Parashat Vayera

Posted on October 18, 2013 | 2 comments

Ask any artist: it’s all about seeing.

We don’t, that is, just see the world raw. Seeing requires the intentional act of focusing our eyes on one particular part of a larger visual field. At times, something new comes suddenly into view – a rainbow, perhaps. But we frequently see things anew even if they have been there all along – we just never noticed them.

That’s the way it was with the ram that Abraham finally saw and substituted for Isaac. God created it, say the rabbis, at the very dawn of creation, and positioned it just so, for Abraham to see. Why, then, didn’t he see it before tying up Isaac and coming within an inch of killing him?

He just never looked. He was too intent on the sacrifice to notice. Only after the angel stayed his hand, did he look up and see. But even so, it was only secondarily that he saw the ram, say the Tosafot. What he saw first was God, hovering behind the angel’s staying hand.

This idea emerges from a close reading of vayisa avraham et einav, “Abraham lifted up his eyes.” The first three Hebrew words end in letters that spell emet, “truth,” and Truth, say the Tosafot, is another name for God. No less than the ram, God too was there all the time. Only when Abraham looked could he see “the truth,” which is to say, God.

When we speak of “seeing a truth,” however, we mean it metaphorically. Nobody “sees” truth itself; we see it in something else: an algebraic equation, perhaps, or a work of art that reaches profundity. What, then, did Abraham literally see, that so strikingly gave him the truth?

Picture the scene. Abraham leans over his son, about to drive the knife home, when the angel diverts his attention, and he “lifts his eyes and sees.” Follow the image. Where does a father look at such a time, if not into the eyes of the son he is about to lose? Abraham’s truth was revealed in the eyes of Isaac.

So the angel jolts Abraham into realizing that it is his son whom he is about to sacrifice; he thereupon looks into the eyes of Isaac, who stares back at him. Until now, they have treated each other merely as a mutual means to an end – the way to fulfill God’s command. But now, with the sacrifice suspended, they actually see each other for who they really are. The moment of truth arrives at the miracle of meeting which the Hebrew perfectly describes as panim el panim, “face to face.”

Only humans communicate face to face, says philosopher Roger Scruton. Animals look at each other, but not into each other. It is in each other’s eyes that we humans find the frightening vacancy of evasion, the meaningful glance of understanding, or the certain sign of love. If we try to dissemble, it is our faces that give us away: the way we blush, for example, or tear up against our will.

“To this day,” says the biblical author, the place where Abraham and Isaac finally see each other is called Adonai Yeira’eh, “God is seen.” And lest we think that the revelatory moment of true relationship comes only once in human history, the Torah provides it again when Jacob and Esau reconcile: “Seeing your face,” says Jacob, “is like seeing the face of God” (Gen. 33:10).

It’s all about seeing: stopping the task at hand and seeing into each other’s eyes. It’s easy to hate collectivities of people, hold prejudices against whole groups, ignore the poverty of faceless nameless others, or even sacrifice individual people whose eyes we carefully avoid. But look into the eyes of a single person who is temporarily at our mercy, and we cannot fail to see the truth: the presence of God right there in the other person’s face.

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Parashat Ki Teitsei

Posted on August 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

The weekly Haftarah is usually related to the Torah portion that it follows, but this week’s Haftarah, Isaiah 54: 1-10, seems different. It is the fifth of seven readings that began after Tisha B’av, as part of a rising crescendo of faith in a better time to come – not a bad lesson these days, with renewed reminders of global warming, genocide in Darfur, and the bankruptcy of American cities.

Instead of Isaiah, Jews once upon a time read Zechariah 9, an even more explicit promise of hope, because of its express guarantee of a messiah who will save us from the terrors of history. Zechariah 9:9 contains the familiar picture of the messiah on a white donkey, an image borrowed by the Gospel of Matthew, who has Jesus ride a donkey for his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Perhaps, say scholars, it was precisely the Christian use of this verse that prompted the Rabbis to replace the Zechariah reading with the Isaiah passage that we now have.

Well, perhaps. But is that really the way things work? When Christians borrow a Jewish image or idiom, do we Jews abandon it?

