I'm Jon Spira-Savett, rabbi at Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire. This website and blog is a resource for Jewish learning and Jewish action. It is a way to share my thoughts beyond my classes and weekly Divrei Torah. You'll find blog posts, standing resource pages with links and things to read, and podcasts as well.
Okay, it’s second semester of my first year of college in this plan I'm doing, and already I’m a week and a half behind. I will catch up this week and then do the project the way I intended, which is a day at a time.
“This semester”, I am taking first of all Introduction to Psychology with Jerome Kagan. I was trying to take some courses that would meet requirements in majors I was considering, otherwise I might have skipped to some other less intro course. I did know somehow that Professor Kagan was a major scholar, and he was a great teacher for the intro class. I can’t yet find my notes, so I may have to settle for some general memories later on, plus the one paper I do have.
I also remembering shopping a class called Psychobiology, which perhaps today we would call neuroscience. The lecture was about the corpus callosum, and what was learned from people for whom the connection between the two halves of the brain had been compromised. For some reason I decided the hard science of the course would be too demanding for me, maybe too much memorizing things I didn't think I was good at? Or maybe that I would go back and take the class if I chose psychology as a major, but only if that happened. This is the second example of a class I remembering shopping and not taking but where I remember the first lecture vividly. I’d looked at a class called Conceptions of Human Nature first term, and the first lecture talked about Freud and Marx, I remember, as dramatic contrasts in views of the basic premises of what a human is like.
I took a Government course, Political Development of Western Europe, with Professor Peter Hall. This was recommended as both a good background for and a taste of the Social Studies concentration. Professor Hall got great ratings in the student course evaluation guide. I wasn’t going to take the course because of the 300ish pages of weekly reading, but when I mentioned this to my parents my mom said, “Are you afraid of taking a class with a lot of reading?” I said, “No,” and then took the class. Thanks Mom! Also I guess I was considering majoring in Government, and maybe this would also be a way to get a requirement done, though I can't remember how much that was in my calculation.
I don’t think I was considering history as a major too seriously, but I did want to take another Jewish Studies course, and a visiting Israeli professor named Israel Bartal was offering a course on the history of Zionism. I think I knew a lot of the timeline from my Muss program in 11th grade, and then reading Sachar’s History of Israel and a bunch of other things related to Israeli history in high school, some of them over and over. Obviously this would be a deeper, more critical dive.
I needed a Core course, and something less demanding. I ended up with a Literature and Arts C course, Empire and Art in the Medieval West I think it was called, with Professor Nora Nercessian. My neighbor Terry took it too. I guess I liked that it might touch on religion a bit, maybe, and also that it wouldn’t stray too far from history I knew something about from high school. I was always intrigued in high school by the notion of the Holy Roman Empire, for some reason. Not positive about that or what else I considered there in choosing this course, or which other options I discarded.
The first couple classes in the art class were about how the Germanic rules starting with Charlemagne claimed succession to the Roman imperial crown in some sense. Professor Nercessian reviewed some of the Roman imperial self-representations, in sculpture and a bit in architecture, focusing on Augustus, Trajan, Diocletian, and Constantine. There were nuances revealing their perceptions or backdrops of order vs. chaos in the world, dominance as an emperor, human power verging sometimes into a kind of chosenness by God. Charlemagne and successors would consciously imitate some of this, though they did not have access to the quality of materials or craftsmanship that the Roman and Byzantine emperors had.
All of us want to hold ourselves to a high standard of integrity and honesty and to go the extra mile for people as much as we can. But what happens when we are stuck dealing with another person who is either straight up unethical toward us, or whose actions are only just technically acceptable, not against a rule or a law but right at the line and not as good as they should be. And no feedback is going to lead to any change.
I’m talking particularly about business relationships, where in addition to being unpleasant it might cost money that a provider with more integrity would not charge. Though you can think about whether what I say applies beyond a financial context.
Whenever possible we should avoid people who are known to do business this way, or to extricate ourselves once it becomes clear that this is the case. But that’s not always possible, either because there is only one person or firm who does what we need, or because the financial or practical costs of cancelling a contract are prohibitive. Left in such a situation, how far is it acceptable to sink from our own standards to set things right for ourselves, so long as we are not ourselves violating a basic ethical norm?
This is how exactly how I see the situation of Yaakov Avinu and his father-in-law Lavan, in Genesis chapter 30 in Parashat Vayetze. Lavan has taken advantage of Yaakov’s labor for nearly two decades, changing the terms of his service and giving Yaakov the most unfavorable interpretation of their agreements. Yaakov finally tells Lavan he wishes to leave and they negotiate an exit fee to be paid to Yaakov. Instead of asking for a certain number of sheep and goats, Yaakov proposes to tend part of Lavan’s flock for one last period of time, and then collect the speckled and spotted animals among that part as his final payment.
Lavan agrees to the terms as spelled out. Then, Yaakov sets up a breeding system that dramatically increases the number of speckled and spotted animals within his assigned flock, far beyond the expected yield. When Lavan’s sons become aware of what has happened, they see it is as stealing on the part of Yaakov, and communicate that to their father.
