This year I updated my usual re-post about Moshe and Yeshayahu, your "two personal spiritual assistants", and published it at the Times of Israel:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/your-two-personal-spiritual-assistants-toward-the-new-year/
This year I updated my usual re-post about Moshe and Yeshayahu, your "two personal spiritual assistants", and published it at the Times of Israel:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/your-two-personal-spiritual-assistants-toward-the-new-year/
Posted at 10:39 AM in Calendar, Coronavirus, Current Affairs, Devarim, Elul, Foregiveness, High Holidays, Holidays, Patience, Rosh Hashanah, Soul, Spirituality, Teshuvah, Theology, Torah, Yom Kippur | Permalink | Comments (0)
Post 1 today after George Floyd's killing. This one isn't the main point. More to come.
I was thinking about the president’s posing with a Bible last night after his speech, as I said my brief morning prayers while wearing tefillin. Tefillin are leather boxes with little scrolls from the Torah inside them, attached to leather straps that wrap around your nondominant arm and around your head in a literal implementation of Deuteronomy 6:8. Trying to get the words into your arm and into your head, by spiritual osmosis. When you take off the tefillin, they leave an imprint on your arm for a while, like when you sleep on the wrinkle of a sheet and then look in the mirror (also your hair, I’m not putting that in a photo).
I don’t keep my tefillin on for very long each morning, not nearly as long as those who say a full service. And this was one of the hardest practices for me to take on for a variety of reasons. I wear the tefillin that belonged once to my great-grandfather and that I got refurbished in the Old City of Jerusalem. I have my tefillin on long enough for me to say the Shma (passage from Deuteronomy 6) about the oneness of the divine, love of God through heart and soul and action, and seeing Torah as new every day, the language I should use to speak, and the lens for “sitting in my house and going on my ways.” Then I say a brief part of a prayer that evokes the Exodus, the part that recalls the divine as one who lifts the lowly and humbles the arrogant and redeems those who call out, and that quotes the song of the first moments of redemption and freedom from Exodus 15.
And even so, with the imprint of all this on my body, it is hard during the rest of the day to be and to appear like someone who was wrapped in the Bible. It’s required in my tradition every day, with the exception of Shabbat and festivals when we hope the very air is so Torah-filled that we don’t need the extra help. It doesn't really "work" just once in a while.
So how dare anyone make a show of holding the Bible at arm’s length, standing on the *outside* of a house of worship he has demanded that people be allowed to enter inside as a national priority. Show me that something has made an imprint on your arm, at the very least. Then I will believe it has anything to do with your actions. Then I will believe you are, in your words, "pay[ing] my respects to a very, very special place."
Posted at 10:29 AM in Community Relations, Current Affairs, Interfaith Dialogue, Jewish Education, Justice, Leadership, Prayer, Rabbi, Spirituality, Tefillin, Theology, Torah, Tzedek, USA | Permalink | Comments (0)
I just finished these thoughts. They are a combination of commentaries, reflection pieces, discussion prompts related to the Seder text, the Pesach Haggadah. You could read them before or after a Seder, or even during. Wishing everyone a good festival and a Zissen (sweet) Pesach.
https://images.shulcloud.com/544/uploads/Pesach/sederthoughts5780.pdf
Posted at 06:51 PM in Calendar, Coronavirus, Current Affairs, Freedom, Health Care, History, Holidays, Holocaust, Jewish Education, Justice, Pesach, Spirituality, Study, Talmud, Theology, Tikkun Olam, Torah, Tzedakah, Tzedek, USA | Permalink | Comments (0)
This is a version of the D'var Torah I gave on Saturday, April 4, 2020, Shabbat Hagadol 5780.
According to the Passover Haggadah:
“The Torah speaks of four children. One is wise, one is wicked, one is simple, and one does not know to ask. Echad chacham, v’echad rasha, v’echad tam, v’echad she-aino yod’ea lish’ol.”
I have been thinking about these four children as responses to COVID-19. The smart responses and the evil ones, the simplistic and the – what -- oblivious or simply dumbstruck. I think each of these children has two sides, a side that needs support and encouragement and a side that needs teaching and guidance.
