I'm Jon Spira-Savett, rabbi at Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire. This website and blog is a resource for Jewish learning and Jewish action. It is a way to share my thoughts beyond my classes and weekly Divrei Torah. You'll find blog posts, standing resource pages with links and things to read, and podcasts as well.
"Today" in Justice (Moral Reasoning 22), it was both a lecture and the first section! In the big lecture, the focus was on critiquing Bentham's utilitarianism, from the outside and the inside. I remember Professor Sandel's funny thing about how a research attempting to measure comparative utilities by survey found that living in Kansas was less desirable than having a tooth pulled. So obviously, practical issues with applying the principles of Bentham. Even John Stuart Mill, whose father attempted to apply Bentham to his education, ended up claiming that certain pleasures should factor higher in the utilitarian calculations.
JSM's bigger revision was to base individual rights on utility, a bold move that seems to go against the principle of aggregation. In the lecture it was also noted that Bentham was a penal reformer, on the basis (so say my notes) of the excessive pain inflicted on prisoners. My notes say something about liberty being taken into account, but I have no idea what I actually heard. I am surprised that more of a point wasn't made to compare the imputed social "gains" from incarceration to this pain factor. It doesn't seem a slam dunk that Bentham would support penal reform, but that's his major public policy contribution I think.
Professor Sandel chose utilitarianism as the starting point for the dialectic of the class, rather than starting chronologically with Aristotle. No question he wanted to feature the critiques, which go in so many directions (come from so many directions). At the same time, he wanted to give the broad consequentialist intuition its due. Over time, it's been clear to me just how tenacious utilitarianism remains as a metaphor, if not a method. I mean I still think all the time about whether I am doing enough good, in some kind of measurable way. That's the positive part. The negative of course being the treatment everywhere of people as commodities. Which I think I only started to get the language in this class.
The section, with (now Professor) Benor, had such a different feel. He talked about wanting us to learn how to read philosophical texts. It looks like he had two methodological points. One being to track certain concepts and the debates over them through different texts, being careful to identify each thinker's take on a term that might seem common among philosophers. So Bentham did not hold by the concept of "community" as something other than the aggregate of its members. (Benor asked the clarifying question: If there is no community, how is the idea of "general utility" even relevant?) Benor also instructed us to read a philosopher as though their picture of the world is true, rather than critique as we go along. Later on, I learned from my co-teacher Leslie Bazer to call this "the believing game", from Peter Elbow. I forgot that I had heard it long before.
This move is incredibly hard. It's gotten easier for me, I think because I have the time to do it when I am preparing to teach, and because I know there will be a time for the believing game and a time for critical reading. My students, even adults, have much more trouble doing this. It's really hard to hold a picture of someone else's thought when they seem wrong. And even more so when you feel strongly about a problem and the new idea you're being asked to consider seems not helpful or relevant even, and you want to talk to the merits of the issue. Just today in Torah class, we were talking about the idea of malchut, and my whole point was what are various approaches to making anything out of a problematic metaphor for the Divine. But a lot of the conversation was: Here's my solution, or here's why I don't even consider that metaphor worth considering.
Back to substance -- I don't know if I had thought much about what a "community" is before this discussion. I still wrestle with the concept, and even last week and this week have been back and forth with some people about it. Eager to see what I learned and thought later in the course. Bentham's position that you can't say the community is prior to the individual -- I don't like it at all as a normative proposition. I would like to believe it's not even descriptively correct. Do I have a refutation, at this point in my life? Not a universal one. I am working long-term on this idea of a podcast series called "I in We", which is about how the individual emerges as a distinct, sacred (if you will) entity out of prior groups and possibly communities.
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.
This is what I said at the ceremony of lighting candles at the end of our annual Holocaust Remembrance Program in Nashua which the Jewish community holds at Rivier University in conjunction with the school, our Catholic partner in remembering. After the thank you's I said this:
We came here this evening to learn and to mourn. We learn to pick up lessons, and charges -- but we mourn just because. Not because everyone whose memory we honor was righteous or heroic or resilient. But just because they were ours.
We comfort each other, and we comfort especially those who are mourning a loved one whom you knew, or whom you might have known if not for the Shoah.
How many candles we could light. If we wanted to recite the names of every Jew who was lost and began today and did not stop, we would be here until the start of next spring. We honor the memory of six million Jews and millions more – Roma, LGBTQ+, disabled, political opponents of the Nazi regime. We weep for every person who lost a life, and we weep for those who survived but lost loved ones, or whose body or soul was wounded forever by those who acted and those who stood by.
As Jews we are grateful for you who have come to sit with us and around us as we grieve. Because alas, even our mourning has become contentious. We Jews have been told this year by too many that we cannot simply mourn our dead. That we cannot share the names and faces of our dead and our captives. That our pain is not significant enough. Among the many shattering things about last October 7 is that survivors of the Shoah had to go through it or see it, in Israel and here. So it is precious to have not just our own Jewish place but a public place, where we can mourn.
This year the charge of genocide is being directed against us. Jews in Israel are not engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people. Jews here are not supporting a genocide against Palestinians.
I am an educator and a member of the state Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education, so for those who say something else than what I jsut said and want to talk about it I offer myself to listen, to hear the pain of others and not just hear it but acknowledge it and the mourning and anger with it, and also to explain why I just said that the death and terrible suffering in Gaza is not genocide. If you need to have that conversation, or know someone who maybe does, if you have a young person in your life for instance, please come get my number or share it.
We often ask ourselves as Jews how much to devote our energies to the safety of Jews everywhere and to anti-Semitism, which has increased in all directions, and how much to work as allies to other groups who experience bias and intolerance and more, and need us with them. There is yet another part: As Jews we have to deal with the racism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias within us.
I have them, in ways I know and in ways I continue to discover. We have people within our Jewish collective who are powerful who dehumanize Arabs and who do not hide their wish actually to remove Palestinians from their communities in many parts of the Land of Israel. We have to take responsibility for that. We have to live with the knowledge that in our hands are the lives, dignity, and freedom of another people. Not in our hands only, to be quite sure -- but still, much of it in our hands.
We have been insistent that the people of this country learn to see anti-Semitism is not just its overt forms but its most subtle forms, not just its physical forms but also its ideological ones. We have achieved support for that at the highest levels of American society and government. We have succeeded in passing a law in New Hampshire that every young person explore these things, even if they know not a single Jew personally, just because they are American. How could we not ask the same kind of thing of ourselves.
We have set a high standard for observation and nuance. We cannot be the one group not in the kinds of conversations everyone is having, with that level of nuance, even though we are in such pain and it is so hard.
Nor should we want to be. Looking at ourselves, doing our teshuvah, is not a reward to terrorists. It has absolutely nothing to do with them. It is on the contrary about who we see when we look at ourselves with the glorious third eye that sees us as the Divine sees us. It is how we know after the Shoah that we are still here. It is how we know, after everything, who,we, still, are.
We came here tonight for hope, in the story of people who were here for us when that took tremendous courage. We have heard a story that makes us less lonely as Jews, and it’s a story that might inspire us to be more courageous ourselves. This is an evening to see glimmers and sparks and beacons, not only in the past. To feel love and understanding across difference in this very room.
And we came here tonight to remember, to light candles because flame is both destruction and light. Let us light these candles, and bring to light again the beloved souls we are remembering here.
