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A Lot of Tov! Podcasts to Share

I've gotten so behind on posting each new Tov! podcast here!

So here's a way to find all the ones you haven't heard yet. The most recent one features two college students, Sadie Meltzer and Lela Spira-Savett!

 

A Year of Jewish Ethics #14: Labor Justice, Part 1

The Jewish perspective on the responsibilities of employers reflects the story of our oppression in Egypt, shi’ibud mitzrayim. That oppression began as forced labor, and when the Torah teaches about wage workers, it often uses the same words that it uses to describe slavery. Jewish law recognizes the inherent dynamic between the one who pays and the one who waits to be paid, the power of the employer and the vulnerability of the employee. So the Torah not only demands a fair wage but emphasizes this particularly for those who most need the income. Employees hired for a day of work must be paid on that day, and their wages may not be held even just until the next morning. This law so that workers not experience even a night of exploitation, and also so that employers not experience a night like Pharoah, the who took our labor for nothing.

The treatment of workers goes beyond the money relationship. One midrash explores the Hebrew word perech or b’farech, which shows up both in the Egypt story and in the later Torah laws and is usually translated as “ruthlessness.” The midrash relates the word perech to the two words peh rach, which means “soft mouth” or “soft speech, gentle speech.” It imagines Pharaoh first inviting our ancestors to join him to work together on his building projects, even making bricks himself. Thinking this was a gesture of comradery, they came to build alongside him and worked with gusto as a strong and mighty and devoted people would. But when night fell, Pharaoh left them with overseers who were instructed to implement strict quotas on their production. The pose of solidarity and graciousness in the midrash is an injury on top of the material exploitation. So employers are charged to be careful how they speak and how they related to workers, not to mislead about intentions or insinuate promises or offers or relationships they do not intend to honor.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, one of our foremost teachers about Jewish labor law, reminds us of the Torah’s teaching that all of us are in fact servants – servants of the Divine (for instance Leviticus 25:42). She quotes the frequent Talmudic elaboration that we are not servants to other servants – v’lo avadim la’avadim.

That’s true regardless of economic status. So, many Jewish teachings emphasize that a laborer should never made even to appear lower status or slave-like. That applies to the nature of the work, the conditions, and the way employers and supervisors speak with employees.

Shabbat is of course the ultimate Jewish teaching about labor. The Torah teaches that no matter who we work for, we deserve to rest, and anyone who works for us is entitled to the same rest as we are. This is a matter of justice, again recalling the unceasing work imposed on us as slaves in Egypt. And we recognize that even the Divine is pictured as needing to stop working after creating the universe. We are not to become slaves to our work, even to worthwhile work as God’s surely was and is.

Work itself, whether self-directed or in someone else’s employ, is considered by the Torah to be a way we imitate God. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that the Torah’s command about Shabbat begins “six days shall you work” (Exodus 20:9, for instance) -– we are to be creators as the Divine is a creator. In treating our employees well, we are recognizing and honoring someone who through their labor for us is reflecting the Divine.

For a much deeper dive, see Rabbi Jill Jacobs' responsum, "Work, workers and the Jewish owner."

A Year of Jewish Ethics #13: Lost and Found

It is a mitzvah to return a lost object to its owner. That might seem like a fairly obvious thing to do, but what’s not so obvious is why Jewish law considers returning things to be such a major mitzvah. There are eight chapters devoted entirely to lost and found in the Mishneh Torah, the comprehensive code of Jewish law by the philosopher and Rabbi Moses Maimonides.

To start with the basics, the name for this mitzvah is hashavat aveidah. Hashavat means “returning of”, from the same word as teshuvah, changing ourselves by returning, and aveidah is something lost.

The first thing you’re supposed to do when you find an item is to figure out whether it has signs that it belongs to someone else or rather the kind of thing that is easily disregarded even by someone who might have owned it. This section of the laws is fairly common sense. Look for a name or some kind of identifier, obviously. But also it makes a difference if the item has indications that it was made or assembled by someone, even if you can’t tell who at first glance. The Mishnah gives the examples of a pouch of coins, or a stack of three coins, or a loaf of bread with coins inside it, or a loaf of bread with a distinctive shape different from the typical loaf sold in the market. These look like things someone cared about, put together with intention.

