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A Year of Jewish Ethics #4: Are You Responsible for Your Group?

What responsibility does an individual have for the faults of a whole group? In the first part of Bereshit, the book of Genesis, there are at least two stories that touch on this question directly. One is the story of the Flood, the Mabul in Hebrew, and the other is the situation in Sodom and Gomorrah, S’dom v’Amora. Both of these stories are about a places with a pervasive culture of evil.

The Torah describes and portrays S’dom and Amora in a few places as beautiful, ungenerous, and violent. And also spiritually corrupt, which I take to mean that somehow their ideas and practices justify those other evils and perpetuate them. God presents Avraham with the idea that places like this have no hope and should be destroyed. (I will add here that theologically I don’t believe that this is actually how God operates – I treat this as a metaphor or a thought experiment.)

Avraham argues with God that there might be a group of people within the cities who are tzaddikim, which either means they are innocent of the corruption of their place, or that they are actually people of integrity.

Eventually Avraham and God seem to agree on two possibilities. If there are ten people who are tzaddikim, the cities should not be destroyed at all, and if there are fewer, the cities are doomed but those individuals should be able to leave or extricated.

It turns out that is not a group of ten tzaddikim. There is one family who seem to stand relatively apart, the household of Avraham’s nephew Lot, and maybe it’s only Lot himself. They aren’t admirable, particularly, but they are not the worst of the worst, not what we think of when we think of the pervasive evils of S’dom. They are rescued when the cities are destroyed.

Let me suggest a couple possible lessons from the story of S’dom and Amora, knowing that in later teachings in this series I will have other things to add from the Torah and the Talmudic tradition about this question of individual responsibility within a group guilty of terrible things.

One lesson is that an individual is obligated to leave a group that cannot be swayed away from its vileness, if it’s just one or two against everyone. If you stay past a certain point, then you are responsible even if you’re not one of the ringleaders or you don’t agree. Your presence starts to contribute in all kinds of ways anyway – each time you are silent it strengthens the others, for instance.

It's hard to leave -- Lot and his family hesitate, even when the divine messengers who want to pull them out explain that staying means they will not survive the coming fire and brimstone. But that’s the only way they have a chance to remain innocent and not complicit.

Another lesson comes from the counterfactual that Avraham and God articulate, the idea of ten tzaddikim. Jewish tradition links this with the minyan, a quorum of ten adults for communal prayer. Here in the Torah, it’s a group of ten who stand for the idea of a moral community, not just some individuals who are morally courageous.

Such a group creates an enclave where alternative ideas can be shared openly and fleshed out and lived on a small scale, which can show itself as an alternative to the culture of the larger group. Even a minority can stand up together and try to lead the majority in teshuvah, in reflection and a way back, as long as the small group shares a life together and strengthens each other. A single person or family like Noach or Lot can’t do this, nor can just a few people, and they can’t be expected to take responsibility for that.

Even though there was no such small group in S’dom and Amora, the tradition sees Avraham teaching that there could be and if there are ten people then if they don’t leave, they ought to be a deliberate counterculture. It is at least the first half of the Margaret Mead idea: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

Changing the world, in the context of something as extreme as S’dom, does not mean changing things completely. But when you are part of such a minyan, you now have the possibility of staying productively, and working on one important thing where the larger group has veered off.

S'dom and Amora, and the Flood, represent the extreme versions of a thought experiment about an evil society and the role of one tzaddik. I’ll come back in other installments with more specifics from the Talmud, about for instance how long a group like this ought to keep at it when the possibilities are better than they were for Lot and for Noach.

Avraham: Extraordinary Compassion and Justice in the Same Chapter

This is the draft of my D'var Torah for tomorrow, focusing on Genesis 18 within Parashat Vayera.

One afternoon when Avraham did not feel at all great, two things happened. First, he saw three strangers going along their way and he ran out to them to bring them home. Second, and right after, he had a major debate with the God about whether five cities should be destroyed.

I was saying a few weeks ago, when we started from the beginning of the Torah, that we often deal with the Torah one story at a time. So Sodom and Gomorrah is one thing. Welcoming the three travelers is another thing. Each one has a lesson perhaps. But the Torah also has a structure and a flow, and among others the Talmudic rabbis were always wondering about what they called hekesh or juxtaposition – why is this story right next to that one.

So why are these two stories right next to each other?

One is a story of extraordinary chesed, love or lovingkindness, in which Avraham and Sarah go to great lengths in every way to bring people into their home and take care of them. The other is a story about tzedek, about the nature of justice and its application, and it’s also extraordinary because in all other places where God and people debate about tzedek it’s between doing it and not, but here God and Avraham are debating about how it applies.

The people who divided up the Torah into chapters in the Middle Ages, both the Jews and the Christians, made these two stories a single chapter. Which happens to be Genesis chapter 18, and maybe it’s a coincidence but 18 in Hebrew is represented in letters by chai, which means life. Both stories are actually life and death stories, which I’ll talk about. Somehow this chai chapter is about the relationship between chesed and tzedek, compassion and justice, which is both an evergreen topic and also something particularly of the day.

So what’s extraordinary about the first story is hinted at in the second verse. Avraham lifted up his eyes and whoa, three men were standing over him, and he saw and he ran toward them from the opening of his tent and he bowed to the ground (18:2). If they were standing over him, what does it mean that he ran toward them, and that he bowed?

Avraham didn’t just want to do something for them. He felt that he should make the effort to go up to them, even though they were already next to him. He felt that he should not stand over them, as some kind of lord, or as a wealthy shepherd like himself might do over a scraggly wanderer – he wanted to look up to them, even though he was already sitting and they were standing.

The Torah describes what Sarah and Avraham did next in the language of maher, which means hurrying. They didn’t stop to find out anything about these people until they could offer them some refreshment of water and food and restoring their feet. Only when they were sitting would Avraham and Sarah and their people stand.