I doubt it: For one thing, the image of a messiah riding a donkey shows up in medieval Haggadah illustrations, so we never gave up the image entirely. For another, there is the motsi – the blessing we say over bread. The Talmud interprets “bread” here messianically – the bread God will provide in time to come. Similarly, in the birkat hamazon, the grace after meals, where we praise God for feeding the whole world, it is not that God already does so, but that someday, we trust, God will. Christian theology co-opted the messianic symbolism of bread too: among other things, the Lord’s Prayer requests, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Echoing the Rabbis, Church Fathers call that “the bread of the Kingdom-come,” not the ordinary stuff we hold in our hands or put in our stomachs. Bread also became the central substance of the Eucharist, the ritual that most defines classical Christian faith. Jews didn’t stop saying the motsi or the birkat hamazon on that account.

But wait. Didn’t we drop their messianic meaning?

You might think so, because of how few Jews know what that meaning is. Our ignorance, however, is no reaction to Christianity. It is part of the mistaken notion that no self-respecting modern Jew can entertain matters of religious belief — the very promises that make religion worthwhile in the first place. Most Jews who recite mealtime prayers do so purely out of habit, sometimes mindlessly mumbling through them; others, seeing no point in them, let them lapse – why not, if they have no transcendent significance.

We hardly need to worry about fighting Christian interpretation, which, in any event, is usually just our own, transferred to a Christian context. Our problem today is the ease with which we have settled for practice without meaning — the way we have given up intimations of transcendence.

The seven Haftarah readings of which this week’s passage is the fifth culminates in the promise of Rosh Hashanah: the hope that God’s purposes will someday be realized worldwide – that’s what the shofar is supposed to herald. In this week’s reading, God assures us, “My love will never leave you. My covenant of peace shall never be removed.”

Should we just mumble this through, the way we do the motsi? Or are we willing to consider the possibility that we are born into a world where love can dominate, where we are in covenant with the divine, and where evil and want just might slowly but inexorably be expunged from human experience?

I have trouble believing these things every hour of every day. Who doesn’t? But the Haftarah, the motsi and the birkat hamazon are prayers. Prayer is precisely the medium that punctuates the humdrum and the harrowing with the poetry of possibility.

Ritual is the regularized affirmation of order that matters; Inherited rituals are reminders of the shapes other people saw. Our ancestors saw patterns we should not want to do without. Even the lowly motsi should be a metaphoric means of dreaming in league with God.

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Parashat Ekev

Posted on July 26, 2013 | Leave a comment

The good news is our parashah’s promise, “If you obey these rules… God will love and bless you.” The bad news is that “these rules” include the commandment to destroy the Canaanites “showing them no pity.” Does God really revel in the wholesale destruction of others?

“Yes,” say biblical literalists, “If the Bible says it, it must be so; the Bible is inerrant.” But the Bible is quite “errant,” since as much as it is God talking, it is also us hearing, and the people who wrote it down many centuries ago couldn’t hear more than their age allowed. The point of ongoing Jewish commentary is to help later ages hear better – and our commentators disassociate “these rules” from their original military context, insisting, that what God really wants is love.

The Malbim quotes Maimonides (Rambam) who differentiates two kinds of love. Love of God, as commanded in the Sh’ma (“You shall love Adonai your God”) is exemplified with mitzvot that have no earthly use, like putting a m’zuzah on our door. True, a m’zuzah may benefit us – reminding us, perhaps, of the sanctity of home — but we affix it just because God commands it: as when a loving parent says, “Do me a favor,” and we just do it. This love, says Rambam, gains us nothing here on earth. We are rewarded in the world to come.

The second kind of love is what human beings owe each other. Not all that long ago, it was the norm for people in power to enslave or even slaughter others without compunction. Maimonides reminds us that God rejected that behavior, by expressly prohibiting murder, rape, and even just ripping off an anonymous customer who wanders into our store. God rewards this love also in the world to come, but unlike the m’zuzah kind of mitzvah, showing love to human beings benefits us in the here and now, with a just and safe society.

