Brotherly Love

Throughout the book of Genesis, brothers are fighting brothers.  At the same time, there are barely concealed lessons on how the fratricide is going to cease.  By the time Exodus begins, the Israelites have learned those lessons.  Have we?

Sibling conflict is as old as the world.  Cain kills Abel.  The birth of Isaac leads to the expulsion of Ishmael.  Esau loses his birthright to his younger brother, Jacob, and Jacob has to flee Esau for his life.  He goes to the home of his mother's brother, Laban, who treats him like a brother: that is, cheats and exploits him.  Ten of Jacob's sons sell their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt.  It seems as if this cycle of family violence will never end.

Yet along the way, we see brothers coming together when they share a concern for someone other than themselves.  At first, it is their father.  Isaac and Ishmael come together to bury their father Abraham.

And Rabbi Jonathan Kligler comes up with a beautiful midrash to say that burying their father let Isaac and Ishmael reconcile.  (May this be a model for their descendants in Israel and Palestine!)

Similarly, the two sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Menasheh, could have been at war with each other over their grandfather Jacob's blessing.  Jacob, a younger son himself, gives his best blessing to the younger son Ephraim.  He does bless both of them, however, without hesitation or reservation.  They, too, come together for the funeral of their father, Joseph.  And they stay together.  Even though (or because?) the two half-tribes are allotted separate territory in Canaan, they remain the tribe of Joseph.  

Look now at the book of Exodus, which we are reading from January through mid-March 2013.  Moses is a younger son, raised in luxury in the Egyptian court, while Aaron, his older brother, is an Israelite slave oppressed by the Pharaoh.  Moses returns to his family and his people with a message from God--which he stutters too much to deliver by himself.  He needs Aaron.

And Aaron steps in.  Until his death, Aaron speaks for Moses and acts in concert with him.  Certainly, Aaron and their sister Miriam (a leader and prophet in her own right) sometimes argue with Moses, but only about whether he is leading well, not about whether or not he should lead.  The project of making the Jews ready to receive the Torah and to live by it was bigger than any sibling rivalry.  It still is, today.  Jews need to remember that, and all people can take a lesson about how to turn brotherly hate into brotherly love.

This blog entry is dedicated to my brothers Gary Fischman, Joel Fischman, and Ron Fischman, my sister Yael Fischman, and my brother-in-law Jonathan Charry. 

Resolve to Communicate Better in 2013!

It’s a new year.  Here are ten resolutions that every organization should make to improve their communications in 2013.

1. Google yourself. What are the first things people see about you? Would you support the group you see on screen?

Exodus through the Looking Glass: Parshat Sh'mot

I wrote last week about an interpretation of Exodus that compares slavery in Egypt to living under a totalitarian regime:

...Zornberg shows me a) that it is well grounded in traditional rabbinic texts,  b) that it lets us honor Jewish women as agents of redemption and c) that we can appreciate sensuality as a realm of freedom even--perhaps especially--in times that try our souls.

How is it grounded in rabbinic texts?  Intricately, and with too much care, attention, and detail for me to summarize here.  The idea that Zornberg returns to again and again is that there is a real question whether the Jews are worthy to be redeemed, and whether they can see themselves as worthy--a play on the double meaning of the Hebrew word ra'uy.  

How are women agents of redemption in Exodus?  By making men see themselves as worthy: that is, desirable!  She cites a midrash to the effect that after Pharoah decreed that the Israelite men should work in the fields, and not sleep at home with their wives:

Said Rabbi Shimeon bar Chalafta, What did the daughters of Israel do?  They would [buy wine] and go to the fields and feed their husbands....And when they had eaten and drunk, the women would take the mirrors and look into them with their husbands, and she would say "I am more comely than you," and he would say "I am more comely than you."  And as a result, they would accustom themselves to desire, and they were fruitful and multiplied.... (p. 57)

Mirrors are not mere vanity: they make us look at ourselves and find each other delightful.  Sensuality is not a sin: it is an affirmation of me and you, life, and the possibility of a future.  How can we imagine that God desires us if we do not desire each other?  And if we can see what is "comely" in ourselves despite toil, separation, subjugation, and contempt, we can hold out hope that the oppressors have it wrong, and that we will yet be free.

Reading Exodus in a New Way

The Exodus is about to begin again.  On January 5, to be precise.

Jews read the five books of Moses, or Torah, every week, in a yearly cycle.  It so happens that on the first Saturday of 2013, we read the very first portion of the book of Exodus.

It takes a mental leap to put ourselves in a place no one is yet calling Egypt, with an enslaved group of people, no one is yet calling Jews, over three thousand years ago.  Often, people in the U.S. try to imagine it by using as a guide the experience of the enslaved people closest to us, whose history we know the best: Africans captured and brought to the United States.  We know the songs,"Go Down Moses" and all the songs that say "Look Over Jordan," that explicitly connect the Negro slaves with the Israelites.  We know the speeches of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in which he refers to the Exodus and the Promised Land (too many to count).

But Avivah Zornberg, in The Particulars of Rapture, takes us to a different time and place: Eastern Europe under Communist Party rule.  Instead of King and gospel, she invokes Vaclav Havel, and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  Putting ourselves in the place of the enslaved Africans let us feel the pain of the lash and the load on our shoulders.  Putting ourselves in the place of the citizens of a totalitarian state, we focus instead on what it takes to maintain inner freedom: to know that we are not just slaves, not simply parts of a whole.

For me, this is a new approach.   I welcome it all the more because Zornberg shows me a) that it is well grounded in traditional rabbinic texts,  b) that it lets us honor Jewish women as agents of redemption and c) that we can appreciate sensuality as a realm of freedom even--perhaps especially--in times that try our souls.  More on this to come: stay tuned.

Social Cohesion: It's a Gift

Marcel Mauss' classic The Gift is a time capsule left to us from another era, and yet it is still widely quoted today. I think there are two types of people who cite its authority. 

The cynics take Mauss to be saying that there are no disinterested gifts: that all presents and sacrifices are intended to show off the giver's power and put the recipient in the  giver's  debt.  You can find traces of this argument in the book, certainly.  But Mauss would say that this is missing the point, and missing it in a way that's peculiar to modern society.

His larger argument is that gift-giving is not at base a personal but a social act.  In what he calls "archaic societies," that is self-evident.  People in those societies are engaged in a constant circulation of gifts.  Sometimes it is cooperative and friendly.  Sometimes it is competitive and even aggressive.  Often, it is both.  But the expectation that gifts will be given, accepted, and reciprocated binds people together.  Mauss insinuates that we still act like that in our supposedly individualistic societies much more than we let on...and to the extent that we have abandoned the ways of earlier social systems, he thinks we ought to see about bringing them back.

Socialists have liked Mauss' book for its insistence that the self-interested, calculating actor in the dramas written by economists is a recent invention.  That implies to some (including Mauss) that we could easily reinvent ourselves.  To me, that is far too optimistic.  Social change does not happen just because people like old ways better.  The ways we live, we are forced to live by the institutions we have to live under.  But at least it gives the lie to the ideology that people just have to be motivated by economic self-interest now and forever.  "Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall return to thee in many days" is not a business plan.  It is a hopeful moral statement about how we should live.