We find out quickly that these aren’t random travelers, and they have a chai message especially for Sarah and Avraham, a message that they will be welcoming a new life in the next year. But for the first verses Avraham and Sarah have no idea. They don’t have a people where they live, except the camp of followers they have put together. Their land does not lack in enemies. They live on the edge of the desert, which is a dangerous place, and who knows if these are maurauders. As we will soon see, Avraham and Sarah don’t live too far from S’dom and ‘Amorah, where the people are known to be generally vile – maybe these three people come from there.

So I don’t think it’s too much to think that Sarah and Avraham are taking some risk in running toward these travelers and bringing them into their home. At the very least, Sarah and Avraham are do good and ask questions later. As far as they are concerned, it’s the three men who are in danger, from thirst and hunger and bandits. It’s life and death for the three possibly, and at the very least they need something now. That’s the only thing that Avraham and Sarah process.

So there is no hesitation. This is extraordinary chesed.

Avraham escorts them from his home, because it’s dangerous to go out from settlement and there is desert in two directions. They and Avraham stop on the mountain ridge overlooking S’dom and ‘Amorah, and God engages him in conversation. The Torah says that God has an inner monologue: “Should I cover up from Avraham what I am doing? Avraham is surely going to become a large and powerful nation, through whom all the earth’s nations will be blessed” (18:17-18). And God continues to think that all of this is because God wants Avraham to charge and command his descendants in the ways of justice so that they can become great in these ways. So God then speaks to Avraham and says essentially: What is going on down in the valley in S’dom and ‘Amorah is so evil and I’m going to check it out to see if it’s as bad as it sounds. I’m sending my team to investigate. That’s all God says at first, and the messengers leave and now it’s just God and Avraham.

And without hesitation Avraham says: “So you will even sweep away the innocent with the guilty, or the righteous with the evil, tzaddik im rasha?” (18:23) Not, “Tell me more about what you meant by that” – Avraham cuts right to it, and then posits this situation of fifty tzaddikim, and winds it up by saying, “It would be profane for You to put to death tzaddik and rasha, and the tzaddik would be just like the rasha. Profane for you – the Judge of all the world will not do justice.”

And as you know from there, Avraham and God have this negotiation which ends with an agreement to save the cities if there are ten tzaddikim, which again might mean righteous people or just innocent people.

So what’s interesting to me is how this part of the chapter, the tzedek part, has Avraham doing different things than the chesed part. He talks here very differently about people, and his relationship to the people down in the valley is very different, even though what he is trying to do is the same which is to save their lives.

The chesed story is up close human contact. In the tzedek story, Avraham is far away from the people he’s talking about, whom he describes in terms of numbers and concepts, abstractions even.

In the first story Avraham is bowing down to people he doesn’t know and who may be a threat to him. He calls them “my lords.” He makes a presumption of good. In the second, Avraham is on a mountain ridge looking down on them. He calls them tzaddik and rasha, righteous and evil. He has no problem with the language of good and evil, toward people or toward God.

The midrashim say that the people of S’dom believed what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine to a punctilious extreme, punishing someone who took a short cut across their property just as severely as they would punish a thief.

They had no language for cooperation, only isolation that would surge into small-scale violence and occasionally a mob. Avraham does not volunteer to go up close and get to know them better, and he’s fine looking down on them from the hills.

At our Ritual Committee meeting this week, Larry Rubin brought us an interpretation of Avraham’s pointed words to God. It’s not necessarily an accusation that God isn’t intending to treat the people in the cities justly, but a statement that it’s not enough to apply principles of legal justice. “The Judge of the entire earth wouldn’t only do justice.” Sometimes you have to figure out how to mix the law with mercy, and just calling people guilty even when that’s true is not enough to tell you what to do. Mishpat is the law, but tzedek or mishpat tzedek is the integration of the law and a higher justice.

How could Avraham be such an extraordinary man of chesed and such an extraordinary man of tzedek, not just the same person but the same day? To see all people as potentially good and essential for him, and to see people honestly as good and evil? To be generous up close and to make difficult justice decisions from 10,000 feet?

So I don’t know for sure, or at least I can say I haven’t learned how. There are some extraordinary people like that and they are in our local civic community and our Jewish community.

And I love to contemplate such people, and try to become like them, and I love to contemplate Avraham even when he is so beyond who I am. It is inspiring to be in the light of any real person who is an amazing ba’alat chesed or ba’al chesed, and to be in the presence of someone who is an amazing ba’alat tzedek or ba’al tzedek. There is a reason we were put in this community of Beit Avraham v’Sarah and connected to those two souls.

And I want to leave just three other points, which are not easy but are important.

One is that this analysis of Avraham is to remind us that chesed and tzedek are different and require different actions and words and thoughts. Avraham with the travelers is not the same as Avraham looking at S’dom. A thousand points of light are incredibly important, but they do not necessarily make one big light. Justice does not happen, injustice is not pushed back only by individual and small group acts of generosity and caring, no matter how many.

Nor can the right laws and the right policies by themselves create a compassionate society.

So second, most of us can’t be both Avrahams. But among us we can do both. So if you are more the person of chesed, make sure also to do anything you can for the people of tzedek, whether that means contributing to their causes and organizations, sharing their wisdom, or giving them moral support by taking them out for coffee if it’s a local person, or an encouraging word. And vice versa, if you are focused on tzedek work make sure to give to and support the chesed work even if that’s not what you yourself are mostly doing.

And finally I want to come back to where I started, which is that on the day Avraham did these two extraordinary things, he was not feeling great. It was right after his bris, so he didn’t feel physically like himself, and also I think he was carrying the weightiness of the brit, the covenant that God had just reaffirmed to him. Part of being so committed to a certain world, and knowing you and your descendants would be charged with making big dreams real, is feeling the weight of that responsibility. So whatever pain you are feeling right now, about the country and the world, know that it is covenantal pain. Avraham found extraordinary chesed and tzedek in himself precisely when he was not feeling like himself. So can we. So will you.