So some mitzvot show love of God; others, love of neighbor. Neighborly love gets subdivided into prohibitions that entail physical pain (torture) or death (murder); and those that entail only monetary damages (cheating customers). In the evolutionary scheme of things, the first category enters our awareness sooner than the second. When word reached us recently of slave-like conditions in Chinese labor camps that make goods bound for America, we recoiled. Ongoing persecution in North Africa led this year to a reaffirmation of the1993 UN Convention Against Torture. Increasingly, that is to say, countries of conscience recognize slavery, torture, and murder as inhuman.

The evils of financial sin, by contrast, have barely dented our awareness. Now that we know how Chinese workers are being brutalized, will we protest their conditions by boycotting their goods? Hardly. Other than degree, there is no difference between an average citizen saving money by buying merchandise made by slaves, and an unscrupulous business ripping off billions from the public. Both are instances of economic evil.

How fascinating, then, to find Rashi calling economic moral prohibitions, “light commandments that we walk all over,” because compared to murder and mayhem, they seem miniscule.

The literal reading of Torah to allow mass murder and torture was put to rest with rabbinic interpretation centuries ago. But we still “walk all over” the prohibition against immoral commerce. And the two are related: if it cuts consumer prices and raises corporate earnings, even “ordinary” torture in China will start looking not so bad.

Turning a blind eye to economic moral shortcuts contaminates society until no society is left. Relaxing our fight on the moral frontier of finance threatens the moral heartland with erosion.

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B’ha’alotcha: On Ritual, Religion, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Posted on May 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

Freud did not have our sedra specifically in mind when he wrote his treatises on religion. He would have pointed to its demand that the Passover sacrifice be done “in accordance with all its rules and rites” as evidence of his claim that religion is a caricature of obsessive-compulsive neurosis.

To be sure, it is a ritual; and the very nature of ritual is that it must be done “just right.” But that was, of course, Freud’s very point.

Still, Freud was not altogether objective in his critique. Lots of things, not just religion, are done “just right,” including Freud’s own writings which follow very strict canons of scientific research and argument. In the government of Freud’s Vienna, everything followed exact bureaucratic specification. And if Freud had consulted his own physician, lawyer, or accountant, he would have noticed all due attention being paid to detail.

As to ritual, whatever academic conferences Freud attended were nothing, if not ritually determined as to such things as who gave papers to whom; and who responded and how. Indeed, the psychoanalytic method has itself been described as a highly ritualized process. It was not, therefore, ritual that Freud found objectionable so much as it was religion, which he had rejected long before he applied his psychological theory to it. Freud’s commitment to scientific secularism had no room for religion, and as time went on, Freud developed theories that justified his objections.

But Freud was a genius and a doggedly accurate observer of human behavior; he was not, therefore, altogether wrong. Sometimes religious ritual does approximate obsessive-compulsive disorder. An example is the way some medieval Jews interpreted the phrase, “in accordance with all its rules and rites.” The 11th-century rabbi, Joseph Tov Elem (or Bonfils, his French surname), incorporated the line into a pre-Passover synagogue poem that highlighted the importance of attending to every detail of Passover preparation. One verse of that larger composition still concludes our Haggadah: “The Passover celebration has concluded appropriately,” we say, “in accordance with all its rules and rites.”

Bonfils had internalized an attitude that pervaded Christian circles in his day: the idea that religious rites (like baptism and Eucharist) achieve their intended impact as an automatic consequence of punctilious attention to detail. By contrast, skipping a single step or doing anything out of order renders the ritual null and void, so at roughly the same time that Bonfils was writing his poem, other rabbis were developing mnemonics to guide Seder leaders in doing everything “just right.” We still have one such mnemonic today: Kadesh urchatz, by Samuel ben Solomon of Falaise. We chant it as the Seder begins just to anticipate what follows, but originally, it was used to guarantee that the Seder not be rendered worthless on account of an error in order.

In its time, this was indeed an obsessive-compulsive attitude, but it is not typical of the mainstream Jewish approach to ritual over the years. Even “in accordance with all its rules and rites” was interpreted to mean more than an obsessive concern for sacrificial detail. Both Rashi and Ramban, for example, think it also entails linking the ritual acts of the Passover sacrifice to the non-ritual aspects of the Passover message — eating unleavened bread, for instance, as a recollection of the haste with which Jews departed Egypt so long ago. Elsewhere, too, the impact of halachic action is not normally believed to follow magically as a consequence of doing it flawlessly.