Some meandering and very rough notes about the opening of this week’s Torah reading, Leviticus 16, somehow sort of in light of week’s events at Columbia University and other places.
The chapter appears to be just the description by the Divine to Moshe and Aharon (Moses and Aaron) of an elaborate ritual for Yom Kippur, the annual Jewish high holy day of “atonement” – cleansing, resetting. This year, I’m thinking that it’s hinting at a conversation between the Divine and Moshe about his brother Aharon, who is not there at the moment. The conversation is about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing.
Some scholars view this conversation as the center of the Torah itself. It references the Holy of Holies, which is in the very center of the traveling community of Israel in the wilderness.
“The Divine said to Moshe – after the death of two of Aharon’s sons, in their coming near in the presence of the Divine, and they died. The Divine said to Moshe: Speak to Aharon your brother, that he not come just anytime the Holy Place inside the curtain, facing the Cleansing-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover that is on the ark, and die – for in a cloud I am seen over the Cleanings-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover. This is how Aharon should come to the Holy Place…. And atone/cleanse/reset for himself and for his household…”
And then more, about atonement/cleansing/resetting/ransoming for the entire people, through offerings and a scapegoat and an encounter in a cloud in the Holy of Holies.
1. Nadav and Avihu
In the first verse, the Torah is already wrestling with itself. The two sons had names, so why are they hidden here? Nadav and Avihu were their names. They died in a fire that came out from the Divine presence, when the two of them brought some kind of unauthorized fire offering. So that’s a reason to hide them. But then the verse shifts, softens -- unauthorized, “strange” fire is reported here as “coming close to the Divine.” And the Torah just mentions that they died, as a thing that happened without pronouncing judgment. It happened and it seems to be how Aharon is marking time right now, or how Moshe is, or how the Divine is.
If you want to say Nadav and Avihu were punished, you could say they wouldn’t tolerate holiness by any kind of methodical system. They had waited through seven days of an elaborate ritual of dressing up and waiting inside, to become priests. As soon as that was over, they just came the way they decided was right. You could say they wanted a short cut to absolutes, to truth. They didn’t trust authority, not their father’s or the Divine’s. They were protesters against the system. They were individualists masquerading as brave rebels. They broke from their tribe and family, from a long collective process of inquiry into truth and value and holiness, and fell into groundthink, an echo chamber of two.
Or you could Nadav and Avihu were right, but the Torah has no room for them, or the system can’t figure out how to assimiliate them. They were on a different plane, one which just couldn’t coexist with the world of method and system. The Torah doesn’t say in the chapter where they died that they sinned. The “strange fire” of many translations is probably too harsh and wrong for the Hebrew “zarah”; “unauthorized” is more precise. So maybe their story isn’t about punishment at all? Nadav and Avihu were just completely absorbed, in every sense, figuratively and literally. And still we can’t build a bridge from the Torah to them, on this way of seeing it. And to those they left behind, the matter was never resolved, and no one understood who they were or what they had done.
2. Aharon and his two sons
I never noticed this before this week: the Divine is worried that Aharon will go back to the place where his sons died, and if so he would also die. He might go at the wrong time, or he might go not prepared in the authorized way.
None of them had been priests for long. But Aharon was the quintessential system guy. He had to be, after he had improvised in the Golden Calf situation and look at the chaos and carnage and death that ensued. Aharon was at the top of the careful pursuit of holiness, the absolute, and truth – with his carefully designed garments, and the step-by-step processes of shepherding people through their offerings whenever they felt whole, or guilty, or joyful. Aharon would be the one to make judgments, first by oracle and eventually by the book of Torah.
But even so Aharon couldn’t suppress the improvisational, says the midrash. Doing his compulsory figure-eights, Aharon had the cultivated calm and metronomic pace to listen to people. And when they hurt he wanted to help them find peace within, or reconciliation between.
From time to time, could it be that Aharon was jealous of his two sons? Wished he could dispense with the time-consuming processes and inquiries, and go straight to the absolute? Is that the ground he wanted to go back to, at the Holy Place – to experience himself as they did for a once and only time? Did he need go there to reassure himself that this was him, and that was them, so he could reground himself? Or did he ever doubt his own way? If he did, who else could the Divine possibly find, to model the best of the priestly way and not just the prophetic?
Or maybe Aharon would go to the Holy Place simply to weep at the site of his loss, which was or wasn't connected to anything Nadav and Avihu did or represented in relation to him or anything. And the Divine was worried the people might never get him back from there, or never get him back intact.
3. The Divine and Aharon
How to talk to Aharon about this? How to protect him from searing pain, from being retraumatized by the Holy Place itself? How to shield him from a complexity he might never emerge from?
But also, how could even the Divine know when Aharon was healed enough, clear enough, to play his essential role? Which was to help the nation take responsibility, be accountable in a global way, for all it had done over a year’s time. It was Aharon the priest, not Moshe the teacher, whom the Divine designated to shepherd them through. It was Aharon the Divine wanted to train for this, even after Aharon had made the Golden Calf.
I have sometimes thought that Aharon’s priestly life was the Divine’s way of guarding him from ever making another public pronouncement in front of an idol that *This* is your god, O Israel. Literally from now on his every word and move would be scripted. But for some reason, that’s not the Aharon I’m seeing this year in this text. The Divine wants the father of Nadav and Avihu to be the one who comes to their meeting together in the Holy of Holies, to be the one person who will speak out loud the Divine name.
4. The Divine and Moshe
So the Divine went to Moshe with this dilemma.
Usually when the Divine has a charge that involves Aharon, the Divine speaks to them together. Not always, but mostly. Here, it stays for the time being between the Divine and Moshe.
Let me tell you what I have in mind, which the people need soon, and we need Aharon to guide them through. Maybe if I tell you, Moshe, you can tell him? Or you’ll know when he will be able to take this on?
Could we possibly say that the Divine “felt better” unburdening from this load, even if it would be a charge, a command whose execution we don’t hear much about?
Usually the Torah records that Moshe passed along what was spoken to him by the Divine, and then the Torah reports who followed through on the matter. In this chapter, it’s only sort of. We hear at the very end that someone did what the Divine had charged Moshe, but you almost miss it. We don’t know if “he did what the Divine had charged” means that Moshe talked to Aharon, or that Aharon performed the ritual.
Usually we don’t think of the Divine and Moshe as having conversations of consoling, of reflection. Moshe is the insistent one, the resistant one, the impatient one, the one who has an answer back or pushes the Divine to do something or do the opposite of what was just announced. Who just demands that the imperatives of absolute truths and methodical systems be reconciled – and you, Divine, make that so now! Usually the Divine relies on Aharon to slow things down and soften the edges, or make the dilemmas less painful.
On very rare occasions, it has to be Moshe. In this chapter, Moshe just listens to the Divine, listens absolutely, like no other time. And I have to think Moshe sobs in worry for his brother, for the Divine, for the people who need both the Divine and Aharon. Sobs for himself, for being Moshe and not Aharon. For not being able to meet these needs of the people himself.
And the Divine will not forget this, and will one day teach Moshe how to be like Aharon. But not yet.
5. Aharon and the people
It’s not like there haven’t been “sin offerings” until this point. Somehow it hasn’t been enough.
They need from time to time a broader accountability, for their year as a nation. Not just when they realize or find out they’ve done wrong – that’s what the “sin offerings” were for. They need to be made, forced, to ask themselves on an annual basis what have we done wrong, and give real answers and not just formulaic ones.
