks, and I hope you’ll do your part to make sure other people find them too.

Giants, Not Grasshoppers -- Toward the Landscapes Just Ahead of Us

This is my D'var Torah from last Shabbat, June 20, Parashat Shlach L'cha.

This week in the book of Numbers, there is a beautiful project that Moshe is getting impatient to launch. In a nutshell: it’s about becoming a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, in a land flowing with milk and honey. Moshe is impatient in a good way, and his instinct about the moment is that the people have been sitting still for too long. A lot of study groups working on the laws and the institutions, the beginnings of complaining because the people are in limbo in the desert... So Moshe decides it’s time to move closer to moving by sending out the scouts, the m’raglim. From the Hebrew regel, the leg – there’s going to be movement, shoe leather. Not everyone at first, but while the people are sitting still there is going to be activity by some. Sounds a bit like us now, yes?

So how did this step go?

The land flowing with milk and honey, eretz zavat chalav ud’vash, is now also a land that devours its inhabitants, eretz ochelet yoshveha. And the kingdom of priests and the holy nation? Now it’s we saw giants, and we looked to them like grasshoppers, and that is how we came to look even to ourselves.

And as a result, the people went nowhere. For a whole generation.

What happened, and what can we learn from for our own moment?

I summarized Moshe’s big project in two parts -- there’s the land and there’s the group itself. The most important thing we can learn from the m’raglim is not their report about the land but their report about themselves. Read carefully – the ten negative scouts said good and bad things about the future ahead. Bounteous, but also impossible. What they said about themselves though was very clear: We are grasshoppers, not giants.

I want us to look at this so we can learn how we can be giants and not grasshoppers, across the many landscapes we are looking at now and looking ahead to right away and over the next six months.

When Moshe set up the mission for the twelve m’raglim, he structured it for them around a set of questions, and most of them were good, clipboard kind of questions. Observe and report what’s out there – what’s the soil like, the trees, the fruit, the cities? But he threw in one question that wasn’t like that. Tell about about the land, hatova hi im ra-ah – is the land good or is it bad?

What kind of question is that? God had already given promises about a good land over and over. Opening up that question opened up the possibility of coming back and saying the land is bad. And that colored everything. The ten m’raglim had the opening to say the land was bad because they were really reporting on a different issue: Are we good or are we bad.

Calev and Yehoshua were able to say the land is good, because they could also say: We are good. Calev said: Yachol nuchal la. We are capable, we are up to this.

The others said: the land is good, the land is bad, see it both ways -- but we are definitely grasshoppers, looking at giants.

Why grasshoppers? Why not ants or locusts? There’s almost no traditional commentary on the metaphor.

I think last year I asked my daughter Sarinah about this, who is of course the bug expert in my household. Between her teaching and some other research, here are some things I’ve learned about grasshoppers:

1. Grasshoppers aren’t discriminating about what they eat. They’ll eat pretty much everything, whether it’s nutritious or not for them.
2. Grasshoppers use up what’s right there and they have no relationship to what’s right nearby in the field. They hop – they flit from one place to another. They’ll go any distance from where they are and then eat whatever happens to be there.
3. They are obviously at home in the grass – they exist where the roots are shallow, they don’t try to be near anything whose stature is much more than their own. In fact they have evolved to basically look like grass.
4. On its own a single grasshopper behaves fine, but in groups they devour, they destroy.

So why did the ten m’raglim compare themselves to grasshoppers? It wasn’t just about size and strength, small grasshoppers compared to giant humans.

They were saying about themselves, and they were saying about all of Am Yisrael:

1. Like grasshoppers, we can’t focus – we’ll try anything whether it’s useful for us or not. We hop from one thing to another, one focus or mission or cause to the next.
2. Like grasshoppers, we don’t lift our eyes up enough – we’re content to be in a field where everything is small like us, where nothing reaches to the heavens. In the psalms grass is compared to the wicked, who are widespread and fast growing but shallow, while the righteous are like a palm tree – tall, not so many, but deeply rooted. They were saying: We’re grassy, not palmy.
3. Like grasshoppers, we don’t sink roots. Our commitments are not deep, we don’t take the time to make them deep or to trust one another to be deeply rooted.
4. Like grasshoppers, we don’t trust ourselves as a group to be capable of great things – we think if we try to act collectively we will be destructive.

What the ten m’raglim were saying is that they didn’t see themselves or the people as wise enough or capable enough to try big things without destroying in the process.

Giants, they thought – that would be someone else. Those huge Canaanites who look they had fallen out of the heavens, godlike in strength and stature. Pharoah was a giant. Giants are Avraham and Sarah, in our past but not our present. You Moshe aren’t a giant, and neither is anyone else we know or could even imagine right now.

