“Despoiling the Egyptians”: An Exercise In Moral Logic

Posted on January 24, 2012 | 4 comments

The  sedra for this week (Bo) features one of the most troubling episodes in all of Torah: the so-called despoiling of the Egyptians. Back in Exodus 3, the Israelites are promised that they will leave Egypt not just with their freedom but with great wealth. “You shall strip the Egyptians bare,” goes the promise, in colloquial English of today.

Sure enough, this week the Israelites prepare to leave by “borrowing” objects of silver and gold from their neighbors. Borrowing? Not exactly. Everybody knows, that they are leaving Egypt for good with no intention of returning. The Egyptians comply because “God disposed them favorably” toward their erstwhile Jewish slaves (verse 11:3). How so? They repented of the evil they had done as slave masters, says Ramban. But let’s face it: it didn’t hurt any that the Egyptians were frightened to death by the plagues.

This is a significant moral dilemma. When the Egyptians had the upper hand, they impoverished the Jews. Now that the tables are turned, should the Jews then impoverish the Egyptians? Ibn Ezra dismisses the whole issue by insisting that God who owns the entire world can rightfully allot it to whomever He wishes. End of story. But most commentators cannot buy that. Surely God is subject to the same moral law as that which binds human beings.

So commentators try to get the Israelites off the moral hook by observing that the Israelites “borrowed” the Egyptians’ goods only at Moses’ insistence. They were not looters, that is, not a mob intent on extortion. The Israelites requested their neighbors possessions against their own will, actually – purely because Moses commanded them to do so.

Still, what moral rationale could Moses have had? Following the Talmud (Sanhedrin 91a), most commentators decide that Moses was only claiming the wages owed from years of unpaid slavery. This was not vengeance; it was justice. Ethical law prohibits an underclass from using its sudden turn of fortune to rob former masters. But Moses (a prophet, after all) imposed a higher order of moral logic than what ethical law permits.

Ever the philosopher and legalist, Maimonides thinks through the consequences of this position. In his code (Hilkhot Y’sodei Torah, Chapter 9) he comes to the astonishing conclusion that “someone who is known to be a prophet” may temporarily override the laws of Torah. But think about it: are we really ready to permit our leaders, even temporarily, to override morality? They would have to be recognized prophets of course but how can we know for sure that someone is a prophet?

Maimonides’ prime example — Elijah who offers a sacrifice on Mount Carmel despite the Torah’s mandate to do so only in Jerusalem — is talmudic (Yeb 90b). But Elijah’s case is different. Whatever he did, he did himself. Convinced of an emergency situation, he acted on his own — he did not induce others to sacrifice outside the Temple. And the rule of Torah that he dismissed was not a moral one. It impacted God, perhaps, but not other human beings.

The case of Moses is more difficult because Moses instructed others to disobey a precept and because the precept in question was moral. Can just anyone, then, be a modern-day Moses?

That frightening possibility may underlie Maimonides’ insistence that Moses was utterly unique. The Torah concludes by observing that no prophet has ever arisen like Moses, and Maimonides raises that observation to the status of being one of his 13 principles of faith. In principle, then, a prophet may instruct others to countermand basic moral logic. In practice, however, we are wary of anyone who tries to do so. No one, after all, is like Moses.

The logic attributed to Moses is not wrong: considerations of justice should (and do) guide our thinking about compensation for slaves – – that has been our position regarding the Sho’ah. But we arrive at that conclusion by going through the institution of law, not by going around it.

In the end, the Torah is not in heaven, Maimonides reminds us. It remains the responsibility of human beings to interpret it. But interpretation is the very stuff of law not its dismissal. In the era before Sinai, Moses was the singular embodiment of legal interpretation. He had the right, therefore, to instruct the Israelites to take what was properly theirs. But no one has arisen like Moses, and we are beyond him now.

The sure sign of civilization, Judaism insists, is the rule of law. Societies stand or fall on the balance of justice and mercy with which their understanding of law operates. We insist as well on morality but entrust it to the complexity of such properly functioning legal systems.

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Denominations: The Final, Moral, Test

Posted on January 15, 2012 | 5 comments

In response to my blog decrying the premature obituary of religious denominations, I have received several emails that deserve response. Some readers charge me with unfairly championing Reform Judaism as the only successful merger of modernity and tradition. Others think I unfairly dismiss Orthodoxy as a monolithic premodern whole. Still others persist in thinking that denominations necessarily limit creativity. At the very least, others say, why not argue for a single denomination outside of Orthodoxy, giving us Orthodox on one hand and non-Orthodox on the other? These are very important critiques that require clarification. Let me take each in its turn.