What Yaakov has done here is to make a specific agreement and then get the most out of it. Presumably Yaakov knew that he would be able to leave with a bigger payment than Lavan thought he would owe, but it’s all within the letter of the agreement.
Did Yaakov owe Lavan the kind of extra, ahead-of-time transparency that Lavan had never given him? Lavan had not always lived by the letter of his own statements; was it okay for Yaakov to make the most of his own, as long as he himself has not lied?
In this kind of circumstance, where Yaakov has been defrauded over many years, I see the Torah indicating that it is permissible for him to try to make his situation better so long as he does not engage in actual dishonesty. He has after all an obligation to his family and himself, and is not required to leave without the means to set up away from Lavan in some kind of security. And at the same time, it’s important for Yaakov to understand that he is stooping. Not stooping all the way to Lavan’s level, but in that direction. There is a spiritual cost to making that choice in the moment, and a risk for the future of getting used to it -- a risk to himself and to people he may affect. Much of Jewish ethics is a virtue ethics, where our ability to act well has to be built and then replenished continually by repeated actions. When we do something we know is just all right but not honorable, we set up an obstacle for ourselves. Yaakov already has too much experience in his prior life being comfortable with deceit, and indeed some of his own children will learn badly from his example.
I have not quoted much from the Talmudic commentaries on Yaakov and Lavan, or other sources that ask the same question outside that context. But at least on this story from the Torah, there is a sense in the tradition from some interpreters that someone in Yaakov’s situation has a defense for stooping the way he did -- but one ought to still recognize that it is stooping, and take more steps than Yaakov did to prevent yourself from making such stooping into a habit, much less something you are proud of.
I am probably already getting a late start on my second semester of college review, so here I am bundling all my leftover notes about first term.
I haven't mentioned my Hebrew literature class with Professor Safran. I don't know that I have notes. We read mostly Agnon stories, and talked a lot about his interesting religious concerns and in general his mode of creating characters that were "projections of his own inner life", or I suppose of the dilemmas of modern Jewish intellectuals. Alas, almost everyone else in the course could speak Hebrew; I could understand but hardly say a word at the time.
I haven't said much about Expos (Expository Writing). I am sure my notebook is somewhere, but all I have found so far are a couple of stories and my final paper. I was delighted to see some great phrases here and there in my stories. As a fiction writer, I was heavy on interiority, not so much on plot, a bit on relationships. At least twice there was a character named Sam or Sammy who was not the narrator, obviously a stand-in for me (middle name Samuel), or a kind of idealized version of me or who I wished people saw me as!
My final paper on Malamud was pretty good! I remember how hard it was to really come up with a thesis that was interesting and actually borne out by my examples. I wrote about main characters who were somewhat conventional but also dreamers inside themselves, who were then challenged by unconventional characters who disrupted their equilibrium or their projects in profound ways. It's interesting to see what I was thinking about "conventional" Jews the year before I became more observant myself. It was a nicely written paper, tight and crisp and confidence.
My final psych paper was a stretch, an attempt to crystallize a cognitive+social psychology perspective on moral development. I am sure we were encouraged to stretch. I didn't find the analysis terribly resonant today, it was rooted again in the limits of my own experience, though I stumbled toward a couple of things. One was a good attempt to clarify what it would mean to synthesize a cognitive and a social perspective on development. The other was a nice typology that sort of anticipated the David Riesman types I'd read about a few years later. I liked that whoever graded the paper -- not sure if it was Scott the TA or Professor Demick -- really went over the language. This one was more unruly than the Expos paper.
I haven't conveyed yet just how excited I was to study psychology for the first time. I always had wanted to, to explore more about why people do and say and relate the way they do. The course did not disappoint, and I just ate it up all the time. Professor Demick, as I think I've commented, was a terrific lecturer, engaging and completely information-packed. Even though it was specifically Intro to Development, it was such a great general intro to the field that my next course, Intro to Psych, seemed a lot like I was reviewing.
When the school year ended, our family picked me up and we went out to Rockport for some days before going home. I bought two books from Justice that had been excerpted in the sourcebook -- Walzer's Spheres of Justice and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In my memory I read them both cover to cover while in Rockport; perhaps I only started there but I did absolutely read each one. I was determined to have a more solid, less debater/argumentative hold on both liberalism and conservatism, to take the critiques super seriously. Though Walzer is and was more fun to read, Nozick had his entertaining parts, and I slogged through the parts that had more symbols in them.
I guess I'll leave it there, and start to catch up on second semester!
For much of Justice, certainly the last many weeks of the course while I was a freshman, my main interest was finding a good philosophical justification for distributive justice. Both of my papers were critiques of libertarianism, attempts to buttress the politics I had (and have). The choices in the class were between a Rawslian justification and a communitarian one.