But Calev knew different. The Torah says he had ruach acheret, a different spirit. Rabbi Zohar Atkins says actually he had two spirits. One spirit understood what the ten grasshopper-scouts experienced, he got it entirely. And one spirit that said no, the giants are us. A kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

And I know different too. I know that we are giants, we Jews of this time and place. And if we are not giants, it’s just that we aren’t giants yet.

The justice issues of our day – we can be giants.

The grasshopper view is that we will lack focus, we will approach them shallowly like the roots of grass, and we will destroy our own community in the process. There were giants of justice in the past, not in our current generation. But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, we can learn and act with depth, and we will in fact strengthen our own Jewish community in the process as we also strengthen America. I know this, because the people in our congregation who have already organized a prayer service and a resource list and a thoughtful committee and are grappling with how to talk within our Jewish community, they are acting like giants.

This pandemic, and how we will live through it by taking care of each other even though we don’t know if we have to do this for weeks or months still – we can be giants. The grasshopper view is that we lack focus. We do creative things for a bit and soon we’ll run out steam, or we will do it shallowly with e-mails only and just appear to be active. But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, on making sure every person in our community gets a phone call with regularity, and we can act with depth as we discover what people need in concrete ways or in emotional support.

And I know this, because there are people who are stepping up to make calls even though they have other commitments and are tired, and there are mental health professionals who are making their wisdom available to me and our leadership, and there are people generous in all kinds of ways, and these people are acting like giants.

The future of Jewish community and the synagogue, here and across America – we can be giants. The grasshopper view is that we lack focus, we try to do one thing that might appeal superficially and then another, and we don’t take the time to really root ourselves in a mission that we repeat over and over. The grasshopper view is that communities will just eat up an ever-diminishing set of resources and burn out our own leaders.

But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, because rabbis in the hundreds around the country have been organizing ourselves with focus on how not just to survive but how to innovate during the pandemic.  Talking to each other and creating new networks out of nothing. Look at us, you here this Shabbat morning, recreating community on the fly every single day and week. Wait till you meet Sarit, our newest team member, a thoughtful educator and a social entrepreneur - she is already starting to guide us and focus us. And in the months leading into and out of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I will show you how deep and how giant is Judaism as a response to this time we are in, and how many incredible teachers there are for you around this country.

We are not grasshoppers. If we are not yet giants, morally and spiritually, I am here to tell you we can be, if we decide to go into the new lands together. I’m going. The lands ahead of us, whether it’s the landscape of justice in America or the landscape of the pandemic or the landscape of synagogues – they are good lands. They are flowing with milk and honey. It’s no question whether they are good or bad – they are good. But if you don’t believe that yet, the lands are what they just are. Our job is to go into them now. Even when we have to do that while staying physically inside our homes. As Calev said: yachol nuchal lo – we are capable. Because, us -- we are a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Shabbat Shalom.

First Thoughts After George Floyd: Justice Torah From Rabbi Akiva and Ben Azzai

This was my Dvar Torah for (Zoom) services on June 6, 2020. I'm making reference here to the Bar Mitzvah of Seth Brown.

I want to thank the Browns again for this simcha and as I told them, usually my words of Torah are light on days like this, but sometimes the world thrusts events at us that call for some Torah that can’t wait. So I will take a few minutes for words of Torah after the week we have had. I am going to speak quietly and with humility, not pretending to be possessed of every insight about race in America or to be a tzaddik myself in this area. I will add some more to this at our program on Monday evening.

And this is Torah from a particular point of view, the Torah of this particular Jew who is white and has many privileges, who has been thinking most of all about the black people who are closest to me, namely my own cousins and members of this Temple community, some of whom are children. I have been thinking about how I see the world and change in the world, because of where I come from. My formative experiences center on the mid- to late-1970s. Saturday night TV in that time in my house was The Jeffersons, Bridget Loves Bernie, Mary Tyler Moore – the television of a world moving toward integration of every kind – and I was a Sesame Street child, who took for granted Gordon and Susan and Bob and Luis and Maria. In there was the struggle for Soviet Jewry, which was everywhere in my Jewish world, and seemed like the same thing.

And one of the records always playing in my home was Marlo Thomas’s “ Free to Be You and Me.” Here’s the verse that for a long time was my anthem: “There’s a land that I see where the children are free, and I say it ain’t far to that land from where we are.”

I was taught to see that better world not too far away, to know it wasn’t here but to believe it was being created by people like my parents and their friends and my teachers and by me and my friends. The question I never had until a few years ago is how far is that land, really, from where we are. If it has taken so long to get there since the mid-1970s, is that because it is in fact farther than I thought, or is it close enough to see but there is a river in between with dangerous rapids and we have not built the bridge, is it close enough but we have for some reason refused to pay the money to clear the road that would get us there straight and fast.

Or to say it like the Torah would, as we are in the book of Numbers -- why is such a short walk from Egypt to the promised land taking forty years.