1.      “I unfairly champion Reform Judaism as the only successful merger of modernity and tradition.”

I never said it and don’t believe it. All denominations today arose as responses to the challenge of remaining Jews in a modern world. So too, did Zionism and Jewish socialism, the strategies that were favored in eastern Europe where religious reform did not dominate Jewish consciousness as much as it did in the west. All Jews have had to wrestle with modernity and either affirm it or (at some psychic cost) deny it. I cited today’s Reform Judaism an exemplary instance of merging modernity and tradition, but there can be others.

2.      “I unfairly dismiss Orthodoxy as a monolithic whole that is inherently premodern.”

Not so. Modern Orthodoxy is exactly what its name implies: modern and Orthodox. Its preeminent German founder, Samson Raphael Hirsch shared a great deal with the reformers, including the conviction that he was at home in Germany, the desire for modern aesthetics in worship, and the conviction that chosen peoplehood implies a Jewish mission. To be sure, Hirsch faulted his likeminded Reform colleagues on other counts, but is he modern? Of course. Modern Orthodoxy has moved on significantly from its Hirschian origins, just as modern Reform has from its parallel German starting point, but by no means do I dismiss modern Orthodoxy as inferior, even though I, myself, have chosen to identify as Reform.

3.      “We would be better off with untrammeled creativity on the congregational level, but without denominations which limit it.”

It is not true that institutions necessarily protect the status quo. Renaissance art and Baroque music (for example) were supported by the establishment. Great inventiveness has arisen out of corporation-sponsored think tanks. Denominations can catalyze greatness by encouraging brilliance, supporting genius, and rewarding excellence.

4.      “Why not opt for a single denomination outside of Orthodoxy, so that we have Orthodox on one hand and non-Orthodox on the other?”

We live in a time of enormous personal choice and if denominations offer real options, people are more likely to identify with a particular type of Judaism than with Judaism in general. Jews insistent on traditionalist worship and a halakhic life-style will be drawn to Orthodoxy. Jews who care deeply about egalitarian worship, a tradition of prophetic ethics, and spirituality will be happiest in Reform. Other denominations can and should make their own claims to specificity. Because we cannot predict the kind of Judaism that any given person will seek, we need strong denominational addresses all along the Jewish spectrum.

I am, you see, very much a pluralist. I think we need pluralism to keep us sharp and competitive. Respectful denominational competition can be healthy. But as much as we should champion everyone else’s right to practice Judaism as they wish, we also have an obligation to identify deeply as our own kind of Jew. We should allow for many options but be passionate in supporting our own favored option.

5.      The moral argument

I say “everyone else’s right to practice Judaism as they wish.” But there are limits. Some interpretations of Judaism are beyond the pale, offensive to the point where we must say so. When, for example, a rabbi in Israel refuses to rent to a Muslim on prejudicial, even racial, grounds, we must all denounce his message as a kind of Judaism we will not tolerate. We should stand together in respecting the licit interpretations of Torah while denouncing the illicit ones.

That is another reason for denominations. In the normal course of things, be it politics, religion or life in general, the crazies always shout the loudest. How much impact can the reasoned opposition of several scattered synagogues have? Denominations, however, speak with the accumulated voice of many; they command attention in the press and media. We need their voice of sanity when Judaism is wrongly represented as other than it is.

Indeed, the moral test of denominations is precisely this. Are they willing to make their voice heard? Given the disturbing news from Israel of torched mosques, abused women, and trampled human rights, we are at the point where we are about to find out.

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Rule Makers or Rule Breakers? An Iron Cage of Our Own Making

Posted on January 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

After a hiatus of about four years, I’ve returned to my course on Ritual Studies. I love this course, which has grown to become a synoptic understanding of the major currents in western thought since the nineteenth century. Every time I teach it, I become enamored anew of the geniuses who dissected the realities of modern life so brilliantly. This time round, I have rediscovered Max Weber, who so trenchantly predicted the institutional malaise that threatens the quality of Jewish life today.

This malaise substitutes managers for leaders. Weber predicted it as part of modernity’s transition from traditional and charismatic authority to authority that is rooted in the calculus of institutional rationality.