If an object looks like it might belong to someone, Jewish law says to hold onto it and make a public announcement. Anyone who claims the lost item would have to tell its identifying marks; otherwise you are not obligated to give it to the person.

And here’s where the mitzvah goes beyond the obvious. There is one view in the Mishnah that you have to wait for a cycle of the three annual pilgrimage festivals to be completed before giving up finding the owner. There is a tradition that in the Second Temple in Jerusalem there was actually a lost and found, known as the Claimer’s Stone, Even To’en, where people would announce lost objects and come to look for them on the festivals. After a time, if the owner doesn’t materialize, then the owner is considered to have given up hope of finding their lost object, and the finder can keep it.

Before that time is up, the person with a lost object is obligated to take care of it. If it’s a scroll, the Mishnah says, it should be unrolled and read from each month. There are responsibilities for another person’s lost animals – the finder has to take care of them. That’s how the Torah introduces this mitzvah, by talking about animals that have wandered off (Deuteronomy 22:1-3). As you can imagine, this is itself a complicated area of Hashavat Aveidah, because there are costs that go with taking care of an animal.

Where does the spiritual force behind Hashavat Aveidah come from? One is the general Jewish concept that possession does not come with unlimited rights. Possession as often comes with obligations and limits. It’s always a covenant between us and God, and that’s even when I do own outright the thing in my possession. We are in some sense always borrowers from the Divine, even when we are not holding onto someone else’s lost item.

But we can also zero in on the two words that label this mitzvah: Hashavat Aveidah Hashavat , the returning-of, comes from the root shuv, which means to go back or return both literally and spiritually. I’ve already taught in this series about teshuvah -- going back as the central spiritual practice of reviewing our deeds, going over them, and if we did wrong and find ourselves returning to a similar situation then choosing a different action.

Lost objects remind us of our own misplaced souls, which we are always seeking and which we depend on others to bring us back to.  Lost objects remind us that the world is full of good things that aren’t always where they belong. Ideas and ideals and purposes, when they are not actively being made real it’s not because they don’t exist, but just because they have wandered off, become detached from the people they belong to.

In the Torah the first avediah, the original lost item, is the Jewish people. We were lost in Egypt, away from our domain, the place where we did our essential work and were nourished. The Divine found us, cared for us in the wilderness while we were still lost, and returned us. Lost and found is the foundation of our story. The whole Exodus story is Hashavat Aveidah.  So every time we stop and notice a lost object, and try to return it, we are trying to imitate the Divine.

For a deeper dive into the spiritual significance of Hashavat Aveidah, and its relationship to teshuvah, click here to read or here to listen.

Yasher Koach

Here is the draft of my D'var Torah for tomorrow, when we read Parashat Ki Tisa and the story of the Golden Calf.

When someone has an honor to the Torah, we say to them: Yasher koach. This is a Yiddish-y inflection for yishar kochacha. Koach is strength and there are two views of what yishar kochacha means. Yishar kochacha or yishar kochaych, addressing a male or a female. It might mean “May your strength be straight.” From Yashar, which means straight in an ethical sense and also a geographical sense. If you ask directions in Israel, the most likely response is Yashar Yashar, sometimes Yashar Yashar ad hasof which means go straight until you can’t go straight anymore.

Or this might be from an Aramaic root that also means strength – “May your strength continue to be strong.” There’s also a debate about the vowels, whether it’s yishar kochacha or y’yasher koachacha, meaning “May the Divine make your strength straight.”

The custom is to say to someone yishar kochacha, yishar kochaych, and the person replies Baruch tih’yeh, may you be blessed, or brucha tih’yi. A person who has been close to the Torah has a strength, which hopefully can bestow a blessing. That in the same family as kissing the Torah.

Yasher koach is the Ashkenazi form of the custom, and the Sefardi form is Chazak u'varuch, "be strong and blessed", or Chazak ve-ematz, "be strong and courageous," and I like to reply in the Sefardi form gam Baruch tih’yeh, "Also may you be blessed." If you haven’t watched the comedian Modi talk about the difference between Sefardim and Ashkenazim on yasher koach vs. chazak ve-ematz, here it is on YouTube.