Of course we perform our rituals “properly.” Otherwise they would not be rituals. But everything that matters deeply to us gets done that way: arranging an anniversary evening, perfecting a golf swing, posing for an important photograph, creating a beautiful dinner: these are all examples of making sure that details do not get overlooked. Far from being obsessive-compulsive behavior, these are instances of artistic enterprise.

The lesson of it all — from the biblical Passover sacrifice to the Seder of today, and every other ritual we have as well — is that human beings have an artistic impulse at our very core. We describe God’s original act of creation as artistry; and we have been partners with God ever after. We love harmonized melodies, complementary color schemes, matching clothes, flowing language, and even coincidences that suggest patterns behind pure randomness. We should conclude (contra Freud) that while people can use ritual to further their own obsessive-compulsive needs, most of us appreciate it for its artistry — the means to express ourselves through what is graceful, elegant, beautiful, and profound.

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B’har

Posted on May 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

Advocates of modern political and economic positions often look to the Bible for religious support — as if revelation some thousands of years ago should have anticipated the dilemmas of every age to come. This week’s portion, with its compelling laws of ownership, have therefore been mined by liberals and conservatives alike to defend their views.

Ardent socialists, for example, have cheered the idea of declaring every fiftieth (or Jubilee) year a time when land devolves upon the original owners, thereby prohibiting large landed interests from owning real estate in perpetuity. Equally ardent capitalists note the high value placed on private ownership in the first place. The Bible itself measures land value against the number of harvests to be realized before the Jubilee, thus recognizing due market value to guide investors. Land purchased in the first year of a fifty-year cycle is worth more than the same land purchased, say, just ten years before that cycle’s end.

To all of this, the modern collector of commentaries, Yehudah Nachshoni, reminds us that both socialism or capitalism are “concepts derived from modernity.” Readers can find support for both throughout the Torah, which, after all, was given long before Adam Smith or Karl Marx.

Not that Torah is irrelevant to modern concerns; but what it provides is a spiritual framework, not an economic one. Maimonides rightly observes (in his Guide, 3:38) that the laws of sabbatical and Jubilee years were given “to imply sympathy with our fellow human beings and to promote the wellbeing of humanity.”

Its essential claim is that all property — land first and foremost in an agrarian economy — belongs to God. By extension, we, the owners, also belong to God. Neither land nor people can be ravaged for personal gain.

To be sure, ecological concerns are inherent in laws that prevent abuse of land; the land is God’s after all, not ours, in the long run. But overall, the Torah’s concerns here are with issues of people, who are, as it were, tenants gifted with stewardship over goods that predated our coming into the world and will be here long after we die.

In biblical times, ownership of at least some plot of land was crucial, so the Torah makes each of us a landholder. We may sell our land if absolutely necessary, but not all of it — at least some residue of property must be retained lest the owner become completely destitute and become indentured to some other person.

In reality, indentured servitude did occur, of course — Torah’s regulations here are ideals, after all, and as such, were as subject to economic conditions as we are. So rabbinic regulation turned to conditions of indenture, as a consequence of the spiritual principle that we too belong to God — no less than the land does.

If we sell ourselves, in effect, as a matter of economic survival, our masters must recognize that they now have mere stewardship over us, until such time as we can revert to our original master, God. The entire Jewish story begins with the proclamation that God redeemed us from Egyptian slavery and says, “You are my servants” — not (say the rabbis) so that you should become “servants to other servants.” We may indeed, therefore, acquire masters for ourselves in respect to any manner of work, but insofar as we are God’s servants, “we have no power to sell ourselves into absolute servitude.”

Most obviously, our new masters may not make total serfs of us, subjugating us through hard labor — farekh, in Hebrew, the same word used to describe the work that taskmasters assigned the Israelites in Egypt. But the Rabbis apply it to even the smallest details — like asking servants to do unnecessary work just to keep them busy. We also may not give our workers assignments with no end in sight, like doing field work “until I return,” since the worker has no idea when that will be.

