What we do, who we are, and the High Holy Days

 

Both last year and this year, in the month of Elul leading up to the High Holy Days, I have read Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's On Repentance and Repair. At the end of 5783, I read it on my own, and this year, as we approached the close of 5784, I re-read it with a group led by Rabbi Eliana Jacobowitz at Temple B'nai Brith in Somerville. (Yes, it's worth reading and re-reading!) 

The book builds on Maimonides' teachings about teshuvah (the repentance and returning to the right path that is the focus of the High Holy Day season). Rabbi Ruttenberg stresses certain aspects of those teachings that she thinks that we, in Christian-dominated American society, may be in danger of forgetting: 

• that acknowledgment, amends, and apology by the perpetrator are the central issue--not forgiveness by the victim--and 
• that true teshuvah involves self-transformation so that if we found ourselves in the same situation again, we would not repeat our mistakes. We would act differently.

On one point, Ruttenberg (and, I think, most of us) would disagree with Maimonides. He states that if the perpetrator does true teshuvah and asks the person he has hurt to forgive him, and the victim repeatedly refuses, then the victim takes the sin on themselves. All of us in the TBB reading group recoiled at this. We are too familiar (and Ruttenberg gives examples of) cases where the harm was so deep and permanent that the sin is unforgivable. We have seen too many cases of victim-blaming (especially by men, of women they have hurt) to want to fall into that trap again.

To be fair, Maimonides is aware of such examples. It's clear he's talking about an extreme and extraordinary occurrence. Still, given our respect for his scholarship and thoughtfulness, I asked Rabbi Eliana: why does he bring it up at all? What makes it important to him to say that being unforgiving can sometimes be a sin in itself? She taught me that he is imagining a case in which the victim is now in a position of power. Refusing to forgive when the offender has truly repented can ruin their lives and their reputation, even lead them to desperation and suicide. It's that abuse of power, she explained, that motivates Maimonides to address this rare case.

I was satisfied. In Jewish learning, we do not have to agree with a conclusion in order to ask how the person stating it arrived at that conclusion, and to learn something from the person with whom we disagree. (See the ongoing debates between the schools of Hillel and Shammai.) The abuse of power is an issue I have been paying attention to for at least fifty years, and I honor Maimonides for being sensitive to it, even if I cannot go where we goes with that train of thought.

Teshuvah, virtue, love

I was reminded of this discussion just today, when I listened to Rabbi Shai Held discuss Maimonides on teshuvah, but with a different emphasis. Rabbi Held wants us to hear Maimonides--and, I think, God!--speaking to us in two different voices at the same time. He calls them the prophetic voice and the pastoral voice. The prophetic voice wants us to pay attention to how far we are from acting righteously all the time. The pastoral voice wants us to be encouraged to believe that we can and will do better.

Not only do, but be. Rabbi Held thinks of Maimonides as the principal Jewish advocate of virtue ethics, the idea that we want not only to do the right things, but for the right reasons, in the right spirit. (A Jewish school of thought that sounds a lot like virtue ethics is mussar.)  

He puts repentance and repair in the context of our relationship with God, which as he says in his recent book that I am also perusing this month of Elul is about love. Following God's commandments is important, but so is recognizing God's love for us and trying to live up to it--in part, by how we treat other people.

Held reminds us that if teshuvah is about trying to correct our actions and also transform ourselves, the High Holy Days are only the beginning of the process. Having a new beginning every year is vital, but every single day, we should be engaged in self-examination, acknowledgment of where we have gone wrong, making things right with people and with God, and changing our lives. It's a tall order, but it's a Jewish way to live.

Shanah tovah to all my readers, and if I have injured you in the past year, or week, or day, I hope you will lovingly bring it to my attention so I can do better by you, starting now.

The Talmud and the Internet, by Jonathan Rosen: a review

Growing up in Pittsburgh and attending the pretentiously titled School of Advanced Jewish Studies, I took a bite of Talmud. Not even a mouthful: just enough to taste. And it has nourished my curiosity forever.  Read this book if you want to whet your curiosity too.

Like me, author Jonathan Rosen finds the form of the Talmud even more intriguing the intricacies of its content. It's the original hypertext.

The Mishnah is at the center of each page, a set of oral traditions about how to read and practice what we find in the Torah that were finally written down between 180 and 220 CE by Rabbi Yehudah haNasi to keep them from being forgotten. The Gemara comes below, giving four centuries more of debate about what how those traditions make sense and what they really mean. More commentaries are arranged at the bottom and along the sides: the medieval scholar Rashi and his disciples especially. That's not even getting into the entirely separate books that comment on the Talmud, from Maimonides' Mishneh Torah to the latest one hot off the press.

As Rosen points out, these commentators hold lively discussions, even when one of them is rebutting another who's been dead for centuries. They don't confine themselves to any genre. Legal discussion rubs shoulders with etymology, moralism with fable. They remind him (and me) of nothing so much as weird and unpredictable discussions on the Internet--especially the more unbridled Internet of 2001, when this book was published.

Rosen is both incisive and evocative when he makes the case that Talmudic discussion is the lifeboat of the Jewish people. When the destruction of the Temple by the Roman empire cast Jewish life adrift, it was in these discussions that we made our home.

Rosen is elegiac when he looks at 21st-century Jewish life, changed forever by both the Holocaust in which some of his grandparents died and the acceptance of the Jews into secular society, and of secular society into Jewish identity. Can we find ways to transmute our existence in new circumstances as the creators of the Talmud once did? Or will the culture that he and I hold dear fade into memory? Or both?

Without Charity

Maimonides taught that out of seven levels of charity, the highest level is teaching a person a profession, so that he or she will never have to depend on charity again.  My teacher, Arnold Jacob Wolf, used to say that there was an eighth, higher level: creating a society where no one has to depend on charity.  (As Rabbenu Karl Marx wrote, "From each according to his [sic] abilities, to each according to his needs."

I want to follow Rabbi Wolf's example by taking another inspiring thought and expanding it from the individual to the social.  Here it is:

Last week's Torah portion, Mishpatim, includes rules and instructions on how to act with integrity in business.  This week's portion, T'rumah, is all about building the portable sanctuary that the Israelites carried around for forty years in the desert.  The editor of Etz Hayim comments, "...it teaches that only after we make our living honestly can we give any proceeds to charity."

This is an inspiring thought, but let's take it social. 

• Let's provide full employment, then give to charity.
• Let's guarantee a living wage, then give to charity.
• Let's make sure that the gap between women's incomes and men's disappears, then give to charity.
• Let's make sure there's affordable child care, health care, housing, college education, continuing education, food, and heat, plus paid sick days and parental leave, plus a guaranteed comfortable retirement for anyone who works, plus support for anyone whose disability prevents them from working for pay...and then, and only then, give to charity.

If we do all this, then (as Rabbi Wolf suggested) we may have a society where no individual has to depend on charity. Let's start today!