Shabbat Shalom.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #3: Is Anger a Moral Emotion?

 

Emotions are a part of ethics. We can’t completely disconnect the principles we want to be guided by from the feelings we experience when someone is living up to those principles or violating them.

But does emotion help us act more ethically? I am recording this not long after the 2024 election, when anger has been a dominant tone both of President-Elect Trump’s campaign and of many people’s reaction to his victory.

Some might say that anger in particular gets in the way of the self-control we need to deliberate on decisions or choose a path of action. Too much anger of course does that.

I am connecting this topic to the parasha called Lech L’cha, the Torah reading which introduces us to Avraham, whose initial name is Avram. I’m struck by two sets of midrashim that suggest a backstory to Avraham, and fill in imaginatively what the Torah doesn’t tell us about the first seventy-five years of his life.

One midrash imagines Avram as a child. In the version in Bereshit Rabbah, his father Terach has a store where people buy figurines of the gods, and one day leaves young Avram in charge. One of the things Avram does when no one is watching to is to smash all the idols but one, and then place a bowl with a dish of flour in front of the largest one and a stick in its hand. When his father return and asks what happened, Avram says that a fight broke out among the idols over who would get the offering, and the big one smashed all of the other ones in order to take the offering. Terach brings Avram before the king, who eventually puts Avram in a fiery furnace from which he miraculously emerges.

Compare that midrash to what Rabbi Moses Maimonides teaches about young Avram. He imagines Avram as a boy who would observe the night sky and wonder about its patterns, who gradually on his own formulates the thought for himself of a single Mover of everything. He comes to believe that everyone around him is in error. But Avram pours his strength into his arguments with them, and smashes idols as a calculated teaching technique and to save people from worshipping them.

These two versions of Avram’s backstory have very different emotional tones. In Bereshit Rabbah, there is at the very least a climate of anger, in the stories told about the many gods and in the approach of the king to a dissenter. Maybe Avram’s smashing reflected that or maybe he absorbed that in his early life and had to leave in order to put it behind him.

In Maimonides’ version, the tone is contemplative. Smashing idols isn’t anger, but a controlled display for a teaching purpose. The people might respond to it viscerally, but Avram himself never loses his self-control.

So can anger be a moral emotion? I think both versions of Avram’s backstory tell us that anger can be part of a moral life. But anger is only morally significant when it is activated by a righteous cause, and even then there is a danger of the anger taking over. In the best case, anger helps us activate our energy for what is right. But the anger itself has to be modulated and converted into something else, particularly to leave room for our own deliberation and for gathering community around what is good. No good ideas and no concerted action for good can be built on anger alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then why was God not pleased?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Year of Jewish Ethics #2: Moral Psychology (and Good Enough?)

 

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This series of short teachings about Jewish ethics is mostly about the “what”, the principles of action. But that can’t be disentangled from moral psychology, which is the inner experience of trying to do the right thing. Torah discusses moral psychology as well as moral principles. As the year goes on we’ll see a lot how they are intertwined in specific situations where what Torah thinks is right depends on what Torah thinks is possible for a human to do.

The story of Noach is one of the places where the Talmudic rabbis talk about broad themes of moral psychology. The first verse of Parashat Noach, Genesis 6:9, says Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b’dorotav, which could be translated: Noach was a human, a righteous man, he was pure in his generations. In the Babylonian Talmud Rabbi Yochanan and his protege Resh Lakish pick up on that last phrase, pure in his generations. Rabbi Yochanan says: Sure, pure in his generations, but not so much if he was in any other generation. Resh Lakish says: If this is how he was in his own generations, how much the more so would he have been righteous in any other generation.

Each of them has something valuable to say here. According to Rabbi Yochanan there is a lot to be said for being the best against a pretty bad backdrop. We shouldn’t get carried away and say that Noach was the greatest tzaddik ever, but without him there would have been no one to save any aspect of the world.

Resh Lakish teaches that it takes a lot more just to be Noach than you think in a time when the climate is violent and corrupt. Sure, Noach didn’t turn people around in the end, but just holding his own and rescuing the ones he did in the ark took incredible moral courage.

Resh Lakish would know: He was a bandit when Rabbi Yochanan saw something in him, recruited him to leave his gang and become one of the Sages. There is a whole set of stories in the Talmud about how Resh Lakish struggled to overcome his past moral failures and worked to prove himself as someone with a moral and intellectual center, someone more than his charisma in his own eyes and in the eyes even of his teacher Rabbi Yochanan. (Some more about this relationship here and here.)

For us right now, there are two sets of things to think about. One is about the standard we hold ourselves and other people too – when do we demand absolute moral excellence, and when is it sufficient to act good enough for the situation or time we’re in? And what do we need to understand better about our own moral psychology, so we can prod ourselves or anyone else to act righteously enough?

Cookbook, Scrapbook, Big Story -- What Is the Torah?

This was my D'var Torah for Parashat Bereshit 5785 (October 26, 2025), the start of the new Torah reading cycle. Here's a short video that does some of this from a similar angle.

Some of the best cookbooks are mostly not recipes. Each dish is the occasion for a story – of someone special in the family who passed the recipe along, or of a culture where this originates, or a time the author traveled to the place the recipe is from. Those descriptions can themselves be luscious, and the stories and images make the tastes even more layered when you actually make the recipe.

Should we think of the Torah as the original great cookbook? If you skipped past the introductory pages, say into the middle of Leviticus, it would totally seem like that kind of cookbook.

Scrapbooking – that’s a practice which has come a long way from scissors and bad glue. Forget about digital, I’m talking about the craft of scrapbooking. The fine papers to write on or paste on, handmade or marbled; the perfect sleeves to slip things into. Which could be anything from pictures to favorite poems to family trees. All of which tell a story -- the growth of a person, a family, maybe even over generations, helping us know who we are.