The Rawslian view is that people with and without egalitarian values personally would choose, in the “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance”, that it would be in their interest to choose a system where property rights would be qualified by the need to make the worse off better off whenever the wealthy gained. The communitarian view, exemplified by Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice, is that people like us, in order to be true to our own actual understandings of the nature of exchange and property and the idea of equality, could realize our social ethic only in a society egalitarian in a variety of ways. Those would include certain social welfare policies, certain ways of limiting the market in the spheres of health and education, certain limits on the translation of financial power into the political sphere.
Walzer was trying to answer the question of how a society of libertarians and social-welfare liberals ought to act, and he appealed to a thick common ethic. That seems to be the ground of his argument, even though of course the libertarians don’t share the ethic. (I think Walzer was arguing that unreflective conservatives and probably religious conservatives ought to recognize his egalitarianism as their own if they thought about their own actual values.)
In any case, back in college the communitarian approach seemed to me more persuasive. Partly I’m sure because the course set it up that way, as the last stage of a dialectic Professor Sandel was guiding. Also because Rawls’ ingenious move to make egalitarianism independent of any substantive ethic just rang wrong or maybe feels a bit off, like it’s an intellectual alchemy of turning self-interest into something else. That may be also tied up with my own personal story at that point, which was about finding community among peers for a first time over the prior couple years, and thinking about the role of communities in my family's civic and religious life, and the notion of covenant that was important to the congregation my parents were helping found. (Ironically, freshman year was the year I was most distant from Jewish community in all my life, though not because of any principle; I just hadn't found my place and wasn't urgently on that.)
Looking over my last few weeks of notes in the course as me now, I find myself engaged mostly with a different question. Why would someone choose a democratic politics over one that advances one’s own or one’s group’s substantive social ethic? Why are values of democratic process and pluralism the kinds of things that someone with a strong ethical position should support as a matter of principle? Why would someone give higher priority, even just at times, to considerations that would legitimize another competing ethic “winning” for a time, an ethic that you think is morally wrong?
And I ask that thinking mostly about the Christian right today, but also wondering what a committed egalitarian would say given what has been going on in our own American politics. Sandel’s own critique of Rawls is that the latter’s philosophy is built on a concept of human nature that isn’t real for anyone: that there is a “self” who can experience a separateness from one’s own “ends” or conception of the good, who views those things critically and can see why another would choose a different set of ends or goods. That kind of “self” isn’t universal; it is the preferred self-understanding of people with a certain philosophy, or who are in certain social groups like the ones who study ethical philosophy and not just their own group’s ethics. If Sandel’s critique holds, then on what grounds would we expect a “narratively situated self” to surrender or subordinate their conception of the good, particular when what’s at stake is a core belief like the equality of people or the right to have enough to live on?
And I still don’t have a great answer. In section, Benor suggested that a truer picture is that a person has many attributes and convictions and they can be arrayed on a scale from complete commitment to able-to-detach-from. I didn’t remember that until I reread it, and it seems like it would add to the philosophical picture though I don't see how he played it out for us. I think in the notes from Sandel (and I didn’t remember this either), Rousseau suggested that a civic republican version of democratic politics would educate people toward more of a common sense of the good and toward the ability to look more critically and deeply at their own values and to engage with the values of others. Those are the best case, but still not an answer to why someone would enter that politics in the first place.
Lately I’ve been listening a bit to Professor Danielle Allen, who adds a more Aristotelian layer, which is that all people need to engage in public matters to flourish truly, and that engaging in political debate in certain ways itself cultivates the self. Again, I would like that to be true. Professor Allen has a genius idea that such a view allows for the choice to sit back and opt out, which would be a particular civic posture, not an individualist withdrawal. A "higher-order withdrawal", not an apathetic or disconnected one. I don’t know what she says about people who hold a strong ethical view and don’t acknowledge that others do too, even after being willing to engage with such others.
So while I can argue against a Christian view of America, and certainly a Christian-nationalist view, I don’t have a good answer for why people with those views ought in their frame of reference to put democratic values high up.
I listened to an interview with Dr. Yuval Levin, who in a way flips my question around and says that there is really no alternative to being a classical liberal if you hold a committed conservative viewpoint. I think I have to go back and probe that more, and understand why his argument might make sense on the right (or the left).
I have to myself thought at times that a more liberal-egalitarian or even just classic liberal response might be that even people who live by right in insular communities that don’t let in other ideas are only able to do so in the first place because of the (Rawslian?) social contract that lets them set up such enclaves in the first place. Neither this idea, nor Levin’s, is anything like Sandel’s or Walzer’s. I don’t think it answers the distributive justice question at all.
So that’s where I am, still. I think I have one more thing to write before the "end of the semester", about the books I wanted to read after taking the course.
The word Shalom is probably the most widely-known Hebrew word, among Jews and also people who aren’t Jewish. Shalom means peace, and because of that Shalom is also the word for greeting someone and saying goodbye. Shalom means not just peace but wellbeing and wholeness, so when we see someone we are expressing our hope that they are well and whole, and we leave we wish them a blessing of peace.