These rules, moreover, apply not just to Jews. The Torah has no modern concepts as clear cut as absolute particularism versus universalism; it had no concept of social rules that might apply to people completely beyond the reach of Jewish governmental structures. But it takes a universal turn when it applies these rules of common decency to everyone within the jurisdiction of Jews: not just Jews but resident aliens as well.

The Torah even worries about the spiritual condition of the master. Modern Orthodox master Isaac Breuer lived at the height of rampant capitalism and worried about the wealthy who deny that God owns everything and even live as if they too do not own everything because what they own actually owns them!

More important than the precise examples is the principle: the earth is God’s; all creation is God’s; we are part of creation; we are God’s as well. And in God’s scheme, we are all intended to get beyond Egyptian servitude so that regardless of economic conditions, we may not be reduced to have lives of indignity.

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Tazri’a-M’tsora

Posted on May 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

Medically speaking, the biblical disease that is usually translated as “leprosy” (tsara’at) has nothing to do with slander (motsi shem ra). But our pre-scientific rabbinic ancestors connected the two as if they did. Tsara’at for them was like advanced and untreatable cancer for us. They deliberately associated the gravest threat to bodily health with character damage caused by the misuse of language, as if to say they were equivalent.

That decision should take our breath away. Our culture cares relatively little about damage we do through verbal abuse. Beyond taking adequate care to avoid lawsuits, we engage rather freely in speaking loosely of others.

Jewish law, by contrast, is nothing short of obsessive on the subject. It delineates three kinds of verbal abuse and insists that we cease and desist from each and every one: 1. We are forbidden to invent or pass on lies about people (motsi shem ra). 2. We may not even speak negatively about them regarding things that happen to be true (lashon hara)! 3. And even idle gossip (r’chilut) is forbidden, since gossip thrives on the objectionable, if not the downright sordid.

Clear distinctions among the three categories emerge only in the Middle Ages, where, for instance, the two great legalists Maimonides and Nachmanides argue whether lashon hara is its own classification or just a particularly heinous case of r’chilut. Until then, rabbinic writing frequently lumps them all together as just plain scurrilous talk, which insidiously eats away at a person’s good name and thereby causes injury. The Talmud goes so far as to say that “speaking lashon hara is like denying the existence of God.”

This, mind you, is for lashon hara — speaking evil of others, even if the charges are true! Why is even this lesser offense equivalent to, of all things, apostasy — pretty much the worst crime against God that the Jewish imagination can muster?

Our commentators are of no single opinion on the subject. One prominent example (attributed to Maimonides himself, among others) provides the slippery slope scenario. If we get used to speaking negatively about our own ordinary friends and acquaintances, it is only a matter of time until we do so even of people in authority, including those whose wisdom and way of life testify of God’s existence. We would thereby end up implicitly casting doubt on the most obvious human exemplars of God’s reality.

A better answer, I think, comes from a teaching attributed to the Chafetz Chaim, who is said to have cautioned against speaking lashon hara even of oneself. Discussion of lashon hara usually assumes that the prohibition is rooted in the damage that it causes. But what damage do we cause ourselves by owning up to our own negative character traits? Doesn’t Judaism demand we do just that? We call it t’shuvah (“repentance”)!

The Chafetz Chaim is, no doubt, thinking of people who go beyond proper <i.t'shuvah — people, that is, who habitually run themselves down. It is this constant negativity toward oneself that is forbidden — because being overly self-critical is a slight on God, the Creator who made us.

At stake is what we call religious anthropology, our doctrine of human nature. Judaism insists on seeing something divine in each and every one of us. In 1994, a singing group, “The Halo Benders,” released an album entitled, “God Don’t Make No Junk” — a title that has inspired hundreds of T-shirts, bumper stickers, web-site postings, and other forms of subtle protest against a society that teaches us that we are, overall, wanting.

We can understand the Chafetz Chaim as emphasizing the much earlier and specifically Jewish version of “God don’t make no junk.” It’s one thing to take honest stock of who we are; it’s quite another to run ourselves down all the time (even if the charges are mostly true) without simultaneously appreciating what is good, decent and even godly within us. The self-directed lashon hara of speaking overly negatively about ourselves ignores the reality of God that forms the essence of every living soul.