Should we think of the Torah as the original fabulous scrapbook? It’s on such beautiful parchment, presented so artfully. It’s got all kinds of things in it, with the perfect cover to slip it into and out of.

I am trying to get you thinking from other angles about what kind of book the Torah is, or if it’s even a book at all, as we embark for something like the 1500th or 2000^th-plus time leafing it through it.

It’s interesting that we call the Torah a “book” pretty automatically. It does seem to be in a book, or in a scroll, and every part of it looks pretty much the same, like one book. And yet it’s unlike every other book, where someone asks you “What’s that book about” and you can answer in a couple sentences. That’s not what we do -- we’re so used to considering the Torah’s parts – each story, each law, often each word.

So forget for a minute what you know, and consider the cookbook quality and the scrapbook quality of the Torah.

The Torah has recipes, lots of recipes, and stories of meals. It has travelogues and family trees. Price lists and blueprints and property deeds. Jokes – some pure slapstick, some edgy enough to get you cancelled and not just today, maybe even back then. Yes, laws and stories, but so many kinds of stories, traversing the known world and the mythical world, up mountains and into deepest hottest valleys, adventures and long slogs, crises and amazing triumphs, wrenching dilemmas and world-changing turnarounds.

Is there any other kind of single book that is like this? How do you classify this, what kind of genre or thing even is the Torah?

We’ll just have to call it – a Torah. It’s more than stories and laws, or laws and stories, which is often how we divide it. Halacha and aggada. It’s in a class all by itself.

So we’re starting today another year of reading it and hearing it and seeing it and acting it – and tell me there’s another book group you’re in that does all of those things! And if by chance there is, tell me that it does all of those things with the same book year after year.

We can get much out of Torah by focusing on each week’s installment, or even on a single episode or verse or word. But it’s a good idea also to zoom out and think about the whole thing, to consider what the big story is of the cookbook, the scrapbook, the Torah.

Stories are everything, and the best stories create our lives and our world, just as surely as we make stories and tell them.

I was going to say, “I don’t have to tell you that stories are everything”, but I do have to tell you, and I have to reassure myself. Last year when we began to read the Torah, Parashat Bereshit a week after last Simchat Torah, I worried out loud right here that in a world of bombs Torah would turn out to be too small, and the next week I worried out loud that in the world of lies Torah might nothing more than a temporary hide-out for us away from the world.

But lies get their energy out of stories too, and bombs are usually justified with stories. Stories give life and take life, even if they don’t do so as directly. So it is urgent that we think about what story we are trying to be within, as we start to encounter the Torah this year. Let me tell you what a few might be.

First a story I don’t think we should go with. The cookbook theory of the Torah I didn’t get from left field. There is a version of the-Torah-is-a-cookbook that was for a while the dominant academic theory about how the Torah was first assembled, by the original keepers of the sacred recipes, the kohanim, the priests. The idea is that the recipes for the holy meals, the offerings, were put in the middle part of the Torah for a reason by the priestly editors.

They wanted us to believe that the sacred meals are everything, that they were vital to keeping us connected with the Divine, and the stories in the cookbook helped us to understand why and what would happen if we didn’t. The cookbook told us that the Temple was the center of everything, and that we should admire the kohanim as priests and judges. Because we needed them to keep balance and keep us from changing the one good thing that was helping us keep our home and keep ourselves alive, as a small people in a vast world.

That was never the only view of what story the Torah is telling. And I don’t think it’s a good one even if you substitute our rituals for our ancestors’ and rabbis for kohanim. We should still cherish the recipes and the family stories around them, but that’s not the kind of cookbook the Torah should be for us.

There is another scholarly historical view that the Torah took shape when we were in exile, and that it’s the story of a people who have always been beloved of God no matter what seems to be happening around us. After all, the Torah is a scrapbook of the scrappy, full of pictures of when the first-born gets his comeuppance and the unlikely child emerges. Even Pharaoh is humbled and we come forward.

And though the Torah scraps far too many travel receipts, exile after exile, starting from the Garden of Eden and through our Genesis ancestors, the real story is that we are never permanently far from where we ought to be as the Jewish people. When we are not home, we are for most of the story in the desert heading toward a promised land, and we are never really detached from our destiny, only delayed. The brochures for where we’re going, pasted into the scrapbook in Exodus and Numbers, just get better and better.

And there is another view that the Torah got edited along the way two or three times when we were strong in our land, either really strong or stronger than we had recently been. Twice it was prophets and maybe even some renegade priests, who put this scrapbook together. They lived a bit north of Jerusalem, close enough to have the inside scoop but far enough for some critical distance. They weren’t satisfied with resting on the laurels of priests or kings, the Temple or royal power as it was.

So they assembled for us a story with the Exodus as its backbone. In Genesis we learn that we are part of humanity, and all of humanity arrived as the image of the amazing Creator. We Jews were brought onto the stage as a unique part of humanity, not because we are a different sort of human but because the Divine needed a tikkun for humanity, a pilot project that would affect the whole. Even God can’t control everything about the whole world once these majestic humans are part of it, so there’s Pharaoh out there, and we got caught by him. And we had to fight our way out and pray our way out and then spend a long time learning how not to let Pharoah seep his way into us – his way of power and the idols he imagined were real and his easy slide toward oppressing.

We would be a people at home again, we would rebuild ourselves, we would be empowered -- but we’d continue to be watchful of ourselves. In better times to build our spiritual strengths, and not to sell out and cut corners by taking advantage of our weakest. In worse times, not to lash out at each other, not to find the only answer in physical power, but to find it also in the same spiritual strengths.

Which of these stories, or their variations, will be the one we need this year, as we page through our ancestral scrapbook? Pore over the specific tales and teachings and words. Savor all the tastes and the keepsakes, the adventures and the. But don’t forget to keep the thread of the big story, the one we need to make powerful in the world of bombs and lies. Let’s find that together, week after week.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #1: Speech

 

Last Shabbat I spoke among other things about the imperative this year in particular that Jews immerse ourselves in our own teachings about ethics. To be connected and grounded as we deal with issues in the American and Jewish worlds, we need to make Jewish ethics a core of our Jewish selves. To help, I'm going to try to generate a weekly teaching.