That’s the custom, but where does yasher koach come from?

You’ll never believe. The earliest reference to this phrase is in the Talmud Bavli (Shabbat 87a), where Resh Lakish said when Moshe smashed the tablets, the luchot habrit, God said: yasher koach. Which in Talmudic context clearly means, “Attaboy.” Well played, good job.” 

Resh Lakish notices something in the words but obviously it’s going to be more than the words. When God tells Moshe to make two new luchot, God says: I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, al haluchot harishonim, which you broke apart, asher shibarta (Exodus 34:1). On the surface level that sounds a bit passive-aggressive, so Resh Lakish hears asher shibarta as yishar koach she-shibarta. "Good for you for breaking them."

That’s really strange, that the thing we choose to say when someone is closest to the Torah originated in the act of destroying the two tablets.

And in fact Rashi’s final comment on the entire Torah, on the Torah’s eulogy for Moshe in the final verses we read on Simchat Torah, Rashi says that up there as one of the most important wonders that Moshe did for the Israelites was when he broke the tablets. (Credit to Rabbi Uzi Weingarten for this source.)

There is another early reference, which I got via Rabbi Tzvi Sinensky. It’s in a midrash (Shmot Rabbah 1:32) from probably a bit after Resh Lakish’s time in the Talmud. When Moshe runs away to Midyan and he chases away the shepherds that were menacing Yitro’s daughters, the midrash says that the women said to him: Yishar kochacha for saving us. And Moshe said: Actually it’s the Egyptian taskmaster I killed who saved you. That’s why the text has the daughters telling their father, according to the Torah: An Egyptian man saved us from the shepherds – meaning that the series of events that led to Moshe saving us started with that Egyptian man, who was beating a Hebrew slave.

Both of these yasher koach’s are paradoxical. Paradoxical sources for strength that we make a callback to, when we acknowledge someone who has been to the Torah or led us in a ritual or taught us Torah. Breaking the tablets could be a good thing. Another terrible brokenness that happened in Egypt, a beating followed by a killing, leads to a yasher koach.

And both of these moments, in Midyan and with the tablets, are moments of spiritual challenge and physical strength.

So what all is going on here? With broken and strong?

I know a lot of us feel that our moment now is spiritually challenging and also in our muscles and in our breathing and our heartrate. So part of strengthening our strength and straightening it is in attention to our bodies. Our hearts are pushing us so hard, to walk straight toward our solidarities and toward our principles. There isn’t a separation between what we think and know, and our emotions which are very physical things. And sometimes the burst of a push we can make reaches a limit, which the Torah represents as Moshe holding the tablets and then dropping or breaking them, or saving a life but violently and driving off the shepherds and then sitting in thirst, expended.

There is a lovely midrash about the breaking of the luchot that says that when Moshe first lifted up the tablets, even though they were big solid stones, they were light because of the letters that God had written, which had a heavenly gravity to them. Look at our Torah scrolls, where the words are written from a line etched above them in the parchment, as if they are rising up and not descending. So all the words on the luchot make them light.

When Moshe saw the calf, this midrash says that God took all the writing off the tablets and suddenly they became heavy again like regular stone. So Moshe couldn’t hold them anymore, and he dropped them and they broke. But this midrash says the erasing was actually an act of compassion. Seeing how far the people were from the covenant written on the luchot, God decided to temporarily hide the evidence, to take away all the terms so the whole people couldn’t be held guilty. Which would have been too much for Moshe. So this was actually a chesed for Moshe, a way to give Moshe time to catch his breath. And Moshe got it – instead of trying to hold onto the tablets right at that moment, when they weren’t working, he let himself drop them.

And God said yishar koach sheshibarta, good for you for breaking them, and soon we will be ready and write again and figure this out.

That’s the moment we need a yasher koach, a broken moment when we’re promised that the strength we felt before but not this moment, will return and increase and let us walk straight again.

Yasher koach is a reminder that the Torah itself knows us when we feel broken, because of the time of the calf, when he world around the Torah was so broken and the Jewish people was so broken that Torah itself had to be temporarily broken. The tablets were restored, and came to strengthen us in actual battle and in spirit.

