January 15, 2012: Parashat B’shallah

The exception to my rule of thumb not to speak about directly about politics, the sole occasion when I will break that rule, is when I feel not speaking my mind is at odds with my conscience.

It compels me to entertain perhaps the most controversial question emanating from the horror that took place in that parking lot in Tucson this week: the question of whether the tone and temper of the times played some role in what happened.

First is to be perfectly clear: only one person bears the guilt for those murders and injuries and trauma: the madman who did it.   Moreover, it is fair to speculate that he would have done it no matter the tone and temper of the times.  He may have been bent on murder and mayhem the moment he failed to receive the answer he hoped for from Cong. Giffords at a public gathering several years ago.

Who understands the mind of a deeply deranged individual? There’s a decent possibility that what some conservatives have been saying about some democrats and vise versa meant nothing to Laughner, that he wasn’t even aware of it.  Perhaps what he did was simply an act of nihilism.  “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” as the Johnny Cash song goes.

For that reason, we cannot and must not assume any direct connection between what he did and the temper and tone of the times.  Yet we must not stop there.  We must move forward and ask difficult questions, and in answering them choose our words very carefully.

For, while it is true that there is no proof of any causal connection between the times and the act, it is no less true that there is no proof there is not.  So the question is this: how do we approach the possibility that somehow the times we live in to some extent laid the groundwork for the massacre?  Are we to take a position akin to the presumption of innocence, that since there is no letter from Laughner saying something along the lines of, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” we simply dismiss the possibility?

A question is not a person. The question of linkage doesn’t deserve a “no” answer, just because there’s no proof the answer is “yes.”   So I say, why not play it safe?  Why not err on the side of caution, and  contemplate a possible relationship?  What is to be lost by stepping back and saying that perhaps the politics of division have gone too far and therefore may have played some role? Should we wait until there’s another assassination/massacre?

To me, the answer to the question I ask seems obvious, and the proper response for any opinion shaper whose rhetoric, words and/or graphics, utilized violent imagery is to make a commitment to desist from such expression.  I know it is too much to expect someone like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, as well as those pouring vitriol from the left, to step forward and say: “look guys, we’ve gone a bit too far in demonizing each other.  Let’s put our country first and tone down the rhetoric.”

But it should not be too much to ask for someone whose camp has employed blatantly violent imagery not to go on the offensive.  Sarah Palin’s diatribe brings to mind Pharaoh in this week’s sedra.  His actions already have lost him his labor force; now he does something that costs him his army.   And, like Pharaoh, it is quite possible she has rendered herself a force no longer to be reckoned with.

We owe it to the people who died in that parking lot and to those struggling to recover from their wounds to soberly consider the very real possibility that the politics of division as practiced the past two years bore at least some causal relationship to the evil that manifested itself this week.   We cannot afford to be sanguine about this.  We cannot afford for individuals or parties to resist contemplating a relationship just because it runs counter to protectioning their own interests.

Heschel, in describing the operating premise of the prophet who comes to beseech that the community examine their ways and return to God, put it best: few are guilty, but all are responsible.  One man did this dastardly deed.  One man, alone.  But we all, that is to say, Americans as a community, bear the responsibility to examine and mend the moral fabric of our social culture.  So let begin by asking: At what price political victory?

January 7, 2012: Parashat Veyehi

In this week’s parasha, Jacob’s life draws to an end.  The last act of the last patriarch is recorded in the penultimate chapter of Genesis, chapter 49, the bulk of which comprises+- our Torah reading today.  “Jacob called unto his sons and said, ‘Gather unto me, and I will tell you what will befall you b’ahareet ha’yamim’” – two Hebrew words whose primary meaning has been translated or interpreted in more than one way.  “In after the days” is the literal meaning, which is gibberish.  Clearly, b’ahareet ha’yamim is an idiom.  Our Humash translates, “in days to come,” which certainly squares with the thrust of what follows: Jacob’s conveying to his sons, one by one, a prophecy of his progeny’s tribal future, based, interestingly, on character traits of each son.  Even more interesting, albeit less convincing in context, is the approach of some commentators who take a decidedly mystical approach, chief among them Nahmanides, who interprets: “They are the days of the Messiah.”  In this school of thought, Jacob’s charge to each of his sons alludes not just to a vision of the future of each son’s tribal progeny, but to the VERY end of days, to END TIME, to the end of time.  Jacob is hinting, deep down, to the end of history, perhaps even to what comes after that, the world to come.