Welcome to the first in a series of short weekly teachings about Jewish ethics, jumping off from the parasha, the Torah portion.

The first chapter of the Torah is about the power of speech and the ethics of speech. God creates everything through speech. On the first day, God simply says y’hi or, let there be light, and light comes into existence. On other days, God speaks an intention to create something and immediately creates it. There is no gap between the speech, the intention, and the reality that comes into being.

Words are that powerful – they make or change reality. Nothing is more powerful than spoken words. And the ethical ideal is how God speaks in the first chapter of Bereshit (Genesis). There is no gap between what we mean, what we say, and the reality we create. That is what true and faithful speech is.

In the morning prayers, we say Baruch she-amar v’haya ha’olam – Blessed is the One who spoke and the universe came into existence. Baruch omer v’oseh – Blessed is the One who speaks-and-acts. Speaking and doing are for the Divine one thing.

It’s important that we have that introduction, because once human beings arrive speech gets complicated. We have the snake who uses speech to manipulate, Adam and Chava (Eve) who use speech to speak part of the truth, Kayin (Cain) who uses speech to deflect. God speaks questions, to draw people out. God has to confront the possible difference between the generous speech that creates and provides, and the implications of declaring that if the people eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil they will die. Ultimately, God decides to delay carrying that out.

Speech is the foundation of Jewish ethics. The power of speech and how we ought to speak. It’s foundational within families, as the Torah says about the first human family. And it’s foundational in our widest world, as the Torah says by making speech the pillar of creation and the social order. How do we speak knowing how our spoken words create the world? How do we speak so that there is no gap between what we say and what we create?

Herds, Hearts, and Hashgacha: A D'var Torah on Mattot-Masei

This is the current draft of my D'var Torah for Parashiyot Mattot-Masei, the end of the book of B'midbar (Numbers), specifically chapter 32.

The best two word opening to a story probably in the whole Bible is cattle -- lotsa! "Umikneh, rav." I would hold that up with “in the beginning” and “God tested.” The first word is cattle, probably we should say herds so you’re not only thinking cows, and the Masoretes who standardized the chanting and punctuation put a pause after "herds", umikneh and slowed down the word "lotsa", rav. These words come before we even hear who the people are in this particular story, perhaps to emphasize something about those people, who are the tribes of Gad and Reuven, joined by some or all of Menashe, which is that their self-definition has a lot to do with their herds. The Hebrew word for herds mikneh comes from the root kanah which means to acquire or own, and we might want to hypothesize that these are the extreme materialists among the Israelites.

They come before Moshe and Elazar, Moshe’s nephew the current Kohen Gadol, the high priest, and they say: This place we are right now, across the Jordan River from the land we are going into, is great for our herds, and we would like to have our tribes live here and not over there on the Israel side.

At this, Moshe seems to go kind of ballistic. He says that he cannot believe what they are asking. How could you not take part in what we’ve been waiting for, and fight with your fellow citizens. It’s the end of 40 years of wandering, and the whole reason they have been wandering for 40 years is because the people followed the words of the ten scouts who advised them that they should not be going into the land -- and now we’re almost there and you want to replay this again? How could you once again set an example that the rest of the people will want to follow? You don’t think maybe God won’t add more years of wandering?

It is tempting to say that this is a fundamental conflict of values between spiritual values and material values. Eretz Yisrael is a special place, Moshe knows, not because it’s the easiest place to herd or cultivate. And as he’ll say later, not on bread alone do people live. And here are the tribes of mikneh, of possessions and material. Of course Moshe is going to be upset.

But the Netziv of Volozhin spots a different kind of tension here. He notices that Moshe in his response to the B’nai Gad and the B’nai Reuven shifts the language from the herds to the heart, from mikneh to lev. The Netziv suggests that the people of Gad and Reuven and Menashe are expressing fearf, and it’s not a fear of war. They are afraid of “Hashgachat Hashem”, of Divine “hashgacha” in the Land of Israel.

Now you may know this word “hashgacha” from the world of kashrut -- hashgacha means supervision. You hear about a restaurant and want to know, what’s their hashgacha? A person who supervises is called mashgi’ach or mash’gicha.

But “hashgacha” has a broader meaning, which is being noticed by the Divine, individually and in all of our actions.

The materialism of the people of Gad and Reuven is a cover for a spiritual fear. They are afraid of living life as though every moment were worth noticing. As though every action, every intention, has a cosmic significance.

They are afraid that their lives don’t have that significance, that they aren’t worthy of being watched by the Divine and seen in that way. So they try to define themselves in terms of the external markers of a good life -- prosperity, which is good, and safe homes for their children. They use the language of mikneh to say we’ll be satisfied if we’re doing well in the aggregate, if we’re productive. We’ll give our tithes, just let us count what we do and calculate at the harvest, we’ll mark the year with everyone but if it’s okay just watch us from a bit of a distance, the rest of the tribes and God also.

This fear of hashgacha, that our hearts and our lives won’t stand up to being seen by the Divine -- I wonder if Moshe doesn’t see through that right away.

I wonder if Moshe didn’t make a show of accusing them of something, and getting hot and in their face. Because look what happens: Immediately they tribes come back and say: No, no! We’re not going to abandon the people. We will fight with them for the land, in fact we’re going to lead them into the land, and we will be the first to gear up, and only when we have secured this national mission will we go back and join our herds and our kids. Yes, they talk about the herds before the kids.

And I’m sure if you followed you noticed how Moshe goes over this twice, once in the positive -- are you saying you’re going to go and lead the people and.... and they repeat it. They say it in the positive and the negative -- if we go as fighters into the land, and with the rest of the people.... and if we don’t then we understand what it says about us, and the consequences of that. And Moshe brings them to Elazar the kohen, and repeats what they said, and has them say it again.