Shalom is even part of the name of our holiest city, Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, the City of Peace. Shalom is central to the Jewish view for humanity and for our holy land.
And at the same time, Judaism is not pacifist. War is sometimes unavoidable and sometimes necessary. One question we can ask is how Judaism views that necessity.
One response is in the midrash about the reunion between Yaakov and Esav. Yaakov returns toward home after 20 years of separation from his brother Esav, who at the time wanted to kill him. So Yaakov is afraid this is still the case, particularly after hearing that Esav has 400 men with him. The Torah says that "Yaakov was very afraid and he was troubled", vayira Yaakov m’od vayeitzer lo (Genesis 32:8).
The midrash picks up on the two descriptions for Yaakov’s fear, and explains it like this: Yaakov was afraid that Esav might kill him, and he was troubled that he might have to kill Esav.
Between this verse and the brothers’ actual reunion, there is the famous story of Yaakov wrestling at night with a being. This being is often called an angel, but in one midrash, the being is described as a representation of Esav and his might. In the course of the fight, Yaakov is given a new name, Yisrael, which has inside it the word sar which means "power" or "rule." And at the end of the fight, in the morning, Yaakov is limping.
These two midrashim suggest a view of war: that being powerful is necessary, and that even justified killing is wounding to one’s soul. War can be necessary for survival, and survival is important not just in itself but in order to continue the covenant the Jewish people are charged with following. Killing in war is never desired, whether the people who die are innocent or enemies. Going to war ought to be sobering, never triumphalist, even when it’s unavoidable or the cause is just. A people who fights will be defined by that fighting, as Yaakov was renamed Yisrael, and they will always have something to heal from, as Yaakov did.
And shalom must remain a goal and a hope, embraced even when shalom between particular nations isn’t likely in the short-term. That is one of the reasons why the essential part of every Jewish service, the Amidah, always concludes with prayers of shalom.
The story of Yaakov and Esav is basically about an unending competition, which begins even in the womb over who will be born first. Esav wins, earning the birthright which would be relevant for inheritance way later -- but Yaakov manages to get it from him in a deal for some lentil stew. The brothers compete for their father Yitzchak’s blessing, which is about both a spiritual legacy and an easier life for the blessed one and his descendants. In between these two stories, Yitzchak himself is in a competition with his Philistine neighbors over control of a series of wells that his father Avraham had dug and the Philistines claimed for themselves or tried to block Yitzchak from accessing.
These competitions are all in Parashat Toldot, a single Torah reading. And these stories are part of a larger motif of competition that goes throughout the book of Bereshit (Genesis), from Kayin and Hevel (Cain and Abel) all the way to the end through the twelve sons of Yaakov.
Competition is a fact of life the Torah acknowledges and depicts, from specific incidents between individuals to the destiny of tribes and nations. So what does Judaism generally have to offer us as a perspective on competition?
Obviously these Genesis stories portray the destructive effects of certain kinds of competition. In the Talmudic tradition, competition can be a generative dynamic. Talmudic Judaism itself is created and expressed through a series of discussions where rabbis try to best each other intellectually and spiritually. The generations that created the foundations of Jewish law in the Mishnah and Gemara are anchored by pairs of sages who pushed each other about every kind of topic: Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael, Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah, Rav and Shmuel, Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, to name a few. Not to mention Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, two entire schools of thought. In the Talmudic literature, when a pair of sages squares off for the sake of Heaven, Torah is perfected.
In Talmudic thought we also find the notion of harnessing the yetzer hara, which is the selfish or competitive nature within us. Humans are regarded as having two motors, this yetzer hara, the so-called evil nature, and the yetzer hatov, the nature for good. In one view, the yetzer hara is what perfects goodness (Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 9:7), because it’s competition that pushes people to do constructive things like building a house, and more profound things as we've seen with the Talmud. If someone in the economic sphere becomes wealthy through competition, their wealth can become tzedakah that helps someone else on a scale that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. Even if the original motivation is not pure, the outcome can be very good.
In a future video, I’ll talk about competition more particularly in the realm of business. For now, the Jewish view of competition can be summed up with reference to another Talmudic story, where the rabbis capture the yetzer hara and put it in prison (Yoma 69b). Many creative and productive activities come to a screeching halt. So the rabbis come up with the idea of altering the yetzer hara in some way and then release it back into the world, to get the best of competition without its destructive effects. That’s the Jewish perspective. If only the story told how us how to do that specifically, not just metaphorically!
This is the note I sent our synagogue community today, before the first candle of Chanukkah. Chag Urim Sameach!
Dear Friends:
Tonight begins Chanukkah, the festival of light and miracles and hope.
This year Chanukkah comes at a time of ongoing war in Israel, and at the end of a difficult year for Jews everywhere. Hostages are still captive in Gaza for 446 days. In America we are in an uncertain period of anticipation, between elections and inaugurations. Each of us has what is going on in our own lives. And to boot, Chanukkah is beginning at the end of Christmas Day.
So what can we make this year of our festival of light, miracles, and hope?
