Tag Archives: Bible

Open Letter to My Students 76: Peace of Mind

Posted on April 23, 2025 | 2 comments

Primo Levi, recently released from Auschwitz, recalls a savvy confidante warning him, “The war is not yet over – not for you.” Indeed, on July 4, 1946, the few remaining Jews in the Polish town of Kielce were herded together and clubbed, stoned, or stabbed to death.  In 1946 as well, Jewish survivors elsewhere, barely alive from concentration-camp starvation and forced death marches, languished in Displaced Persons camps with nowhere to go. Even here, 64% of American Jews claimed personal familiarity with anti-Semitism. 1946 was not a very good year.

How amazing, then that in 1946, the leading book on the New York Times best-seller list was authored by a Rabbi from Boston, Joshua Loth Liebman, and entitled Peace of Mind. 

“This is the gift that God reserves for special proteges,” Liebman wrote. “ Talent and beauty God gives to many. Wealth is commonplace, fame not rare. But peace of mind – that is the fondest sign of God’s love.” 

Peace of mind is an inner virtue: not something we gain from life’s experiences, but something we take to them, to help us make it through them. Think of the biblical Aaron, who suffers the sudden death of his two oldest sons. The Torah defends the event as divine punishment for offering “alien fire,” an obscure sin that neither the Talmud nor the commentators explain very satisfactorily.  I read the account as a case of “grasping at straws,” like Job’s friends who imagine all suffering must be deserved. It isn’t. When inexplicable tragedies strike — through hurricanes, earthquakes, and such – we too call them “acts of God,” without really meaning it.

What matters, however, is not the logic we supply but the response we manage to muster. Aaron, the Torah says, is silent. He endures the loss and moves on.

With all our sophistication on dealing with bereavement, we tend nowadays to fault him for not venting his anger, railing at God, crying foul. I don’t necessarily recommend such stoic silence, but I do marvel at the Torah’s picture of Aaron the father who takes even the tragic death of his children with apparent equanimity. 

 By contrast, when King David’s son Absalom dies (while in armed revolt against him, no less), David laments, “Oh my son Absalom, Absalom my son, would that I had died instead of you.” What do we learn from Aaron that we do not see in David?

Every biblical hero is painted with faults, but also redeeming virtues.  Abraham almost sacrifices his son, but is faithful; Moses loses his temper, but is humble; And Aaron? Aaron’s failure is his compolicity in making the golden calf. What is his distinctive virtue?

From Passover to Shavuot, the period we Jews are traversing at this very moment, we read our way through Pirkei Avot, the rabbinic book of wisdom par excellence. I love the instalment that says, “Be among the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing it.”  Aaron’s genius, apparently, lies in the attainment of peace. 

But not just any peace.

We normally think of peace as something external, peace between individuals or nations.  Aaron was apparently sensitive to that – too sensitive in fact, to the point where he placated the stormy Israelite rebellion at the foot of Mt. Sinai by letting them build the golden calf that was later seen as Aaron’s moral downfall. But I doubt if Aaron could have much luck in the world today. Peace between Ukraine and Russia? Peace for Israel and its Hamas neighbors? It if were just this outward sort of peace, I don’t think Jewish tradition would have bothered mentioning it. Aaron was not anticipating Machiavelli; he was no Henry Kissinger. 

So whatever his success at internecine or international intrigue, the peacemaking for which he was reputedly famous was something else altogether — not peace without, but peace within, the kind of inner peace that allows Aaron the father to go on in life despite the trauma of two lost children. Aaron had mastered Joshua Loth Liebman’s peace of mind.  

We especially need peace of mind when other forms of peace are lacking. Sooner or later, we all discover our lives spinning out of control.  We wake up one day with a rare disease that we thought only other people get; a drunk driver barrels into us and cripples us for life; we discover that someone we love has lied to us; undergo a miscarriage, suffer mid-life crises and problems with aging; lose a job and all the collateral damage that comes with being jobless. 

