Three Things to Remember Now that We've Made Biden President-Elect

 

Three things we should all keep in mind this morning:

1. Count all the votes. Yes, still.

It's not a partisan issue. It doesn't matter if your candidate for President is winning or losing right now, or if the additional votes would help them or hurt them. It doesn't even matter if the final vote count won't change the results from the preliminary counts. It's your right, my right, everybody's right that when they cast their ballot, it matters. That says that every citizen matters. People have fought and died so that they could participate in democracy in this country. Count all the votes.

2. Remember the people who were excluded from voting this election.

Close to 1.5 million formerly incarcerated people in Florida who had served their time were given their voting rights back by a constitutional amendment passed by people who could already vote in that state in 2018. The Republican elected officials interpreted that law to mean the new voters were still out of luck unless they could pay all fines and court fees they owed: in some cases, thousands of dollars. Only about a quarter of them voted this year. And that is just one example of voter suppression in 2020.

Work to make sure everyone who's legally entitled to vote actually has the chance to do so, even in local elections, certainly in national ones.

3. Black women are owed.

 

I am seeing lots of kudos for Stacy Abrams for her heroic work getting voters registered in Georgia, which may yet be the state that tips Biden-Harris over the top into victory. She deserves them. Across this country, though, tens of thousands of Black women have been the spearhead of this campaign. They are owed more than thanks.

I remember a political theorist writing about thirty years ago that we should make every policy as if it were designed for a pregnant Black woman, and that would make sure we benefited everybody else. Time has proven that perspective too limited (what if the pregnant Black woman is also a lesbian? or an immigrant? or disabled?), but it makes a point.

Not only should Black women (and men) have a seat at the table. Everyone sitting there should be listening and finding out what they need.

Jews Aren't Perfect, and We Don't Have to Be

Lots of Christians are puzzled by Jews. I hear it from them in many ways. 

"What's your solution to sin?" a young woman asked my wife at a social gathering.

"Don't you want to go to heaven?" a child asked me when we were both in elementary school.

 

More recently, and at more length, I see Christians online propounding the proposition that Jews are trying to do something impossible: to live a perfect life. As they understand it, Jews are "under the Law" (their term for Torah, which actually means "Teaching" instead). 

To be "saved," they theorize, Jews have to live up to all 613 commandments in the Torah, all the time. Since no one can do that, they argue, we are playing a mug's game. We should accept Jesus and be saved by faith alone. This approach is summarized in the popular slogan, "Christians aren't perfect--just forgiven."

Aside from the fact that Judaism isn't about salvation from sin, or heaven and hell, all these formulations miss something very basic:

It is not at all impossible to live the way God wants us to live, according to Judaism. In fact, it's easy, if you try.

Learning from Psalm 15

I was reminded of this basic Jewish belief just this morning, when, as part of a worldwide program of Hebrew Bible study, I read Psalm 15. At first glance, the psalm seems to set an extremely high standard.   

1. A psalm of David. LORD, who may sojourn in Your tent, who may dwell on Your holy mountain? 

2. He who lives without blame, who does what is right, and in his heart acknowledges the truth; 

3. whose tongue is not given to evil; who has never done harm to his fellow, or borne reproach for [his acts toward] his neighbor; 

4. for whom a contemptible man is abhorrent, but who honors those who fear the LORD; who stands by his oath even to his hurt; 

5.who has never lent money at interest, or accepted a bribe against the innocent. The man who acts thus shall never be shaken.

In fact, as Rabbi Yaakov Bieler points out, at least one rabbi around the time of Jesus looked upon these works, so mighty, and despaired. But another one cheered him up.

When R. Gamliel would read this text, he would be reduced to tears. He said: Who is capable of doing all these things? However, when R. Akiva read these verses, he would laugh. 
Gamliel asked him: Why are you laughing?

He said to him: See what the Torah says concerning “swarming things:” (Leviticus 11:43) “You shall not draw abomination upon yourselves through everything that swarms, you shall not make yourselves ritually impure therewith....” One might think that one doesn’t become ritually impure until he is contaminated by all of the various types of swarming things. Yet if an individual comes into contact with a single bean-size swarming thing, he is deemed ritually impure.