The wise one asks: What are the specifics about this disease? What do we know about how it spreads? What steps have been effective in different countries or regions? What do the models say? Who are the chachamim, the experts and Sages, to whom we should be listening?
In the Seder, the wise child asks: Mah ha-eydot v’hachukim v’hamishpatim asher tsiva Adonai etchem? “What are the testimonies, the rules that you don’t ask questions about, and the rules whose reasoning is important, that Adonai has commanded?” What is based on well-attested research, what are the things we don’t have time to debate but simply all have to do, what are rules that will work better if we take the time to understand them?
That’s the chacham of today, and the more of this we have the better we will all be. We need to encourage more people to be both well-informed and trusting of the scientific policymakers and the officials who are listening to them.
The Haggadah says that you should give the chacham detailed answers, of the specifics of the laws of Passover. So too today, the chacham needs ways to be practical – things to know and to teach others, concrete ways of giving tzedakah and doing for people who are vulnerable in all the ways that people are at risk now.
Of course, it’s also hard to be chacham right now. The chacham is the one who knows more than most what there is to be frightened of, who has the burden of seeing the danger in a trip to the store or a walk in the park. Who worries about people who have no option of staying home to work safely, who has no one to go shopping for them. These aren’t reasons to avoid being the chacham. But the chacham needs support – so as not to become overwhelmed or burn out. So as not to become so worried or sad that it’s impossible to smile or laugh or share a good moment with someone.
The wicked one asks: What is the burden that you have all taken on? In most years at the Seder, we often call this rasha not wicked but rebellious, in a sort-of good way, and we have more understanding than the rabbis of old seemed to. We say it’s just a phase, or it’s a teenager, or there is value in critical thinking, and maybe we even admire the rasha for not going along with the crowd.
But today we can say that there are wicked people, and we see them all over. They are standing too close to other people in the supermarket. They are coughing without covering. Online they are suggesting that only older people will die and we shouldn’t all have to lose our jobs because of that. Or that this is all a hoax or a liberal conspiracy.
And the Haggadah’s answer to the rasha is no answer today – fling it in his teeth, fine, if that’s your position you will not be redeemed. That’s not going to work now. The hazard of their wickedness isn’t just to them but to the rest of us through them.
So we are in the position of what Judaism calls the mitzvah of tochacha, confronting and trying to correct someone’s behavior. Which means taking a stand in public and telling strangers to step back or get out of here, as evenly but firmly as we can.
And to anyone who expresses views that can make this all worse, we have respond calmly also – in the way we repeat the new mantras of safety, by combating the bad reads with good ones that aren’t angry or ideological but sensible and factual.
I think too that today’s rasha needs understanding. There may be terrible fear at the heart of this: a fear of confronting what is really happening, or of having one’s worldview suddenly challenged or possibly irrelevant to the day. The rasha needs comforting.
And the online rasha who says it’s really not that serious a disease has long ago become deeply mistrustful of knowledge and of political authority.
Now is a time for us to show that knowledge works. People who value knowledge are creative and faithful and tireless and compassionate. Now is a time for us to key in on figures in authority who are relentless about human life; who show what it means to take responsibility and be advised by those who know more; who admit error and move on because they are committed to the people who chose them. We have to notice all these people now, and talk about them to people we know who are stuck in rasha mode.
The simple one says: What is this? This tam is the one who doesn’t keep close tabs on the news; who isn’t intentionally going out unnecessarily or willfully misbehaving but is making do with a minimum of information and precautions while out.
Or maybe the tam is the one of few words. Cooped up in the house with everyone, this is the one who doesn’t really want to fill the time together with talk, or doesn’t want to talk about feelings or worries.
And the Haggadah says: Open up to this one: “With a strong hand did Adonai bring us out of Mitzrayim.” Don’t overwhelm with more than they want to talk about. Start with the big picture: We are in a tough time and we are fortunate that there are strong powers out there doing their best to keep us safe and guide us through. And I will be here for you, to answer whatever question you have, about what’s going on or about what this is like. To talk to you when you do want to talk.