All the more so is that true of our times today, when we cannot even keep up with the daily barrage of news; when no matter how hard we try, we wonder if we are making a difference. How in the world do we get through all that? How do we sleep through the night and manage to get up and face another day? 

Only with what Liebman describes and Aaron epitomizes: the inner serenity of soul, the peace of mind that lets us separate briefly from the ongoing traumas that afflict us. I don’t mean deceiving ourselves, declaring ”’Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace,” as Jeremiah puts it. I mean harboring our inner resources lest we deplete ourselves utterly and become a problem to those who love us, and even to ourselves.

“Loving peace of mind and pursuing it” is the only armor we have against life’s inevitable and in tractable trials. It was Aaron’s secret and I try to make it mine as well.

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Open Letter to My Students 75: Do I Believe in God?

Posted on April 9, 2025 | 3 comments

Google “Song, ‘I Believe’” and you get some sixty entries. The most famous dates to 1953, and has been sung repeatedly by the likes of Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley, Glen Campbell and Barbra Streisand. “I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard; I believe that someone in the great somewhere hears every word.”

Conclusion: Americans may believe in different things, but they all believe in believing. 

I am never surprised, therefore, when people ask me if I believe in God. When I pose that question at congregations where I teach or consult, most people hesitantly raise their hand, but only when given a choice of “Yes, but….” Mostly, Jews avoid the question.

And for good reason: it isn’t a Jewish question altogether.

To be sure, the entire rabbinic tradition just assumes the existence of God. But belief is less central for Jews than for Christians. That is because, from their very inception, Judaism and Christianity went different ways. 

Christianity was popularized by Paul, a first-century Greek-speaking Jew from Asia Minor; so was influenced heavily by the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition that asked questions of belief. Rabbinic Judaism, by contrast, remained true to the biblical focus on behavior: what we should do, not what we should believe. Classical Christian literature is theological; the Jewish equivalent is legal. 

 To be sure, Jews are not uninterested in matters of faith. But we are quicker to doubt tenets of belief and slower to adopt them officially. 

The church father Tertullian (160-240) is usually credited with saying, credo quia absurdum, which religious sceptic Voltaire (1694-1778) translated as “I believe because it is absurd.” Although Tertullian may not actually have said it[i] (let alone meant it that way), it is sometimes cited as a justification for believing in what science and reason doubts. Isn’t that the point of faith after all? 

Not necessarily. When I say I believe in my son, I may have all kinds of evidence to back up my statement. And in any case, I certainly don’t mean that I believe in his existence. Similarly, when I say that I believe in myself, I have in mind trusting my ability to make good decisions, not deciding after some serious doubt that I exist. Does “I believe in God” affirm God’s existence? I don’t usually use the expression “believe in” that way.

We might, of course, ask, “Do you believe in Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster?” There we do question actual existence. But is God like that? 

If you press me, I’d say I do believe in God, but the way  William James did: not because the evidence supports it; and certainly not because it is absurd; but because there is no evidence either way — if God is beyond time and space, what kind of evidence could there even be? And where there is no evidence, James declared, we should choose to believe whatever will help us live a better life. It’s like the question we ask of a new acquaintance, “Does he like me?” If we wait for certain evidence, we will never trust enough even to begin establishing a friendship.[ii] So we assume the best and see what happens. 

So too with God. I don’t assume (for example) that God inevitably heals the sick; I have evidence against that. But believing in “God,” as some supportive presence beyond me that explains the order in the universe while affirming the good and the just within it is something that I find helpful. As I said in an earlier letter, faith is a strategy we employ more than a thing that we “have.”

But we need not go that far. For over a century now, we have known that to get at what words mean we need to watch how they are used.[iii] Instead of asking if we believe in God, we should ask how we use the word God in the first place. 

If my cancer test comes back negative, I may say, “Thank God.” If I promise to attend your wedding next year, I may add “God willing.” I do not believe that an entity named God saved me from cancer or cares whether I attend your wedding. God is not an entity altogether. When I say these things I am simply testifying to the extreme importance of “escaping cancer” and “getting to the wedding.” I use the word God to name those things that are of inestimable importance to me. My life is richer for elevating them that way – a whole lot better than “Gee whiz, I’m cancer free,” or “Yeah, I’ll try to get to your wedding.”