Chanukkah is easily the simplest of our holy days, and at the same time rewards a deeper dive. What could be simpler than one light sparking another, one light joining next to another, light that refuses to run out or to succumb to darkness? So simple -- yet so hopeful, even miraculous.
Dig a little deeper, and there is more. In the earliest telling of the Chanukkah story, in the book of First Maccabees, the rededication of the altar in Jerusalem took place on the exact anniversary of its defilement by the emperor Antiochus. The legend of the miracle of eight days of oil required someone to have enough hope to squirrel away a cruse of pure olive oil to begin with, to hide it close enough to be discovered yet out of sight of the oppressor. To me, hope is the capacity to know that something better is real as long as it ought to be, even when today it isn’t real and even when you don’t know when it might be.
And the whole story of Chanukkah is set in an era that is the first precursor of our own. The Hellenistic world revolutionized by Alexander the Great, by Greek-inspired culture and philosophy. Judaism was transformed in the centuries before and after the revolt of the Maccabees at time, even during the revolt itself. Judaism was translated into Greek language and in conversation with Greek philosophy; forced to grapple with questions of power, both ethical and strategic. Jews in Judea and Egypt and throughout the Middle East were often adapting and sometimes fighting to make our place as a unique nation in a world defined by a dominant empire and its culture.
Sometime during Chanukkah, give yourself the gift of a deeper dive, into the nature of hope and into the world of the Chanukkah story that is so relevant for us.
It is still a miracle to live as Jews in our age. To live in an era of freedom and strength like Jews have never known before. Which Jews have helped build in America and still do, for ourselves and everyone, and which Jews have created and still create in the Land of Israel.
It is still a miracle to be able to create and reenergize a modern Jewish culture and a modern Torah, to bring our rich legacy to bear on the most contemporary challenges from war and peace to majorities and minorities.
It is still a miracle that there are small cruses of oil everywhere. Sources of light and energy, hidden away to be rediscovered when we need them. Reserves of friendship and community, of wisdom and resilience.
Chanukkah is for the times when we wonder if there will be enough of these to last even through today. It is a reminder for each of us to be that cruse of oil for someone else close to you or simply in our community, when they are going through a tough time. Each of us is here to light the next candle -- to help one person not have to shine alone, to help a few people with commitment become a group or a movement.
This year Chanukkah begins as Christmas Day ends, and then the two seasons run alongside each other. That’s part of the origin story of Chanukkah too. It’s no accident that on the Jewish calendar the festival begins on the 25th of the month of Kislev, or that Christmas is the 25th, both originally in dialgoue with an existing holy day. Since the very first Chanukkah in 164 B.C.E., Chanukkah has been a time to reflect on our relationship to the larger world we’re in. For the members of our community who have both celebrations in your lives -- thank you for being part of Beth Abraham, and thank you for bringing something of Judaism to the people you’re connected to who might be less familiar with us.
This year we light our candles knowing that there are still hostages hidden in the dark tunnels under the Gaza Strip. Israeli, Jewish, American, and from other nations. May the merit of our deeds during Chanukkah hasten their freedom and restore them to light, to their lives, and to their loved ones. We pray that the night skies of the Holy Land be lit only by candles, and no longer with rockets.
The word Chanukkah means dedication. Each night as we light our candles, let us rededicate ourselves -- to someone, to some worthy action we can take individually or through our gifts of tzedakah. May all the lights in our windows and from our souls join together and radiate, showing and reflecting the light of the Divine One throughout the world.
Chag Urim Sameach – A Joyous Festival of Lights, Rabbi Jon Dear Friends:
Tonight begins Chanukkah, the festival of light and miracles and hope.
This year Chanukkah comes at a time of ongoing war in Israel, and at the end of a difficult year for Jews everywhere. Hostages are still captive in Gaza for 446 days. In America we are in an uncertain period of anticipation, between elections and inaugurations. Each of us has what is going on in our own lives. And to boot, Chanukkah is beginning at the end of Christmas Day.
So what can we make this year of our festival of light, miracles, and hope?
Chanukkah is easily the simplest of our holy days, and at the same time rewards a deeper dive. What could be simpler than one light sparking another, one light joining next to another, light that refuses to run out or to succumb to darkness? So simple -- yet so hopeful, even miraculous.
Dig a little deeper, and there is more. In the earliest telling of the Chanukkah story, in the book of First Maccabees, the rededication of the altar in Jerusalem took place on the exact anniversary of its defilement by the emperor Antiochus. The legend of the miracle of eight days of oil required someone to have enough hope to squirrel away a cruse of pure olive oil to begin with, to hide it close enough to be discovered yet out of sight of the oppressor. To me, hope is the capacity to know that something better is real as long as it ought to be, even when today it isn’t real and even when you don’t know when it might be.