There is one who does not know what to ask or how to ask – she-aino yode’a lish’ol. The Hebrew could mean: One who does not know how to ask anything at all, or one who doesn’t know that it’s okay just to have questions, or one who doesn’t know which of the many questions would be appropriate to ask at this moment.
I think about our actual children, who will have this interlude in their formative years that will shape them, or who are aware enough that this time will be something shadowing their adult lives. They must be so full of questions, and it’s hard to have answers we don’t know what the next few days are going to be like.
And I think of the teaching of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, who taught that the one who doesn’t know how to ask is the most profound of the four children: For who even knows what questions are worth asking?
What do we ask at a time like this? Sure, there’s a too-familiar script of questions from catastrophes past: Why is this happening, why did this person die, why did I get sick or why did I not, what kind of God is this?
Now on top of that: What will it be like to hug someone again, to be with a boyfriend or girlfriend, to put out a bowl of potato chips at a party? How do you talk if the only options are to be focused through a phone or screen, or not to talk at all? We used to sit around in a room, talk for bit, wander and in out, talk a bit and stop and talk again. If we spend two months seeing people only on screens except for those in our house plus the quickly cashier at the supermarket, what will be the impact on our friendships? On society?
What will be the effect of this big unplanned experiment in distance and togetherness? Will we find ways to be more close and more responsible for people we don’t usually see, but who are tied to us, who affect us, who feed and care for us? What will we discover that we cherish about our face-to-face, local communities?
You can go crazy thinking of questions. I am, a bit. Or you can be fascinated by them. I am, actually, a lot.
It’s appropriate to take time not to ask anything, just to deal with what is in front of you. It’s okay to be overwhelmed by so many questions that you just can’t ask anything.
It’s also important that we move from not-asking, or not-being able to ask, or knowing what to ask first.
The Haggadah says: When you don’t know what question to ask or answer, tell the story, and say: “This is something that Adonai did for me when I went out of Mitzrayim.” We’re going to have stories to tell. Don’t forget to put yourself at the center. How it affects you. How you are acting. Your part of the story matters no matter what. You are the person who deserves to be taken care of while we are in this Mitzrayim, and you are the person who deserves to be brought out from this Mitzrayim.
We are all children now, in the midst of a society of children who are wise and wicked, simple and overwhelmed. We will do our best to understand this story while we are in it, and to teach each child of any age according to the need they have right now. So that as many of us can come out as possible, as we once came out Mitzrayim.
May you all be well, Shabbat Shalom, and even in these times a Zissen (sweet) Pesach.
Posted at 10:10 PM in Calendar, Coronavirus, Current Affairs, Ethics, Freedom, Health Care, Holidays, Jewish Education, Justice, Leadership, Pesach, Spirituality, Study, Theology, Tikkun Olam, Torah, Tzedek, USA | Permalink | Comments (0)
Again, I'm behind in my post though not my studies...
The second chapter of the Talmud begins with a discussion of the concept of kavvanah, which means "intention." The specific issue is whether one can fulfill the mitzvah of reciting the Sh'ma by mechanically vocalizing the sounds, or whether kavvanah is required. The Talmud begins by positing: yes.
There is an entertaining part of the discussion, in which an example is suggested: A person is proofreading a Torah scroll at the time when one is supposed to recite the morning Sh'ma, and happens to be proofreading Deuteronomy chapter 6. Does this count? You know you're reading these words, you know it's the Torah -- but you have the purpose of proofreading, not the purpose of affirming the oneness or uniqueness of God.
More to the point, the rabbis discuss the meaning of the word "Sh'ma" itself -- does it mean the physical act of hearing, or the concept of hearing and receiving, i.e. understanding. So there is a debate about whether the essential thing is to say the Sh'ma audibly to one's own ears, or in a language that one understands whether or not it's Hebrew.
What distills from the exploration is that kavvanah could have four possible meanings:
#2 and #3 are usually the debate within traditional Judaism, about how deep kavvanah has to go -- but at least an awareness of the mitzvah/command dimension is needed. In my next post I'll go into #4, which I was surprised to find in the Talmud -- kavvanah possibly detached from the mitzvah act.