Even if they are in pain and in mourning, they need this periodic accountability. Nadav and Avihu were their loss too. Their trauma. It happened in their Holy Place.
Aharon will have to be the one to lead them through this new Yom Kippur, this day of cleansing/resetting/ransoming themselves back. Partly because Moshe is too harsh. The teacher is always grading. Partly because Aharon is the master of both systematic method and peaceful reconciliation.
And because when Aharon shows the people how to do this, from within his own pains and questions and anger and uncertainties, they will say: If he can, if he must, then we must, and we can.
Aharon will show them that you start with yourself, and your family. Before he can engage the people in confession, he must reflect on himself, on Nadav and Avihu, on everyone who is left. He will confess what he can, and what he doesn’t know is a sin or not he will at least offer up out loud as a report, to say that he knows.
Then he will speak on behalf of the people. Atonement is a word muddying the matter. There is a dimension of confession and acknowledgement, and then there is the Kippur, the cleaning/resetting and possibly ransoming back of one’s own soul and the national soul.
Interlude – Two Goats
The Mishnah says the two goats have to be identical in every way. The one that will carry off all the people’s wrongs to a far-away, sealed-off place no one can get to – and the one whose blood Aharon will take with him into the Most Holy Place.
Our worst acts and our ideals, sometimes they flow from place that are twinned within us. A quantum entanglement. (Or maybe just a cliché.)
6. Aharon and the Divine, or: Two Cherubs, or: Us Now
In the Most Holy Place it is crowded and it is lonely.
I have often thought of this part of Yom Kippur, where Aharon disappears into a cloud and meets the Shechinah, right by the ark with the deposit of the Divine words, as a calm retreat. A place he can see the most things, and hear spoken the special sounds of the Divine name, a word reserved and protected from the ways the world barnacles onto even our best most powerful words. How peaceful, how whole in this place.
This year I wonder about the lonely part. How will the Divine and Aharon be together? Will the two cherubs, which in the midrash embrace when the people as a whole are reconciled – will they be a comforting metaphor, especially to Aharon, or a cruel reminder of the separations he feels? Or of Nadav and Avihu who came toward this place and are no more – tragically, or because of their choices?
From Tali Adler this year, I think for the first time that Aharon and the Divine speak to each other. It’s not just Aharon, speaking the Name. About the Golden Calf, and what happened; about Nadav and Avihu, and who they were and what they did and what happened to them, and how everyone was affected. Aharon and the Divine have the best and most difficult conversation, about the year past and the losses and the wrongs and the world. Just like our midrash says that revelation at Mt. Sinai took as long as each person needed – a spiritual case of special relativity – so too Aharon and the Divine speak. From their perspective it takes as long as they need, maybe infinitely long, even if to the outside it seems to be over in a few minutes.
They have the conversations we all need – about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing. I wish the Torah would have told us more how to do that.
I believe Aharon emerges more cleansed, and restored, and healed. Through his acknowledgements, of his own faults and those of the people. And then all of the people through him are cleansed and restored and healed. They feel better and they are better, in every sense of the word. I believe this because I believe Moshe doesn’t tell Aharon to do all of this until Aharon is ready. (I wish the Torah had told us more about when Aharon was ready.) I believe this because I believe it’s possible to be ready.
Here is a session I did picking up on another of the themes I laid out in my talk a couple weeks ago. Grateful to Valley Beit Midrash for hosting it. You can watch or listen.
Rabbi Karen G. Reiss Medwed and I recorded this conversation last night, and you can watch it on YouTube or listen as a podcast. The Megillah (the biblical Book of Esther) is a story of anti-Semitism set in the Diaspora in a multiethnic empire where Jews were living in peace. How did the Jews of the story see themselves in biblical Persia, according to the biblical text? What were the various ways they responded to being a minority and to anti-Semitism, and how did that unfold? How in particular did Esther view herself, act, adjust in real time? How should we take the end of the Megillah, the forceful and violent Jewish response described there?
All of this hits us differently after October 7. Karen and I walk through each part of the biblical story and reflect on how different parts resonate today and might answer some of the dilemmas we are facing. We recorded a week before Purim 5784/2024, and much of it reflects the year and also the particular moment during this war.
This is a slightly revised version of a D'var Torah I gave on the Shabbat that was the last day of Pesach in 5782 (2022).
Right before Pesach in 2022, a bunch of people mentioned to me an article they had seen from the New York Times by Rabbi Sharon Brous. Her piece referenced a book known as the Slave Bible, or as its inside title page says “Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West India Islands.” This version of the Bible was published in 1807, and it was used in the Caribbean islands under British rule at that time to teach slaves to read and to teach them Christianity. As Rabbi Brous writes, this Bible is unique in that it has deleted the entire story of the Exodus. It jumps from Joseph’s uniting with his brothers all the way to the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, and then from there to the sternest and most warning parts of Deuteronomy, and that’s it for the Torah.
There are in the Deuteronomy section brief references to having been brought out of Egypt but no mention at all of being slaves there. So this was truly a Bible without an Exodus, and a Bible suffused in fact with justifications of slavery from various points in Genesis, as well as other parts of the Old Testament and New.
Rabbi Brous asks us to imagine how it’s possible to have a text without Exodus, without slavery and oppression and liberation, and call it a Bible. What kind of biblical religion could really be true to the Bible without that story -- it’s absurd. Yet that was the Bible and the biblical religion, quote-unquote, being fed to slaves in at least part of the English-speaking world into the 1800s.
After the third person mentioned this Bible to me, I found myself putting into focus an idea that’s been eating slowly at me for a while. I found myself thinking that there is a mirror-image Bible, not exactly a Bible but a book based on the Bible, and in this particular Bible the Israelites are continually being redeemed, over and over.
In this Bible, every mention of slavery and Pharaoh disappears quickly into a celebration of rescue and protection from not just oppression but hunger and pain and disilusionment.
In this version, God operates the world in every moment with compassion for every last creature, and has in every moment since the beginning of time, and God never naps from this concern and care for a moment, and never lets any creature fail to find at least a word to say or sing to describe this world.
In this version, the Sea is not a dangerous thing to try and cross, but a gushing out of gratitude.
In this version of the Bible, even our bones -- the least articulate part of our body, the part of us that can’t see out into the word at all -- even our bones proclaim Mi Chamocha, the words of the Song we sang at the Sea -- "Adonai Mi Chamocha, Who is like you, who rescues the powerless from the one who is stronger."
This Bible, where the liberation from slavery in Egypt is amplified and exaggerated -- it is the Siddur. It is our prayerbook. I’ve just been paraphraising for you most of pages 104-105 in our version of the Siddur, the prayer we call Nishmat Kol Chai after its first words, “the breath of all that lives.”
In recent years with all that has been happening in the world, I have been especially fascinated by what I will call the Nishmat Bible, which is the opposite of the Slave Bible. Part of my fascination is the flat-out contradiction between some of the words of the Nishmat prayers and what’s in our Torah. I mean the Torah is very clear that while Shifrah and Puah and Miryam and Yocheved were saving the lives of babies one by one, and while Moshe was taking matters into his own hands quite literally, God had to be reminded of the Israelites after some long period of time, finally snapping into action and setting a bush to burning. I mean: Is that the God who, in the words of the Nishmat prayer, “does not sleep and does not slumber”?