The verse in question and the context in which it appears would make this approach seem a bit fanciful, to put it mildly.  Yet, for reasons I will now explain, the approach stands on solid ground.  Biblical exegesis is a 4-fold enterprise, which has a formal title: PARDES, a Hebrew word meaning “orchard.”   The Pardes concept delineates almost unbelievably wide parameters for valid textual interpretation of the Bible.  The word Pardes is an acronym, representing four discrete modes of Biblical interpretation.  P stands for pshat, the prima facia textual meaning; R for remez, for what the text hints at; D for drash, the fanciful layers of new information glossed atop the superficial meaning; and S for sod, the text’s secret meaning.  It’s also important to note that more than one of these meanings can, and often does, apply simultaneously to any given text.

For example, the commandment to wear tefillin is drash; no where does the Torah say explicitly anything about tying boxes filled with scriptured parchment on one’s arm and forehead.  Rather, the mitzvah stems from scripture calling us to place God’s words “on our arm and between our eyes.”  The contextual meaning of that scripture is metaphorical and it applies to all Jews all the time – not just to Jewish men upon turning 13 laying tefillinwhen they pray Shaharit.  The pshat is the verse’s metaphorical, spiritual meaning.  Gleaning the material mitzvah of laying tefillin verse is drash.  The point here is that the verse yields both meanings, equally; neither cancels the other.  Nor do we have to decide between the two in terms of the “official/primary meaning.”  The same scripture tells us to do both: to lay tefillin, AND to keep God’s words in what we do and what we think.

So, it is possible, that when Jacob tells his sons to gather ’round so he can tell them about “ahareet hayamim,” Jacob, could, in fact, be cluing them in to what is going to happen at the very end of time.  How to glean precise content about that future from what he says about and to each of them in the succeeding verses, is quite another story, which I will resist the urge to undertake here and now.  Instead, let us meditate a bit further on a philosophical question that naturally flows from the claim that these two word refer to the end of time, the messianic era.  Put simply, the question is this: Is the future pre-determined?  Is that really what Judaism teaches?  And, if it does, can we and should we believe in such a thing?

When the Lubavitcher Rebbe died without a biological heir in 1994, a good portion of his followers concluded that he was/is the messiah.  Chief among the reasons they adduced to validate that claim was the mystical teaching, from the Zohar, that history as we know it will draw to an end at or around the year 6000.  Within that conceptual framework, the idea of a messianic era 250 years in length, initiated by the “death” of the Rebbe/arrival of the moshiah, to conclude of six millenia of history, has a certain resonance. The claim that the rebbe is the moshiah is thus predicated on a deterministic view of reality, at least with respect to its length.  We note that a portion of Jews drew similar conclusions for similar reasons about another rabbi some two thousand years ago.  And remember Y2K?  That madness too was predicated on a very deterministic philosophy of the world.

I’ve given away my personal sentiments about historical determinism.  As a governing philosophy, I indeed think it’s a crock, and the craziness of rebbe-as-moshiah claims and Y2K are pretty good proof.  At the same time, I believe we should be humble.  The essence of knowledge of God is that we can know absolutely nothing about Him or Her or It.  Maimonides got it right.  In that sense, it is indeed possible God has charted a path for each of us, as well as for all combinations of animate relationships at every intersection of the web of life for all time.  Ver vays?  Who knows?  But saying for sure exactly what it is, that’s another matter.  And making plans or policy based on such purported knowledge crosses into quackery.  Christopher Hitchens was completely right and completely wrong: right in his claim that making policy at any level based on a preconceived vision of the future is reckless; wrong in his claim that he knew for sure such a thing doesn’t exist in the mind and plans of God.