And the whole story of Chanukkah is set in an era that is the first precursor of our own. The Hellenistic world revolutionized by Alexander the Great, by Greek-inspired culture and philosophy. Judaism was transformed in the centuries before and after the revolt of the Maccabees at time, even during the revolt itself. Judaism was translated into Greek language and in conversation with Greek philosophy; forced to grapple with questions of power, both ethical and strategic. Jews in Judea and Egypt and throughout the Middle East were often adapting and sometimes fighting to make our place as a unique nation in a world defined by a dominant empire and its culture.
It is still a miracle to live as Jews in our age. To live in an era of freedom and strength like Jews have never known before. Which Jews have helped build in America and still do, for ourselves and everyone, and which Jews have created and still create in the Land of Israel.
It is still a miracle to be able to create and reenergize a modern Jewish culture and a modern Torah, to bring our rich legacy to bear on the most contemporary challenges from war and peace to majorities and minorities.
It is still a miracle that there are small cruses of oil everywhere. Sources of light and energy, hidden away to be rediscovered when we need them. Reserves of friendship and community, of wisdom and resilience.
Chanukkah is for the times when we wonder if there will be enough of these to last even through today. It is a reminder for each of us to be that cruse of oil for someone else close to you or simply in our community, when they are going through a tough time. Each of us is here to light the next candle -- to help one person not have to shine alone, to help a few people with commitment become a group or a movement.
This year Chanukkah begins as Christmas Day ends, and then the two seasons run alongside each other. That’s part of the origin story of Chanukkah too. It’s no accident that on the Jewish calendar the festival begins on the 25th of the month of Kislev, or that Christmas is the 25th, both originally in dialgoue with an existing holy day. Since the very first Chanukkah in 164 B.C.E., Chanukkah has been a time to reflect on our relationship to the larger world we’re in. For the members of our community who have both celebrations in your lives -- thank you for being part of Beth Abraham, and thank you for bringing something of Judaism to the people you’re connected to who might be less familiar with us.
This year we light our candles knowing that there are still hostages hidden in the dark tunnels under the Gaza Strip. Israeli, Jewish, American, and from other nations. May the merit of our deeds during Chanukkah hasten their freedom and restore them to light, to their lives, and to their loved ones. We pray that the night skies of the Holy Land be lit only by candles, and no longer with rockets.
The word Chanukkah means dedication. Each night as we light our candles, let us rededicate ourselves -- to someone, to some worthy action we can take individually or through our gifts of tzedakah. May all the lights in our windows and from our souls join together and radiate, showing and reflecting the light of the Divine One throughout the world.
Chag Urim Sameach – A Joyous Festival of Lights, Rabbi Jon
I shared this D'var Torah on Shabbat morning, December 14, 2024, about a week and a half before Chanukkah.
Muhammed Asefi is a physician from Afghanistan, who is an artist-in-residence this year at Arizona State University. Dr. Asefi, before he was a medical doctor, wanted more than anything to be a painter. So he did both, and by the mid-1990s in his thirties he was already a well-respected doctor and a prominent painter, with actually hundreds of his works on display in Kabul in places like the National Gallery and the Foreign Ministry.
When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they imposed a ban on the depiction of living creatures in art, in line with a particular interpretation of Islamic law. In fact as soon as they took over they came upon several of Dr. Asefi’s paintings, I believe at the presidential palace, and they tore them apart. He knew that it was only a matter of time before other works of his and many others would be destroyed. Dr. Asefi wasn’t particularly an activist to that point in his life, but he began to work on a scheme to save as much forbidden art as he could. Sometimes he would do something like take a portrait from the National Gallery, and hang in its place a landscape of the same size, hoping a not-art-savvy official wouldn’t notice that anything had changed and sniff around.
The more audacious project he came up with was actually to cover up forbidden aspects of paintings and leave them hanging in the same galleries. With the help of a patron, a businessman named Muhammed Saber Latifi, Dr. Asefi began experimenting to see if he could use watercolor to paint over parts of an oil painting. The idea was that to create a temporary hiding place within the painting itself, something that could be removed later on if conditions changed.
And that’s what Dr. Asefi did with more than one hundred paintings. Bit by bit, he painted over a person, or a horse, or a bird. He made a riverbank of grazing cattle into just an empty riverbank, matching the background color in oil perfectly in watercolor. He replaced people with flowers. He would take a painting and tell an unsuspecting Taliban official that he was working on repairs to it, and then he’d move things around, and put the altered piece back somewhere else, to throw them off.
And indeed, when the Taliban were deposed after 9/11, Dr. Asefi went back to all the paintings -- and with sponges soaked in water he took away the watercolor, and one after another, there were the original paintings once again.
This story I have told you is a story about hope, and it is exactly the story of Chanukkah. What Dr. Asefi did was exactly what the legend says about the kohanim, the priests in the Beit Hamikdash in the early days of Antiochus. Anticipating that Antiochus would soon come and defile the Temple and the olive oil necessary for its lamps, someone made sure a cruse of oil was hidden away somewhere in the Beit Hamikdash itself, where they could retrieve it one day, and if not them then the kohanim of a future generation. Retrieve it and restore the lights of the menorah again.