It's good to know that the Torah knows some of the topsy-turvy-ness that we associate this time of year with the Megillah.

Yasher koach is a reminder that every certainty we have, everything that makes us ache today, is actually a revision of some original, a second version of the covenant. Because there is no value that came into the world pure, that hasn’t had a crisis where it broke and needed to be renewed or updated or made more complete. Not freedom, not equality, not Am Yisrael, not Tzelem Elohim. And that will continue. It feels sometimes like the world is broken today in a way it hasn’t before, but that’s not true. Over and over the tablets are broken or we have to let them go, and yasher koach, we mourn and then we engrave again, and it’s the only way we straighten our strength and our path.

And all of this is in our minds and in our bodies. Broken and strong are spiritual and physical. So when you come up to the Torah, make a point to hold onto it. Or when the Torah comes near you, or when it is held up in the air – feel your arm as you reach for it. And then we can say to you, Yishar kochachem. When you are strong may your strength be made straight, and when you are flagging, may you be strengthened.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #12: Exodus and Freedom

In my overview of ethics and Exodus, you may have noticed I didn’t talk about one central idea: freedom! Well, the Jewish conception of freedom deserves its very own presentation.

In Judaism freedom has many layers. The term for free people is b’nai chorin; a free person might be a bat chorin or a ben chorin. One of the first blessings we say in the morning expresses gratitude to God she-asani bat chorin or she-asani ben chorin, for making me a free person.

Obviously from the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, freedom means not being subject to a tyranny or tyrant, and not being forced to work without earning a fair share of the fruits of one’s labor. Flipping that around, we have a positive obligation to do what’s in our power to increase political freedom and eliminate economic exploitation. Whether that’s in how we vote or how we treat people we pay to work for us, or in more continual or large-scale civic action.

When the rabbis of the early Talmud were discussing how to tell the Exodus story at the Pesach Seder, there was a disagreement about the exact arc -- the beginning and the climax of the story. The sage Shmuel said that the story begins with “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Mitzrayim”, Avadim hayinu l'Phar'oh b'Mitzrayim -- suggesting that the story is fundamentally about political and economic oppression, and the Exodus achievement is crossing the sea into freedom. Rav said that the story begins with our idol-worshipping ancestors long before even Egypt, and that the real transformation in the story is arriving at Mt. Sinai. There, away from Pharaoh, we were given the freedom to accept the Torah and the Divine covenant. Rav’s concept of freedom includes the ability to choose a covenant to be bound by.

The debate between Rav and Shmuel foreshadows a distinction made by the modern Jewish political philosopher Isaiah Berlin between negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from unjust constraints. Positive freedom is freedom for. The choices a free person has the ability to make ought to be good choices, directed at a higher good and guided by Torah. The Exodus story is obviously about both. The demand Moshe brings to Pharaoh from the Divine is not just “Let My people go”, but “Let My people go that they may serve me" Shalach et ami v'ya'avduni.

The freedom at Mt. Sinai involves trading a surface freedom for the ability to choose wise guidelines and commitments to live by. Being able to make a covenant and bind ourselves to it is part of the Jewish concept of freedom.

Sometimes what gets in the way of our positive freedom isn’t force from the outside, but forces on our inside. In fact all the way back at the beginning of the Torah, in the Garden of Eden, the first woman exemplifies for us the nature and operation of freedom as she weights the fruit she has heard she may not eat, but which the snake says will bring her godlike powers. The Torah describes her moment of deliberation, as she sees that the fruit is good to eat, exciting to the eyes, and fascinating to contemplate. In that moment, she is free to assess the outside authority of God and the snake, her relationship to her husband – all of that coming from the outside -- and the superficial and deeper dimensions of the fruit, the present and the possible future that might flow to her if she eats – these are on the inside.

Being free means using our capacity to assess authority when authority gives us both rules and the space to follow or question. It means sorting out our perceptions and judgments, noticing what is on the surface which might appeal to our desires in the moment, and what might be deeper implications or consequences.

Being b’nai chorin, free people, means bringing more decisions into this kind of awareness. It means cultivating that in others whether as educators or parents or friends, and creating spaces for others to act with that kind of freedom. And not ourselves being arbitrary authorities or exerting emotional force or manipulative words to push someone away from their freedom.