Is the rebbe the messiah?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  Unfortunately, the question itself has spawned a certain amount of tension among believing Jews.  Did the messiah come 2012 years ago and leave soon after, his promised return we await?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  An ocean of blood has been spilled on the question, and that’s the tragedy.  Killing over what can’t be known.  (Parenthetically, is what was revealed to Muhammed in the version called the Koran God’s final prophecy?  Maybe yes, maybe no; much blood continues to be spilled on that, as well.)   At least the question of whether Jacob delivered the authoritative picture of the future at the end of time never has been more than a matter of academic dispute among deceased commentators.  That’s the only appropriate realm for such a question.   Let Maimonides and Nahmanides duke it out in the pages of sacred commentary.  Subscribe to one or the other’s interpretation.  And leave it at that.   That’s not just the Jewish way, it’s the American way, undergirding the separation of church and state.

The greatness of this society rests on the anti-establishment clause of the constitution.  That clause keeps questions of religious philosophy out of the hands of lawmakers.   More than anything else – more than our fortunate geography, more than our plentiful natural resources – THAT is the source of our strength.  That is the reason why we lead the world in so many ways, why the world looks to us for leadership, why we are the model of a civil society.  Not because we are a secular country; but because we separate and keep certain questions in their proper realms.  The future of our planet depends on others following our lead.  May they soon so do.

January 1, 2012: Parashat Va’eyrah

A Jewish person was feeling a bit depressed, so he went to see a psychiatrist, who showed him a collection of random ink blots and asked him what he saw.  The Jewish person stared at the blots for a full two minutes, then said, “Tell me doctor, are you Jewish?”

“Why do you want to know that?” the doctor inquired.  “Well,” said the patient, “maybe you could give a landsman a hint?”

Perhaps everybody here knows that feeling: part of being an active Jew is an intense identification with all things Jewish.  You don’t even have to be religious.  My father wasn’t, for example.  But if there was a Jewish player on one of the teams he followed, that was always his favorite player.  If you’re Jewish and you travel abroad, Jewish sites are always at the top of the list.  The leaning tower of Pisa?  Not before we see the Jewish ghetto in Venice.

It’s not difficult to cite what’s behind this: our shared history, especially a few events whose drama and whose ubiquity – for lack of a better term – are of particular allure.  Surely near the top, if not at the top, are the plagues in Egypt, the first eight of which occur in our sedra, Va’eyra.  Even the most secular Israelis attend a seder every year, and the recitation of the plagues with the removal of a drop of wine as each is pronounced, followed by a robust round of dayenu necessarily is deeply affecting.  There is a doubling of affect: the common history and the common seder experience.  We Jews may find much to disagree with each other about, but that comes only after the initial sense of commonality we sense whenever we meet someone new, only to discover he or she is Jewish.  It’s like stumbling across an unknown family member.

Most non-Jewish Americans can’t relate to what I’m talking about, and not just because they’re not Jewish.  The reasons are outlined by two professors of philosophy which was the subject of David Brooks’s column in yesterday’s NYTimes, entitled, “The Arena Culture.”  Briefly, since the dawn of the secular age some 300 years ago, large communities have suffered from a lack of shared values we absorb via our common culture, a condition that has left individuals prone to anxiety and indecision, a spiritual void, if you will.  Into that void have climbed sports, especially when experienced in an arena.  Other arena-based events, such as political rallies, offer a similar feeling of being “whooshed up” – defined by feelings of intense elevation during magical moments.

Many of us can think of such moments.  I was in the stands when Pete Stoyakavich kicked a 54-yard field goal as time expired to beat the Broncos by a point.  Generally, the behavior of crowds leaving an arena event varies depending on what happened there.  When the hotel shuttle picked up Civia, my sons and I after the OKC Thunder game Monday night, he remarked that he knew they’d lost, because when the win he hears everybody whooping it up.  Anybody who goes to Chiefs’ games, even like me only two or three times a year, knows that there’s a huge difference in crowd behavior between a winning and losing effort.  Likewise, who wasn’t struck by the beatific expression on faces in the crowd as they gazed up Geo W Bush while he addressed the convention during his reelection campaign in 2004?

Unlike our predecessors up to the dawn of widespread secularism, modern man in general gets “whooshed up” only on occasion, and primarily only when he experiences “whooshable moments” with a large crowd.  Fascism well knows that reality.  Gone are the days when your typical man or woman in the street got that feeling simply through feeling connected with God.  Thus, the spiritual void with the fading of the common world outlook framed by religious belief.  Thus, the rise of arena culture in its place.