The key to Dr. Asefi carrying out his plan, at risk to his life, was hope. Another artist-activist, the Czech writer and then president Vaclav Havel, said that hope is different from optimism. “It is not the conviction that something will turn out well”, ever or in the foreseeable future. “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”
Hope is the conviction that there is a picture that deserves to be seen, that deserves to be real even when it’s not real right now – and hope is living in the light of that picture anyway. That is the hope that Chanukkah comes to teach us. The key moment is stashing the oil in the first place.
I have many times linked this to the dreidel and taught that there is a deeper truth in this children’s game. The spinning top is the uncertainty of our lives, and the four plays that can happen represent four kinds of hope experiences. Taking all the M&Ms, or some; standing pat, or putting M&Ms into the pot – these describe four hope situations. Hope can go with abundance, of course, with gimel or hay. But hope can go with stuckness, numbness, with nun. Hope isn’t a feeling itself, a prediction. Which is why hope can even go with shin, when you have to give away, when you are bereft, when the reality moves farther away.
It’s the shin I am talking about this morning. When the s’vivon lands on the letter shin, you take away from what you have and put it into the middle for now. In the phrase nes gadol haya sham, “a great miracle happened there,” shin is the last part; sham in Hebrew means “there.” The not-here-ness of what we hope for -- and yet there can be hope.
Shin hope is putting up an altered painting in the Afghan National Gallery, when its true beauty is only under what you can see. Shin is facing destruction by preparing a cruse of pure olive oil, and then hiding it near where it might give light one day.
Shin in the dreidel seems like the opposite of hope – losing plain and simple. But in some ways it is actually the foundation of hope. In dreidel, every shin eventually becomes gimel winnings at some point. Someone has to put in the M&Ms in the middle, or else there is nothing to take when you win.
That is the story of Chanukkah too. The kohanim who hid away the oil – it’s because they had already the story of the slavery of their ancestors, and the liberation afterwards. The story of Joseph’s bones, buried deep in Egypt, which he had made every generation promise to find whenever they would be freed. Yes, something was being taken in the time of Antiochus – but the kohanim of our legend made that a shin, another deposit of hope.
The Afghanis have their own such story – Dr. Asefi and others like him could only have kept their culture alive underground because they had stories of cultural destruction and reemergence going back all the way to Alexander the Great. They have for instance a story of sixteen people who survived the sack of Herat in the 1200s by Genghis Khan, and from those sixteen everything was rebuilt. (Sixteen, twice our Chanukkah number of eight!)
When the world is shin, when the miracles seem to be receding, we can be frightened and sad and oh-so-uncertain, and at the same time live with hope.
It’s true in the wide world and for our own lives also. When we are dealing with illness or sadness, with depression or loss, hope means believing that light isn’t gone, but hidden; the beauty isn’t lost, but covered up. Beneath the surface of today is the pure oil of friendships we’ve cultivated, of community; the light of our Torah’s wisdom and our people’s experience; the images and movements of characters in the stories we have told before and been inspired by.
We may not know how the dreidel will fall today, this turn or the next or the next. Some of the M&Ms we get back down the road will be the exact ones we put in, paintings restored.
Sometimes not, and today’s shin may become a very different gimel down the road. You have been thinking: why am I talking about Dr. Asefi when the Taliban are back. Which is of course why Dr. Asefi is in Arizona right now – he is in exile. But he is there because of hope. His own, because to him his work of creating and teaching is not done. And the hope of others who believe his story is not negated; it is just a shin, it will inspire someone else to be an artist for freedom. His shin will be transformed once again, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere.
And so too for each of us. We can hope when what is ahead is clear or seems positive, and we can be hopeful, we can live hope, through uncertainty, even in worry and fear. Because hope isn’t a prediction or a feeling. Hope is the oil itself, even when we don’t know yet what lamp it will light or when. Hope is the conviction that there is a hidden picture that deserves to be seen – and hope is living somehow in the light of that picture, nonetheless.
Shabbat Shalom, and an early Chag Urim Sameach! (A Joyous Festival of Lights)
NB -- While I have heard and told about Dr. Asefi before, I drew on a few published pieces this time. There was an NPR piece I heard once which I am not sure I can pinpoint now, with apologies to the creator. Here is one from the New York Times, one from the Washington Post, and one from the author Andrew Solomon. I learned about Dr. Asefi's presence and work at Arizona State University here.
In chapter 23 of Bereshit Sarah dies and in order to bury her, Avraham makes his first purchase of land. Burial is such an important mitzvah, and it’s important that a mitzvah becomes the context for the first purchase recorded in the Torah. What does this teach us about a Jewish ethic of ownership?
Avraham wants to buy from the Hittites M’arat Hamachpelah, the cave of Machpelah. Their leader, Ephron, wants to gift it to him, or perhaps only to give him the use of it. But Avraham wants to own it. So they go back and forth about whether it’s a gift or a purchase, until they agree on a price and make the deal.
Many people are critical of Avraham’s focus on this business at a time of mourning. But I think it’s worth considering nonetheless what the story teaches us about the ethical significance of ownership.