Traditional authority is best illustrated by royalty, where rule passes automatically from father to first-born son. You get what you get: monarchs whose competence varies with chance. Charismatic authority depends on the gift of personal magnetism: Ghandi or Churchill (on one hand), Hitler or Stalin (on the other). Again, you get what you get, a “great man” cult, but no guarantee of what the “great man” will represent.

By contrast, said Weber, the modern world seeks rational predictability. Financial markets thrive on “no surprises.” Corporate efficiency requires process and protection from tyrannical whim.  People move up systematically to inhabit roles that are hedged with rules. To be role-defined and rule-driven, institutions expand bureaucracies and bureaucracies spawn managers.

Bureaucracies abhor novelty; they like rule makers, not rule breakers; they squeeze out individualism and chase out eccentrics. The managers risk imprisonment in what Weber called an “iron cage” of their own bureaucratic making. They mistake rules for reality, and then, seeing the intricate interplay of one rule with another, they live in mortal fear of precedents that might plague them later. They play it safe by multiplying meetings and erecting committees to make choices which they then merely implement.

While market-based organizations have a bottom line — sleepy bureaucracies get put out of business — not-for-profits survive as long as they retain monopolies on basic services that people require. But how long will monopolies last? How long will people still want what their parents and grandparents did? How long will they settle for services that are not spectacularly delivered?

All our institutions face these questions. As I said in my last blog, for example, synagogues that collect dues through the primary promise of life-cycle moments and pastoral care are discovering that they cannot maintain the monopoly. Granted, they usually promise community too — but in practice, that sense of community reaches only a tiny proportion of the members who are insiders: the people who like study and prayer but who generally have no exceptionally high standards for what study and prayer should become.

I may seem unduly harsh because I overlook synagogues that do much more (and do it much better), but the synagogues that I describe do exist, and they exist in large numbers — run by managerial rabbis who care deeply for people and for Jewish tradition, but who substitute management for leadership. Overworked and undersupported by institutions that barely make their threadbare budgets, these rabbis have little time to grow, to study, or to think.

Their synagogues remain stable, orderly, and predictable. The small coterie of regulars come and go to services, classes and meetings, complaining on occasion about their inability to interest more people, develop new leaders and raise more money. They are congregations in stasis – managed well and smoothly run, but limited, because managers rarely shake up well oiled systems. Congregational greatness requires rabbis with enough dissatisfaction to risk change. They need rabbis who are more than managers.

Appreciating bureaucracies for what they can do but knowing their limitations, Weber himself wondered how leaders might push management into being less risk averse. He put his faith in holdovers from charismatic authority. Charismatics dislike stasis. They thrive outside the system. They champion visions of alternatives.

These visions arise from what Weber called “ends derived from values” rather than assessments dictated by purely managerial reasoning. Only leaders who are value-driven will risk challenging bureaucratic steadiness despite the uncertainty attendant upon unsettling the status quo. Boards need to be challenged to go beyond custodial and fiduciary responsibility and develop what has been called “generative thinking” about the mission that makes what they do worth doing.

What goes for congregations goes elsewhere as well. The days of monopoly rule are over. Our institutions need to know more than how to do business with fiscal probity and managerial efficiency. They need to make sure the business they are in is responsive to a new era; and then do it creatively, nimbly, and with excellence that questions the rules as much as it honors them.

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The Myth of Denominational Demise

Posted on December 29, 2011 | 21 comments

The world is filled with certainties that aren’t – like the myth that religious denominations are dead. We will eventually have three inchoate pools of people, it is said: Orthodox, “Other,” and Unaffiliated. Already Orthodoxy is less a denomination than a way of life rooted in halakhic observance, community consciousness, and synagogue centrality. “Other,” presumably, will feature the very opposite, synagogues as “limited liability communities” that collect dues in exchange for rabbis on call, life-cycle ceremonies, and occasional events like High Holidays. The growth market will be “a pox on both your houses” — the unaffiliated altogether.

Evidence for this sorry denouement includes the documented decline in religious affiliation generally, the generational replacement of the baby boomers (who joined things) with their children (who don’t); economic conditions that allow little luxury for supporting synagogue movements; an internet era that provides programming for free; the declining numbers of Conservative Jews, once the majority denomination; and the stagnation of Reform Jews who maintain their numbers only because of the in-migration of Jews by choice.

So why are denominations not necessarily on their way out?

Denominational obituaries assume that organized religion in general is a thing of the past, but it is equally arguable that religion is just changing, not disappearing. Religion, as we know it, is a post-World- War-II response to the Cold War era, baby-boomer children, and suburbia. Synagogues insulated Jews against latent anti-Semitism, and provided safe spaces to rehearse ethnic identity and support of Israel. Plenty of post-war money paid denominational offices to provide the programs that a synagogue needed to ramp up and reach out.

