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.

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.

 

Ordinary and Extraordinary Holiness (Parshat Tazria)

 

"And he shall call tamei, tamei..." (Leviticus 13:45, Parshat Tazria)

The Jewish people have a long history of celebrating the holiness of everyday life. Those celebrations are set out in the Torah, and they follow a definite cycle. It's three times a day every weekday and four times on Shabbat. Add in new moons and holidays (like Pesach, next week) and you have a life of paying attention to the divine in the mundane. 

In ancient times, my ancestors celebrated by offering sacrifices in the Temple. Now, prayer services replace those sacrifices, one to one, which shows how crucial the rabbis who created our form of Judaism thought it was to establish continuity with the Temple practices.  The rhythm of prayer echoes the rhythm of the offerings that used to form the center of Jewish life.

Those offerings were a really big deal to the entire Jewish people, and so if anyone was not in the ritual condition that allowed them to enter the Temple (tahor), that was a big deal, tool. When a person became ritually impure (tamei), that disrupted their calendar. It put them outside of the normal holy condition, or prevented them from participation in channeling holiness into the world, depending on how you look at it.

But at certain times in the life cycle, that rhythm of weekday, Shabbat, new moon, holidays, year in and year out, must be disrupted. There will be times when, instead of being in the midst of life, you are on the threshold between life and something else.

When you've given birth.

When you've come into contact with a corpse.

When you've become ill with a condition that makes you look like a corpse yourself (tzara'at, the subject of a large portion of Parshat Tazria and the one after it, Metzora, with which it is combined in most years' Torah readings).

All of those experiences cannot be anything but overwhelming, to those who observe them and especially for the people going through them at the time. You cannot pay attention to the regular requirements of life in those liminal moments. They take a person out of being tahor and into being tamei.

It is right and proper to acknowledge the power of those moments between life and death. It only makes sense to excuse, and perhaps to forbid, people from trying to channel everyday holiness when they are in a peak moment of a different kind of holiness. But being tamei, while it is necessary, alienates people from their normal lives, their normal selves, and their community. It cannot be allowed to become permanent.

Parshat Tazria is all about the need for people to be rejoined to their community and to the supremely important practice of holiness in everyday life. In the 21st century, the how-to's are very different from back in Torah and Temple days, but the need is exactly the same.

So, we can respond to this week's Torah portion by studying the medical handbook it provides to the cohanim (priests), or by reading the midrash in which later rabbis used tzara'at as the springboard for a discussion on the importance of not slandering other people. We can reread "And he shall call tamei, tamei..." as a Talmudic source suggests: 

One commentator reads, "The impure shall call out, 'Impure!'" That is, people tend to project their own failings onto others. A corrupt person sees corruption all around [BT Kid. 70a].  (Etz Hayim, p. 657)

But we can also respond more directly, in terms that make sense for today. When people we know are overwhelmed--with pregnancy, childbirth, medical conditions, or mourning, but also with social stigma that tells them they are not in a condition to be part of the community--when their whole beings are crying out, "I'm isolated, I'm hurting, I'm alone"...we can hear them. And we can respond.

Listening to Moses (and people with disability)

We read the beginning of the book of Exodus in shul yesterday, and I am grateful to Penina Weinberg, my fellow member of Temple B'nai Brith, for bringing forward Professor Julia Watts Belser's discussion of Moses in Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole. 

There's a longstanding tradition of commentary on Moses' saying he was "slow of speech and tongue" (4:10). Older midrash has Pharaoh trying to tell whether a prediction that Moses would take his throne away from him was true and placing before the baby Moses a gem and a burning coal. The theory was that if he were greedy and ambitious, Moses would reach for the gem. Instead, he grabbed the coal and, as babies do, put it in his mouth. Thus, the rabbis explained, he burned his speech organ, explaining his reluctance as a grown man to "speak to the Children of Israel." That is why his older brother Aaron has to interpret for him, to the Jews and to Pharaoh's court.