 

God’s desire to do good is 500 times greater than his inclination to punish. If touching a single bean-size swarming thing is considered equivalent to having had contact with all of them, doesn’t it logically follow that if a person does a single aspect of one of the commandments listed in Psalm 15, he will be considered as if he has carried them all out? (Yalkut Shimoni, #665)

Gamliel said to R. Akiva: You have comforted me. You have comforted me. 

 

So I say to all my Christian friends who are worried about the state of my soul, because I am "under the Law" which is supposedly so hard to fulfill: cheer up! Even if I believed in the kind of vengeful God who would send me to hell forever for doing the wrong things--the New Testament God--it is very easy to do enough of the right things to win God's forgiveness.

Jews aren't perfect, and we don't have to be. 

(Psst: we don't think you need to be, either. With or without Jesus. We can disagree about this, but realize that if we actually believed the same things as you about God, we would be Christians. The differences are real.)

 

Before and after you read Halakhah, by Chaim Saiman: what should you know? What will you learn?

I have written in glowing terms about the book  Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, by Chaim Saiman. It's a novel explanation of an important topic, and the author writes well. But it is still not easy going.

If you plan to read it (and I hope you do!), think about acquainting yourself with these terms first:

1. Torah
2. Rabbi
3. Mishnah
4. Gemarah
5. Talmud
6. Midrash
7. Halakhah
8. Aggadah
9. Shulchan Aruch
10. Responsa

The Judaism 101 and My Jewish Learning websites would be good places to start.

And here's your reward: in addition to being able to follow Saiman's ingenious arguments and examples, you'll learn about topics like the following!

• The way that Jewish interpretation of text changed from Talmudic times through the early and late medieval periods and into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
• How Ashkenazi Jews thought and wrote about halakhah differently from Sephardi Jews.
• Quick sketches of major thinkers like Maimonides, Nahmanides, and the sages known as the Rif, the Ran, the Tur, and the Brisker.
• The difference between Talmud, codes of law, and responses to particular questions (and the way that all those differences can get blurred sometimes by creative interpretation).

Honestly, you could spend years of study just following up the introductions that Saiman gives you in this book. But if you only read this book, you'll get a road map that you never had before.

Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, by Chaim Saiman

This might be your story.

You grew up in an environment where Christian culture was the norm. Even if you weren't religious yourself, from an early age, you heard people contrast Jewish legalism with Christian spiritual freedom. You heard that the letter of the Law killeth and the Spirit brings life.

Even today, you dimly recall Bible stories where it sounds like Jesus is throwing off the chains that the "old covenant" put on the Jews. In the back of your mind, you wonder why the Jews stubbornly clung to their dried-up set of rules.

Then you read Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, by Chaim Saiman, and it blew your mind.

Or this might be your story.

You grew up in a Jewish household. Your family celebrated the holidays and occasionally showed up at shul (especially if you someone you knew was becoming bar or bat mitzvah that day). 

But you never really considered keeping kosher, not driving or shopping on Shabbat, or praying multiple times a day. That all seemed liked Old World, black-hat sort of stuff. You vaguely knew there were rules about it in the Talmud. That seemed like reason enough to avoid the Talmud, and "Jewish law" in general.

Then you read Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, by Chaim Saiman, and it blew your mind.

In this book, Saiman makes a convincing case that "Jewish law" is nothing like what people think it is. It's altogether strange, like a parallel universe. It mixes together stuff that clearly looks like "do this and don't do that" with storytelling, exegesis, parable, philosophy, and mysticism, as if there were no boundaries between them. 

Even the legal parts of the texts are eerie. They pay as much attention to situations that rarely occur, don't occur any more, or never did and never could occur (by the rabbis' own reckoning) as they pay to everyday issues of what to eat and drink and how to do business. They look at Bible stories and poetry as possible sources for legal reasoning (and vice versa!) 

Perhaps most strange of all: We are accustomed to thinking of "law" as something a government enforces. Halakhah was created--yes, beginning at the time when Jesus was still there to hear about it--in a situation where Jews did not govern themselves. 