Denominations back then had bureaucracies that churned out personnel and services; what they did not have is a clear ideological mandate to justify the personnel and services they churned out.

No one will join that kind of denomination. But denominations are what we make of them. They can define what religion is becoming not reflect what it used to be.

Precisely this ability to evolve with the times is what makes religion in America so exceptional. Indeed, one explanation for its robustness, relative to the anemic state of religion in Europe, is America’s separation of church and state, which has prevented state support and conditioned religion instead to fend for itself. Static churches, sociologists say, die out; creative ones succeed. Denominations that hunker down with old ways of thinking are indeed doomed. But denominations that think differently have a future.

This different denominational thinking must acknowledge the fact that, unlike the Cold War era, ours is a time of spiritual search. The limited liability synagogue that trades dues for services will find competitors who offer bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, and even funerals (not to mention high holidays) for a whole lot less than what it costs to be a member. And who needs denominations just for that?

But assume our synagogues respond to the spirituality surge and urge us on to be our better selves. Assume they deliver purpose, meaning, and a reason to be alive. Assume further that they ritualize these higher human goals by connecting people to each other, to their past, and to God. Assume also the existence of rabbis who have something deep to say – rabbis, that is, whose intellectual acumen is equal to whatever society offers elsewhere at its thoughtful best. Assume, in a word, that synagogues manage to ennoble the human condition in communities of commitment, where the scar tissue of entrenched routine is replaced by an intentional response to the human yearning to matter.

Suppose all this, and you get synagogues that need denominations.

A single synagogue has but limited reach while denominations unify a thousand synagogues to influence policy round the globe. Denominations can run seminaries that invest in visionaries who compete in the marketplace of big ideas. Only denominations can galvanize large scale investment for a Jewish future; rally opinion world-wide; or have a voice that must be taken seriously far away in Israel and in circles of power everywhere. Only denominations can argue our way to a viable vision of religion for the vast mass of Americans who yearn for a form of religion that is not Orthodox but is equally authentic and equally deep.

I write this after attending the latest biennial of the Reform Movement, which certainly didn’t look dead or dying. It reaffirmed its commitment to the marriage of modernity and tradition; the courage to take moral stands; an inclusive vision for Jewish Peoplehood; and a compelling portrait of Judaism at its moral and spiritual best. It was religion as it just might be, religion that only denominational greatness can provide.

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Why Faith Matters

Posted on November 9, 2011 | 9 comments

Abraham’s centrality for Western civilization has been debated ever since the earliest Christians described him as the paradigmatic “man of faith.” Salvation, they concluded, arises through “faith” (what we believe) not through “works” (what we do). The Rabbis, by contrast, emphasized works over faith.

But Abraham as a paragon of faith is part of Jewish tradition too. Only through faith in a God who summons him does Abraham leaves home and family altogether. Rav Soloveitchik has provided an entire treatise entitled ”The Lonely Man of Faith.” Faith matters in Judaism.

How could it not — faith is inherent to being human! It takes faith to imagine that anything we do at all has importance in the long run. We have little or no control over our personal fate; we cannot predict what will happen to those we love; when we die, we take nothing with us; and, frankly, how much do we remember about even our grandparents, not to mention their grandparents? The entropy of time washes memories away.

It is also not clear that what we do has any long-term impact on history, which we wish we could control but, obviously, cannot. It takes faith to act as if life is worthwhile despite regular personal setbacks and in the face of traumatic global events we never expected and have trouble controlling now that they are here.

Soloveitchik traces the human experience of faith to the Bible’s very beginning. He links the Bible’s two separate accounts of creation (Genesis 1:1-2:4; and 2:5-2:24) to parallel aspects of human nature. The first story addresses the need to be creative. “Fill the earth and master it,” God says (1:28) — in other words, “Be productive; do something.” The second narrative, however, focuses on God’s giving us “the breath of life” (2:7). Its concern is life itself: not what we fill our lives with doing but what the point of all that “doing” really is. This deeper question addresses what we mean by redemption, or (as Christians prefer saying) salvation. Story One highlights accomplishment; Story Two underscores redemption.