In Jewish law this has become known as the stipulation of the tribes of Gad and Re’uven, the t’nai bnai Gad uvnei Reuven -- which is when you make a pledge or an agreement in both the positive and the negative, which is a legal thing to make words airtight.

But I think what Moshe is doing is smoking them out, and causing the people of Gad and Reuven to declare that they are more than they realized. They are people of herds, yes, but also people of solidarity, and commitment, and passion, and energy, and people who can see a picture beyond their own neighborhood. Moshe gets them to say it and then he says it back to them. More than once. And in front of someone else.

Moshe is saying -- this is what hashgacha looks like. This is what it’s like to have someone look into your heart, into more of your actions than you might have chosen, into more of your intentions. It’s at first a bit of a shock to the system but I bet it feels good, to hear me say out loud what I am seeing of you that’s deeper, and to hear yourselves say it also.

This was a demonstration of what it is like, to live under Divine hashgacha, and hopefully you will embrace that.

I think Moshe was saying to them that their materialism was not superficial. These people may lead with mikneh rav, lotsa cattle, but the Divine is described in our Amidah in the same language, as koneh hakol -- everything is Divine possession, Divine material.

To the extent they are people of mikneh, it is a good thing -- through herds they will perpetuate the people and the land they graze, they will feed, they will tithe. It’s through material things that you experience not only surface joys but deeper ones, and as Michael Walzer has written there is a spirituality of milk and honey, of the seven species of grains, there is a material life that is infused with spirituality and in fact all spiritual life in Torah is through our bodies and our things. So be people of mikneh and hashgacha, don’t say it has to be that you’re either a superficial materialist or you have a spiritual life. Don’t see these as two opposed value systems when they are not.

As we finish up the book of B’midbar (Numbers), getting ready to be ever closer to the end of the Torah, so too we are getting ready to be closer to the new year. We all deserve to believe our lives are worthy of Hashgachat Hashem. That we lead lives and have hearts worth being seen in all their moments, and that it brings God joy to see all those moments. We all deserve someone like Moshe to shock us when we act more superficial than we really are. Someone to make it less scary to say what is deeper in us, our truths and our pains, and to say them back to us.

D'var Torah for Balak: Saying We Are Blessed

It's Friday and here is my current draft of a D'var Torah for Shabbat morning on Parashat Balak, Numbers 22:2-25:9:

In the parasha this week, an enemy of the Jews asks a man of powerful words to curse Israel. To say bad things about us in a way to bring us harm.

And it doesn’t work.

Balak, the king of Moav, fears that Yisrael is going to conquer his land, which is just across the Jordan River east of Eretz Yisrael -- but he has no actual justification for that fear. He doesn’t seem to know that the Divine regards his people as a kind of cousin-people to Yisrael, and even though they are presumably pagans and aren’t necessarily all that friendly, there is no reason why Yisrael and Moav can’t coexist. Which doesn’t prevent Balak from spreading this libel to others and from trying to enlist Bil’am, a sorcerer from the region who has the power of blessing and cursing, and in the Torah those are the kind of words that make things happen, sometime immediately.

It doesn’t work, and the Torah has a lot of fun with both Bil’am the sorcerer and Balak the king, making them look foolish and giving us some laughs at their expense. Bil’am has of course the talking donkey, who sees Divine messengers better than Bil’am does, and Balak looks ridiculous running Bil’am around to different places hoping if they find the right scenic overlook Bil’am will be motivated to issue the curse.

In the end not only does Bil’am not curse Yisrael, but in fact blesses us. I’m not sure we really needed Bil’am’s blessing, but Balak thinks it’s powerful and tells him basically to stop talking -- if you can’t say something bad about someone don’t say anything at all.

One of the remarkable things about this parasha is where it is in the Torah, in particular at this point in Sefer B’midbar (the book of Numbers). We have been reading about problem after problem. The past four weeks have been complaints about hunger, and thirst, and inadequate battle readiness, and unfair leadership, and plagues, and leaders at their wits’ end. A lot of people have died. This is the Torah speaking about us. This is Divine word and it’s not been terribly complimentary about us. Some years it’s fun to read those stories at arms’ length and really revel in how wise and the Torah is about group dynamics and political processes. This year not so much, it’s been very on the nose.

My point is that the Torah and Moshe himself say some pretty horrible things about our people, and they are frustrated words and include some pretty accurate criticisms, and in fact we are bogged down in the midbar (wilderness), not getting anywhere. And then the Torah switches it up. Just when you could think it would be the perfect time for outsiders to pile on and their curses would work at a time of our weakness and weariness -- the Torah says no: We are blessed. You can’t curse us. You can try. But no matter where you position yourself, you can’t curse us. You can want to, you can pay someone to, it just doesn’t work. This people is blessed.

And for a couple chapters it’s not even a struggle. Even a donkey can figure it out, can cut through the political dynamics and the money being spent and say -- don’t go that way. This people is blessed, and there is nothing you can do or say that will change that.

This year, people began trying to curse us since before the sun even set on October 7. I remember talking about this in the fall, it was Parashat Lech L’cha when the Torah first says to Avraham that he will be blessed and through his descendents all people will be blessed, and in my D’var Torah just three weeks after October 7 I was already talking about how we needed to hear those words, because so many people were saying the opposite, about Israelis and about Jews here. It felt so unrelenting already back then, and it has continued these past nine months.

So it’s important now to listen as the Torah says we are blessed, and this is not only the Divine point of view or our point of view but also an outside point of view -- if not an enemy leader, at least a powerful religious figure outside of our own.

It is Bil’am the foreign sorcerer who says: Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov mikenotecha Yisrael. How good: all the places you live, Yisrael, and the places you gather to pray, all the places where you draw in the Shechinah and where you find shalom with yourself or with family, and where you connect among yourselves.