Whether for that reason or for something congenital, Moses was a stutterer. Belser (Penina says) uses him as a model of how disabled Jews can not only achieve leadership despite their characteristics, but even because of them. So, when rabbinic interpretation jumps ahead to Deuteronomy (where Moses orates for chapters and chapters) and concludes that God must have healed him in the meantime, Belser rejects that interpretation. She, and Penina, and I all like to imagine that forty years later, Moses still spoke with his usual stuttering voice--and the Israelites patiently listened.

Now, here's the further question this raises for me: What happened in the meantime to make it possible for him to be willing to speak, and them to listen?

Was it simply that Aaron (and Miriam) had died, and Moses had no other choice?

Or had he gained a lot of confidence by being a prophet and a leader for all those years?

On the audience side, was it simply that the generation who had met Moses in Egypt had all died out (except for Joshua and Caleb)?

Or had something changed for the Israelites over that time: the experience of living in the wilderness, or of being taken care of by God just as Moses said, or something else?

Most importantly: can we learn anything from the Torah about how to change our own society so that people's differing abilities and disabilities are valued, as part of what they brought with them to Sinai? What?

P.S. I also want to think about big brother Aaron and how he was able to put himself at his brother's disposal after not seeing him for decades!

Falsifying History is No Way to Support Your Cause

Recently, I had to restate some very basic facts about Jesus.

Jesus was a Jew. He lived and died in a land that the Roman Empire called Judea. He did not oppose the empire, but other Jews did.

Jesus of Nazareth was of course a Jew. He was the child of a Jewish mother, and that made him a member of the Jewish people. His doctrines were Jewish. He read the Torah in Hebrew and spoke Aramaic, just like all the Jews (and just like I read the Torah in Hebrew and speak English). Moreover, if he and all his original followers hadn’t been Jewish, they would never have heard the word “Messiah,” much less understood the concept. Jesus is the favorite Jewish man of millions of people in the world.

At the time Jesus of Nazareth lived (c. 4 BCE-33 CE), the land was called Judea, not Palestine. When Jews rose up against Roman tyranny, the Roman armies destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, prohibited Jews from entering the city (which they renamed Aelia Capitolina), and started using the name “Syria Palestina ” to emphasize the destruction of the Jewish state. It wasn’t “Palestina Capta” that the Emperor Vespasian put on his coins minted to celebrate his military victory: it was “Judea capta.”

Jesus is quoted in the Gospels as saying, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and render unto God the things that are God's." He is also quoted as saying, "My kingdom is not of this world." He was no Simon bar Koziba, nicknamed Bar Kochba, who led a military rebellion against Roman rule. He was not even Rabbi Akiba, who hoped Bar Kochba would be the Messiah to free the Jews. Roman rule was not an issue to him: the end of the world as he knew it, was.

These things are not in dispute among any one who has ever studied the history of that time and place. There is ample archeological and documentary evidence about Roman rule, Judea, the Jewish wars, and the origins of the concept of a Messiah. Jesus' teachings vary somewhat from one gospel to the other, but the basic message is clear.

Why do I have to go into these simple facts yet again? Because in the context of late 2023, a wrongheaded meme is circulating that says "Shoutout to all the Christians who've remained completely silent about the Palestinian genocide while they get ready to celebrate the birth of their favorite Palestinian man."

This is nonsense. I can recognize that I am not the audience for message, and I can attribute the meme to good intentions--but Jesus was not a Palestinian, he was a Jew, and that shouldn't make a difference in any way to our response to the horrific situation in Israel and Gaza as of today, December 22, 2023.

We can oppose the brutal attack on Israel on October 7th which killed 1200 people (Muslims, Christians, Druzes, Buddhists, and Jews) AND the total war that Israel has been waging in Gaza almost without interruption since (which has killed 15 times as many lives), AND work for a ceasefire and a lasting peace—all without falsifying history. And we must.