From childhood on we are trained to value accomplishments but, eventually, accomplishments pale. That is the message of Ecclesiastes: “Utter futility! All is futile. What real value is there in all the gains we make beneath the sun?” If that sounds jaded, just consider how history is filled with accomplishments that do not matter anymore. We go to school to get a job, get a job to build a career, build a career to get ahead, get ahead to get further ahead, and so on. But to what end? “Accomplishment” is simply what we do; “redemption“ is the certain sense of why we do it. Redemption derives from faith in a transcendent purpose, a higher ideal to which we owe allegiance. Judaism calls that God.

We are back to asking whether we are saved by works or by faith — by accomplishments, that is, or by redemption. Accomplishments satisfy the human thirst for creativity, but will not suffice at moments when we are forced to wonder why creativity matters in the first place. Faith alone can tell us we amount to something, even when we feel like failures; when devastating illness interrupts our plans; and when we die so poor as to have little sense of material accomplishment or so young as to be unable even to conceive of a lifelong project, let alone to see it through. Only faith provides the redemptive certainty that we matter regardless of how our accomplishments turn out. And only faith can measure our accomplishments in the first place.

The Bible introduces Abraham as someone of no accomplishments at all; we get no biography of him whatsoever (the Rabbis have to make all that up). Abraham’s single claim to fame is that he responds to God’s call to undertake a journey in faith. He will face disappointment after disappointment; struggle with the land to which he is summoned; lose the battle to save Lot; banish his first son Ishmael; prematurely bury his beloved wife Sarah; and die virtually alone, far away from Isaac whom he once almost sacrificed. But his faith in a God whom he never sees will not flag.

Why are Jews so heavily invested in accomplishment, but not redemption or faith? Why are we so ready to dismiss the possibility of God, of being called, and of measuring ourselves without accomplishment as our center? The challenge is hardly to be like Abraham the great accomplisher. It is to face the possibility that we are called, like Abraham, to have faith in redemption, no matter what we manage to accomplish.

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One Hundred Great Jewish Books is now available.

Posted on October 24, 2011 | 1 comment

One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millennia of Jewish Conversation

One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millennia of Jewish Conversation

I’m happy to announce that my latest book, One Hundred Great Jewish Books, is now available. The full title, One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millennia of Jewish Conversation, reflects an idea I have been playing with for about a decade now. What is Judaism, if not an identity that is portrayed through a rolling conversation across the centuries! The book is a running record of the conversation as portrayed through every variety of Jewish book: classical texts and medieval responsa, but also modern fiction, short stories, histories, biographies, and even comic books, encyclopedias, and cook books. I read over 200 books to make the selection, but here it is at last: my running guide to the Jewish conversational record.

I hope you enjoy it, so we can continue the conversation here.

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Time To Go Back To Work

Posted on October 19, 2011 | 2 comments

If you google sukkat shalom (“sukkah of peace”), you get hundreds of references, most of them titles of synagogues and lyrics for songs. The synagogue names bespeak a deep-seated desire for places of respite. The song lyrics acknowledge the metaphor’s origin, our nightly synagogue prayer that God “spread over us Your sukkah of peace.”  We call the prayer Hashkiveinu, “Lie us down,” a perfect nighttime meditation for that twilight moment when the daily grind succumbs (we hope) to nightly rest.

Tradition connects this sukkah of peace to Amos, 9:11, God’s promise to “raise up the fallen sukkah of David,” a glorious picture of the end of time when Israel’s travails will have come to an end. The nighttime Hashkiveinu reflects this very “raising up” by following “Lie us down in peace” with, “Raise us up to life.” Here too, it is possible to see a messianic theme, relief from exilic oppression, just as Amos had foreseen.

That can hardly have been the prayer’s original intent, however. It is a mistake to think that even people in the Middle Ages lost much sleep over cataclysmic metaphysical issues like the eventual restoration of the Davidic monarchy and the coming of the messiah. These eschatological metaphors were appealing because they provided ways to ponder the more immediate problems that prey on our minds and rob us of sleep: “disease, violence, want, and agony” (dever, cherev, ra’av  v’yagon), for example. Hashkiveinu was, first and foremost, a bedtime prayer reflecting the hope for a night of peaceful sleep.

Its bedtime image of the sukkah came from the holiday that ends this week. The simple joy of sitting in a sukkah and consuming festive meals in the ambience of nature’s fullness is a perfect antidote to the harried lives we normally pursue. Whether in our nightly prayers or in the temporary booth we call a sukkah, we are invited to pause for inner reflection and outer quietude.