That’s why to me there is a connection between the first of the Ten Commandments and the first rule in the law code that immediately follows. The First Commandment doesn’t sound like a commandment – “I am Adonai Your God who brought you out of the land of Mitzrayim, out of the house of slaves.” The first law is about possessing and freeing a household slave after six years. I don’t think it’s really a permission to own slaves. On the contrary, it’s a recognition that each of us at some point finds ourselves exerting coercive power over someone else, in one way or another. We have a responsibility not only to relinquish that, but to bring a person who is not free enough toward their own positive freedom.

Lessons For Our Moment, From When the Ten Commandments Were Individually Delivered

This is a version of the D'var Torah on Parashat Yitro that I gave in 2021/5781. I've lightly updated it to reflect the changes in the pandemic and the presidential administration since then. It centers a midrash I've linked, and my own take on that midrash.

The midrash called Shir Ha-Shirim Rabba takes the opening of the Song of Songs and applies it to the revelation of the Ten Commandments. The verse says, and I don’t know if my blushing will come through on camera -- Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine. יִשָּׁקֵנִי מִנְּשִׁיקוֹת פִּיהוּ כִּי־טוֹבִים דֹּדֶיךָ מִיָּיִן. Like The Weavers: “kisses sweeter than wine.”

The midrash is one of my all-time favorites and as I tell it now hopefully by now some of you will be remembering from when I’ve told it before.

Rabbi Yochanan said that for each of the Ten Commandments, the Divine sent a personal messenger, a מַלְאָךְ mal’ach, to bring that particular mitzvah to each Israelite, to tell it to them, and then to have a discussion about it, for as long as necessary until the particular Israelite would say: I agree.

So imagine the mal’ach coming to you and saying: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or spouse or servant or donkey or anyting else that belongs to them. And you say: I’ve already agreed not to steal anything  -- does God really care if I’m feeling jealous from time to time?

And the mal’ach says well it depends, maybe your envy will cause you unconsciously to pressure your neighbor to give you something you don’t really need and that’s not really going to make you better off. After all, this is your neighbor who would do anything for you and wants you not to be distressed, or maybe just wants to get you out of their hair. So how about instead of thinking about what they have that you don’t, you try to figure out what’s eating you?

And the Israelite says: Ah, that’s why you (meaning: God) included their spouse and their house and the people who labor for them and their animals. You mean sometimes we get focused on the easy life we think someone else is having right now, we think why can’t mine be like that, and then maybe we think they don’t deserve it, I do -- and that drives us apart?

And the messenger says: You’ve got it. Of course we use others to judge our situation, but that’s a first step, not a shortcut.

Envy is a clue to think about what’s out of whack. Maybe it’s something in your power, or maybe it’s out there in society, in the distribution of houses and donkeys and fields. Use that itch to think about those things, and maybe your neighbor even agrees with you about that and you can bond. Okay, says the Israelite, this coveting thing -- you’re not trying to control my mind, it’s trying to make sure we don’t  get so caught up in our minds that we drive ourselves apart from our neighbors.

And the mal’ach says: So it’s a law, agreed, no coveting? And the Israelite says: Yes! And then the midrash says the mal’ach gives them a kiss -- “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” -- and the Israelite feels great, and really connected. And the mal’ach goes back to the mothership for the next mitzvah.

Rabbi Yochanan imagines each Israelite during the revelation of the Aseret Hadibrot (Ten Commandments)  in their own spiritual bubble, with a personal angelic tutor who is very patient and a personal time warp. Rabbi Yochanan is solving a problem of grammar in the Ten Commandments, which is actually a bigger problem. The commands are delivered in the Hebrew singular even though all the Israelites are together. And even though every thing in the Ten Commandments only makes sense in the context of the collective. Honoring parents, and not murdering; letting your household rest on Shabbat, and not coveting -- those are all social. Even the issue of idols is about taking some power  or image recognized by everyone and projecting that as a godly power.

