Law and Love

Can we obey commands we don't understand? And if we do, is it a loss of independence, or is it a sign of love? 

What is a chok?

The Torah portion we read on this past Shabbat, Parshat Bechukotai, begins like this:

אִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַ֖י תֵּלֵ֑כוּ וְאֶת־מִצְוֺתַ֣י תִּשְׁמְר֔וּ וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם אֹתָֽם׃

If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, 

 

The word for "commandments" is mitzvot, and Jews are pretty familiar with the concept of a mitzvah. The word for "laws" is chukot, and that is not so familiar. What is a chok? And why is it such a challenge to follow the chukot (more often pluralized as chukim)?

We often see this word in Torah in combination, chukim u' mishpatim : "laws and judgments." Judgments are based on principles of justice, and they are logically justified when we understand the situation. As Rabbi Menachem Leibtag states, however, "a CHOK can be logical, but it doesn't have to be!" It is binding, and lasting, whether or not a reason is given, or can be deduced. We have to follow it whether or not there is a reason or not. Because God said so.

"Because God said so"? What kind of reason is that?

For some thinkers, notably Soren Kierkegaard, obeying God's commandments when they don't make any sense is the most meritorious thing we can do. It shows a higher level of faith than carrying out instructions that make rational sense. Faith is much more of a Christian or Muslim thing than a Jewish one, however, and even those Jewish thinkers who stress faith also value applying human reason to our texts. In fact, their faith requires that they do so!

And let's be real: we are living in the 21st century. We have inherited the modern understanding that using one's intelligence is a good thing, a necessary thing, part of being a dignified and independent human being. Irrationality can be seen as threatening: a gateway to fascism. Unquestioning obedience can be seen as a throwback to a premodern age. 

Even the main body of our parshah, the tochecha or warning about what happens when we don't obey, can sound dictatorial--or like a parent threatening a child with consequences. "Because I said so"? As the Jewish people, and as adults, haven't we outgrown messages like this? Why should we even study the chukim in Parshat Be'chukotai?

I suppose it depends on our understanding of what a parent is like.

My parents taught me to question

In 2024. the yahrzeit, or anniversary of death, for my father, Mel Fischman was the week before this parshah was read. My mother's birthday will be the following week, and Faye Fischman would have been 90 years old. 

My parents were the generation that demanded reasons for everything. They were a puzzle to their hard-working immigrant parents, who may not have been able to keep from working on Shabbat--they were poor, and they had to make a living--but they knew that's what they were supposed to do. They kept kosher. They hosted the Passover Seder. And their children said to them, "If you can't explain it, we're not going to do it."

Still, my parents had very strong Jewish identities, including the Jewish cultural emphasis on education. They sent us to Hebrew school beginning around age nine or ten. Just as, when we got home from secular school in the afternoon, they asked, "Okay, kids, what did you learn today?", so did they ask the same question about Hebrew school. We learned together that some questions about Judaism do have logical answers! We began adding practices that made sense to us: first home rituals like getting together without fail for Friday dinner, then synagogue...which ultimately led to my being at Temple B'nai Brith and giving this d'var torah!

A God of Love

My parents taught me to question everything, even if they sometimes chafed at being the ones we interrogated. I think God does that too.

You might laugh. You might think Dennis is projecting Mel and Faye onto God, in some kind of Freudian sense. I admit the possibility. But I think it's the reverse. Mel and Faye learned what it mean to be a good parent from Judaism. They learned that questioning is a central part of the Jewish tradition, and they passed that value onto us.

Because of that, when my parents said, "Do it because I said so," it was so exceptional that I heard it in the context of all the times they had encouraged me to question. When they said, "Do this right now," I trusted that they understood my situation, and that they had my good in mind. Sure, like any adolescent I rebelled in major ways, and I used their authorization to question everything as my license to decide and act independently. When I did obey them, however, it was an act of love. And remembering the times when I obeyed them helps keep their love alive, even when they are no longer an imminent presence in my life.

Remembering God's "Because I said so," the chukim, can do the same, if we allow it. It can remind us of times in our biography, or periods in our communal history, when God seemed like a member of the household, and when we could trust God to remember us for good. We need those reminders.

In some ways, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, the Velveteen Rabbi, says it better than I can. As she paraphrases Parshat Bechukotai in her poem "Either/Or," in 70 Faces: Torah Poems:

If you will follow my laws

and observe my commandments

I will grant you rain in its season

you will eat your fill

I will live in your midst.

I will untie your tangles.

Where there is rye bread

there will always be pastrami.

You and your mother will remain

on good terms, no matter what.

But if you do not obey

if you break my laws and spurn my rules

if you break my covenant

I will set my face against you

I will shatter all your glory.

I will leave your boat becalmed.

You will never find 

a good parking space again.

You will poison the skies

and your fields will not feed you.

I can be infinitely more hostile

than you, but I won't be.

In the end you'll realize

I was here all along,

waiting for you.

 

Quick thoughts on Moses, Aaron, Garments, and Parshat T'zavveh

Last week, my wife and I each worked hefty part-time jobs: figuring out how to place my mom, Faye Fischman, in a skilled nursing facility where she's likely to spend the rest of her life. So, I did not have the time or the brain cells to spare for writing an organized blog post. Here are some thoughts from reading last week's parshah with Zornberg's commentary:

1. I was talking about the parshah with my friend and study partner Lisa Andelman, and I said, "I am so much more like Aaron than Moses, and I'm glad. Moses has to stand up to the full weight of talking with God all the time, making it up as he goes along. It wears on him, and he gets angry with the people he's leading."