But as we have seen, that is only half the image of Hashkiveinu — and half the image also of the sukkah. Like it or not, “Lie us down in peace” becomes “Raise us up to life.” If “Lie us down in peace” addresses the real nighttimes we endure, then “Raise us up to life” speaks to the real daytimes we confront. A nightly wish for peace is fine, but when morning dawns, we awaken to the real world of work and worry. So too, we should not get too comfortable in our sukkah of peace. Like peace itself, the sukkah is deliberately made to be temporary, a feeble structure that cannot last. When Sukkot ends, we face the autumn preamble to the inevitable blast of winter.

Sukkot peace is not supposed to become soporific, dulling us to the tasks that will follow. We have every right to enjoy a week of languor in the sukkah, but not at the expense of deluding ourselves about what lies beyond it. Words have many opposites, some healthy, some not. An unhealthy opposite to “tranquility” is “anxiety”; a healthy one is “urgency.” When life resumes at the end of this Sukkot week, it should do so with some urgency. Life matters, after all, and life consists of the real world outside the sukkah’s walls. Both peace and struggle are part of the human package; we don’t get one without the other.

Human nature suggests we would prefer evading life’s exigencies. I am not thinking of such immediate challenges as earning a living, confronting sorrow, building relationships, and just plain making it through each day; these impinge so noticeably upon us that we can hardly avoid them (although some of us try to). My concern is the larger issues that we delude ourselves into discounting, if not downright disregarding – the fractures in our country, aging of our Jewish institutions, and dangers to our planet. The life that greets us when the sukkah comes down is not an altogether pretty thing.

Not that we should despair; there is much about the world to celebrate, and celebrate we do, when we emerge from the cocoon of the sukkah for the joy of Simchat Torah; and recollect again how “In the beginning,  God created the heavens and the earth” and found it “good.” As we take up residence in the world outside the sukkah, it is this image of natural and intended goodness that should consume us. When sitting in the sukkah ends, we “rise up to life” in a world whose continued goodness depends on us. The holiday month of Tishri gives way to Cheshvan, a month known best for having no holidays in it at all. It will be time to go back to work.

 

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9/11: Remembering How We Remembered

Posted on September 11, 2011 | 5 comments

By tomorrow, the various memorials for 9/11 around the country will be matters of memory, allowing us to remember how we remembered. That exercise is worthwhile because it elucidates two different meanings of the word “remember”: the ordinary sense in which we merely bring to mind whatever it is we want to recall and the ritual usage that goes much deeper than that. We remember 9/11 — ritually; we remember how we remembered it — ordinarily.

It’s too bad we use the same word for both. Remembering 9/11 is a far cry from remembering where we put our checkbook or the way it was when we were ten. English sometimes strives to keep them different by calling the ordinary sense “remembering,” and the ritual sense “remembrance.”

We are all familiar with rituals of remembrance, an activity common to most religions but central also to secular communal consciousness. Even societies that deliberately reject religion — France during the French Revolution and the Soviet Union, for example  — practice them. If nothing else, they must remember the revolutionary moment in which they were formed, and for that, they need something sacred, if not “religious.” Central to the act is usually an attempt to relive what happened in condensed form: rereading a Declaration of Independence, perhaps, or recreating a mock battle. With 9/11, there were six moments of silence — one for each of the four hijacked planes that caused the mayhem and one more for each of the buildings that crumbled.

Television too played this ritual role by reliving the day’s fateful horrors. Witnesses remembered what it was like; young people described growing up in the shadow of the tragedy, and pundits waxed eloquent on the meaning of the occasion — not to provide information that we didn’t know already, but to ritualize the knowledge we already had, by reviewing it, rehearsing it, re-feeling it, and reliving it.

Because ritual remembrance is a category of the sacred, and because Judaism and Christianity are religions where remembering is central, we can learn a lot about even the secular act of remembrance by borrowing terms and concepts from Jewish-Christian understanding.

First, Christian. At his Last Supper, Jesus famously said, “Do this in memory of me.” Ever since, the primary liturgical act for Christians has been the Eucharist, a ritualized replication of that moment, described by the Greek term for remembrance, anamnesis. The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship calls the Greek word ”practically untranslatable in English. ‘Memorial,’  ‘commemoration,’ ‘remembrance’ all suggest a recollection of the past, whereas anamnesis means making present an object or person from the past.” What matters is this sense of “making present,” as if past and present coalesce into a single intensive experience of “now.” It is as if we are able to inhabit two separate points in time simultaneously. Time stops momentarily (and momentously), as “then” and “now” become the same.