It’s all social, but Rabbi Yochanan says there’s a paradox -- first each person has to go into a kind of isolation, and then “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” The individual is wooed into the collective in a very deliberate way. Crossing the sea in a big crowd and singing together wasn’t enough. Each person has to feel loved with some love that is as big as everything, that is love from the Divine and the whole people, and also gets connected through a specific other. Only an individual who has been spoken to and kissed this way by a divine representative will say: What we have together is better than wine, better than the high that I experience from my own pleasure or the buzz I get from having my own ideas all on my own.

Up until now, the people had only negative experiences of the collective. Being miserable together, as slaves, who sometimes turned on each other. Watching Egyptian togetherness -- conformity, complicity in evil, mass psychology, the mob. Even when they got out, the Israelites knew themselves frequently as a group of complainers.

How could they trust themselves to be a group that could heal from slavery and get to the promised land? They needed shared ideas, and not shared idols. They needed a picture of fulfillment more motivating than coveting what some small group of them had.

Rabbi Yochanan in the midrash says that if each Israelite will feel loved enough to say “yes” for a moment, ten times, then we get to the  verse right after the Ten Commandments: “and all the people together perceived the voices and saw the bright lights” וְכָל־הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת־הַקּוֹלֹת וְאֶת־הַלַּפִּידִם v’chol ha’am ro’im et hakolot v’et halapidim.

A path to solidarity is what we need right now. We need it to stay alive, we need it to be more than just alive. It’s tempting to think of groups, especially political groups, only in terms of mobs and groupthink. It’s easy to perceive comformity, or to see insider groups that do sloppy work together. Those are real dangers of groups.

So Rabbi Yochanan says solidarity has to be built a person at a time, out of two elements: it’s built out of discussion, and out of loving affirmation. It has to originate on top of the mountain; there has to be somewhere for everyone to look up. But the real work is up close, person by person.

We can’t just assert solidarity or unity. It doesn’t come via the media or speeches. We have to make it by wooing people with our ideas and with our love. On the political level, when I first wrote this D’var Torah, I wanted President Biden and Vice President Harris when they were in office to go out and identify individual communities, let’s say the counties in this country where they got the lowest percentage of the vote, and have a midrash kind of conversation -- here are some principles and ideas, let’s talk about them, talk back and I’ll answer. And even if we don’t find a yes ,we’ll go back to the mothership in DC and come back shortly for the next conversation.

Same for Republican leaders in Congress --  do that. Find whatever community organizng group or congregation will do that with you in those counties. Set up a health clinic for the community there, and have the conversations.

On an individual level, in our own synagogue and our local community, we have to be the personal ambassadors for solidary rooted in reasoned conversation and love, for anyone who opens their ears or their arms.

We are going to need more of this kind of solidarity, to comfront the challenges of Am Yisrael and the United States, and to build our own community as a place that is welcoming and helps each of us reflect and be challenged, grow and flourish. It can’t be done if all we do is criticize when groups fail, which they often do. We need to build the collectives where we trust, and ask what it would take to give ourselves over in solidarity, to say yes to what the divine messengers are offering us.

It’s so hard to imagine getting to that kind of solidarity these days, to believing it’s possible. And it’s hard to imagine that we require it -- but I think there is no alternative. Some critical mass of solidarity is a matter of life and death. It doesn’t have to be everyone but it has to be more than it’s been in a long time. At Mt Sinai time could stand still to get that kind of solidarity, and even then it only held for a short time even for B’nai Yisrael.  We can’t stop time like that. But we each need to be receptive to messengers who come and offer us rational conversation and love, and we need to find opportunities to be those messengers.

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” That kind of intimacy, that kind of solidarity -- it can be scary; we know it was in the Torah. Resisting solidarity will always have its rewards for people -- the wine, the yayin, is a symbol for a real intense feeling that you don’t share but have just on your own. It’s not lasting, but it’s powerful. I myself (Jon) do covet -- and what I covet are pockets of solidarity in this world that are somewhere else. But then I know the question is how not be jealous, but to learn how to do solidarity better right here. So let’s think about how we can open ourselves when the mal’achim come and try to connect us more deeply, and how to be those divine messengers ourselves, patiently trying to build the solidarity we need for life and healing, to overcome isolation, for justice and for peace.     