If we contrast the high we feel as Jews when we find that someone who interests us also is Jewish, with high people get from arena culture, we find something very interesting: a perfect illustration of the clash of two cultures, extended back in time more than 3,000 years: Greek (or Hellenistic) v. Jewish culture.  A Greeks city was oriented around the gymnasium; Jewish cities around the hall of study.  Esau like to hunt; that’s a sport.  Jacob stuck around the house and learned.  Esau is the progenitor of Rome; Jacob of Jerusalem.

Such is the hollowness of secular culture.  It facilitates anxiety and indecisiveness.  It leads one to seek escape, through activities of questionable constructive value: computer games, evenings of hours in front of the tube watching sitcoms between interminable advertisements.  Over-emphasis on elements in the community whose chief benefit is providing a few moments of collective spiritual lift, which begins to fade the morning after.  I say over-emphasis, because I know for a fact it spices up life, but in proper perspective.  I’m delighted the Chiefs are back to their old selves.  But it doesn’t make me think everything is well with the world.

People ask: how did our small, embattled people and culture survive, when so many others much larger have come and gone?  There are several interlocking reasons, but the one that stands above the rest is our Torah.  It’s not without reason Torah is called “Mahyim Hayyim,” Living Waters, and “Etz Hayyim,” Tree of Life.  As a record of our forebears encounter with God in their time, it frames a prism through which we seek to encounter God in every age.   And if you’re looking to feel “whooshed up,” going to the Torah is effective every time – unlike in arena culture, where your team might not win, and where you’ll walk away considerably lighter in the pocket.

December 24, 2011: Parashat Mikketz/Shabbat Hanuka 

The Torah records God’s appearances to the patriarchs, describing what He communicated to them within those appearances.  These direct, unfiltered encounters with the Divine come to an end with the last of the patriarchs.  Thereafter, only Moses would merit such face-to-face time with the Almighty.  But prophecy nevertheless remained very much alive, all the way until the destruction of the Holy Temple, when, according to rabbinic teaching, it drew to an end.  Aside from direct encounter experienced by the patriarchs and Moses, what did prophecy consist in?  Heschel’s exploration into the phenomenology of prophecy yielded the concept of empathy.  The Biblical prophets, from Joshua through Malachi, experienced God through their preternatural ability to sense God and, crucially, God’s intentions through the medium of pathos – their ability to feel what God felt, especially God’s feelings when He was upset with human misbehavior.  Read more »

December 3, 2011: Parashat Vayetze

Jacob knew an opportunity when he saw one, even as a very young person.  Recall the ease with which he obtained the birthright.  Esau returns from the hunt, obviously exhausted, sees Jacob cooking up a tasty concoction of lentils, and casually says to his twin brother, “fork it over.”  Sensing an opportunity, Jacob offers a trade: the lentils for the birthright.  Desperate with hunger, the aroma of the steaming lentils rising under his nose, Esau bites, and blunders into trading away something of enormous value – albeit down the line, upon the demise of his father – for a small bit of immediate gratification.  Jacob makes out like a bandit, literally. Read more »

November 12, 2011: Parashat Vayera

Over the years, I’ve become quite the champion of Abraham as the epitome of righteousness.  Among the evidence I’ve adduced for this position is his negotiation with God on the question of whether Sodom and Gemorah should be destroyed.  I’ve argued for interpreting the interesting circumstance in our parasha, in which God shares His desire to destroy the cities — so disturbed is God by the evil He perceives in those cities — that He seeks out objective advice from Abraham.

In a recent discussion, my position came under cogent attack.  If Abraham was so righteous, my challenger asked, why did he cease negotiating at 10 innocent individuals?  Why not take it all the way to 1 – spare the cities, God, for one good person.  Why should even one be swept away with the evil-doers?  Great question.

Thanks to the Rabbinic commentaries, I had an answer handy, and I want to share it with you.  The essence of a good person is the ability for his or her goodness to influence or inspire others to be good.  Minimally, a good person should have such an effect on at least ten others.  Thus, the fact that even 10 good people could not be found in Sodom and Gemorah proves that there was in fact not even one good person.  And it shows why Abraham didn’t need to negotiate all the way down to one.  QED

More important than explaining and justifying Abraham’s negotiating strategy, such a goodness standard says something very important about Jewish teachings and values.  The bar for the true measure of goodness, of righteousness, is quite high.  A good person, a person who does good things, can’t rest on the laurels of the righteous quality of his or her personal behavior; he or she has to strive to inspire others to the same standard.

