Tag Archives: God

Open Letter to My Students 76: Peace of Mind

Posted on April 23, 2025 | 1 comment

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 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 67: A High Holy Day Message from Home

Posted on October 2, 2024 | 5 comments

I do like to write about “home,” especially when Rosh Hashanah rolls round and people head home for the holidays. Never mind the reality: broken homes, dysfunctional families, aging parents, and the mystery of undying sibling rivalry. Charles Henry Parkhurst, the reforming Presbyterian pastor who brought down New York’s infamous Tammany Hall, got it right when he said, “Home is heaven for beginners.” 

At the new year we become beginners all over again. Out with the old; in with the new; new year’s resolutions, or, for Jews, t’shuvah, literally, “returning” to God, but also to our childhood selves, the innocence we left behind when we took the wrong turn toward mistakes and misdeeds. Our prayer book calls the holiday yom hazikaron, the day when God remembers us, a somewhat frightening possibility, except for the fact that God, we say, is merciful – like the parents we either have or wish we had; parents, that is, who welcome us back home no matter what we’ve done out there in the world. “Home,” says Robert Frost “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Home is the name we give to the comfort and safety of belonging, while “not at home” means being always on guard against ever-looming disaster. So Rosh Hashanah emphasizes the positive: the guarantee that however much we may have strayed into a world where anything can happen, Rosh Hashanah brings us home to safety. 

But then comes Yom Kippur. If Rosh Hashanah is the guarantee of being back home again, Yom Kippur is a study in potential exile. Just a couple generations back, synagogue goers wept with shame over the misdeeds they might have done without even knowing it; they trembled from the fearful possibility that an obsessive accountant-God kept careful ledgers of it all.  Not that I am advocating that kind of guilt-ridden religion; we are well rid of it. But it did reflect the recognition of what a life poorly led might come to. To this day, we say over and over again on the High Holy Day supplication, Hashiveinu eilekha, “Bring us back to You,”  O God, which is to say, bring us home. An all merciful God must surely have inaugurated the open-door policy of letting us in long before Robert Frost wrote about it.

Even more poignantly, there is that Yom Kippur prayer Sh’ma Koleinu (“[God] hear our voice”) which we are supposed to say as if standing before the almighty Judge and passionately pleading our case. The central entreaty is this poignant line: “Do not throw me out” – the worst case scenario! We’ve completed a year of managing the world outside, a year of struggle, disappointment, and outright pain – which, God knows, this past year has been; and then we make it back home, only to have our parents throw us out. 

The High Holy Days are a frightening bungee jump from on high, where we almost land safely on firm ground, only to get yanked back up to the giddy state of free-fall: home for Rosh Hashanah; then thrown out on Yom Kippur. 

We can, if we like, avoid that roller-coaster nightmare: sit silently through services; give in to the boredom (which is easy to find); and then leave, unchallenged and unchanged. I can hardly blame people for doing that. The liturgy can be impenetrable; the verbiage endless; like getting lost in a Wagnerian opera because you do not understand the German and cannot relate to characters with names like Walktraute, Grimgerde, and Schwertkleite. Services should come with an accompanying program alerting you to the highlights, telling you what to look for, and informing you that prayer is not so much something you go to as it is something you must enter into. You should also be warned that if you mistake the prayers for prose instead of poetry, you will find the service alienating. Yes, “alienating,” itself an echo of exile, homelessness, home-sickness even.

The biggest mistake is focusing on a High Holy Day message of times past, seeing Yom Kippur, say, as a Jewish version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, just a misery-soaked diatribe on human unhappiness, sin, and guilt – which indeed, is what it was in medieval times (and still is, in many synagogues). Too many people leave too early, missing the final N’ilah service, where the day’s desolation gives way to the ecstatic discovery that we really do get to start again. Remade, reborn, and refreshed, we dare undertake another year of exploration “not at home.” Back to business; back to work; back to school; back to an uncertain future but with all the promise of youth at its best; back being young and eager, even if we are old and jaded.

The metaphor of returning home is overrated. In real life, our childhood home is something we grow out of — a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there again. The High Holy Day homecoming too is a temporary fix. It ends. We venture forth again to life. But we manufacture other homes along the way, informed, perhaps, by the High Holy Day drama in two acts: both Rosh Hashanah’s joys and Yom Kippur’s trials.