So, when you get detailed rules about how to light the Shabbat candles at home, that's one thing. But when you get equally detailed and elaborated procedures for judging murder cases when no Jewish courts had jurisdiction over them...or instructions for how the priests should offer sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, debated after the Temple had been destroyed and Jews weren't even allowed by the Romans to enter Jerusalem...then this is not "the Law" as we know it.

What is it? In a word, it's Torah.

Torah doesn't mean law. It means teaching: by God to us, about the right way to live.

That teaching can take all the different forms I mentioned above: storytelling, exegesis, parable, philosophy, and mysticism. Saiman makes a convincing case that in rabbinic Judaism, the primary way we learn how God wants us to live is through discussion of halakhah. He gives examples of how legal discussion is the entryway to profound questions like:

• Is pain a harsher punishment than disgrace, or the other way around?
• Is a human being primarily body or soul?
• What is it like to pay attention to God's commands at every moment?
• Is justice best served by strict enforcement or by compromise?

These sound like the questions a philosopher would ask. They are not questions that would be posed directly in rabbinic writings, however, and for good reason. Saiman points out:

...the Talmud bears greater resemblance to literature than analytic philosophy...The Talmud simply does not make any sense outside of its "plot"--the foundational claims of the world it inhabits. These include that God gave the Torah to the Jewish people and commanded them to perform mitzvot. (p.139)

The Talmud assumes that the story is always already going on, and that you are a character in it. You don't need abstractions. You need to know how to play your part.

So, here's the story you need to understand why anyone would study halakhah.

You are part of a people addressed by God and entrusted with the task of making this world the way it ought to be. There isn't a moment of your life that's simply just there. It's all there for you to lift it up and make it holy.

You don't have to do it alone. You always pursue holiness in community. 

You don't have to figure it out all by yourself. You are part of a tradition that's thousands of years old and still going strong.

You don't have to reason it out from first principles. You can turn to the first page, instead.

From what time is the evening Shema recited? "From the time that the kohanim [priests] enter to eat their consecrated food [terumah], until the end of the first watch." These are the words of Rabbi Eliezer. But the sages say: until midnight. Rabban Gamliel says: until the dawn rises.

If you decide to ask, "What is the Shema? Why is it said? Why is it said at set times? Why the evening? Who were the priests, what was their consecrated food, and when did they eat it? What were the watches of the night, and what was the first watch? Who was Rabbi Eliezer, and what do we know about his methodology? Who were "the sages"? Who was Rabban Gamliel? What were their methodologies, and how did they arrive at differing conclusions? What did later generations do to decide among them? What practical implications did this question have, the one about when you have missed your opportunity to say the evening Shema? What ethical implications does it have? What does it tell us about our relationship to God?"...then you are part of that age-old partnership with God.

And if you are not, at least you can now stop thinking of it as just a set of rules!

God of Love?

Whenever I hear (or more likely, read) the argument that the God of the "Old Testament" is a god of vengeance and the God of the "New Testament" is a god of love, I think of a passage from my favorite novel of 1968, Heaven Help Us, by Herbert Tarr.

Rabbi Abel and his junior-youth group attend a service at St. James Episcopal Church, where the pompous Dr. Larrabie expounds the theory of Swelling Revelation. Then, at the end of the service, the Rabbi is invited to say a few words.

I can't tell you how happy my class and I are to join you today...It was especially interesting to hear about the theory of Swelling Revelation. Because different sets of quotes might suggest another swell theory. For example...in the Old Testament: "Thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy." But in the New Testament: "He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation."

In the Old Testament: "The Lord of Hosts is exalted through justice...Do justice to the afflicted and destitute, rescue the poor and needy." But in the New Testament: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

In the Old Testament: "Let the oppressed go free...break every yoke..deal thy bread to the hungry...bring the poor that are cast out to thy house...cover the naked...hide not thyself from thine own flesh." But in the New Testament: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire."

Swelling Revelation?

Just to be abundantly clear, neither the fictional rabbi, the author (also a rabbi), nor I are saying that Judaism is all sweetness and light and Christianity is all hellfire. We just resent it when Christians oversimplify both their religion and Judaism at our expense.

"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-3.htm