The implicit denial of God’s presence in any human being, even ourselves, is indeed the subtlest of apostasies. And it is a sin.

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Parashat Mishpatim

Posted on February 8, 2013 | Leave a comment

Twice this week, we encounter Israel’s famous acceptance of responsibility at Sinai. The people first say, simply, “Whatever God says, we will do” (Exodus 24:3). Just a few lines later (24:7), they say, “Whatever God says, we will do and we will hear.”

Tradition has made much of these affirmations. For starters, they have been applied to two different moments in time: the first followed God’s demand that Israel prepare for revelation; the second refers to revelation itself.

Then too, the order of the verbs — first “we will do” and only then, “we will hear” — has attracted enormous commentary. Most interpreters have deduced the lesson that proper comprehension of God’s will flows only from the prior performance of it, not the other way around: that is, we do not first hear and then do; we do and only then do we hear.

But how could that be? “Something” had to have been heard to prompt the doing. The answer must be that, existentially speaking, what we hear at first is only a vague demand for action that must be tried out before we really understand it; in that sense, “we will do” really does come first; only out of doing, do we more fully grasp what was meant by the first hearing. Only then can we revisit the original hearing and rehear it for all that it entails.

Now we understand a lesser-noted difference — in the first promise, “Israel answered in a single voice.” Not so the second time. There, the unanimity of voice is missing. They had no trouble agreeing with one voice that they would prepare for the covenant. But they were of more than a single opinion as to what that covenant entailed, since they knew that it would mean different things for each of them, and only after trying it, would each person know what it might mean personally.

The idea that we try out what we think God wants runs counter to the usual understanding of religion, which, we assume, is black or white, totally objective, clear and distinct from the outset. Nowhere else do we suffer from this childlike delusion. Congress makes rules but then changes them, as exigency demands. Even the Supreme Court changes its mind on what exactly we mean, by, say, “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Sure, we promise enduring love to the ones we marry — but the naivete of courting gives way to the experience of actual marriage, when we understand better what true love demands. Yes, we pledge allegiance to the flag — but then we alter the kind of America for which we believe the flag must stand: the “manifest destiny” of the days when Americans thought the entire continent belonged to them is long gone; our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness means different things in different eras.

Why should this ever-changing landscape of understanding not apply also to religion? Israel could speak with one united voice when the only thing at stake was preparing to receive the covenant. The covenant’s exact terms, however, were another matter. Everyone agreed to commit to it, but they knew that the “it” in question would change, as experience kept revising the understanding of what God had asked for.

Religion gets short shrift in America today because the idea of utter changelessness is blatantly childish. Until we treat religion as a fully adult thing, we can expect religious loyalty to falter. The only way forward is to reassert what Torah here implies: we Jews do agree to do what God wants; but not with a single voice, because we know our understanding must change with personal experience. We hear things differently as we age through life. And God, who made us, knows that very well.

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Parashat Bo

Posted on January 18, 2013 | 1 comment

There is something magic about midnight, as any child who has read “Cinderella” can tell you. It is the witching hour when imagination fails, when radiance turns into pumpkins, when dreams die fast.

Edgar Allen Poe expresses this resonance of despair in his poem, “The Raven,” the tale of a man whose yearning for his lost love Lenore is dashed by a “ghastly grim and ancient raven” who inserts his way into his home “once upon a midnight dreary” with the one-word prophecy, “Nevermore.” Never mind this life; there is also no life after death, no heavenly bliss where the two lovers may someday find one another again. “Is there no balm in Gilead?” asks the man, citing Jeremiah 8:22, no hope whatever? The raven’s answer comes unhesitatingly: “Nevermore.”

Poe’s midnight message chills us to the bone. We have all awakened in the dark and deep of night and thought for sure the nightmares that disturb our sleep are real, that “nevermore” will we find hope, love, health or joy; that a new day will never dawn.

It is around midnight too when the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father appears; and when Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman visits horror upon unwitting travelers. Nothing good can happen in what we call “the dead of night.”