But that’s not even what fascinates me; it’s not a point of theology. What I’m amazed at is our ancestors of the year 1550, or pick another year like that, who sang these words in a medieval world where they had been oppressed for hundreds of years, who had a tradition of singing these words for least six or seven centuries and possibly more than a thousand years, when most Pharaohs in that time were not defeated and the many Jewish exits were not to promised lands.
The Jews of 1550 sang these words every Shabbat against all evidence to the contrary. What was that like? What did it feel like? What kinds of thoughts were they thinking about these words? Even as late as 1550, Jews had no idea that within a hundred years there might be the beginning of some kind of liberation in this world, in Amsterdam or Brazil or the North American colonies. And for most Jews in most places even in 1650 or 1750 or 1850 this was still the case. And yet they sang this Bible where “from the beginning of time to the end” without exception every moment God is taking care of them and “besides You we have no God who redeems and saves.”
I’m just gobsmacked. I can see in 1947 naming a ship Exodus, with Jews in peril still in Europe and in Palestine but it seems like a time that you could feel is those first chapters of the book of Exodus, where something may be coming and you’re in that fight.
I can see in churches in the 1950s and 1960s telling and singing about the Exodus, with protests and actions gaining energy if not always gaining momentum. I can see how in the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s we made “let my people” go a real watchword in solidarity with our people in the Soviet Union, when there was already liberation for Jews in this country and the State of Israel.
It’s easy to see how you make the Exodus a present story when the moves are happening and it’s more than a midwife here and an upstander there but history itself seems in the making.
It’s easier to see how you tell this story after we relocated to America, not only a land of freedom but a land that sees itself as another version of the Exodus story.
But for centuries and centuries our ancestors sang these songs, and made the already Exodus-filled Torah into a turbocharged Exodus Bible through the Siddur. Especially on Shabbat when they sang Nishmat, but also every regular day morning and night. Twice a day Mi Chamocha, the Song of the first moment of freedom. In the morning every weekday it’s “protector and savior for their children in every generation”; in the evening every night it’s the power “Who redeems us from the hand of every earthly power.”
What was it like to sing the Nishmat Bible? How did they do it? When there was no end in sight to oppressions, to crimes against humanity; when there was no debate and no media to show anyone else what was happening to us -- our ancestors kept being the stewards of the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus. Against all the evidence of the actual world. There was no way anyone could have pulled a Slave Bible over them. The Siddur is even more Exodus than the Torah itself.
(And of course, the Slave Bible was no match for the people over whom it was lorded in the 1800s.)
It is those centuries and centuries of stewarding this story, protecting it and retelling it and sometimes adding to it and exaggerating it in profound ways and just crazy ways, that have made other Exodus stories and realities possible in the past centuries. We talk about the power of stories, but it’s more than the story and its content. A story stored up and charged with spiritual energy for that long becomes more powerful at some point than any powerful tyrant or tyranny. That’s what I mean each time I hand the Torah scroll to a BMitzvah and say: You can feel all the noise and energy of our ancestors talking about it; their energy is in here and when you add that up it’s just so much power. Enough to power our liberations in Israel and here, the first modern revolutions, and lest we forget the dramatic fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse three decades ago of the longest and widest single brutal system of oppression in human history. So many have understood these as Exodus stories.
As real as the Slave Bible was in its time, it is really no match. At an interfaith gathering during Pesach one year, our congregation’s friend Olga Tines, the music minister at the New Fellowship Baptist Church, talked about the power of the Exodus in her own legacy as an African-American. She reminded us that Christianity was not the religion that her people brought with them from Africa to North America, but once the white slaveholders began to use Christianity they couldn’t keep those Exodus parts quiet. And like us, the slaves created a hyper-Exodus-Bible of song and prayer, in spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and in sermons. And things happened in the real world because of that, and when other things happened they had faith already because the liberation of slaves was a real thing.
I know it seems like we have discharged some of the energy in the Exodus story. There is so much Pharoah, isn’t there; he keeps coming back. I don’t have to recite the topical litany. A couple of years ago I was working with one of our BMitzvah kids, Benjamin, and we were studying another part of the Torah, the story of Noach, and Benjamin’s view was that we have not advanced at all since the time of the biblical Flood.
And I tried to come back to him with the scholar Steven Pinker and his objective, statistical study The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I don’t know if Ukraine or Burma or Afghanistan changes the calculus but Pinker said the world is less violent and more peaceful than ever before. Benjamin was having none of it.
I’m not blaming him. To make the world more free takes empirical things but it doesn’t happen without stories and without being captured back into those stories. That’s why we need more Exodus even when we might not entirely be feeling it.
If our ancestors for hundreds and hundreds of years, in their situation that was more like Israelite slaves than like anyone else in the story -- if they could keep singing the Nishmat Bible and studying the Exodus story, we certainly can from our position on the other side of the Sea as modern Jews. We can --with our memories of the past century or two in our own lives and the lives of our families. This is not a time to go mellow on Exodus, but to crank it higher. And not just talk about Pharoah and not just about midwives and sprouts, but the splitting Sea and the full-on redemption out ahead.
That’s why we’re here as Jews. You can’t cut those things out of the Bible, and if anything as a Jew you have to multiply them. Somehow, we were the first people who had this story of the Exodus, of Yetziat Mitzrayim. We’ve had it the longest, it changed us and it’s changed the world already. It’s our job in the world to be stewards of this story, pour our energy into it no matter what is happening, and keep bringing it out over and over. And, as we say at the Seder, everyone who uses the Exodus to tell more and more stories is to be praised.
In August we went down to New York for the simchat bat celebration for our newest grandniece, and when we were hanging out with the family afterward at the synagogue, my daughter Lela was playing with R. and P., and she offered to give them piggyback rides. I think it was R. who got the first ride, so P. began to scream that it was unfair, so Lela said how about I give you two rides. And then of course R. began to scream -- that’s unfair! -- and this went back and forth for a minute when I though I might help.
I tried a trick I learned from Laurie which she learned from her mom, Iris z”l, which is to distract a kid with some other words. And I thought the way I would do this was to bring my moral-educator skills to bear. So I said to one of them, R. I think, “What’s fair?”
And there was a pause for about a second, and can you guess what she said to my question?
R. said: “It’s not fair!”
At which point I left Lela to her own devices.
So R. was right about one particular thing, which I’ll tell her when she’s old enough to get it but I’ll tell you now. In Judaism, we say that we value questioning. We value it a lot, and sometimes we even say that questioning is the essence of Judaism. Questioning what everyone takes for granted, questioning authority, even questioning God. It’s why Jews are often b’gadol, in the big scheme, revolutionaries and social critics, and scientific innovators, and litigators.
What R. was responding to is something else which we also say is the essence of Torah, which is knowing right and wrong. We look to Torah for absolute moral principles, which b’gadol is also why Jews have been among the leading activists for civil rights and human rights, in any country we are in and around the globe.
Questioning and having absolute moral conviction are not the same thing.
R. was saying now is the time for moral conviction, not for questioning.
Sometimes questioning is the opposite of what the Torah wants. When Par’oh says “Who is the Divine, mi Adonai, that I should listen and release the people”, that is not: Ah, Moshe, you’ve brought me an interesting theological perspective I’ve never encountered. I have some questions, perhaps we could discuss divinity and its implications for social ethics.