In modern America, we say “A man’s home is his castle.” Think about what this conveys about our culture. Ownership in the dominant American view is bound up primarily with individuality and individual control. That’s the typical starting point – owning creates an absolute individual right, and to deviate from that requires a special justification.
For Avraham, the starting point is different. Avraham has been a wanderer, and while he owns herds and has been very prosperous and never in need, only very late in life does he turns to consider ownership of land for the first time.
For Avraham ownership of the cave is grounded first and foremost in a purpose. There is an immediate purpose, which is a mitzvah he needs to do. He needs the cave to bury Sarah. Avraham also intends for this place to endure beyond his own life, as a physical symbol of his family legacy, which is the story of a covenant that is young at the moment but will unfold over generations. God has promised a mission for his descendants that will take place in this land, and Avraham wants to leave his descendants something connected to that which is theirs undisputedly.
Avraham’s purposes for owning the cave define what he can and can’t do there. He can’t use it to build a separate settlement for himself apart from the Hittites, or a fortification.
Second, for Avraham owning the cave is about defining a relationship between him and the people around him. Avraham has been a transient in this city of Chevron, coming and going, and the Hittites and he don’t necessarily know each other that well. So this acquisition is a jump-start toward an enduring relationship. At its best, doing business with someone is the easiest way to begin to develop trust. In the context of a very specific acquisition transaction, it’s easy to define what honesty and integrity are. If done well, exchanging ownership is an easy win, a deposit on a positive relationship. It’s a moment of equality, and then the boundaries around what’s mine and yours give us a way over time to respect each other’s individuality. Definition helps us see each other as who we are, to relate to each other specifically.
So in this story, ownership serves purpose and relationship. Within those come individuality and the prerogatives of ownership.
This is the ideal. Obviously owning is often not done well. Soon in the Torah Yaakov will purchase Esav’s birthright, but he will do it by taking advantage of someone who is weary and hungry. Modern examples of this are everywhere, including in the contemporary city of Chevron in Eretz Yisrael, and these realities lead some to a critique of ownership all together.
Which is why it’s important to define a Jewish ethic of ownership. Ownership is everywhere in our daily life and our social structure. It pervades our consciousness and our metaphors and our language. To push against the modern language of ownership we need an alternative. In the Torah, that alternative begins with Avraham and the Hittites, and the ownership of M’arat Hamachpelah.
It’s impossible to talk about Jewish ethics and the book of Bereshit without addressing the story of the binding of Isaac, Akedat Yitzchak or simply the Akedah (found in Genesis 22:1-19). Avraham hears a call from the Divine to take his son to the top of a mountain and offer him as an offering. Avraham packs them up early in the morning and they travel for two days, and on the third day proceeds almost in slow motion toward this terrible act. Ultimately a messenger from the Divine speaks to Avraham and stops him.
There are so many ways to interpret the message of this story, but for Jewish ethics I want to follow a tradition in the midrash where God never wants Avraham to make this sacrifice, and Avraham knows this even though he is not sure how exactly it will play out.
So the ethical principle is that God never wants us to set aside our responsibilities for human life, ever, even when how to live up to that is complicated. No one’s death is good for a cause, no matter how good the cause. No one’s death and no group’s death can be the purpose of a cause, obviously, and just being willing to kill can never be the way you ask someone to show how devoted they are to a good cause. If you think that God’s will or some cause is so high that it overrides the value of a human life without a thought, you are always wrong.
So why doesn’t Avraham just say to God right off – “Good test – I get it, this is a command I should not obey even from you”?
I follow a way of seeing this story taught by a Chasidic rebbe known as the Izhbitzer. He sees the Akedah as a question Avraham asks himself after he has achieved some serenity and prosperity in his life. The Izhbitzer imagines Avraham saying to himself: How do I know what my own motivations are? How do I am not serving God only because things are easy?
So I imagine Avraham saying to himself: I say I have learned the principle of Tzelem Elohim, of the image of God manifest in every person. But am I really committed to it? Do I always stand up for it?
What if the only way to protect someone I care about puts someone else at risk? What if now that I am old, the only way to protect our legacy is for my child to fight for it, to risk his life for my ideals, to kill those who threaten it or threaten us if he has no other choice? What if he doesn’t know yet how to weep at the loss of life that might come from his justifiable acts, the way I hope I do? What if my pursuit of justice has blinded me to someone else’s life?
In this line of thinking, the Akedah isn’t something that happened, a demand from God, but an exploration within Avraham’s own soul. He makes himself live with the hardest dilemmas that test his commitment to Tzelem Elohim and human life. Because he does not delude himself that these dilemmas are easy.
So we have to commit and recommit to the absolute value of human life. Sometimes how to do that is clear. Sometimes it’s not, and in those cases, such as a just war fought justly, we still have to recognize that the deaths are not for God, or for the cause, and make sure at the very least that we don’t turn away.
The big idea is that God despises human sacrifice. We think we know this, and we have to continue to ask what it really means.