The adult homes we make must indeed be shelters from life’s storms, but they are never actual heavens, as Pastor Parkhurst wrongly imagined them to be, because as much as we emerge from the High Holy Days with the hope of new beginnings, we ourselves are no longer just beginners. Whether there is some kind of heaven where we eventually find an eternal home I do not know. But until I find out, I happily have recourse to what Sigmund Freud called the reality principle. Life is not a bowl of cherries, but it’s not just sour grapes either. It is a day-by-day grind; but day-by-day joy and satisfaction as well. We will spend next year commuting back and forth from the homes we make to the work we do; and pray that both will be surprisingly rewarding.

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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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Moses Goes to Law School

Posted on January 31, 2019 | 1 comment

This week, Moses goes to law school. Contending with Pharaoh had been easy – it came with a magic staff and miracles. Even last week’s Ten Commandments were child’s play, compared to this week’s  crash course on bailment, theft, kidnapping, labor law, the indigent, mayhem and murder.

And this was just the first lecture. “This is what God calls freedom?” Moses must have wondered. Lawyers reading this will probably sympathize.

By the reading’s end, God sympathizes also. Moses is invited for a personal tutorial in God’s office on Mt. Sinai. God will personally dictate a set of course notes – to be called “the Torah.”  It will take some 40 days and nights.

But why so long? asks Abravanel. “How long does it take for God to write the Torah? Creating the entire world took only a week!”

Ah, says Sforno. This 40-day stretch was for Moses’s sake, not God’s. New-born babies, he reminds us, are not considered fully alive until they make it through the first 40 days. Faced with this wholly new challenge of mastering Torah, Moses was like a new-born.

So God gave him 40 days to adjust. “Come join me on the mountain,” God said. “I can dictate the details to you in an instant, but you’ll need more time than that — someday, people will call it a ‘time-out.’ Forty days in the rarified air of the mountain will provide a bird’s eye view of it all, the big-picture reason for being, and the confidence to start again.”

I love that idea: Time-out in life for us as well – like in major-league football, where play stops on occasion for teams to catch their breath, restrategize, and reenter the game refreshed and renewed. When living wears us down, we too should get to signal to whoever is running us around at the time, and retire for a while without penalty. As in football, life would stop temporarily, maybe with a commercial in some unknown planet where extraterrestrial beings are watching. Who knows?

When the time-out ends, we would bound back into our work and families, new strategies in place, as if reborn and newly ready to face whatever challenges life throws our way.

As it happens, tradition credits Moses with climbing the mountain not just once, but three times – for the first tablets, then the second ones, and, also, in-between, to plead for Israel after the Golden Calf. Three times, Moses huddles alone with God, to rethink, re-strategize, and (like the new-born baby) reemerge reborn. That’s my plan for us as well. We too should schedule a time-out three times in the course of a normal lifetime: as young adults about launch our independence in the world; in our middle years, our “mid-life crisis,” when what we have been doing may not sustain us through the years ahead; and when we grow old, when a lot of life may still be left and we need “time out” to consider what to do with it.

We may need others as well. I won’t limit it to three, because life regularly throws us curves, erects new challenges, and wears us down. At some point it dawns on us that life’s complexities cannot always be mastered just by trying harder and doing better. The solution, then, must lie in stepping back and looking for some hidden reserve deep down within ourselves — the kind of wisdom that comes only from taking time out to reflect on where we’ve been, and to recalibrate where we still most want to go. We call that “revelation.”

Revelation was not just for Moses atop Mt. Sinai; it is available to us all, atop whatever counts as our own personal mountain. Whenever we feel overwhelmed, we need time out to rediscover the still small voice of God within, the renewed discovery of our own self-worth, and the confidence required to reaffirm our purpose and know again how precious life can be.

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Parashat Sh’mini: The Holy Power of Hands

Posted on April 18, 2017 | Leave a comment

I have two tales about hands.

The first concerns the hands of my college president. When we ordain our rabbis and cantors at the Hebrew Union College — an annual event, scheduled this year in just a few weeks’ time — our president lays his hands on each candidate’s head or shoulders.

In theory, the idea goes back to Deuteronomy 34:9, where we hear of Moses laying hands on Joshua, Moses’s successor. In actuality, rabbinic ordination with the laying on of hands is altogether a modern innovation. But never mind. That’s what we do. The idea is sound, the practice unforgettable.