"Aaron, as High Priest, has a defined role. He can innovate--there's a lovely midrash that says that every day for Aaron was like his first day on the job, and he approached it with that kind of freshness and enthusiasm! But he innovates within a structure. And Zornberg says the bells on his garments stand for the ecstasy he feels in the Holy of Holies, in direct contract with God, but the pomegranates stand for the fullness and fruitfulness of daily life in the material world. Aaron is the reconciler and the peacemaker."

But Lisa pointed out, "There's a way that I wouldn't want to be like Aaron. His children have to follow in his footsteps, whether or not they're capable of doing so, and regardless of whether it's the right thing for them. As a mother, I wouldn't want to put that on the shoulders of my children."

2. Literally on the shoulders of the priests are the precious stones engraved with the names of the twelve tribes. They're carrying the weight of the nation on their shoulders--and they're carrying other representations of the Jewish people next to their hearts.

Garments are symbolic. When I was a teenager, my mother made a tallit for each of her children, by hand, embroidering on linen. (My father had the steadier hand with a pencil, so he sketched her design on the material and then she worked the needle and thread.) Recently, my beloved wife Rona Fischman repaired it for me, so all the lines look colorful and new.

Because I am the oldest son, like Aaron, and because originally it was the first-born sons and not the tribe of Levi who were supposed to serve in the Mishkan, the design that my mother made for me includes those bells and pomegranates that Aaron wore. But it also includes the tablets that Moses brought, and the Tree of Life to which the Torah is compared. I cherish her wishes for me: leadership, service, life, and study.

3. I envy people who can praise God with the work of their hands, as my mother did.

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I'm reading through Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's amazing commentary on the biblical Book of Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture. Each chapter expounds one of the portions we read in the synagogue weekly. It's slow going because it is so rich with insights. To keep on track, I will post at least one insight weekly between now and mid-March, when (God willing) I finish the book.

Chopsticks, Hammers, and Social Media

My dear father could never master the use of chopsticks.  He resented people who did.  Whenever we went out to a Chinese restaurant and other people reached for the sticks, he would grumble, "A fork has always been good enough for me.  I don't know why it's not good enough for you." 

I think of my father sometimes when I hear colleagues ask why they need to use social media.  I'm a big believer in print, video, and face-to-face contact myself, but I have to wonder: how much resistance to adopting social media comes from the fear that we won't use them well?  That we'll be still dabbing away with tools we don't understand while other people have eaten our lunch?

This fear is unnecessary.  Anyone can learn to use social media well enough for company.  Once we stop worrying about how to master them, then we can really ask why--and get good answers.

Contrary to what enthusiasts sometimes think, it is not self-evident why organizations should use social media. I see people who leap on board each social media trend as it comes along.  They remind me of the saying, "To the person who owns a hammer, everything looks like a nail."  Social media are tools.  One size doesn't fit all.  We need to know what they can do, and what we want to accomplish.  Then, we can pick the right tool for the job.

Here are some questions we can ask ourselves to figure out what we really need, whether we are communications conservatives or early adopters:

1. Who are we trying to reach?
2. Where does our audience spend its time, and how do they like to get their information?
3. What can we do for them?
4. What are we hoping to get them to do?
5. How much time can we invest?

Then, and only then, can we figure out which social media we should use, and how.  That's a social media strategy.

Play It Cool, Boy

It's not one of my usual blog topics, but in fact, I am fascinated with the way the brain works. This week, research came out that showed how people resist temptation--and it reminded me fondly of my dad! I have to take a moment to share it with you.

The question is about delaying gratification. Political economists have been interested in this for centuries: for instance, Max Weber thought that the capacity to work hard and wait for your reward was what made capitalism possible. Today, according to a Boston Globe article, Columbia University psychologist Walter Mitschel's research says the ability to delay gratification is linked to "everything from SAT scores to social skills to academic achievement."

So how do you wait for your pleasure, or even give up certain things indefinitely? Part of it is "the ability to imagine a future event clearly," according to Yale professor Jeremy Gray. As a planner, I do that all the time. I resist opening every email that comes across my desk right away, focusing on what I need to do to reach my deadlines.

But another part may be the ability to "cool the hot stimulus."

...the trick is to shift activity from "hot," more primitive areas deep in the brain to "cool," more rational areas mainly in the higher centers of the brain.

My dad, Mel Fischman, was a master at cooling the hot stimulus. I always remember the story he told me about how he quit smoking, long before I was born. "I knew smoking was bad for me, and I wanted to stop, but I was having trouble," he told me. "So I sat down and thought about what exactly I was doing when I smoked. I was burning a bunch of tobacco leaves and inhaling the smoke into my lungs. Now, would I stand in my backyard burning leaves, take a deep breath, and say "Mmm, that's good'? Of course not! So why should I say that when the leaves were in a little tube instead?"

When I first heard this story, I thought it was just too clear, too rational. It couldn't have happened like that. I am still convinced that my dad relied on social support more than he let on. But the research (and my own experience with breaking old habits and adopting others, like controlling what I eat and walking daily) shows me that what my dad said was probably mostly true. Thanks to his skill at shifting to a different part of his brain, I grew up in a non-smoking household. I am so grateful!