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Open Letter to My Students 82: Freedom of Speech

Posted on October 3, 2025 | 2 comments

As a rabbi and professor who writes every day, I pay special attention to the line in my Yom Kippur confession that asks pardon for sins of dibbur peh, the damage done simply by “speaking.” Included in that rubric is everything from conversations that are simply a waste of time, to arguing, lying, and using language lightly without regard for its weightiness: its power to convince but also to hurt.[i] Jewish law best captures that hurting power under the category of lashon hara, “evil speech.” 

America, these days, is awash in concerns for “evil speech,” especially as it butts up against our first-amendment right to freedom of speech. A lengthy history of free speech by Princeton professor Fara Dabhoiwala demonstrates how complex the topic really is, but the book’s subtitle alerts us in advance to his conclusion: not just What is Free Speech? But The History of a Dangerous Idea! 

Is the very idea of free speech dangerous? Judaism’s many warnings about speech going wrong might lead us to think so. Lashon Hara, it turns out, is but one of three categories of hurtful speech that Judaism prohibits. The least serious is r’chilut, repeating ordinary “gossip,” that might seem relatively innocuous but is, by definition, negative. Lashon hara is worse, in that it designates purposely malicious speech that will likely damage others, even if it is true.[ii] Outright slander, making up lies about someone, thereby ruining someone’s reputation (motsi shem ra), is the worst of the three.

Given these grave concerns, we might wonder if Judaism even does advocate freedom of speech. Our classic sources are certainly more focused on its limits. Some organizational websites try to demonstrate that the right of free speech is, nonetheless, a Talmudic value.[iii] Their evidence is, at best, suggestive.

But we shouldn’t expect anything better. Dabhoiwala traces the whole idea of free speech only to the 17th-century and its dawning Enlightenment.[iv]  The question ought not to be whether the Rabbis anticipated the Enlightenment (why would they?) but whether Enlightenment ideals are at least consistent with rabbinic values. The best evidence regarding freedom of speech is the very fact that the Rabbis prohibit some categories of speech in the first place; from which we can deduce that any speech other than the restricted categories is permitted!  Hence also the supporting evidence from Talmudic arguments, which encourage differences of opinion, and do not censor out the side that loses the argument. 

So freedom of speech is a modern idea. The Talmud had not foreseen it; but would have welcomed it, albeit with due regard for the damage that improper speech can inflict.

I make this argument for both liberals and conservatives, because both sides accuse one another of limiting free speech, to advance each other’s perspective in today’s culture wars.  With conservatives now in the ascendancy, it is the liberals who denounce the administration’s forbidden (and perhaps even punishable) word-list : such “woke” language as “non-binary” and “gender diversity.”[v] But when liberals held power, conservatives had similar grievances: having to say “the global south” rather than “the third world,” for instance, or (closer to home) having to worry about using the right pronouns. I make no judgement here on either set of claims. I just point out that both sides of the American divide feel victimized by having their freedom of speech curtailed.

More serious is the category of hate speech that Jewish tradition has long warned against. But what counts as hate speech? And does the first-amendment guarantee of free speech have limits. Apparently it does: we cannot maliciously yell “fire” in a crowded theater. White racists cannot burn a cross on someone’s lawn. 

But things get tricky. When he was charged by President Johnson to plan the “War on Poverty,” sociologist (and later, senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan believed that the horrific conditions in our inner-city ghettos is partly the result of problems within black families. Can Moynihan say so? He did. And even write a treatise on it? He did that too.[vi]

Suppose someone believes that Israel is an aggressor, a colonial power. Can they say that? Yes. Write a treatise on it? Also yes.

What they cannot do is say the same thing outside a crowded synagogue, in such a way as to suggest violent action, to a crowd of people waving Palestinian flags. 

Why not? 

It helps to distinguish “word” from “message.” The same words can imply vastly different messages, depending on how and in what context they are said. Limits on free speech are protections not just against words, but against the messages inherent in them. Freedom of speech protects the flow of ideas expressed usually (although not only) through words; it does not permit any and all messages.  

One more thing. The Jewish laws of damages are framed illustratively: mayhem caused a goring ox, for example. A particularly interesting case is “pebbles,” damage caused not directly by the animal, but by pebbles that it kicks up and that fly off and injure someone at a distance. It is not just the message of the moment that we worry about; our concern (especially in this age of social media) is damage at a distance, how messages get spread and magnified until they pollute the very way people think, causing damage over time.