How interesting, then, to find this week that God chooses “around midnight” for the angel of death to slay Egypt’s first born. From Israel’s perspective, however, this is deliverance, so ever after, Jewish lore associates midnight with good things happening. A traditional Haggadah poem carries the refrain, “It happened about midnight.” At midnight Jacob wrestled with the angel; at midnight Daniel was saved from the lion’s den. Baal Haturim concludes, “The Holy One performs miracles for the righteous — at midnight.”

Christianity too adopted this positive view of midnight. Since God had saved the Israelites then, the New Testament pictured prisoners breaking free from a Roman jail on account of the midnight prayers of Paul and Silas (Acts 16:2); and in 1849, Unitarian minister Edmund Sears wrote the Christmas carol, “It came upon the midnight clear.”

A novel touch arrived with the spread of coffee throughout the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. With Jews newly wired by heavy doses of Turkish coffee, kabbalistic masters converted midnight hope into ritual, alongside the promise that midnight was especially apt to find God’s presence among us. Mystical adepts would arise at midnight for a tikkun chatsot, a set of readings intended to bringing about a better world.

But kabbalists were building on more ancient lore: Psalm 119:62, which had King David say, “I arise at midnight to thank You.”

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Chanukah, Thanksgiving, and War

Posted on December 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

As I sat down to write this, it was Thanksgiving in America, and Chanukah was on its way; but the big news was the uneasy truce just announced in Israel. While the rest of New York watched the Thanksgiving Day Parade, therefore, my thoughts turned to this latest round of war and to Chanukah, which commemorates yet another failed attempt to destroy us.

The war that gave us Chanukah was described in I and II Maccabees, whence we get the heroic tales of Judah and his brothers, a priestly family called Hasmoneans. Like all wars, that one too claimed innocent victims in abundance, but eventually, the Hasmonean army prevailed and went on to establish only the second Jewish commonwealth in a thousand years (the first had been the kingdom of David and his descendants).

Not all wars end that well, however, so even though I am not one to overstate the victimhood of Jews – the lachrymose theory of Jewish history, as historian Salo Baron named it — something moved me, as I left for the airport, to take along Yeven M’tsulah, Nathan of Hannover’s chronicle of the 1648 slaughter of Ukrainian Jews by Cossack leader Bogdan Chmielnicki. This was no “Happy Chanukah” tale in the end! We had no Jewish army at all; the Chmielnicki massacres left their mark for centuries as the Shoah of their time.

“I’ve recorded it,” Nathan explains, “so that people can compute the day of their parents’ death and be able to mourn them appropriately.” That’s the best he can offer: proper mourning.

Today’s war in Gaza should be viewed against the backdrop of these two existential bookends: Chmielnicki on one hand and Chanukah on the other. With Chmielnicki, we were helpless; with Chanukah, we were not. Herzl founded Zionism so that we might put Chmielnicki behind us. He even envisioned the Jews of his Jewish State becoming “a new breed of Maccabee.” They would direct just the third Jewish commonwealth of all time.

War is war. All wars randomly maim and erase lives; and all wars are political; there is nothing pure about them. The Hasmoneans were embroiled in internecine civil war as well, one priestly family against another. The Hasmonean chroniclers paint the anti-war party as selfish collaborators and assimilationist idolaters, but they were really just good men and women who saw things differently. The problem is, you never know until after wars are over how they will turn out, so good people are properly divided on whether a war should happen; and if so, with what force, for what duration, and to what end.

This time, in Gaza, war was necessary, it seems, given Hamas intransigence against a Jewish state and the stockpile of fire power raining down on Jewish settlements. Thank God this looks more like Chanukah than Chmielnicki. Most Americans did not give thanks on this Thanksgiving Day for being spared a holocaust. Perhaps at least some Jews did. We have, I hope, put well behind us the day when enemies could slaughter us at will.

I now read Yeven M’tsulah as a historical memory of the way things used to be. I read I and II Maccabees as the way they are again: Jewish power to prevail against forces larger than our own; but also the terrible fact that we are still threatened by those forces, and the stunning reality of what war does in crippling, maiming, burning, and slaughtering, all around.