We call it s’michah, a word also used for sacrifices. The priests of old practiced s’michah — laying hands on the sacrifices before offering them to God. Moses tells Aaron, “This is the thing that God commanded you to do, that God’s presence may appear” (Lev.9:6). But the Torah does not say what “thing” Moses has in mind, so Italian commentator Obadiah Sforno (1475-1550) explains, “It is the laying on of hands.” Hand-laying is as central to Temple sacrifice of old as it is to my college’s ordination today: and for the same reason — not that rabbis and cantors are “sacrifices,” God forbid, but because the touch of human hands is how “God’s presence may appear.”

The second tale of hands comes from a sign I saw the other day: “Need a Handyman? Call me!” As someone who fixes nothing without making it worse, I always need people who are “handy.” Yes, “handy”! They too lay hands on things — hands, however, that mysteriously comprehend the inner life of gaskets, cams, cogs, and cranks. They unmake and remake complex machinery — make the old look like new.

By contrast, my college president’s hands — like the hands of the Temple priest — do absolutely nothing. They just sit there, utterly inert, untrained and unmoving. They are mere vessels for the work that God does through them.

Our Yom Kippur liturgy is insistent on that point: “God reaches out a hand” it says. But God has no actual hands, for God has no body at all. When priests or seminary presidents lay on hands, they do so on behalf of God, that God may reach out through them.

So too, Aaron’s descendants, the kohanim of today, reach out hands to offer the priestly benediction. Many people bless their children that way, too — or, nowadays, increasingly, even one another. In all these cases, the “hands” are not what we call “handy.” They are untrained. They accomplish nothing on their own. The people being blessed do not get put together differently; they are exactly the same as they were before. But there is this difference (a big one): they may sense they have been visited, through those outstretched hands, by the hand of God.

God visits the earth through the magic of human touch, as sacred a thing as there is. Like all things holy, it too is open to misuse — as when we warn, “Hands off,” or feel violated when someone touches us against our will. But also like all things holy, nothing bestows the certainty of hope and comfort better than the human touch, properly applied, by those we love: a friend at our bedside, their hand on our own; a soft embrace when words cannot assuage our pain.

On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo captured the magic of creation by the hint of two hands touching: the hand of God from whom life flows, and the hand of Adam, the first human being to receive God’s life-giving force. We humans, ever after, can do “what God commanded… so that God’s presence may appear.” We too can lay on hands for blessing.

When explanations only make things worse, when words ring hollow, when we have nothing to say, we can reach out, God-like, feeling hope’s promise flow to those in need. God shows up best in the warming touch where two hands meet.

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Donkeys, Tongs, and the Coming of the Messiah

Posted on July 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

The talking donkey most familiar to Americans these days is the cartoon character “Donkey” from the hit movie Shrek (2001). But Donkey’s predecessor, Francis the talking mule, debuted in a 1946 World War II novel, and then seven follow-up films in the 1950s; and the unbeatable original is a whole lot older still — Balaam’s donkey of Numbers 22.

All three donkeys are noticeably smarter than the people who own them, and maybe that’s the point. A donkey is a jackass, after all, the archetypically stupid beast of burden; granting them intelligence is a favorite artistic strategy

The Rabbis, who think Balaam’s donkey was real, trace its origin to creation itself, when God fashioned a variety of things that history would someday require but put them aside until they were needed. One such item was Balaam’s donkey. Another was the first set of tongs

Yes, tongs!

A quintessential breakthrough in human material culture is metallurgy: first iron, and then the process of heating it above 800 degrees centigrade to “steel” it for tasks where ordinary iron breaks. But to manipulate iron, you need tongs, and in order to make the tongs, you first need other tongs! It follows, then, that alongside Balaam’s donkey, God must also have fashioned a set of primeval tongs, which humans eventually discovered and used to make all the other tongs.

Long before metallurgy, there was fire itself, of course, so another rabbinic tale traces that also to God. This story accents Adam, the human being who discovered it; celebrated its heat and light; thanked God for it; and used it ever after

To tongs and fire as benchmarks in human progress, we should add writing, the means of transmitting knowledge through the generations. Rabbinic tradition ascribes the discovery of writing to Enoch, a descendent of Adam. Legend pictures God allowing Enoch to live among the angels, so that he might attain their mastery of the natural universe, and write it down for humans to learn

The important lesson here is that all these tales picture God as welcoming human discovery — unlike Zeus of Greek mythology, from whom Prometheus, like some primeval industrial spy, has to steal these very secrets (metallurgy, fire and script) and give them to mortals: an act for which he is punished by being shackled to a crag, where every day, an eagle rips open his flesh to devour his liver. The God of the Rabbis, by contrast, willingly creates everything we need – writing, fire, tongs, and even (for a single cameo appearance) a talking donkey: and then glories in our discovering them.