The question, of course, is how to go about doing this.  Elsewhere, the Torah exhorts us in strong language: “That shalt surely rebuke thy neighbor” when you perceive that he has transgressed.  But wouldn’t that make a person sanctimonious?  I remember one time, many years ago, hearing a friend criticize his health insurance company for being inept, because they double paid his claim – and to punish the company for its ineptitude, he was going to keep the overage, which amounted to just under a thousand dollars.  I was in a bind; I didn’t know whether to criticize him and be “uncool,” or just let it go, and hope that, eventually, the insurance company would run an audit and discover their mistake and insist he return what he owed them.  I chose the latter; I have no idea whether that’s what happened.

Here’s a more common example, from my seminary days in New York.  Going to a movie on Saturday night usually meant standing in a long line for tickets (unless it was a lousy movie).  Let’s say you’re well towards the front of the very long line, and along come a couple of friends you hadn’t previously planned to meet.  They intimate they expect you to give them cuts.  You can avoid making a scene by pretending you expected them all along – “we were wondering whether you’d show up,” you can announce, loud enough for those nearby who might be miffed.  Or you can tell your friends: sorry, go to the back of the line.  Or should I say, former friends.

In Sodom, no one was willing to take that position.  In Sodom, everyone expected to get cuts, everyone keeps the overage on double payments.  In Sodom, there wasn’t a single person who deviated from that pattern of behavior.

If you saw Leslie Stahl interview Jack Abramoff on 60 Minutes last Sunday, and you heard what Abramoff said about congress, then you know that congress is a den of Sodomites.  Perhaps that’s one reason why the approval rate is running at 9% and trending down.  Abramoff explained that he’d pour free drinks and give free food at his restaurant to staffers on the hill with whom he wanted to curry influence – an ethics violation.  But he added that those folks had to push white house staffers getting their free food and drink out of the way to get to the bar.  Leslie said the things she was hearing from Abramoff – now quite penitent after three years in the slammer – made her want to throw up.  I’m not making it up.  Watch the interview on line.

Is there an innocent person in Washington?  It sure doesn’t sound like it.  And if we think that letting the government regulate Wall Street is going to get those folks to clean up their act, we need to stop smoking what’s in our pipes.  If the protesters in Zucotti Park and elsewhere think the answer is having Washington put the clamps on the bankers, they’ve overlooked a crucial reality: the bankers and the politicians who would oversee the regulators are cut from the same cloth.

So what is the answer?  It is not simple or quick, but it rests in each one of us, in the choice we make to act with integrity, and to take a gentle stand with those around us, even those close to us, when we see integrity violated.  I could have looked for an opening, even long after the fact, to share with my friend who pocketed the extra payment the wrongness of his behavior.  I could have shared with my friends over drinks after the movie, that their expecting to cut in front of dozens who’d preceded them made me feel uncomfortable.

To do less is to add to the corruption.  Lots of little corrupt things like that add up to an evil community.  Washington and Wall Street have become – or better put, perhaps, remain – corrupt not because they are aberrations; rather, because they reflect the general values – or lack thereof – in the general community.  For those domains to change, we all have to change.

November 5, 2011: Parashat Lekh Lekha

In 1973, PBS aired a series tracing human development through math and science.  The title, “The Ascent of Man,” was a pun on Darwin’s famous book.  I didn’t see the series – I was 16 and not very interested in math, unless it included the numbers 36/24/36.  But about 20 years ago, I found a slightly-used copy of the companion book at J Hood Booksellers in Lawrence, which I never missed visiting before it moved to Baldwin.  And what a memorable read it was. Read more »

October 7, 2011: Kol Nidre 2011

Eighteen years ago I returned to Kansas City to teach Torah at The Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy.  On the side, I taught Hebrew school Saturday and Sunday mornings and Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and  Melton mini-school one evening a week.  I also began tutoring students for Bar and Bat Mitzvah.  It was, I recall, quite a grind. Read more »