Posted at 05:23 PM in Bavli Berachot, Books, Calendar, Daf Yomi, Jewish Education, Midrash, Prayer, Study, Talmud, Theology | Permalink | Comments (0)
I am almost up-to-date in my studies, but a bit behind in posting reflections. The first chapter of Massechet Berachot ends with a discussion of two kinds of things that are linked despite being experienced or named differently. One is the series of persecutions and exiles of the Jews. The other is the names of biblical figures.
The Talmud discusses the issue that new experiences of persecution might drive older ones from Jewish memory or salience -- the exile to Babylonia might replace the slavery in Egypt as the focal point of memory, mourning, or even inspiration. There is a sense in the text that we have to integrate all of them, possibly into the original Exodus consciousness.
The rabbis look for insight into that by noticing that some of the renamed people in the Torah have their names permanently changed, but some like Yaakov/Yisrael seem to keep both names. Even for someone like Avraham, the name Avram is remembered later, which the Talmud says is to remind us of the moments that occasioned the spiritual transformation that made him into Avraham and Sarai into Sarah.
I wonder if this is meant to be the final comment on the Sh'ma itself, the foundation of the whole chapter -- oneness of the divine. Transformations in the world, transformations of us spiritually, historical progress and setback and backsliding, personal progress and backsliding -- these all have to be integrated. When we recite Sh'ma, it's to remind us to bring all of these things together, or to guard against burying some of them or forgetting. Or it's just to remind us of the mystery that someone all of these are one in the mystery of the workings of divine energy in our human universe.
A reflection on myself the Talmud student, after a chapter: When I began, I would have said and still say that I'm not really a Talmud person. For years I hardly cracked a volume, and only recently have I found myself doing so more often. I'd have assumed that I had learned maybe 1 percent of the Talmud ever. Now I realize that before I started this, I probably already had, I don't know, 3 percent, which isn't a lot but almost 1/30th!
And I also realized that even though I hadn't studied this chapter in sequence as a single chapter, a lot of it was familiar. It was thrilling to see things in their original composition and order, and to share knowing virtual glances with other people doing the same. I actually didn't have to rely nearly as much as I thought on translations, and the basic argumentation structure was fairly familiar to me. I know when we get into other technical areas beyond theology and prayer I'll need the study aids much more.
My goal right now is just to know what's where. I'm not a great memorizer -- but so far, I could probably without much effort rattle off a lot about what's in the first chapter of Berachot. We'll see if it sticks. But if it does, it's because of the genius of the rabbis and editors, and the community who are subtly learning in sync.
Posted at 10:19 AM in Antisemitism, Bavli Berachot, Books, Calendar, Daf Yomi, Jewish Education, Prayer, Study, Talmud, Theology, Torah | Permalink | Comments (0)
Go to my post from a couple years ago, with links to the text and to a later reading of the letter from King himself. Simply the most important teaching about what it means to be religious that I think I have ever read:
https://www.rabbijon.net/rabbijon/2018/01/mlks-letter-from-birmingham-jail.html
Posted at 10:07 AM in Calendar, Community Relations, Current Affairs, Ethics, Freedom, History, Inclusion, Interfaith Dialogue, Justice, Leadership, MLK Day, Peace, Prayer, Spirituality, Theology, Tikkun Olam, Torah, Tzedek, USA | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'm not necessarily going to have something to write about every daf (page), but here is something from a couple days ago.
Daf 7 opens with a discussion of God's own prayer. The Talmud says that God prays that God's own mercy will overcome God's anger. It's a fascinating depiction of God -- as a being who prays and who needs to pray, who needs to summon will to direct God's own energies. Who would have thought?
I don't find it useful at all to think of God literally the way the Talmud describes. Instead, I take this teaching to be talking about a spiritual experience a person might have. The divine is describe here as not static, but with energies that are expressed differently in response to human actions. A person might experience affirmation or support, or judgment or suffering, as energies of God and not only as personal, internal emotions. These basic experiences of approval or judgment can be experienced as aspects of divine energy. Indeed, to believe that the divine is "one" means that all of these must be rooted in the same divinity.