God is not a piece of furniture in my life; not some thing that I feel obliged to describe and refurbish on occasion, to make God fit nicely with other things in which I believe. God need not be a thing to still be a reality: something like loyalty, love, beauty and harmony. I experience all of these and have words for them.

When it comes to God, I start at the wonder that the human condition entails. At hand right now are a return of spring and life and color and joy; a family Passover seder; a newborn baby cousin; a multitude of new ideas that even at my age I find exhilarating. At hand too are daily headlines that testify to the loss of honesty, integrity, love and compassion — attributes that I consider essential. I invoke “God,” as the best means I have to do these things justice. 

[i] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/abs/i-believe-because-it-is-absurd-the-enlightenment-invention-of-tertullians-credo/69340C3AF8366E79BCF3BDD804DED82E

[ii] William James, The Will to Believe And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1897) pp. 23–4.

[iii] Cf., e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953: 4th ed. London: Blackwell, 2009); J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). For a nice summary of this school of thought at Oxford, see Nikhil Krishman, A Terribly Serious Adventure (New York: Random House, 2023).

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Open Letter to My Students 74: Will the Real Jews Please Stand Up?

Posted on March 9, 2025 | 2 comments

Some 70 years ago, a rabbi (Morris Kertzer) described inviting a visiting Japanese army officer to attend a Shabbat service. When it was over, the officer surprised the rabbi by asking, “What kind of Christian are you?” Upon being informed that he was a Jew, the officer inquired, “Jews? What are they?”

Yes, what are Jews? That question arises again today, not because some visiting army officer from Japan, Jakarta or Johannesburg has never heard of us, but because we ourselves need to decide what we are. There are different kinds of answers. 

Halachah: The usual answer is halachic, the way Jewish jurisprudence sets boundaries to Jewish Peoplehood: to decide who is in and who is out.

Race: The Nazis used a racial definition:  to decide who to murder. 

Secular: Israel, a secular state with an admixture of halachah, has struggled with the issue – as in the case of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew and Zionist, who hid from Hitler in a convent; then was baptized, became a Carmelite Friar, and took the name Father Daniel. In 1959, he sought entry to Israel under the Law of Return. Israel, he claimed, admits born Jews who identify as ethnically Jewish even though they are atheists and practice no Judaism whatever. Then why is he any different? He too was a born Jew who identified as ethnically Jewish. At least one of the supreme court justices who heard the case was inclined to accept his petition, on the halachic grounds that even Jewish sinners remain Jews. But the court rejected a halachic solution. The Law of Return, it said, “does not refer to the ‘Jew’ of Jewish religious law, but to the ‘Jew’ of secular law.”[i] 

Gender egalitarian: In 1983, American Reform Judaism decided to honor patrilineal (not just matrilineal) claims of Jewish descent. 

Were the Japanese army officer to ask today, “What  are Jews?” we would have to answer, “Regarding what? It all depends,” for there are other definitions too, including a moral one. Consider convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein, clearly Jewish by any halachic definition. But when the case came to light, several people said, “Well, he’s not very Jewish in my book!” Yes, Jeffery Epstein was legally Jewish but morally, he was not “very Jewish in my book.”  

I want to build on that moral answer using the Max Weber’s concept of “ideal type.”  An ideal type is a hypothetical model, an abstract ideal (positive or negative) against which examples of real life can be measured. Each culture has its own ideal type. 

From about the 5th century to the 13th, the ideal type for classical Christianity was the monk, who exchanged the real world for the monastery, a place to work, meditate, and pray. The American ideal type is the capitalist entrepreneur who goes from rags to riches by dint of hard work and business acumen. 

Traditionally, ideal types were gendered. The ideal Victorian man succeeded at business, but was also titular master of his home and family; like Mr. Banks (appropriately named) from Mary Poppins. The ideal Victorian woman was a home maker, mother, and moral exemplar for her children.  