Jews do not use the Greek, but have the same ritual consciousness in, for example, the wedding ceremony where the concluding “seven blessings” (the sheva b’rakhot) invoke the idyllic Garden of Eden on one hand, and final redemption yet to come, on the other, collapsing them both into the current blissful moment under the wedding canopy.

In lieu of the Greek anamnesis, the specifically Jewish contribution is the parallel Hebrew word for remembrance, zekher (or zikaron, a variant that means the same thing). We hear regularly of a zekher with reference to the Temple, creation, leaving Egypt, and other events and realities of another era. But the most telling use of zekher comes from the Talmud which employs the term legally by saying, “There may be no proof for such and such a proposition, but there is a zekher for it.” Zecher Can hardly mean “remembrance” here.  It is better translated as,” pointer.”

Now we understand ritual remembrance. It is a pointer that fastens our attention across time, space, and even logic. It attaches where we are to somewhere else we wish to be. It rivets our consciousness on our inherent connectivity to something that might otherwise be lost among the disparate sense perceptions that constantly assail us, as if to say that regardless of how our lives may change, this particular pathway of attentiveness must never be lost. We move on with our lives when the moment of remembrance ends, but the connecting tissue to the event being memorialized attends us wherever we go, deepening our sense of what matters and committing ourselves to the lessons that flow from it.

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The Messy Search for Law and Order

Posted on September 3, 2011 | 2 comments

The things that matter most we rarely know for sure. Among them are the great issues of truth and justice. They go together, as we all know, nowadays, from the long-standing television series Law and Order. In the first half of every episode, the police seek out truth; in the second half, the courts  establish justice. Readers of Torah could have gotten that message from this week’s portion which calls on the Israelites to establish shoftim v’shotrim, “judges and officials.” The officials are the police: the truth finders; the judges allocate justice.

This interdependence of truth and justice comes through also in the blessing that follows the haftarah. “All of God’s words,” we are assured, “are true and just.” But only God is absolutely trustworthy regarding either. The human condition presupposes doubt on both. The S’fat Emet affirms, “It is impossible to arrive at absolute truth”; and D’rashot El Ami acknowledges, “From a human perspective there are many kinds of justice, just as there are many kinds of truth.”

We seem, therefore, to be in absolute need of truth and justice, but absolutely unable to arrive at either of them absolutely. This is not to say that they are relative; we must differentiate the way things are known (“ontology,” in philosophical language) from the human capacity to know the way they are (“epistemology,” as the philosophers say). It is only our ability to know them (epistemology) that is flawed.

So here’s our dilemma. How do we run a society which requires public policy based on truths and rooted in justice, when we can know neither of them for certain?

To begin with, we can take seriously the lesson that “there are many kinds of truth.” Realities about such evils as war and poverty are known not just through quantitative data, but from the stories people tell, whether biographical or purely literary. The old TV program Dragnet featured LA detective Joe Friday eliciting “just the facts.” But “just the facts” are never enough. Take Stephen Crane’s Civil War masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, for example. Its empathy for wartime suffering transcends statistical comparisons of battle casualties. Read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and you understand poverty in ways that “just the facts” will never reveal.

Judaism captures this sort of complexity with the term yosher — neither truth nor justice, but a third category: a “feel for” equity, righteousness, the “rightness” of things. Budgets, for example, should be more than “just”; they should also be “right” — a response to the overall situation, including mitigating factors beyond what the letter of the law understands as “just the facts.”

It is rightness that we have in mind on Rosh Hashanah when we picture a courtroom with one seat of justice and another of mercy, and ask God to occupy the latter before passing judgment. There may be mitigating factors that a Stephen Crane, John Steinbeck or Victor Hugo might pick up, but that “just the facts” would overlook.

The nuanced nature of truth and justice is the overall theme, generally, of these seven weeks of transition from Tisha B’av to the high holy days. It emerges from the Haftarah readings (known collectively as “the seven portions of comfort”) which constitute a serialized dialogue with God on the possibility of renewal following exile. The stage is set on Shabbat Nachamu, “the Sabbath of comfort,” where, God urges Isaiah to “comfort, comfort my people.”  But what comfort can there be if truth is one-sided, and guilt unmodulated by matters of rightness?  Technically, Israel has sinned and deserves punishment. So one week later, Israel responds, dubiously, “But Adonai has forsaken me!” God, however, knows human nature; understands human weakness; and, through our prayers (spoken and silent), hears the stories we have to tell about why we acted as we did.  So the third week, God reiterates the promise: “Unhappy storm-tossed one, I will give you foundations of sapphires.” And now, this week, God underscores the fact that “I, it is I who comfort you,” a reminder that God’s insight (unlike ours) is perfect: God gets at the rightness of things; God tempers justice with mercy in a manner toward which we can only strive.