The Talmud reminds us that what the Torah calls God's anger is a response to wrongdoing; it's not gratuitous or random. I'd say then that the Talmud is describing the anger of our conscience or our spiritual aspect when we recognize or are helped (forced?) to recognize when we have done something that is very wrong.
But the prayer of God is that this emotion or experience not be the end of the matter. The Talmud says here that divine anger is very short. Infinitesimal in time from the divine point of view. The prayer attributed here to God is that when we experience divine judgment, we move quickly from that, toward an equally dramatic perception of divine energy helping us toward righting ourselves, toward teshuvah.
Posted at 04:15 PM in Bavli Berachot, Books, Calendar, Daf Yomi, Prayer, Spirituality, Talmud, Theology | Permalink | Comments (0)
I have to say that I have a bias in my own Talmud study toward passages that seem to be structured a certain way. That seem quilted, where you can make out some kind of logic to the patterning. This page does not have that. It's a skip from one topic to another.
There is a section about demons, and the desire to perceive them (or not!) -- there are certain magical-ish things you can do to see the footprints of them. The rabbis caution against this, because the perception of demons can cause spiritual harm or physical harm. They do posit that demons outnumber humans by a large margin and we are constantly bumping into them.
So all I've really got is the passage that opens and closes the page. The opening teaching, continued from the last page, is about a person who enters the place of prayer with another person. If you cut that person off, your prayer goes awry. At the end of the page, the situation is that you encounter a person who you know makes a real effort to ask about your welfare -- you ought to try hard to ask that person first, and not take their interest in you for granted.
Posted at 08:32 PM in Bavli Berachot, Books, Calendar, Daf Yomi, Jewish Education, Prayer, Spirituality, Study, Talmud, Theology | Permalink | Comments (0)
Today I did my skimming while I was listening, at a meeting, to a presentation about "adverse childhood experiences" and their impact on mental and physical well-being throughout life. It was an interesting backdrop to what most of today's page, Berachot 5a-b, are about, which is: suffering.
The Talmud starts with a fairly traditional theology -- which I reject -- of suffering as punishment. It then moves to the different, but still difficult concept, of "sufferings of love" or yissurin shel ahavah. This is the idea that God brings suffering to those God loves, as a way of.... I'm not positive, haven't done enough theological reading in the area, to know if there's an original sense of the purpose of this kind of suffering. The Talmud seems to suggest that suffering not from punishment can teach; that suffering is a way of proving one's spiritual heights; that suffering is the necessary pathway for the most important spiritual gifts, including the Torah itself.
I can understand that the rabbis, living for centuries already under foreign domination of one or other imperium, might decide that the condition of national suffering must be some kind of sign of a special relation to God that is beyond the material and political. But especially sitting where I was while reading today, I could not find a way to make this concept of "sufferings of love" make sense. Some of us were talking about the randomness of suffering, the fact that people living similar lives in similar situations, whether of privilege or "adverse childhood experiences", suffer or develop resilience and joy.
Anyway, all of that is obvious. Sorry not to be adding anything.
What is interesting to me in the Talmud, though, are stories that follow the argumentation about categories of suffering. I heard a talk by Prof. Judith Hauptman, my Talmud professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in which she noticed that in many places, when the Talmud follows an analysis with a story, the story often nuances or complicated or just contradicts the teaching.
So here, there are some interesting stories of rabbis who fall ill, and are visited by colleagues or teachers. In each vignette, the visitor asks "Is your suffering beloved to you?" and the answer is, "Neither the sufferings nor their rewards." Then the visitor offers a hand and the lifts up, perhaps heals, the one who is ill.
Again, there's an obvious thing -- touch and presence over theology, when someone is suffering in front of you. Don't be like the friends of Job. I like that the Talmud allows rabbis to contradict their own teachings in the face of real experience, even their own. I don't know if the Talmud is setting up its theologies to be debunked, or passing along the range of tools so we will do that if we see fit.
Posted at 09:42 PM in Bavli Berachot, Books, Current Affairs, Daf Yomi, Prayer, Spirituality, Study, Talmud, Theology | Permalink | Comments (0)