There Shall Be No Needy, part 1: What Tikkun Olam means in depth

I came to read Rabbi Jill Jacobs' book There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law & Tradition because Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg referred to it in her book on teshuvah and because I respect Jacobs' work at Truah. 

I expected an inspiring but somewhat dated book I somehow hadn't read when it came out, so I could fill a gap in my education with just a little attention. It is so much more than that! 

Jacobs' book is written for the general public, but it is definitely a work of scholarship. Despite my Jewish social justice background over decades, I am learning so much by reading it--slowly--that I thought I would share some lessons with you, and help my memory by taking notes at the same time! 

Four meanings of Tikkun Olam

Ever since I was in college, when I get to the passage at the end of the Aleinu prayer, I say the part l'taken olam b'malchut shaddai, "to perfect the world under the kingship of the Almighty," out loud. (I do this in memory of my teacher Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf.) Tikkun olam has become a byword of Jewish progressives. In some circles, as Jacobs laments, it has become divorced from anything specifically Jewish. But what does it mean?

Establishing the Divine Kingdom

In the prayer I just mentioned, tikkun olam is about everyone recognizing the sovereignty of God and putting away idol worship. That might sound like it means everyone becomes Jewish, but nothing could be farther from the truth! Modern-day idol worship, as so many of us recognize, is the idolatry of money, power, and social superiority, As Jacobs interprets it, tikkun olam in this sense could mean "an end to all the 'impurities' such as poverty and discrimination that hamper the manifestation of the divine presence." (27)

 

The Preservation of the World

In some of the midrashic literature (for instance, B'reishit Rabbah 4:7), tikkun olam means the physical fixing and stabilization of the planet, and perhaps the larger universe, "such as global warming, deforestation, or the extinction of animal species," as Jacobs interprets it. (40)

The Preservation of the Halakhic System and the Social Order

In the Mishnah, the base text of the Talmud, tikkun ha'olam often refers to problems in divorce law. Specifically, it applies in cases where a man divorces his wife and attempts to change his mind, or where the get (divorce decree) might be technically invalid. If these cases were left unchecked, soon no one would know who was legally married and who was not, and the whole community would be disrupted. So, rabbis in the Talmud stated they could close the loopholes even where they didn't have explicit authority to do so. Why? For tikkun ha'olam, the greater good of having a legal system that worked for the community, and especially for the most vulnerable members of the community.

 

Restoring Divine Perfection

In the Lurianic Kabbalah, there is a notion that the process of creating the world went dramatically wrong, and that everything we see around us as reality is merely the shattered vessels that were supposed to make up one whole, unified Creation. In this conception, it is up to human beings, especially Jews, to lift up the shards and reunite them--and in some sense, reunite God, who is in exile with us in this imperfect world--through prayer and observing the commandments (including the ones to help the poor and to do justice, but also the ritual commandments about Shabbat, holidays, etc.)

A Synthesis

I suggest a reimagining of tikkun olam that combines the four understandings of the term we have seen in tradtional text:

1. the Aleinu's concept of tikkun as the destruction of any impurities that impede the full manifestation of the divine presence; 2. the literalist midrashic understanding of tikkun as the establishment of a sustainable social order; 3.  the rabbinic willingness to invoke tikkun ha'olam as a justification for changing laws likely to create chaos, and 4. the Lurianic belief that individual actions can affect the fate of the world as a whole. (38)
   

From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple & Rabbinic Judaism (Lawrence Schiffman)

According to Jewish legend, the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BCE and the Second Temple in 70 CE, on the same day of the Jewish calendar. 

We Jews mark that day, Tisha B'av, every year, in memory of the two destructions, as if nothing happened in between. 

That elision is certainly consistent with how I learned Jewish history. In my education, there was a big blank between the return from the Babylonian Exile and the conquest of Jerusalem by the Roman general Titus. 

Only the Maccabean revolt was stuck in the middle (the way Chanukah is stuck in the middle between the fall holidays and Pesach in the spring).

For someone like me, then, From Text to Tradition : A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism does a great service.

I picked up this book while I was taking part in a 929 daily discussion of the Tanach. We had reached the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and I was confused. Who were these people, and how did they relate to some of the figures I'd read about earlier in Zechariah (Zerubabel and Joshua ben Jehozadak)? Who were the Jews who never went into Babylonia? What were people from other countries doing in Judea now? And who were the Samaritans, and why was there (what seemed like) sibling rivalry between them and the Jewish leaders?

Schiffman clarifies many of these points and makes me want to learn even more about them. He goes on to talk about Jewish life during the age of Alexander the Great and his successors, especially the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria, not only in the holy land but all around the Middle East. In Judea itself, he briefly addresses the conflicts between high priests and Hasmonean monarchs (descendants of the Maccabees)--and among the members of the royal family themselves. 

An aside: Why, I wonder, have there not been as many novels about the Hasmoneans as about the Tudors, or the Medici? The rivalry in the court of Salome Alexandra is certainly as dramatic as the politics under Elizabeth I. There is fertile ground here for fiction writers!