Strive for it we should (hence, the accent on “pursuit” in this week’s admonition,” Justice, justice, you shall pursue“) but with the full admission of its complexity.  Whether personal quarrels, organizational planning, or matters of congressional debate, the sides involved would do well to remember that they are not God; that there are many roads to truth; that fullness of understanding arrives through people’s stories, not just the facts; and that justice should be tempered by “rightness.”

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Dreams and Visions

Posted on August 5, 2011 | 8 comments

Hardly anyone reads the prophet Joel nowadays. In part, it is simply too painful. His opening vision of a plague is devastating. Then too, he reverses both Micah (4:3) and Isaiah (2:4) who promise a future when, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up sword against nation; They shall never again know war.” Joel turns it around. His idea of consolation is that Israel will prepare specifically for war; “They shall beat their plowshares into swords and their pruning hooks into spears” (4:10).

But there is another side to Joel. I learned it years ago, listening to Reform Jewish teenagers singing a Debbie Friedman melody: “Your old shall dream dreams, and your youth shall see visions” (Joel 3:1). At the time, so many years back, I identified with the youth who would see visions. Older now, I settle for the first part of the verse, dreams. But I admit it: dreams fall short of visions. Dreamers are not visionaries.

Visionaries see promise beyond our present that the old dismiss as just a dream. Joel calls their visions chezyonot (singular: chizayon). A chizayon, says the midrash, is one of ten names by which the gift of the holy spirit is known.

The reason this comes to mind is that Tisha B’av, which falls next week, is preceded by Shabbat Chazon, “The Sabbath of Vision.” Chazon and chizayon are similar names for the same thing: “vision” – but a chazon is negative; a chizayon need not be. “Chazon denotes divine censure” says the medieval commentator, Redak; It designates our failures, our sins, our historical nadirs.

Shabbat Chazon, then, is not a happy Sabbath. It gets its name from its haftarah reading, Isaiah 1:1, where the prophet envisions, “Your land will be desolate; your cities burned!”

Some commentators think chazon here refers not just to the haftarah, but to all of Isaiah, whose final verse (66:24) predicts maggot-infested corpses lying in the fields; “a horror to all flesh.” Traditionally, we follow 66:24 by rereading verse 66:23 (“All flesh will come to worship Me”) so as not to end on such a note of terror.

Why does Isaiah see a terrifying chazon while Joel, living in no better time, and prone to seeing the worst anyway, sees a hopeful chizayon?

The answer is that Joel himself does not see the chizayon. He can’t. By his own testimony, he can at best dream dreams. Only the youth get chezyonot. Our future always lies with youthful promise. So I ask: in the councils of power, our Federations, synagogues, and governing boards of institutions, where is the voice of our 20 and 30 year olds?

Truth is: usually, nowhere — partly by their own choice, but a choice conditioned by our failure to invite them in. We, the older generation, tend to look for every new chazon. The history we know best has prepared us for disasters around every corner. We even thrive on the threat of a chazon every so often. We raise money on it, galvanize the community around it. What we are not very good at – us elders, I mean – is trumpeting the promise of a chizayon, precisely what the next generation would bring.

The Talmud rules that if the preparation day prior to Tisha B’av falls on Shabbat, instead of limiting our joy then, “We may eat and drink all we need, even as much as a banquet of King Solomon” (Ta’anit 29b). A kabbalistic tradition extends the teaching to say that Shabbat releases the light of redemption, so when Shabbat and Tisha B’av intertwine, even the sacred light hidden away in the tragic memory of Tisha B’av can be freed.

The report contains an important lesson: Even our deepest day of mourning has the promise of redemption.

But redemption requires a chizayon of what might be, not just a chazon of what we think always was. We need a chizayon of tomorrow’s promise, not just a chazon that relives yesterday’s suspicions.

Even in a week devoted to fasting for our past, it is no mistake to imagine a glorious future – a future that comes soon, not in some far-off messianic era. That imagination is unlikely to come from a generation that has mostly known trauma. We need desperately to empower a new generation, unspoiled, unjaded, capable not just of passing dreams but of realizable and promising visions.

 

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