Civilization requires regularized breakthrough inventions, but do we invent them despite creation or does the very plan of creation favor our inventiveness? Judaism’s answer is the latter: the cosmos and we are in sync. God welcomes curiosity. God wants us to uncover the world’s secrets

Judaism views the universe as massive beyond imagination, but created with order and logic – just awaiting human discovery. To be a Jew is to value the art of exploring the unknown. Adam stops to investigate fire; Enoch writes notes on what the angels know; some unknown blacksmith figured out how to use tongs; and Balaam marvels at, and listens to, a talking jackass.

God supplies the world with whatever we might need; we dedicate ourselves to finding it. That, the Rabbis say, is what God wants: we are in league with God in manufacturing progress.

Progress is slow, however, measured only in eons, so we must commit ourselves to this business called life, for the long haul. Only eventually will we, conceivably, discover miraculous solutions for such problems as intractable disease, endemic poverty, ecological disaster and war.

We call that eventuality the messianic age, which tradition describes as a messiah arriving on yet one more donkey. That too, perhaps, is a holdover from creation, deposited in the wings of history and awaiting its turn on the world stage. Stay tuned. Who knows

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Parashat Nitzavim

Posted on September 19, 2014 | 1 comment

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” we say, but we are often wrong. It is self-delusion to suppose that if we always make a sound decision, always expend the extra effort, and always do the right thing, we will equally always figure it all out.

Jewish culture especially glorifies the seductive illusion that everything is possible. Sometimes it works — our grandparents lived adjacent to the Lower East Side’s Eldridge Street synagogue, which we now renovate with donations from Scarsdale and Great Neck. But sometimes it doesn’t.

So the important message of Rosh Hashanah is not what we usually think: not the self-congratulatory celebration of Happy New Year, L’chaim! Shehecheyanu, and all that; but the line from Avinu Malkenu — choneinu va’aneinu ki ein banu ma’asim; “Be gracious to us for we have no deeds of our own” — or, at least, some day we won’t have any. Count on it. The day will come (if it has not come already) when our capacity will seem paltry, given lives that grow older and frailer, and the inevitability of meeting challenges along the way that prove insurmountable.

“On Rosh Hashanah,” we say, “it is written who will live and who will die.” As literal theology, I don’t buy that. But as metaphor for the human condition, nothing could be more graphic. Our fate is often written for us; we don’t always get to write it.

This is not to say that we are helpless, but we do need to replace the neurotic notion that we are completely in charge with the recognition that we are often quite dependent — on the weather; on politics and people; on fate, coincidence and circumstance; on any number of things.

This should have been shabbat m’var’khim, the Shabbat immediately preceding the new month, when we pause in our morning prayers to invoke blessing on the month ahead. But the new year is an exception to the rule. Rosh Hashanah is indeed a Rosh Chodesh, a new month, but Jewish tradition dispenses with the normal blessing then because (says the Baal Shem Tov), “In the month that starts the new year, it is God who says the requisite blessing. Only by virtue of that divine act, may we bless the other months that follow.”

The recognition that we are unempowered, on our own, to invoke blessing for the coming year underscores the message that we cannot go endlessly through life bestowing unlimited blessing on everything and everyone. We will get tired, we will sometimes fail, we will need help. Some people learn this the hard way: millions of Americans who are in twelve-step recovery programs, admitting they have to “let go and let God”; and millions more who would do anything to cure a child of leukemia, bring back a teenage runaway, save a marriage, find a job. They do what they can; it is sometimes not enough.

The real heroes of the world are not the people who claw their way to the top as if immune to limitations. Forget Time Magazine’s annual story on the “Person of the Year.” Take the pictures of the rich and the beautiful that fill the New York Times’ style sections and wrap your garbage with them. Life isn’t like that.

The people I nominate for men and women of the year are the ordinary souls who muster the courage to go on, day after day, week after week, knowing they cannot solve life’s worst problems, but committed nonetheless to solving what they can and living with what they cannot. They, and we, will find comfort in a prayer with which Yom Kippur ends: precisely because we are dependent, “God reaches out a hand” to us. We are not alone in our shortcomings; some invisible force sustains us; and throughout the year-long silence following the echoes of Yom Kippur’s final t’kiyah g’dolah shofar-blast, that hand will be there for all who seek it.

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