Schiffman purports to be writing a history of Judaism, not Jews, during this period. Repeatedly, however, he makes the point that you cannot understand how Jewish thought and practice evolved without paying attention to the social and political pressures that shaped it. 

This seems especially true for the period just before the destruction of the Second Temple. Knowing what was going on between different "political parties" in Judea and their relations to Hellenism, to Roman rule, and to nations fighting against Rome (like the Parthians) is vital to understanding Jewish sects like the Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, the people at Qumran, and the Jesus-followers who eventually became a separate religion.

There are some texts that were written by Jews that have played a more important part in Christianity and in historiography than in Judaism. These include the Septuagint, the apocrypha, the pseudepigrapha, the philosophy of Philo Judaeus, and the history written by Josephus. Schiffman explains that the Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora might at one time have been familiar with these, but they increasingly were absorbed either into the Greek-speaking Christian world or into the Hebrew-speaking, Palestine-centered Jewish sphere. 

Then he goes on to explain the texts that did become central to rabbinic Judaism (which with very few exceptions is Judaism as we know it today): the Mishnah, the baraita, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, the books of midrash.

Whew! I see I cannot discuss this book without doing a lot of name-dropping. If you are not at all familiar with this history, perhaps Schiffman is not the best one to introduce you to it. 

If you're in a similar place as I am however--very familiar with some of these people, places, and things and only vaguely familiar with others--then he may be a good teacher to put them together into a more complete picture.

I note, however, that this book was published thirty years ago, and the author was already hoping that recent discoveries and studies would fill out the picture more. If you know of a more up-to-date book that compares to this, would you please suggest it to me?

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?

You Don't Have to Be Religious to Learn Talmud

I was moved, intrigued, amused, and delighted with the following speech by a secular member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament).  Within her coexist an appreciation for the wisdom to be found in Jewish texts and a sharp, independent spirit.  I hope those elements can coexist within the Jewish community as a whole, too.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/opinion/heritage-all-israel

A Questioning Tradition

On the walls of his classroom, one of my high school teachers displayed the following saying, which he attributed to the Koran: “Questions asked only to cause confusion do not need to be answered.” 

 If you read Parshat Korach the way my friend Larry Lennhoff does, then Korach’s questioning of authority was just that kind of confusion-sowing.  Larry wrote in response to my blog post of June 25:

Do you think Korach was sincere? I don't, and neither do most traditional rabbis. I think Korach and the others wanted to keep the idea of [hierarchy], but just place themselves at the top in the place of Moses, Aaron, and their close relatives.

I am willing to believe Korach was sincere.  Partly, I have seen too many sincere challenges to authority dismissed—and partly, I think taking Korach at his word lets us explore more interesting questions.  How and when should Jews challenge authority, including the authority of our own tradition?  How can the tradition adapt and learn from rebels and innovators?  Because that kind of adaptation and innovation is the only thing that keeps a tradition alive.

The Jewish tradition has adapted and changed a great deal over the centuries.   Rabbinic Judaism greatly modified the religious civilization described in Torah.  It had to.  With the Temple destroyed, a religion based on sacrifices conducted by a centralized caste-based priesthood could not have survived.  Prayer and Torah study replaced sacrifice, and in place of the Temple in Jerusalem, the rabbis gave us way of seeking holiness that we could carry out at home, from resting on Shabbat to keeping kosher throughout the year (and in different ways on Passover).

As I have studied it, rabbinic Judaism is a paradox: a bold and respectful tradition of hecklers.  

·         It’s bold because of the authority it claims for its adherents.  “All that a serious student will yet expound before his teacher has already been told to Moses at Sinai” (and has the force of revelation), says the Jerusalem Talmud, Peah 17:1. 

·         It’s respectful because to say something new, you have to study the old and come up with a connection to it, be that connection logical or highly creative, or both. 

·         It’s full of hecklers.  You can find one rabbi saying in the Talmud, “Any dayan (judge, interpreter) who judges that way is no judge!”, and find another responding, “Any dayan who judges that way is no judge!”

And yet it remains a tradition, not a set of schisms.  The 1^st-century teachers Hillel and Shammai disagreed on every major ruling, down to whether you should light more candles as Chanukah goes on or fewer.  Both were highly influential teachers with many followers.  The followers could have grown apart, as Catholics and Protestants did in Christianity and Sunnis and Shi’ites did in Islam.  Instead, the next generation of rabbis found a way to keep them together.  “These AND these are the words of the living God,” they said.  In practice, we light candles the way Hillel told us to do.  To become wiser, we study Shammai as well as Hillel, seeing what we can learn from each.

This is one of the reasons the uncompromising attitude the text of Parshat Korach takes with the rebels poses such a problem for us today.  I will return to Korach soon, asking the question a different way:  when and how should we challenge authority, and how should authority respond?