The classical Jewish ideal type is 1. a Torah scholar, who, however, 2. uses Torah learning to be a good person in the world. It’s not unlike Plato’s ideal of 1. a philosopher, who 2. pursues wisdom to achieve virtue. Yiddish eventually provided a word for the second half of the Jewish ideal: mensch. 

With secularization, that ideal was generalized to scholarship in general. Stories abound about immigrant Jewish mothers giving library cards to their little children. To this day, Jews attend college and even graduate school in record numbers. But the Jewish ideal type must also use all this education for good:  the “mensch  factor,” that is, which shows up in the percentage of educated Jews who are honored for accomplishments that benefit humanity.  Between 1901 and 2023, of the 965 winners of Nobel Prizes, at least 216 (22%) have been Jewish.  

It is not enough to be highly educated and financially successful. The Jewish ideal must strive publicly for the general good of humanity. We will never know the intimate details of people’s private lives: their messy divorces, their failures as parents, and such. But we expect them to try to live good lives at home; and if their private failures degenerate into moral disasters, they lose all claim to ideal status: The Jeffrey Epsteins and Harvey Weinsteins, for example, are out.  So too are the Bugsy Siegels and Meyer Lanskys, mob bosses in what has been called the Kosher Nostra.[ii]

I’m willing to bet that Bugsy and Meyer, at least, never claimed to be ideal Jews. But some Jews do claim the mantle of Jewish respectability, even though their actual lives defy the very notion of the historic Jewish type. I think, particularly, of the West Bank settlers bent on violently displacing Arab landowners, to fulfil a dubious biblical promise of a Greater Jewish Land of Israel.

So like the Japanese officer, I ask, “What is a Jew?” – not halachically, racially or ethnicly, but morally. What is the age-old ideal type that Jews for centuries have pursued as the right and proper way to realize their Jewish identity. It is not the west-bank thuggery but scholar mensch who betters the human condition. 

[i] Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior [Father Daniel Case] Israel Supreme Court, HC 72/62 PD 16 2428 (1962). Here in the United States, Commentary (the most prestigious Jewish journal at the time) published a dissent, charging that Father Daniel’s commitment to Jewish history and even peoplehood was clear; the court should have admitted that it was specifically Father Daniel’s Christianity that decided the case (https://www.commentary.org/articles/marc-galanter/a-dissent-on-brother-daniel/). Indeed, a Jew who practices Yoga and accepts the dictates of Buddhism would doubtless be admitted today. 

[ii] https://mjhnyc.org/events/kosher-nostra-the-life-and-times-of-jewish-gangsters-in-the-united-states/

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Open Letter to My Students 70: In a Time of Despair

Posted on November 7, 2024 | 3 comments

What keeps us going in times of despair; when (to cite Deuteronomy 28:67), “In the morning we say, ‘If only it were night’, and in the evening we say, ‘If only it were morning.” 

 Or as the Talmud puts it (Sotah  49a), In times of such despair,  “How does the world itself keep going?” 

 For liberals like me, the results of the 2024 election is such a time. We fear the worst. How will we keep going?

Start with brutal honesty. We Jews have reason to fear a revival of right-wing anti-Semitism, such as what occurred in Charlottesville during the first Trump administration. Then too, along with other Americans, we fear that our democracy itself is endangered; that we will devolve into a dictatorship, where even basic rights are threatened. And we worry about the poor, the climate, and the very survival of a world that is democratic and free. Vigilance, then, is the first order of the day, lest the unthinkable become not just thinkable but probable.

But even as we fear the worst, we should remember the Talmud’s caution against jumping to conclusions. For any given set of circumstances, it asks, b’ma’I k’askinan? “What are we actually dealing with?” So: What, really, are we dealing with? We may see something short of virulent anti-Semitism, something short of democracy’s demise, in which case, we survive through patience and persistence: living with what we must (patience) but doing what we can to make a bad situation better, fighting as we always have (persistence) in matters of conscience.