There is yet another way that we have left the world of Nathan of Hannover behind us. Nathan comforted Chmielnicki’s Jewish victims by assuring them that God somehow desired their martyrdom al kiddush hashem, “for the sanctification of God’s name” — an idea that goes back to the Maccabean era, took root after the wars against Rome, and flourished especially in the Middle Ages when Jews were powerless to protect themselves. With Chanukah too, we chose officially to recall God’s role: the miracle of oil when the war was over, and the conviction that God fought on our side, giving us victory over a power much greater than ourselves. Long before Adam Smith usurped the term to explain the economy, the invisible hand of history was held to be God.

Nowadays, we quite properly believe that God has no hand at all in the wars we fight. We are on our own, having to rally political support, explain our position to the world, build Israel’s military capacity, and then agonize over when and how to use it. Small comfort, that. But it’s better than writing another Yeven M’tsulah with nothing to offer beyond the proper dates for remembering our dead.

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God is Good; Nature is Neutral; Yadda Yadda Yadda: Let’s Move On

Posted on September 24, 2012 | 1 comment

Having just edited a book called We Have Sinned (Jewish Lights, 2012), I was interviewed last week on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” part of an interfaith dialogue on sin and repentance. I was struck by a segment in the show which raised the issue of God’s love. In response to a question from the host, Neal Conan, the imam assured us that Allah is merciful. The Roman Catholic priest concurred: Christians too view God as merciful. I then cited Rabbi Akiba’s guarantee, “Happy are you O Israel, for God loves you; happier still are you because you know God loves you.” As I finished, I wondered: Why this fetish with staking out claims on God’s love?

Well, for one thing, a lot of people have apparently been raised believing the opposite: a lot of clerics have spent a lot of time describing God as a pretty harsh judge. For another, religious leaders who represent this eternal God of love are often the worst spewers of violence and venom. And finally, the universe that God is supposed to manage can seem downright cruel: the world of hurricanes, droughts and tsunamis is not exactly a loving place.

Each of these difficulties deserves an answer.

1. I regret the miserable systems of religious education that have somehow managed to miss the point. Old-world religion did indeed emphasize sin and punishment more than love and pardon, but those are bygone days, and religion today is no more responsible for them than modern science is for medieval alchemy.

2. Religion’s oppressiveness comes from fundamentalists who use religious certitude for their own selfish ends. The issue, however, is not religion; it is power. Religions, nation states, individual demagogues, and corporations are alike in causing willful damage whenever they get too much power. Religious hate-mongers do abound, but so too do evil CEOs and government officials, and we should no more get rid of religion than we should business and democracy.

3. Way back in 1874, John Stuart Mill set us right about nature, saying, “It impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones… starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve…. All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice.” So yes, the created world is not particularly kind “by nature.” But its laws are open to human investigation, and we have the possibility of taming it for human benefit rather than abusing it by squandering its bounty or poisoning its water, earth and air. God does not micromanage the universe, but God gave us the wisdom and the wherewithal to do so.

Anxiety about God’s goodness may be personal or theoretical. The most common personal concern is our own immediate suffering: tragic death or illness, let us say. Our hearts go out to such victims and their families, who, understandably, wish God had intervened to prevent the undeserved cruelty. Unfortunately, God does not work that way, because to do so would involve playing fast and free with the laws of nature, and all of scientific promise depends precisely on the inevitability of the laws that we discover and then can use to our best benefit.

The usual theoretical concern is the question of whether religions are good or bad for the human race. If they merely foment hatred, war, and hardship, they ought indeed to be boycotted or even banned. But religious faith is no more evil than scientific curiosity or artistic imagination. All three are part of human nature, and if nature is neutral, then so too are they. At their best, science gives us knowledge to make life better; art creates beauty to make life richer; and religion provides perspective that makes life deeper.

Religion is properly the search for “perspective” — why we are here, what makes life worthwhile, what constitutes purpose, how best to live, and (when the time comes) how best to die as well. Let’s stop the childish questions about God’s mercy and religion’s beneficence. Of course God is merciful, or God is not God; and since religion is here to stay, like it or not, we may as well fashion it so that we have a good reason for liking it.

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