So what is the basic spiritual outlook of someone trying to get us to that land?

In the Talmud (Yerushalmi Nedarim) two rabbis debate: If you had to sum up the Torah, basically, how would you do it? Rabbi Akiva says that the most important principle of the Torah is in Leviticus, “Love your neighbor like yourself” (19:18). Ben Azzai, who was a younger scholar, said it’s a different verse, from back in Genesis: “This is the book of the story of humanity: In the day God created the human, in the likeness of God God created him" (5:1).

Rabbi Akiva says: It’s all about of love of other people, and the action that flows from that love. The major thing is to stretch yourself – first to the limit of the comfort zone you have with people who are like you, and then a bit beyond that. Get to the person who is near you, and figure out how they are not basically different from you but basically like you. There is effort to care, the effort is to look for something in common, and the effort is actually to do something helpful or caring.

Ben Azzai says, basically, Okay Boomer. Flower child. Love is great, but if you’re really loving you’re going to reach a limit pretty soon. We can only love so many people. It’s exhausting and there’s going to be resistance because of that. At some point you’ll make your neighborhood of concern bigger, sure, and then you’ll stop and you’ll decide that the other people aren’t your neighbor. You’ll say that you can’t find anything like yourself, you tried but you couldn’t. You’ll start coming up with reasons not to love certain people.

No, says Ben Azzai, we need a bigger frame. This is the book of the story of all humanity. If you’re going to stretch, stretch your imagination to include all people. In the Torah, a book is a place to keep records. A book is bigger than our hearts. It’s where the data is, whether we have an emotional attachment to it or not. And we know that a book is also stories, and stories take us farther than neighbors can and stories get us talking about them. Books and stories are going to take us to neighborhoods we’re just not going to get to otherwise even in our own towns, to prisons we’re never going to visit ourselves. Get some data, learn some history. Learn where your neighborhood itself comes from, who built it.

Rabbi Akiva would say back: You young people, you think you share enough brilliant articles on Facebook you’ll change the world. The brain might see farther than the heart, but it is weaker. If you learn more than you can do, you are in danger of overwhelm, and of not being able to see an ending that’s different from the terrible stories that have been told so far. At some point you have to decide to care, or you have to decide to act, and you can only do that by knowing someone new or by knowing someone familiar in a new way. So work on stretching what like-yourself means to you. And when you made your neighborhood a bit bigger, now try to love all the neighborhoods in your city. This is how it really works. Most people need relationships to change. We don’t have a book with the right ending yet, because no one has written it, and the only way to write it is to love our way there.

Who’s right – I find something compelling in both approaches and both critiques. I wish I knew if one was more right. But be one of them, commit to at least one of these middot, these qualities, and get someone to hold you accountable. If you’re an Akiva, get yourself an Akiva-guide and also a Ben Azzai to challenge you, and vice versa. Please please, I beg you here, please hold me accountable.

I would like to think that this week’s protests happened because we have all been living for weeks in a daily reality of being more attuned than usual to life and death. The germ that is killing is literally novel, that’s its very name, and we have been hiding because that’s what is necessary. The way George Floyd was killed – from that we have been hiding too long. We have been saving lives for months now, lives we know and lives of strangers we can’t see, all of a sudden we’ve been doing it, and at great personal discomfort and sacrifice. When it comes to black lives, why can’t we do the same.

Shabbat Shalom.

Last Day of Chanuka: Dimensions of 8

This last day's focus on Jewish dedication is centered on the number 8 itself.  Eight is a significant Jewish number.  A bris takes place on the eighth day of a boy's life.  Eight is associated with the ancient Temple in Jerusalem -- King Shlomo dedicated the first Temple on Sukkot, the eight-day fall festival.  In the Torah, the portable Mishkan began to operate at the end of an eight-day ritual.

Eight, in other words, is the number that represents covenant.  Seven is nature, and eight is something extra.  What God adds, what we bring -- eight is the partnership between human beings and God in this world.

There are, according to Rabbi Moses Maimonides, eight levels of tzedakah.  The highest level is a gift, loan, or partnership that helps a poor person become self-sufficient.  Leading in the Jewish community in this commitment is the Jewish Funds for Justice TZEDEC program, which I have written about before and can't ever resist boosting again.  TZEDEC pools capital from Jewish institutions and individuals, and invests in loan funds that support economic and community development in low-income areas.  Their newest intiative is called, aptly enough, 8thDegree.  It makes microloans to support small businesses in New Orleans, which is still rebuilding slowly after Hurricane Katrina.  TZEDEC and 8thDegree flow from Jewish teachings but support the wider community.

Shabbat Shalom, Chodesh Tov (it's the beginning of the new month of Tevet), and for a final time this year, Chag Urim Sameach!