The commitment to honesty along with the question “What are we actually dealing with?” apply also to ourselves. We will have to admit our own foibles, question whether we have fully appreciated the other side of things — the reason, for example, that most Americans, not just the crazies, voted against us. We will need new allies if we are to move the needle on America’s newfound persona. And that will require admitting that not every Trump voter is our enemy. Not every Christian evangelical is also a racist white nationalist. People who disagree with us need not be moral reprobates. 

The “other side” in politics is not the same thing as the “other side” in Jewish mysticism – not all conservatives, that is, are evil incarnate, just as, frankly, not all liberals are the good guys. We can be principled without being doctrinaire, open-hearted but not closed-minded.

Honesty, patience and persistence should be augmented by humility. We should ask not just about “them” but also about “us”:  “What are we actually dealing with,” here in our own camp?

The Talmud offers yet another answer: its own response to the question of how the world is sustained in times of dread. It survives, we are told, because of the Kaddish! Yes, the Kaddish, but not because times are so bad that we should say a mourner’s prayer in advance. In Talmudic times, the Kaddish wasn’t yet a mourning prayer at all. Why then does the Kaddish sustain the world?

Start with a fresh interpretation of the word “world,” derivable from the oft quoted Talmudic precept (Sanhedrin 37,a): “To save a single person is to save the entire world.” The entire world? Really? Surely the Talmud does not imagine that if I save someone I thereby save everyone! More likely it recognizes that individual people are each a world unto themselves, as in the English expression, “My entire world was turned upside down.”

We know how the external world (the cosmos) keeps going. The earth spins on its axis no matter who is president. It is our internal world that that prompts the question, “How does the world keep going.” How do we sustain our internal world when everything we hold dear is on life support — when things are so bad that every morning we yearn for night to fall; and every night we yearn for morning to dawn? 

In terrible times then, it is our internal world that is sustained by the Kaddish – not the Kaddish alone mind you (we also need honesty, vigilance, patience, persistence  and humility). But the Kaddish is its own antidote to despair, and this is why.

The Kaddish is above all an affirmation of hope, and not just hope for tomorrow or next week or even next year, but hope over the long haul. It is the bold contention that however much our efforts are stymied in the short run, however severe our setbacks in any given moment (or even any given lifetime), it is the long view of things that will prevail. The Kaddish images a God of history, an ultimate dominion of goodness, a momentous vision of a distant tomorrow beyond the momentary setbacks of our individual lives. 

The idea of such a “moreness” (the best word I can muster) is the very essence of religious consciousness. It seems also to be indelibly engraved on human consciousness, generally; we are a species that pictures “forever”; wonders about life after death; and recognizes, as Hamlet put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Religious metaphors like a messianic era, the Kingdom of God and the eschaton are attempts to capture this insistence that our life’s projects do not ignobly die when we do. So too are all those eulogies about the good we do continuing on beyond us. Why have liberals chosen instead to imagine that our every effort to ameliorate the world’s evils will succeed without setbacks? 

To be religious is to know that we belong to an order of things that is more than our earthly lives can contain; to know, or at last to suspect, that we are in league with God and part of eternity. 

How will I manage the new era that has begun? Through honesty, vigilance, perseverance, patience, and humility.

And when I tire of the effort that such struggle demands; when I run up against the powers that be; when I wonder whether I am making any sizable difference; I will take refuge in the Kaddish and its promise of moreness, making commutations back and forth from the world of the here and now to the place of forever. 

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Open Letter to My Students 69: A Box of Chocolates?

Posted on October 20, 2024 | 1 comment

Maybe Forrest Gump was right: “Life is a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.”

I think about life at this time of year, with the High Holiday hopes in my rearview mirror and the immediacy of Sukkot upon us  – especially with Sukkot’s mandatory reading of Ecclesiastes – whose topic is exactly that: the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life.

My long-time friend, a Catholic priest, Dick Vosko, invariably sends me his own carefully crafted Rosh Hashanah wishes, and this year, he included Ecclesiastes 1:13, “I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under the sky. It is a heavy burden that God has given human beings.” 