No, this is Par’oh questioning something we don’t think should be questioned. People shouldn’t enslave other people, period-full-stop.
And even if Par’oh had said: Let’s talk about this God of yours and the implications for our current labor situation -- this was not a situation for questions like that. This was a situation for moral certainty.
It’s not just that certain things should be beyond question. It’s that if what you mostly know how to do is question, it’s hard to build up the commitment you need to follow through, or to stand up for someone. Sometimes questioning can prevent us from believing that we know right from wrong. We think: if you can formulate a question about this conviction, then maybe it’s not a conviction. But you need to be certain about something in order to fight for it, especially when the people who are convinced of the immoral opposite are certain and fight from that certainty.
Let me give you one example from the week, and I want to say something about it from this lens and then come back to from another angle. Israel is right now before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, responding to an accusation that the war in Gaza constitutes genocide.
To me this particular charge is in the category of when questioning is not spiritual strengthening but leads you astray. When you are in a just war, against an enemy that is real and continues to be dangerous on a day-to-day basis, when you make efforts even though they are imperfect to distinguish combatants from noncombatants by helping them escape the fighting so they won’t be killed and giving warning and even a map and schedule of the fighting -- raising the question of genocide is profoundly confused. And Israeli actions to take account of the human rights and humanitarian needs of Gazans aren't a ruse to cover up genocide or genocidal intent. Gaza isn’t some kind of Theresinstadt, that if no one was looking the whole area and all its people would be bombed to the ground.
On this issue there is moral certainty that self-defense is right and a enemy itself genocidal deserves to be fought.
Considering genocide on the part of Israel as though this were a real question, worthy of the international court, doesn’t further any moral certainty at all -- no matter what the court rules, and may they have the wisdom to rule justly. No result of this case, or of parallel actions on university campuses, will strengthen a moral principle in the world or in anyone’s mind.
The parasha and the Exodus story more broadly do teach us about the questions you should ask even in a situation where much is morally clear and absolute. I have this question of my own -- why does God insist so often that the purpose of the plagues is so that Par’oh and the Egyptians will know the Divine? Why doesn’t God say: It’s so they will know that slavery is immoral. Surely that’s a moral certainty that ought to come before anything else.
In fact, while the Torah is teaching us about moral certainty in Egypt, the Torah is also teaching about questioning at the same time.
The parasha begins with this interesting revelation by the Divine to Moshe. God says: I appeared to your ancestors in Genesis as El Shaddai, but by my name, Y-H-V-H, I was not known to them. (Exodus 6:3)
The commentators interpret this to mean that there was something about the One that Avraham and Yitzchak and Yaakov knew with certainty, and that there was something they didn’t know. Rav Ovadia Seforno says that they never stretched what they knew for certain beyond their own experience, and therefore couldn’t really pass on to their children what their moral convictions would mean for their lifetimes.
And Sara Wolkenfeld teaches a midrash from Shmot Rabbah which says the same thing this way: that before Moshe no one who really knew God ever asked questions at all, particularly when what they knew for certain from the Divine was contradicted by what was happening before their eyes.
They never asked why if the land was being promised to them they were continually fighting the people there, or finding it hard to dig a well, or I suppose why sacrificing my son was a coherent thing to do. They never even asked how their enslavement was supposed to be part of the big picture.
But Moshe asked the Divine at the burning bush: Who are You? What’s your name? I know that slavery in Egypt is wrong, and I tried to do something way back but I couldn’t, so what’s going on that you think I can help change this?
This is a questioning which is grounded in moral certainty. Which asks -- if I know this is right and I know this is wrong, how should I apply it? What do I need to do? What don’t I understand yet? What detail about the big principle might I be getting wrong -- or might you be getting wrong? (Even the angels by the way in one grueseome midrash ask God: If this oppression is so wrong, why do You allow babies to be baked into the bricks that Your people are still being forced to make?)
So Moshe reaches a level where he can ground himself in certainty and challenge Par’oh and also continue to ask questions of the Divine, about what flows further from his moral certainty and what he is charged with teaching the people.
And the Divine continues to say in our parasha and next week’s too and beyond that that it’s not enough to say slavery here and today is wrong, but knowing Me means knowing that the Exodus means something forever, in other places and times, and you will have to keep asking each other about that.
So we can and must ask questions about Israel and Palestine, and the war and its conduct and what comes after. We ask them out of our certainties about a Zionism of moral excellence and out of the certainly that all human beings are created B’tzelem Elohim (in the Divine image). Indeed these questions will strengthen and deeper our deepest moral convictions about right and wrong.
We can and must ask about how the Exodus certainties stretch out to civil rights and equality in the United States. What now, and what toward the future, and what have we been missing in this story, all of these we should ask as we mark this important weekend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.
Some of these wise questions might be very challenging ones, ones that feel every bit as uncomfortable as the genocide quote-unquote “question.” But the point isn’t the doubt; the point is to question in service of conviction. This is the questioning of the chacham in the Pesach Seder, the wise child. Who is convinced that there are important testimonies and laws, and wants to dive further. As opposed to the one she-eino yode’a lish’ol, who doesn’t know to ask questions in the right spirit. I know that my grandnieces R. and P. will understand that one day, because of their parents and the great teachers they want for them.
The Torah calls of this throughout the Exodus narrative “knowing the Divine”, Yediat Hashem. To remind us that it’s impossible to know everything we need to about our certainties but that they are highest thing to strive for. Yediat Hashem is where certainty and questioning meet and then stretch higher. That’s the questioning that is indeed at the heart of Judaism, and as one of our most famous questions asks: If not now, when?
Saving babies, according to the Torah, was the first crack in the oppression of the Israelites by Pharaoh.
In the first two chapters of Exodus, the start of this week’s Torah reading in the synagogue and Jewish study cycle, two sets of people save baby boy Israelites from the death decreed by Pharaoh. First it’s two midwives, then it’s Pharaoh’s own daughter with the help perhaps of her retinue and for sure of Moses’ sister and mother.
What do we know about each of them? Their motivations? Exodus 1-2 are both very schematic and very nuanced, worth a very careful read or re-read for the way stories that might be very familiar were first written out.
The midwives are introduced in 1:15 by name as Shifra and Puah, and they are the first characters given names in the text, other than the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt generations before and had long since died. Pharaoh and all the other actors so far in the present story are described by title and role but not named. And of course it’s very unusual for women who aren’t ongoing figures in a biblical story to be named, or for women at all in the Bible.
Not only did Shifra and Puah defy Pharaoh in their actions; they also defied him verbally to his face! (Clever talk in 1:19; they say the baby boys lived because the Hebrew women are “chayot”, which Pharaoh would have heard as “wild beasts” but also means “alive/full of life.”)
The first interpretive bump in the text is a brilliant gift made out of the fact that Hebrew is an alphabet primarily of consonants, and in biblical Hebrew most vowels are implied and not written. Generally if you know the rules of Hebrew grammar you know the patterns of vowels. But every so often there are two grammatical possibilities, and Exodus 1:15 is such a case. Pharaoh spoke either “to the midwives of the Hebrews” or “to the Hebrew midwives.” One vowel in one word affects whether they might be Egyptian or whether they are clearly Israelite. The names Shifra and Puah aren’t conclusive -- they sound like they could be Hebrew names, or non-Hebrew names made to sound like Hebrew. (Today Shifra has become a good Jewish name, but that’s no proof about ancient Hebrew.)
