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.

How to use and not use the concept of "generations"

Last night, Rona and I happened to be recalling three songs from our youth, all of which in some way touched on the topic of long hair. That probably wouldn't have happened if we had married someone from a different generation instead of someone born the same month and year. If I die and Rona gets involved with someone ten years younger, they probably won't know the same songs, movies, and television shows, and they won't remember some of the same events in the news. For them, that might matter. But what difference does it make to history?

I've long been of the opinion that "talking 'bout my generation" is a useless way to describe social trends. Yes, long hair was an issue for The Cowsills, the Charlie Daniels Band, and the musical Hair, and it wasn't for Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, or the Ink Spots. But hair is just one element of how we present ourselves, and self-presentation is an issue in every era, for a wide variety of people. Jeans were working-class clothes until they became trendy, and then there were designer jeans. Underwear used to be considered obscene. Then, not wearing underwear was obscene. Not wearing a hat made JFK different from Presidents before him, but covering your head indoors or not marked whether you were Jewish or Christian for the longest period of time. Even with hair, the Roundheads during the English Civil War used their hairstyle to distinguish themselves against the flowing locks worn by the aristocratic Cavaliers.

Maybe self-presentation is a constant issue across generations, you say, but isn't it trivial? (No.) Aren't the events that a generation experiences formative of their outlook? Yes and no. In my lifetime, you could trace changes in (white people's) attitudes toward government to integration, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. But in previous generations, going back a hundred years, you could find similar attitudes among some more or less well-organized groups, from socialists to America Firsters. Speaking of socialism, there's a resurgent interest in it among people born in the last thirty years, but so was there in the 1960's, the 1930's, the 1890's.

It's a truism that every generation thinks they're the first to discover sex. The same applies to many "generational" phenomena: in specifics they are new, but if you back up only slightly and take a broader view, you can see how they continue from the past.

I am thinking about what the right questions are to ask about generational change. I am pretty sure "How is this generation different from that one?" is a useless question. Instead, I think we should ask:

• How is this generation framing the ongoing questions about how we should live?
• Out of the perennial issues, what are the issues that are coming to the fore, and how?
• Which questions seem less important to this cohort than that, at the present moment? (And will that change as they age?)
• What are the different terms in which old questions are being posed anew?
• When in history did we actually experience seismic shifts in what mattered and how we discussed it?
  

For instance, you could argue that the invention of the atomic bomb launched a whole new discussion about our ability to destroy the earth. Or you could trace it back to the Industrial Revolution and the "dark satanic mills" that Blake wrote about. Or you could say the big change happened when climate change began to occur at a rapid rate.

I would ultimately say that which of these arguments is "right" depends on what we are actually trying to find out, and to do. But they would all be more useful arguments than "OK, Boomer" or "Get off my lawn!"

Thinking about God: Jewish Views, by Rabbi Kari H Tuling: a review

 

This is an invaluable book, and what you get out of it will depend on two things: who are you, and what are you seeking?

If you're a reader (Jewish or not) who's unfamiliar with this tradition, you may become bemused by the sheer variety of Jewish views about God, and how different they are, and how all of them are valid parts of the Jewish tradition. It may change your sense of what thinking about God can be like. Along the way, you will also quietly learn a lot about Jewish texts and traditional ways to read them and about ways that our understanding of God can shape our daily lives. In fact, Rabbi Tuling insists, "Theology defines what is possible in our lives." Read it, and see if you agree!

If you're a Jewish reader who's well-versed in bible and midrash, like me, you will recognize some of the passages with which Rabbi Tuling begins each chapter and nod along with her line-by-line explication. Some of the medieval thinkers were unfamiliar to me, and some of the modern ones too. But as a person who usually approaches God as a partner in the project of tikkun olam, the repair and gradual perfection of creation, and not as a "God of the philosophers," I found it useful to read over the contrasting views and see how much I agreed with some, and less with others. It made me put into words some of what I believe about God rather than just relate to God as someone who's always already been there.

And if you're a person who's inclined toward theology but not familiar with Jewish approaches, you may be taken up short by how much Jewish views of God can contrast with the assumptions soaked into Christianity (to say nothing of Islam, Buddhism, or other traditions!) You may also learn the connection between daring exegesis and theology in Judaism--much more common than a purely deductive approach--and you will have to decide whether you agree with the author when she says, "Any theology that can confidently explain why children get cancer is a monstrosity."

All of us readers, I think, will get suggestions on what to read next!