The Hebrew for “heavy burden” is inyan ra, variously described by commentators as “obscure” or “meaning uncertain.” So I asked Dick where he got his translation. Following his lead (and adding some research of my own), I discovered several options: 

  • Literally, inyan ra  means “a bad matter,” as if life were a bad joke being played upon us.
  • The classic King James Bible (KJB,1611) and the early American Protestant Bible, the American Standard Version [ASV, 1901]) translates it as “sore travail.” 
  • The old Jewish Publication Society translation  (JPS, 1917) converts the old English “travail” into “task” giving us “a sore task.” 
  • The newer JPS translation (NJPS, 1985) and a standard Protestant Bible (NRSV, 1989) prefer “an unhappy business.” 
  • Dick’s “heavy burden” competed with “terrible burden,” in three other Bible translations: New International Version (NIV, 1984, 2011); God’s Word Bible (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, 1995); andNew Heart English Bible (NHEB, 2008).

However you look at it, this is hardly a cheerful message: Has God really saddled us with “sore travail,” “a sore task,” “an unhappy business” or “a heavy/terrible burden”? Is life a bad joke? Dick chose “heavy burden” because he had in mind the Hamas attack and ensuing war, and thought that for Jews this year, life is indeed a heavy burden. I appreciate his sentiment. 

In context, the inyan ra refers back to the eleven Ecclesiastes verses leading up to it: the ennui that sets in when we are so jaded as to believe that life is nothing but havel havalim, “vanity of vanities [KJB],” “utter futility [NJPS],” or “utterly meaningless [NIV]” (take your pick); because “there is nothing new under the sun,” or (as we might say), “Been there, done that.” Rabbinic midrash[i] focuses on the vain accumulation of wealth and even wisdom. Greed is never be satisfied; we can always have more. As to wisdom, think back to all the stuff you learned in College and how little of it you remember.

The choice of Ecclesiastes for Sukkot is probably just chance. An 8th-century source lists all five scrolls (Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther) as holiday readings.[ii] But reliable manuscripts for that book list only four: they omit Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes was added later on (the 11th century); at some point, scribes who were used to reading it assumed it had always been read, but had somehow dropped out of the 8th-century account. So they mistakenly added it back in.   

In other words, eighth-century Jews were reading Lamentations on Tishah B’av (when the Temple was destroyed) and Esther on Purim (Purim is derived from the Esther story). They also read Ruth on Shavuot and Song of Songs on Passover (two of the three harvest festivals). That left one scroll (Ecclesiastes) unread, and one holiday (Sukkot) with no reading. So the two were later matched up to fill the double void.

Adding Ecclesiastes to Sukkot was consequential. In biblical times, Sukkot was known as the holiday for experiencing joy,[iii] not “sore travail,” “an unhappy business” and a “heavy burden.” To this day, the prayer introducing it (the Kiddush) calls it “the time of our joy” (z’man simchateinu). Does the addition of Ecclesiastes suggest we should hedge our bets — change it to “time of joy and of carrying the weight of the world”? How can life give us family and friends, laughter and love, but also suffering and sorrow; not just all that is good, but much that is bad – even a Hamas attack (on, of all days, Simchat Torah, the day following Sukkot, which will never be the same again). 

But that’s the point: life is not just untrammeled joy. Any given moment of any given day can bring happiness or sorrow, good or bad — exactly what Deuteronomy records (v. 30:15) as God’s own judgement of the human condition: “I have set before you life and good, death and bad.”  We are urged to choose life and good (v. 19) but the tragedy of the human condition is that regardless of what we choose, the bad (not just the good) can come our way.[iv]

Nature itself can be cruel. Even if we somehow reversed global warming, we would still have hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. And regardless of what we choose, other people get to choose too: there are genuinely bad people out there. And sooner or later (we hope later, but it can happen sooner), we die. Life is indeed an inyan ra: not (if we are fortunate) entirely “sore travail” or “an unhappy business,” but for all of us, at times at least, “a heavy burden.” The hardest lesson of all is the realization that we are not in charge down here. 