Shabbat Shalom.

 

A Year of Jewish Ethics #9: If Someone Treats You Badly How Good Do You Have to Remain?

All of us want to hold ourselves to a high standard of integrity and honesty and to go the extra mile for people as much as we can. But what happens when we are stuck dealing with another person who is either straight up unethical toward us, or whose actions are only just technically acceptable, not against a rule or a law but right at the line and not as good as they should be. And no feedback is going to lead to any change.

I’m talking particularly about business relationships, where in addition to being unpleasant it might cost money that a provider with more integrity would not charge. Though you can think about whether what I say applies beyond a financial context.

Whenever possible we should avoid people who are known to do business this way, or to extricate ourselves once it becomes clear that this is the case. But that’s not always possible, either because there is only one person or firm who does what we need, or because the financial or practical costs of cancelling a contract are prohibitive. Left in such a situation, how far is it acceptable to sink from our own standards to set things right for ourselves, so long as we are not ourselves violating a basic ethical norm?

This is how exactly how I see the situation of Yaakov Avinu and his father-in-law Lavan, in Genesis chapter 30 in Parashat Vayetze. Lavan has taken advantage of Yaakov’s labor for nearly two decades, changing the terms of his service and giving Yaakov the most unfavorable interpretation of their agreements. Yaakov finally tells Lavan he wishes to leave and they negotiate an exit fee to be paid to Yaakov. Instead of asking for a certain number of sheep and goats, Yaakov proposes to tend part of Lavan’s flock for one last period of time, and then collect the speckled and spotted animals among that part as his final payment.

Lavan agrees to the terms as spelled out. Then, Yaakov sets up a breeding system that dramatically increases the number of speckled and spotted animals within his assigned flock, far beyond the expected yield. When Lavan’s sons become aware of what has happened, they see it is as stealing on the part of Yaakov, and communicate that to their father.

What Yaakov has done here is to make a specific agreement and then get the most out of it. Presumably Yaakov knew that he would be able to leave with a bigger payment than Lavan thought he would owe, but it’s all within the letter of the agreement.

Did Yaakov owe Lavan the kind of extra, ahead-of-time transparency that Lavan had never given him? Lavan had not always lived by the letter of his own statements; was it okay for Yaakov to make the most of his own, as long as he himself has not lied?

In this kind of circumstance, where Yaakov has been defrauded over many years, I see the Torah indicating that it is permissible for him to try to make his situation better so long as he does not engage in actual dishonesty. He has after all an obligation to his family and himself, and is not required to leave without the means to set up away from Lavan in some kind of security. And at the same time, it’s important for Yaakov to understand that he is stooping. Not stooping all the way to Lavan’s level, but in that direction. There is a spiritual cost to making that choice in the moment, and a risk for the future of getting used to it -- a risk to himself and to people he may affect. Much of Jewish ethics is a virtue ethics, where our ability to act well has to be built and then replenished continually by repeated actions. When we do something we know is just all right but not honorable, we set up an obstacle for ourselves. Yaakov already has too much experience in his prior life being comfortable with deceit, and indeed some of his own children will learn badly from his example.

I have not quoted much from the Talmudic commentaries on Yaakov and Lavan, or other sources that ask the same question outside that context. But at least on this story from the Torah, there is a sense in the tradition from some interpreters that someone in Yaakov’s situation has a defense for stooping the way he did -- but one ought to still recognize that it is stooping, and take more steps than Yaakov did to prevent yourself from making such stooping into a habit, much less something you are proud of.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #8: War and Peace

The word Shalom is probably the most widely-known Hebrew word, among Jews and also people who aren’t Jewish. Shalom means peace, and because of that Shalom is also the word for greeting someone and saying goodbye. Shalom means not just peace but wellbeing and wholeness, so when we see someone we are expressing our hope that they are well and whole, and we leave we wish them a blessing of peace.

Shalom is even part of the name of our holiest city, Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, the City of Peace. Shalom is central to the Jewish view for humanity and for our holy land.

And at the same time, Judaism is not pacifist. War is sometimes unavoidable and sometimes necessary. One question we can ask is how Judaism views that necessity.