And then the Hebrew word for Hebrew itself adds to the ambiguity. “Ivri” means the one-from-across, one-from-over-there, one-from-across-the-river. As a rule of thumb, Israelites are described in the Torah as Ivri/Hebrew either by non-Israelites, or by Israelites in the presence of non-Israelites.
And as if that weren’t enough, the Torah says that Shifra and Puah kept the boys alive because “the midwives revered God” (1:17). You could use that to argue that they were Israelites, worshippers of the One. Or you could say the language calls attention to their unexpected reverence for this particular divinity, a stretch beyond their prior identities.
In terms of what this motivation is in substance, “revered God” sounds like deep spirituality. On the other hand, in the Torah “fearing/revering God” often refers to the most minimal standard of moral decency, and the absence of “fearing God” often means the absence of any moral standard at all. Was this standing up beyond any expectation, powered a strength from deep within the heart, or what any decent person should do?
So, were Shifra and Puah Hebrew midwives, or Egyptian midwives serving Hebrews? Or as some early post-biblical legends have it, Egyptian midwives who because of this experience went over to the Israelites or at least to their God?
Whoever they were, they saved baby boys whose death was an edict of the regime. The act is the same either way, but who they were matters. Did they act because this was their own people? (Later Jewish midrash identifies them usually but not always with Yocheved and Miryam, Moshe’s mother and sister.) Was it because of their guild, their duty to all mothers and babies? Because of their spiritual depth and attunement, or a simple and profound humanity? All of the above? Exodus 1 is a different story depending on the answer.
In the next chapter (2:6), Pharaoh’s daughter is bathing by the Nile when she sees a box floating there: “And she opened it, and she saw him, the boy, and look -- it was a little one, crying – and she took pity on him, and she said, ‘One of the Hebrew children this is.’”
Unlike the midwives, she does not have a name in the Torah. She is Daughter-of-Pharaoh. (Later Jewish tradition calls her Batyah, “daughter of Yah/the Divine.”) At least part of her motivation is clear: it’s a baby! And he’s floating for his very life. “She saw him, the little one” – the Hebrew adds an extra syllable. She saw extra.
What did she mean, “one of the Hebrew children”? It’s not just a surface descriptor, one of the babies who belongs to “them”; it’s a baby her own father has decreed must be killed. Anyone who found him was required to drown him in this very same Nile. No longer only midwives were under this command. Identifying a Hebrew baby boy meant seeing immediately a baby condemned to death.
One view: “She saw him, the little one” – Pharaoh’s daughter immediately saw this about him, a boy not just vulnerable but a specific target of her father. She went to great lengths after saving the baby to see to its care and presumably to hide him and his identity. She broke the law right under her father’s nose. She established a relationship with the baby’s mother across a boundary both geographical (Goshen) and national.
Another possibility: Tali Adler this week wrote something interrogating the meaning of pity, the root “ch-m-l” in Hebrew. Sometimes it’s a problematic term, a selective pity or even a self-serving one. (Tali herself I think concludes that in the case of a baby, one never doubts that “chemlah” is pure compassion.)
But in her general vein -- Why did Pharaoh’s daughter save this particular baby boy? Was this just the only one Pharaoh’s daughter happened upon? Was one enough for her, or would she have saved others? Did her retinue mobilize to hold her back from putting all of them at further risk if they were found out? In any case, Pharaoh’s daughter did this one act and didn’t disturb her father’s system any further.
Or did she? At some point, she gave the boy his name, Moshe/Moses, which works in both Hebrew and Egyptian. She says it’s about her “drawing him out of water.” We know for sure that in the Egyptian language his name locates him in the family of Pharoah. But in Hebrew the name is a charge or a prophecy that this boy will become a drawer-out-of-waters. He will, in a long time.
In the next set of episodes, the text toys with us around Moses’ awareness of his own connection. The narrator and we know he is Israelite, yet we don’t know if he himself does. Read the verses in the last half of chapter 2 very carefully! Moshe is identified later by Midianites as an Egyptian (2:19), and he calls himself a “stranger in a strange land” (2:22), which could mean every place he has ever dwelled.
Was the Daughter-of-Pharaoh the one who gently set up her adopted son to “get it” on his own? Did she play a long game? Did she know how painful it would be for him to discover the oppression around him, that he would have to flee from the situation for decades and then from his own role in the revolution, until he couldn’t say no to the Divine voice any more?
“Hebrew or humanitarian” and the other interpretive questions aren’t just about nailing down the motives of these specific characters. The opening chapters of Exodus are parallel to the opening of Genesis. Genesis has 10+ chapters of creation and the origins of humanity before we get to Abraham and Sarah, the founders of Israel (and others) with their special relationship to the Divine. Exodus 1-2 are a kind of second creation saga. Idioms from Genesis 1 are sprinkled throughout. Humanity as an ethical principle prior to Israel and Israel’s Torah is in play, at least as a possibility.
Encountering this part of the Torah, we Jews are being asked whether this Exodus story is about our liberation alone, or about the nature of liberation in the scheme of the universe generally. It's about whose babies we have to see.
Can the story be ours, and also ours-toward-others, and ours-and-others’? Do we read our liberation story as something that has to finish before we can relate it to other people, or can our stories run ongoing in parallel, or are they actually interwoven?
And what if in one telling we are in a process of liberation, and in a simultaneous telling we play a role in oppression? Michael Walzer argues for this at an early stage in our history. He says that the biblical prophets saw the Israelite ruling class during the era of the kings as both beset by empires and acting like Pharaohs to their own poor.
For me, all the answers are yes. Exodus liberation is past and present, ours and others’-near-us. The first law the Israelites receive after the Ten Commandments is to liberate their own “Hebrew slaves” (21:2). I would argue this means – the slaves which are Hebrew-to-you, the way you were Hebrew-to-others.
****
Now for the harder part, spiritually and morally. I hope you’ll read this part graciously toward me, particularly if you’re a committed Jew or a committed Christian. I hope it might spark some one-to-one or small groups conversations; it’s certainly not my definitive word.
The story of oppression and liberation of the Jews is not over yet for us. The century or less of tremendous Jewish freedom doesn’t mean the process is complete or the book is closed.
About a dozen years ago I first articulated to myself and to the congregation I serve that Palestinian liberation should and will be a Jewish story, a part of our own midrash on Exodus. When Palestinians are free it should be not begrudgingly or in spite of us, but because of us and because of our own liberation.
For a Jew, this focuses the challenge of the babies in Exodus 1-2 and the account of those who first saw them and acted -- what biblical scholar Jon Levenson has called “the universal horizon of biblical particularism.” In the past month, compassion for babies has been at the center of reactions to the Israel-Hamas conflict. The horrors inflicted on babies by Hamas on October 7. The babies in hospitals and homes in Gaza killed and wounded and put at risk in Israel’s military response.
This week how can we Jews not see our own people’s babies and the babies of Gaza at the same time, as we read of Pharaoh’s decree and the midwives and Pharaoh’s daughter? Which of those characters are we supposed to be?
For many Christians recently, there has been another powerful biblical anchor. So many people shared in December an image of or based on a baby doll amidst Gazan rubble set up outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as this year’s nativity scene. How could people not perceive a link between then and now, especially Palestinian Christians and those who have bonds to them?