Forrest Gump was only partly right. Who knows what any given day will bring? “You never know what you’re gonna get.” But it’s not all chocolates!

The “end of the matter,” the final word, as Ecclesiastes puts it (v.12:14), is “Revere God and keep God’s commandments.” That sounds a little too pious for me. It resonates poorly in age when reverence for a supreme anything rings hollow, and when the very idea of being commanded runs counter to our rampant individualism. But beneath those ancient words lies a timeless message: that there is something beyond us to which we owe allegiance, a “something” we Jews call God. We do what we can to choose life and good; even knowing that we will all get sick, all suffer losses, all die someday – some of us sooner than we wish and more tragically. But the nobility of the human condition still stands: we have minds to choose wisdom, hearts to embrace love; a conscience to know good from bad, and a habit learned from childhood to put one foot in front of the other: no matter what the future holds.  

[i] Midrash Rabba to Kohelet 1:13. Cf. Ibn Ezra to our verse, “It is called inyan ra because human being occupy themselves with things that will never prove satisfying.”

[ii] Massekhet Sofrim, 14:1. 

[iii] Cf. Leviticus 23:40, Deuteronomy 16:15, Nehemiah 8:17. And, as the Rabbis remember it, Mishnah, Sukkah, 5:1. 

[iv] On the connection to Deut. 30, see Rashi to our verse. 

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Open Letter to My Students 63: Passover Thinking for This Year of Trauma

Posted on April 17, 2024 | 4 comments

The world is broken. And getting worse. So why I am still optimistic?  

            Just a few decades ago, the Iron Curtain fell, a grand coalition for freedom blanketed Europe, even Putin was an American ally, and I wondered then why other people were so pessimistic. 

            The optimistic/pessimistic divide seems to be baked into our brains, some of us leaning positive, others negative. Given both sides’ ability to argue their positions, it is hard to escape the conclusion that reasons follow — they do not precede — our sunny or cloudy disposition. Our predisposition toward one side or the other makes us see the evidence differently.

            Optimism/pessimism can be mapped onto another divide: liberal/conservative. Liberals see a world where change heralds promise; conservatives see a world change implies loss.  

            And indeed, researchers have tracked both optimism/liberalism and pessimism/conservatism to different regions of the brain.[i] We are hardwired to lean in one direction or the other. 

            In 1901/02, William James applied the two dispositions to religion, calling optimism the religion of “healthy-mindedness” and pessimism the religion of “the sick soul.”[ii] James’s nomenclature betrays his own psychological makeup: he suffered intense periods of depression, and wished to be “healthy” like other people. So ignore the unfortunate terminology. His point remains. Pessimistic religion emphasizes the preponderance of evil in human history. Optimistic religion stresses the positive presence of God and the steady evolution toward a better time to come.

            We actually need a balance of both. Evil, after all, is real. Pessimists make too much of it; optimists ignore it at their peril. 

            All of which brings us to the Passover Haggadah, and the story we tell about ourselves this year.  

*

            The rabbinic celebration of Passover began centuries before book culture. With no  written text to fall back on, whatever got said at the seder was made up on the spot – following, however, an agreed-upon outline. “Start with [Israel’s] degradation (matchil bignut); then finish with praise [to God] (um’sayem b’shevach); and seal [the message] with redemption (v’chotem big’ulah). More colloquially, “Tell the story of Israel’s degradation and praise God for redeeming us from it.”[iii]

            But what is Israel’s “degradation” and (by extension) its opposite, “redemption” from it? Two third-century Talmudic Rabbis, Samuel and Rav, debate that point.[iv] Samuel offers the obvious answer. Degradation is “Our ancestors were slaves to Pharaoh,” in which case, redemption is “God freed us” from it. Rav, by contrast, identifies true degradation as “In the beginning, our ancestors were idolaters”; redemption was our conversion to worshipping the one true God. For Samuel, degradation is imposed from without; for Rav, it is what we do to ourselves. Both positions are included in the traditional Haggadah.