Every time we walk in here the first thing we do is to sing the words of an outsider who blessed us. Who affirmed for us our sense of being blessed or our dream of being blessed.

Now I have to say it is not enough to be blessed from the outside, to have some relief from those trying to curse us, and it’s not enough even to hear words of Divine blessing. We need to bless ourselves and each other.

We have spent these nine-plus months reacting to the curses of others --  pushing back on them; our mood and sense of wellbeing defined by them. When we have heard a blessing we have felt better -- whether from the president of the United States, or seeing our symbol projected in light in Berlin!

We have been in a pattern dictated in this country by the attempted curses of other people, and in Israel profoundly shaped by that dynamic as well.

But being Jewish today means being able to say our own blessings about ourselves in our own words, from our own observations and convictions.

On Monday I participated in a siyyum, a completion of a one-day worldwide reading of the Tanakh, the whole Bible, which was organized by the Goldberg-Polins, the family of Hersh who is a Yerushalmi still captive in Gaza. His parents, Rachel and Jon, said that while they and other hostage families have been tirelessly speaking to the outside world, and lobbying their own Israeli leaders and powerful people around the world for the hostages’ release, they also decided it was important to spend a week flooding the world with Torah u’mitzvot.

So they organized this Torah study. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They had an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages with Leket Yisrael, and to post on one webpage acts of chesed people would be doing this week all over the world. There are at least 200 things pinned to that page, mitzvot of all kinds from taking the challah offering from bread to opening up one’s swimming pool to lots and lots of feeding to reaching out to call friends to cultivating patience to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel.

At the online siyyum, with about two hundred people, Jon and Rachel spoke about their faith, their conviction that Hersh and the others will come home and lead good lives, and they spoke those words toward him. They talked about how the Bible is showing them right now how to be resilient and hopeful. They talked about the importance of peace and safety for Jews and for all people.

This is how we are a blessing. It’s not a one-dimensional thing. It’s so much richer than the one word curses or the short phrase curses that the Balaks have been trying to get repeated over and over, from hill to mountain. And no one can say it quite like us. Bil’am says Ma tovu -- we say Hinei mah tov umah naim, shevet achim gam yachad: look how good and how more than just good, what we are all together.

And we don’t have to be perfect to bless ourselves nonetheless. The whole book of Numbers is still there, all the problems, and in fact immediately after the Bil’am-Balak story the Torah brings us back to ground level and more trouble with Israelite behavior. Rabbi David Kasher proposes that this was going on while Balak and Bil’am were watching from above. But still, says Rabbi Kasher, Bil’am proclaimed that we are blessed.

We are quite good at criticizing ourselves in real-time as Am Yisrael, and we don’t hide away the self-critical parts of the Torah either. But criticisms are not curses. As Rabbi Kasher says, they do not destroy our covenant or block Divine love for us, and they do not prevent Bil’am from noticing that we are blessed.

It would be great to have others stop trying to curse us. But mah tov, how good, if we would also bless ourselves and each other. Mah na’im, how delightful and how sweet we are, just here today on Shabbat. What are the good things you have to say about yourself as a Jew right now? What are the things you are proud of when you look out on your people, your community, your fellow Jews? Say it, and your heart becomes a mountain, and all of us will blessed.

Shabbat Shalom.

The Grape Cluster and the Two Who Carry It: A D'var Torah for Pride

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Pride Shabbat 5781/2021, for Parashat Sh'lach L'cha (Numbers 13:1-15:41).

I love this parasha about the scouts, the m’raglim, and the fact that the Torah is so brutally honest about how hard it is to go forward even to a land of milk and honey, even when the alternatives are to stay in a desert or to return to Mitzrayim (Egypt). I love the duality of feeling like giants vs. feeling like grasshoppers -- and as I’ll tell you in a bit, thanks to Pride Shabbat I love the big cluster of grapes, so large it takes two people to carry it.

When I look forward on Pride Shabbat, toward a promised land, I personally have to start by looking back, to a day I think of as “The Lunch of the Three Jonathans.”

It was right after a final exam during college, and I remember this lunch partly because we ate at one of the dining halls I almost never went to. I can’t remember if I ran into two other Jonathans by accident or if I had plans with one and the other showed up too.  These two other Jonathans were distinct and important in my life at that time.

Any one of us could have become rabbis, and we briefly talked about it that day because I thought I might and I really thought they should too, both of them. Of the three, Jonathan #1 -- I’ll call him just Jonathan -- he really was the one most suited at the time to become a rabbi. He had the widest vision; he had the widest ranging intellect of the three of us; he had integrity and fearlessness about being an activist; he had been an active youth group person in high school. I brought up the rabbi thing and Jonathan laughed, a certain look on his face that was trademark for him -- a combination of a silly grin and a knowing, “no-way” laugh. If it’s possible to be simultaneously loving and telling someone how stupid they sound for the thirtieth time, it was that kind of laugh.

Jonathan #2 at the table was me, the only one called Jon to the exclusion of Jonathan. Jonathan #3 was a star yeshiva student, sometimes called Jonathan and sometimes Jon, and he’s a whole other story.

I knew Jonathan wasn’t going to rabbinical school but it was fun to poke him about it periodically and I didn’t mind the look and the laugh. I thought I knew at the time why Jonathan wasn’t going to be a rabbi, because we were good friends and had talked about it. But it turns out, I didn’t know at all.

I didn’t know until another lunch three or four years later, in a different cafeteria, this one at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I was in rabbinical school, and Jonathan was on a panel of three people brought in to talk about what it had been like to grow up Jewish and gay.

I knew Jonathan was gay, but that was the first time I heard him speak about what it was like to have been a gay Jewish teen, in a liberal Jewish community in Boston in the 1980s. People in his youth group thought of Jonathan as the ultimate insider, a leader, he said -- and Jonathan told his story of being unseen, of the closet as the price he had to pay to belong. Other people, straight kids, could be draped on someone of the opposite sex in a friendly way as they hung out, but for him this kind of regular youth group behavior was a constant reminder of what he couldn’t share, and the very cameraderie that was so essential for other teens was alienating to him, and told him that there was no room for him within Judaism. We didn’t use words like “heteronormative” so much back then in the early ‘90s, not even the gay and lesbian speakers on the panel that day. But that’s what Jonathan was talking about.