One response is in the midrash about the reunion between Yaakov and Esav. Yaakov returns toward home after 20 years of separation from his brother Esav, who at the time wanted to kill him. So Yaakov is afraid this is still the case, particularly after hearing that Esav has 400 men with him. The Torah says that "Yaakov was very afraid and he was troubled", vayira Yaakov m’od vayeitzer lo (Genesis 32:8).

The midrash picks up on the two descriptions for Yaakov’s fear, and explains it like this: Yaakov was afraid that Esav might kill him, and he was troubled that he might have to kill Esav.

Between this verse and the brothers’ actual reunion, there is the famous story of Yaakov wrestling at night with a being. This being is often called an angel, but in one midrash, the being is described as a representation of Esav and his might. In the course of the fight, Yaakov is given a new name, Yisrael, which has inside it the word sar which means "power" or "rule." And at the end of the fight, in the morning, Yaakov is limping.

These two midrashim suggest a view of war: that being powerful is necessary, and that even justified killing is wounding to one’s soul. War can be necessary for survival, and survival is important not just in itself but in order to continue the covenant the Jewish people are charged with following. Killing in war is never desired, whether the people who die are innocent or enemies. Going to war ought to be sobering, never triumphalist, even when it’s unavoidable or the cause is just. A people who fights will be defined by that fighting, as Yaakov was renamed Yisrael, and they will always have something to heal from, as Yaakov did.

And shalom must remain a goal and a hope, embraced even when shalom between particular nations isn’t likely in the short-term. That is one of the reasons why the essential part of every Jewish service, the Amidah, always concludes with prayers of shalom.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #7: Competition

The story of Yaakov and Esav is basically about an unending competition, which begins even in the womb over who will be born first. Esav wins, earning the birthright which would be relevant for inheritance way later -- but Yaakov manages to get it from him in a deal for some lentil stew. The brothers compete for their father Yitzchak’s blessing, which is about both a spiritual legacy and an easier life for the blessed one and his descendants. In between these two stories, Yitzchak himself is in a competition with his Philistine neighbors over control of a series of wells that his father Avraham had dug and the Philistines claimed for themselves or tried to block Yitzchak from accessing.

These competitions are all in Parashat Toldot, a single Torah reading. And these stories are part of a larger motif of competition that goes throughout the book of Bereshit (Genesis), from Kayin and Hevel (Cain and Abel) all the way to the end through the twelve sons of Yaakov.

Competition is a fact of life the Torah acknowledges and depicts, from specific incidents between individuals to the destiny of tribes and nations. So what does Judaism generally have to offer us as a perspective on competition?

Obviously these Genesis stories portray the destructive effects of certain kinds of competition. In the Talmudic tradition, competition can be a generative dynamic. Talmudic Judaism itself is created and expressed through a series of discussions where rabbis try to best each other intellectually and spiritually. The generations that created the foundations of Jewish law in the Mishnah and Gemara are anchored by pairs of sages who pushed each other about every kind of topic: Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael, Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah, Rav and Shmuel, Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, to name a few. Not to mention Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, two entire schools of thought. In the Talmudic literature, when a pair of sages squares off for the sake of Heaven, Torah is perfected.

In Talmudic thought we also find the notion of harnessing the yetzer hara, which is the selfish or competitive nature within us. Humans are regarded as having two motors, this yetzer hara, the so-called evil nature, and the yetzer hatov, the nature for good. In one view, the yetzer hara is what perfects goodness (Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 9:7), because it’s competition that pushes people to do constructive things like building a house, and more profound things as we've seen with the Talmud. If someone in the economic sphere becomes wealthy through competition, their wealth can become tzedakah that helps someone else on a scale that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. Even if the original motivation is not pure, the outcome can be very good.

In a future video, I’ll talk about competition more particularly in the realm of business. For now, the Jewish view of competition can be summed up with reference to another Talmudic story, where the rabbis capture the yetzer hara and put it in prison (Yoma 69b). Many creative and productive activities come to a screeching halt. So the rabbis come up with the idea of altering the yetzer hara in some way and then release it back into the world, to get the best of competition without its destructive effects. That’s the Jewish perspective. If only the story told how us how to do that specifically, not just metaphorically!

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.

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.

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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.