            By the Middle ages, a list of things that count as redemption — any one of which would have been enough to merit praise of God — was assembled into a list, called Dayyenu (“It would have been enough”). By then, rabbinic theology had fastened on the centrality of human sin as the cause of Israel’s various historical bouts with degradation; so the crowning act of redemption was seen as the establishment of the Jerusalem Temple with a sacrificial cult that provided atonement. Jews settled down to await a messiah who would build a third Temple, the necessary means to atone sufficiently to end Jewish degradation at the hands of the nations. In William James’s scheme of things, we had become a religion for sick souls. 

            Animated by emancipation from medieval ghettoes and aflame with the promise of modernity, nineteenth-century Reform Jews rejected Judaism’s sin-and-punishment mentality. Their 1908 Haggadah added a Dayyenu line: yes, God “built for us a temple,” but God also “sent to us prophets of truth and great leaders in each generation to bring all hearts nearer to the divine kingdom of righteousness and peace.” In 1923, “great leaders in each generation” was changed to “made us a holy people to perfect the world under the kingdom of the Almighty, in truth and in righteousness.”

            Either way, this modernist version of our sacred story replaced the “sick soul” perspective with optimistic “healthy mindedness.” 

            Is degradation persecution from without (à la Samuel) or something we bring upon ourselves (à la Rav)”? Or a combination of both? Is ultimate redemption dependent on God (forgiveness of sin, bringing a messiah) or on us (acting “in truth and righteousness,” “great leaders in every generation,” being a “holy people”)?

            Rarely have these questions loomed as large as they do this year. The many chapters of the Haggadah’s evolution give us lots of leeway in answering them. Looming over any answer we might choose to give, however, is the Haggadah’s judgment, “Not just once, but in every generation, enemies arise to destroy us [degradation], but the Holy One saves us from them [redemption].” The entire statement is hard to accept as literally true. Anti-Semitism is indeed always around, to some extent, but lots of Jews in lots of generations have lived pretty happy lives. And we would have to expand the idea of divine intervention to include our own capacity for maximizing good over evil.  

            Whatever our story, then, do we emphasize the negative (anti-Semites are always out to get us; there is no progress: first Pharaoh, then Hitler, now Hamas) or the positive (we are empowered to affect redemption; there is progress: from Egypt to Sinai and a promised land; a post-Shoah State of Israel and healthy diasporas; a reconstituted Jewish future when the war ends)? 

            One thing is certain. The Haggadah in all its forms emphasizes redemption. However bad our degradation, we conclude with the image of Elijah the prophet, and “Next year in Jerusalem.” I will end my seder as I always have – as Jews everywhere always have: with the promise of redemption.

            The late Rabbi Michael Robinson (z”l, may his memory be a blessing) recalled visiting Israel and tripping over some loose pavement. Shaken by the experience, he pulled himself onto a nearby bench to recover.  A rather pious-looking man passed by (a rebbe perhaps ?) and asked what happened.

            “I fell,” Rabbi Robinson explained.

            ”No,” said the rebbe, “You got up.”

            The Haggadah reminds us that Jews are the People who get up. 

[i] Cf., e.g., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/#:~:text=The%20volume%20of%20gray%20matter,threats%2C%20is%20larger%20in%20conservatives; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807005/.

[ii] William James, Gifford lectures, 1901/02; published as The Variety of Religious Experience (1902: Modern Library Ed., New York: Random House, 1994), Lectures 4-7.

[iii] M. Pesachim 10:4,6. Those portions of the Mishnah between “Start with [Israel’s] degradation (matchil bignut); then finish with praise [to God] (um’sayem b’shevach)” in Mishnah 4; and “seal [the message] with redemption (v’chotem big’ulah)” in Mishnah 6 are later insertions. The verbal form (matchil, um’sayem, v’chotem) demonstrate that the three phrase go together.

[iv] Pes. 116a.

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