Yet if Jews face the challenge of “the universalist horizon of biblical particularism”, Christians face the other side of that coin. Call it “the particularlist horizon of biblical universalism.” How might my friends in Christian faith see particularity, multiple particularities, in the universalism of the Christian story?
When I first saw the image from Bethlehem, I was both upset and afraid. I was upset at exclusion. Does this mean you can’t see my babies during your holy season, only yours, only theirs? And also afraid of what happens when Christians map the war this way. If Jesus represents (only?) the Palestinian babies today, then we Jews today are also the ones who are King Herod in the Gospel of Matthew, ordering the massacre of babies, Herod who is described exactly as Pharaoh from Exodus 1-2.
What would happen if this was the takeaway from Advent and Christmas this year, absorbed on social media and in churches in the United States? How would people emerge from that and look at me and my people? That’s an immediate fear. In the wider picture, what would that do to the possibility of a story where Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian liberation are intertwined?
Seeing the Bethlehem image many times, I tried not to let it disturb my own compassion for Gaza, not to let me off from my own Torah imperative to keep Gazans in my view and in my prayers, even as I was fearful and upset for myself and my own. I felt better actually after seeing a Christmas Day post from one of my religious Jewish-Israeli friends visiting the U.S.: “Where I live, we could use hope and miracles. So if you pray today, keep us all in mind.” I had thought of asking that out loud too, and wish that I had.
I know many of my Christian friends in faith did just that. I prayed that the prayers of my friends during Advent and on Christmas would be capacious enough to see the babies of Gaza these past few months and the babies in Israel who were murdered on October 7 or who were present when their parents were killed; the babies and toddlers held underground as hostages, including baby Kfir Bibas, not even a year old, who is possibly still alive in captivity. All of these babies, and older children, who lost their lives or who will have to grow up and live with the trauma of this from their youth. Not to mention the babies of Ukraine during Putin’s bombings, and other places I forget even to think about too much of the time, who need to be in our stories too.
****
I have a strong memory of Mrs. Nussbaum’s Sunday School class at Shaare Shalom Congregation, when I must have been in first or second grade. We were making our own cut-and-paste versions of the Haggadah, the text of the Pesach (Passover) Seder. I remember myself doing a page with babies being thrown into the Nile. I picture it in the traditional old-style Hebrew School notebook, with the picture of Rabbi Moses Maimonides on the front, though that’s probably wrong. Cutting, pasting, maybe even coloring.
We were taught about the babies and assimiliated it very matter-of-factly as Jewish kids. I don’t remember being scared about it at the time. I, who became the father who wanted to shield my own small children from violence of any kind in TV and books as long as possible, who fast-forwarded past the Nazi parts of “The Sound of Music” with my kids.
Today, it’s the story on the shore with Pharaoh’s daughter and on land with the midwives than I’m eager to cut, paste, and color in. These women will help me see the liberation stories in which I as a Jew am involved – our own story, Palestinians’ and our story with them, African-Americans’ and other American’s and our story with them. It’s not only about babies, or even just children.
I can’t say that in any of the liberation stories of our time I have been active like Shifrah, Puah, Pharaoh’s daughter. I haven't saved any babies. I am perhaps most like Pharaoh’s daughter at the shore at the first moment, trying to see extra and able to say, “One of the Hebrew babies this is.” That’s the moment I guess I have to study so I can know what’s next.
Who were Shifra, Puah, Batyah. What’s the best version of them, the best place to put the vowels and the best way to interpret their words -- and how can I become like them.
This is the note I sent out to the congregation and posted on Facebook.
Dear Friends:
This past Tuesday along with about a dozen people from our synagogue, I was in for the March for Israel at the National Mall in Washington. About 20 people from the Southern New Hampshire Jewish community were there in total, along with a student group from Dartmouth and perhaps some others I’m not aware of. Together we helped make up a crowd of 290,000 people, according to the highest count reported. If that number is anywhere near accurate, something like one out of every thirty American Jews was together for an afternoon! I took a group before and after the rally to meet with Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Representative Annie Kuster and their aides, and others met with staff in the office of Representative Chris Pappas.
I had about ten days’ notice about the rally, and I didn’t know at first that I would go. I am one of two working parents with a child at home, and even though I work for the Jewish community it’s not easy to take an impromptu midweek trip out of town. I don’t usually like mass events and the simplistic speeches. But it didn’t take me long to realize that I was going, or for Laurie and me to work out the details to make it possible.
I went first of all for you in our community who are Israeli, for my Israeli family and for yours, all our Israeli family and close friends. For people who have suffered losses, who know hostages held in Gaza, whose lives are in danger right now in the fighting. Your needs and their needs are important, and it was important to show you and the public that our community notices you and the people you are connected with. That I notice. One of the goals of the march was simply to show human solidarity in a hard time. Especially when Israeli grief and danger are being drowned out or denied entirely by so many.
I went for the hostages in Gaza and for their families, who have been screaming at all of us and at those in power to do something for the immediate release of about 240 people still being held, for 41 days as I write this. #BringThemHomeNow. The most powerful part of the day were the speeches of three family members, and you should take the eleven minutes to watch that (click here).
I went for our kids who are college and graduate students, including my own, who are suddenly living in environments of ongoing physical threat and danger across the country.
If you haven’t read a good news report on the rally and want to, look it up at the Times of Israel or the Jerusalem Post or Ynet or the Forward. Here I wanted to share my overall impressions and reflections, and then tell you about our meetings on Capitol Hill.
1. As I said above, the most intense moment of the rally program came when three family members of hostages spoke. Orna Neutra is the mother of Omer. She called out his name, and called on us to match Omer’s own compassionate being with our own compassion back to him and all the hostages. Alana Zeitchik has six family members being held, including small children – she began with love and ended with peace. Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, asked us present and asked the world in the name of each hostage, child and adult: Why are you letting them stay in the dark, buried in the earth’s crust.
The speakers challenged us to keep the more than 240 hostages in the consciousness of the public and our leaders every single day. They spoke about how inhuman it is subordinate the hostages’ lives to any political, military and diplomatic strategy. I don’t think any of us outside their circle know how to hold that perspective, other than to take action each day that keep the hostages’ lives front and center. (Small thing I did just now – a note to the White House, since the switchboard is closed today.)
2. Natan Sharansky spoke. He talked about what it meant to know he wasn’t alone when he was in prison in the Soviet Union, and how much the gathering in DC means to him and to Israelis now. I was a child and a teen when Sharansky was a refusenik, a household name among us, and I was in college when he was released. Almost thirty-six years ago was the massive march in DC for Soviet Jews, and now here he was in front of us. Just seeing him was a living hope, and he told his story to us with no anger, only reassurance.
3. The student speakers were amazing. Confident, proud, empowered. I hope they took some of the strength from us back home and back to campus with them.
4. This was not in any way an anti-Palestinian gathering. The enemy was defined over and over very specifically as Hamas. From the microphone I heard no gloating over deaths of Gazans in war. Some speakers mentioned peace and innocent Palestinians suffering. I don’t mean to say this was a peace rally, by any means, and there was no talk at all about what specifically will happen after the fighting ends.
Near me, one person was holding a sign calling all Gazans members or supporters of Hamas. Some people asked her to put down her sign, and in the end someone put up an Israeli flag to block the view of her sign, and when those arms were tired another bigger sign obscured hers, “LA Stands With Israel” I think.