Listening to Jonathan I was crushed on so many levels. Ashamed of ourselves as a Jewish community. Ashamed of the myself for the things I thought were tough for me when I was in USY. After hearing him talk that day at JTS, I couldn’t believe that Jonathan had ever set foot in Hillel.  He had so much Jewish and Israeli in him that just walking away was never an option -- that too would have denied him so much of himself. Jonathan came to the Seminary and said he appreciated that we students were listening to their stories, even though we couldn’t ever fix Judaism for him enough that it wouldn’t be painful. At least maybe we could do better for kids in the future.

I was crushed and ashamed that I had known Jonathan by then for at least five years, intense years, and considered him a good friend -- and I never knew any of this. What kind of a friend had I really been. What must have I communicated, out loud or in unspoken assumptions, that he wouldn’t think of me as someone he could share any of this with when we were in college.

I hold up these two lunches next to each other in my mind, the lunch of the three Jonathans in college and the lunch listening to Jonathan at JTS, because the second lunch was the first turning point for me when it came to think about Judaism and LGBTQ+. It was Jonathan’s gift to me and hopefully his gift through me. That was the first time I got that it wasn’t enough to be unfazed when someone came out, to treat it as no big deal, an interesting and important thing about someone just like other interesting and important things. That was the moment I realized that the Torah about LGBTQ+ lives ought not be confined to two verses in Leviticus. It’s because of Jonathan that I eventually became convinced about marriage equality -- later when his partner Peter was dying and I saw what was already one of the most beautiful love stories I had known become even more beautiful and heartbreaking. It took me quite a while even so to arrive where I got to about gay marriage right around the time I arrived here in New Hampshire.

I cannot stand here as an ally, or tell you that I use he/him/his pronouns, without acknowledging Jonathan, and the impact of his friendship and pain and integrity on me. It would not be truthful to say I always knew what the promised land looked like, that from the start I was like Kalev (Caleb) in our parasha and knew how to be a giant and not a grasshopper.

Jonathan might be horrified that I am talking about him to you only through a series of stories about Mitzrayim and the midbar, Egypt and the wilderness, and not getting on to talking about visions of the promised land. (I should say that Jonathan is someone I’ve also learned from about other things, such as affordable housing and Israel-Palestine.)  I really want to embrace the terrific formulation that the Tzedek crew created about this Shabbat, which I stole for my note yesterday. We are celebrating LGBTQ+ Jewish lives and we are celebrating what queer Jews have brought to Judaism, to Torah itself.  So let’s talk about that enormous cluster of grapes, so unexpected, so big and juicy it takes two people to carry.

A cluster like maybe you’re not sure what it is, and I can say about myself that I’m only just beginning to get a view of what might be called queer Torah, just in the past two or three years. And I have to say, I’m excited and challenged. Here are a few things I’ve begun to see, on my own scouting of the land we’re heading to.

Liz brought to my attention the Queer Niggun Project -- melodies composed and traditional prayers interpreted by LGBTQ+ Jewish creators. Last night I was so taken by the “Carousel Niggun” for L’cha Dodi, one of the big Shabbat love songs -- this version mashes up very traditional, yeshivish Hebrew pronunciation with both old and new idioms for the metaphor of God and Israel as lovers, married partners.

Or take Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Svara, which she calls a “traditionally radical yeshiva.” Her insight is that queer theory is actually the key to understanding the Talmud, because the Talmud was originally a project of marginal Jews who saw the world shaking before other Jews did, and these different-living, different-thinking sages were far more ready when the Temple was destroyed than any other Jews to pick up the pieces and make something strong and beautiful, which is the foundation of all of our Judaism today.

Rabbi Lappe says that a queer perspective is actually helpful and necessary for everyone, because the Talmudic rabbis were brilliant at tooling for a world exactly like that of the scouts in our parasha, who knew they would have to move into a new world about which so much was uncertain.  So at Svara you study in Aramaic, the rabbis’ own language, whether you’ve ever studied before or not, and sometimes their study events attract an aundience that is majority straight, because they find it’s the queer perspective that is illuminating. Once upon a time, this kind of thinking was the very definition of Conservative Judaism. I heard this same kind of perspective encoded musically in Itai Gal’s niggun from last night.

So this is my very new-for-me take on queer Torah. People like me, communities like ours, have tended to talk about LGBTQ+ Jews as people “we” quote-unquote need to “welcome”, to “include”, and to do that we have to let go of something we have had, some earlier definition or some certainty. But really, these queer teachers and creators are saying: What we have is this cluster of fruit, and we can carry it together. Yes, you could say it’s heavy, it’s unusual, I don’t know what to make of it. Or you could say it is nourishing and it’s sweet and it’s been missing. It’s been there rooted in the land the whole time, but until we went looking for it, hopefully together, you didn’t recognize it. You thought milk and honey was in the future, but the truth is the promised land is even richer.

When I think about us, this community in particular, I think about the two scouts holding that large dowel between them, carrying this new and large fruit. I can easily imagine that one of them, but only one, was Kalev, confident about the future and ready to live in it right away. The other was concerned or had questions, felt the weight of it more than the sweetness. But they carried it together. That’s a moment I treasure too in the parasha. That’s why we invited Mimi Lemay here. That moment is a hope for us, so that we don’t get stuck in the desert for 40 years. We don’t know exactly what the promised land is like when it comes to equality or what it means truly to celebrate LGBTQ+ Jewish lives all the time. What we can know, and what I do know, is like this in the Torah’s words: tova ha-aretz m’od m’od. The land of our Pride is a good land; it is very, very good.