The rally was sponsored only by two national umbrella Jewish organizations, so that no other organization would have to decide to endorse some specific other Jewish organization’s participation. As a result, the charedi Agudah movement was there with very secular Jewish groups; AIPAC and J Street were both there; the Zionist Organization of America, pretty right-wing on the Israel-Palestinian question, came and so did Americans for Peace Now.
5. It was remarkable that the one word I heard only a single time all day was: “Netanyahu.” The State of Israel was represented by President Isaac Herzog. (The president is not the head of government, but the head of state. He is elected every few years by the Knesset, the parliament, and functions like the British monarch minus the land and wealth.) Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. also spoke, Michael Herzog, and yes, the president is the ambassador’s young brother. This was all about solidarity with Israelis as a people. And because of Israeli Arabs and Druze, and because of so many visitors and foreign workers in the area outside Gaza on October 7, this was also about more than Jews and even more than Israelis. Near me was a sign for one of the Thai hostages, part of a set of posters you’ve probably seen for every single of the hostages.
6. The music was very special, songs I knew and songs in Hebrew I didn’t know but apparently every young person there did. (Generations present: When Debra Messing spoke, the college kids were trying to figure out who she was; one of them mentioned “Will and Grace” almost as though it was as old as “I Dream of Jeannie.”) At the end, Matisyahu sang his anthem “One Day”, and the Maccabeats joined him: All my life, I've been waitin' for/I've been prayin' for/for the people to say/That we don't wanna fight no more/There'll be no more wars, and our children will play”, and in the crowd that might have been the loudest song of all. We had sung “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah” two hours before.
7. That actually wasn’t the end. There were some non-Jewish clergy who gave long sermons right after, but it was overtime and people left, including our group for a meeting on the Hill. Pastor John Hagee spoke, and this was the most controversial thing about the event. He is a prominent “Christian Zionist” with a history of hateful words and ideas, including anti-Semitic. It was absolutely correct to have the bipartisan leadership of the two Houses of Congress represented, even though everyone at the rally had someone among them whom they despise. Pastor Hagee wasn’t needed and his presence on the program was over the line. At least by then most people were leaving.
8. I stood on my feet stuffed in one place for at least four hours, having had only a small breakfast and some granola bars to nosh on. I didn’t have any water with me. I don’t get inspired by speech after speech saying much of the same thing, as was a lot of the program I haven’t mentioned. And yet, the time felt like nothing at all. I had a random talk with a man who was commuting to work on the train in from the airport at the start of the day, a man about my age with political opinions and life perspective, and we blessed each other. I was with hundreds of people I know who I didn’t get to see at all because who could find each other. And yet, something about the moment helped me feel connected, and when better days come we’ll tell more of our stories about Tuesday.
Before the rally six of us met with Representative Annie Kuster, and afterward with Senator Jeanne Shaheen. For me, this was an essential part of the day. Having something concrete to do, something more in my element. It grounded me.
Rep. Kuster and a senior member of her staff met us in the Capitol, in the members’ dining room. She told us how that morning, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had screened the video of Hamas atrocities for all House members who were willing to see it, and how many members were shocked beyond anything they had seen before. She talked about the efforts to move the supplementary appropriations for Israel’s military needs, which she supports. We thanked her for her personal support and outreach to our Jewish community, and her staff’s calls to me on a regular basis.
Much of our conversation was about increased anti-Semitism. Each of us in the group spoke about our own child’s experience on campus, and the physical and emotional danger to Jewish students that is accompanying certain slogans and accusations of genocide against Israel. The degree of all this was obviously surprising to Rep. Kuster.
We turned then to the matter of Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her use of phrases like “from the river to the sea”, “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Rep. Kuster said she did not vote for the censure of Rep. Tlaib for a variety of reasons. She told us that she talks with Rep. Tlaib directly and within the Democratic caucus generally about why this language is unacceptable, and that she has made some public statements to that effect.
I am absolutely convinced that Rep. Kuster thinks and has done the things she told us. We pressed her to take more responsibility as a public official to be more specific about why specific characterizations of Israel are both false and physically dangerous to Jewish students in particular, to make her statements more frequent and audible, and to call on other public officials to stop making such characterizations. Already this week there is some evidence that she and her staff heard us. They asked for my help in drafting a statement about our meeting, and incorporated some of what I suggested. You can read her statement here.
I gave Rep. Kuster and her office a copy of a book I often recommend, Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which also includes letters back from Palestinians. She wrote me subsequently that she plans to read it and then pass it along.
After the rally we met with Senator Shaheen. We were actually expecting only to meet with a couple staff members, since Sen. Shaheen had talked with some of us just a couple weeks ago at the Jewish Federation.
Sen. Shaheen is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the subcommittee for the Near East. She talked to us about a briefing she had been at concerning negotiations for the hostages’ release, which we of course emphasized. Sen. Shaheen too has been a longtime supporter of U.S. defense assistance to Israel.
We asked her about a letter she and other Senators had sent to President Biden asking him to raise certain concerns with Israel about humanitarian issues in the war in Gaza. Her public statement about that letter is here.
Both Sen. Shaheen and her staff were also very affected by what we told them about college campuses. Despite a lot of recent stories about how aides to Democratic members of Congress are at odds with their bosses about Israel, everyone we spoke with in both offices told us how engaged they are with the issues facing Israel and American Jews, even after our meetings formally broke up. It has been my experience that all the members of New Hampshire’s delegation in Washington have some of the best and most knowledgeable staff on all of Capitol Hill.
Some of you have asked what you could do in terms of advocacy around these issues. I would say in brief that over the next week or two, you could send notes to Sen. Shaheen and Rep. Kuster thanking them for meeting with us. Then you could thank them for their continued support of our community’s needs and Israel, urge them to press for the immediate release of all hostages, and ask them to take a strong and specific public stance whenever any public official. I can help you craft that if you'd like.
A couple final personal spiritual thoughts after this week.
I have a pretty wide Jewish definition of joy. Sometimes I stretch it so far that means something like “feeling purposeful.” But to be honest with you, I can’t say that on Tuesday I felt particularly joyful. Sometimes rallies like this are like camp reunions. This didn’t feel that way for me at all. There were small moments of joy for me: Finding our group in front of the Capitol, a building that takes my breath away. Running into someone I have known for a long time. Dinner after all of it with my nephew. I hooted at times and waved my sign, and sang along when I could, but it wasn’t out of joy overall. Still, I know I feel different after Tuesday than before.
I feel better; that I can say. Part of it comes from the analogy of mourning that a lot of people have been using over the past month. I am not right now an immediate mourner for October 7, but I have been part of an extended Jewish family in mourning. As I tell every family, no one mourns the same way or on the same schedule. Just for me, Tuesday in DC was a kind of shloshim occasion, like the traditional thirty-day mark. Not an end, by any stretch. I just feel a bit more ready to talk with more people in more dimensions about what is going on, and a bit more ready to be in the wider community discussing and educating, returning to my familiar modes. It was good to be talking to our representatives. That seemed more like me, even though the conversations were unlike any I have ever had with them. I am not fine yet.
I am grateful: for the Jewish people, for the United States of America, for my family’s safety and wisdom, for community, for all the teachers and inspirations who brought me to this week, for everyone who is standing up for us and for what is right.
Please feel free to ask me more. I will go now and light an extra Shabbat candle and put some extra tzedakah in the box, for the people who need us now.