A reviewer of Dabhoiwala’s book concludes, “Such freedom [of speech], the skeptics insist, is not an unalloyed good. They’re right. It is an alloyed good. But alloyed goods… are the only kind we ever get.”[vii] And we need them.

[i] Iyyun T’efilah, Siddur Otsar Tefillot (Vilna: 1914; reprint. 1938), d.h. b’dibbur peh, vol 2, p. 1122 

[ii] Maimonides, Hilchot de’ot 7:2. 

[iii] See, e.g, https://truah.org/resources/freedom-of-speech-in-jewish-tradition/; https://rac.org/jewish-values-and-civil-liberties.

[iv] To John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) and John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689).

[v] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html

[vi] The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: The Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, March 1965).

[vii] Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Watch What You Say,” The New York Review of Books (September 25, 2025), p. 66.

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Open Letter to My Students 81: Recapturing Eternity

Posted on September 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

It is time to reclaim timelessness, “foreverness,” the way we fit into eternity. But only the right kind.

The “right kind” is not new; and it takes two forms. Individually, eternity is some form of “moreness” in which we participate after we die; and, possibly, before we are born as well: an eternal soul, perhaps, that transcends our corporeal being and produces our deepest form of identity in this, our earthly state. There is also a corporate dimension, the way even our tiny lives contribute to a larger destiny for humanity – if not an actual eternity, at least an “almost” one, in that we see our impact joining that of others and stretching out at least as long as our planet survives (some 7-8 billion years or so).

Despite the impossibility of producing evidence one way or the other, we have believed in at least one of these two eternities for almost all of human history. Despite the  same impossibility of producing evidence one way or the other, many people now disparage that belief – with terrible consequences. Among them is the urge to carve out ersatz experiences of eternity: oases of quietude or of hedonistic pleasure that deny reality round about them. Like William Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us.” By “getting and spending,” he added, “we lay waste our powers.”[i] Not so us. We conclude, falsely, that by “getting and spending,” we can escape the noise around us while the world goes away.

Alas, the world never does go away. 

A case in point comes from Jenny Erpenbeck’s remarkable novel, Visitation. A woman moves into a spacious lakeside estate, what she calls her “piece of eternity.” In the perfection of being that followed, “her laughter was the laughter of today, of yesterday and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago,” as if time were “at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that.” 

But the world intrudes. It is the early days of Nazi Germany; she must ignore the fact that the property has been “purchased” from Jewish owners who were forced to “sell” it. Then the war doesn’t go well, and the woman’s finances are drained. When the war finally ends and Soviet soldiers utterly ransack the place, the woman bemoans their “drilling a hole in her eternity.”[ii] Her remaining years are spent stranded in Communist East Germany. She is clearly on the wrong side of history. 

Now let us extend the story. With her false eternity fading away, the woman discovers she will inevitably age, sicken, and disappear into the nothingness of death, that, for her (with no real eternity to draw upon) must be like the black hole of dying stars that suck up the light of the universe and never give it back. 

“Mass,” say the physicists, is the amount of matter in an object, the extent of its resistance to being buffeted about by change. What if humans have not just physical mass, however, but moral mass as well, measurable by the extent to which we resist being thrown into dismay by the events of the moment? What if moral mass is augmented by imaginative mass, the capacity to think beyond the moment, to see ourselves as part of a larger cosmic plan where the “almost” eternity of history and the actual eternity of a soul are better measures of what matter? 

We need not make do with counterfeit eternities and the knife wounds of history that perforate it. We can look to those real eternities of which we are a part. Eternity is not a carved-out part of life; life is a carved-out part of eternity.

I said that there is no real evidence of either eternity, but where there is no evidence, the Talmud suggests there may at least be intimations: finite intimations, that is, of infinite realities.  Shabbat, for example, is an intimation of the world to come. Yom Kippur is shabbat shabbaton, “a sabbath of sabbaths” where the gates that open onto rebirth and a betterment of time never close. 

So too we have humanity’s own intimations of timelessness: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for example. And nature’s own intimations too: a harvest moon; sunsets over the ocean; and stars – the endlessness of starry nights, stretching into vastness. Like ultra-rationalist Emanuel Kant, I too am filled with awe by “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”

Medieval rabbis ascribe special necessity for congregations gathering on the High Holy Days not just to pray together but to pray out loud together so that “individuals may learn from one another.”[iii] What must they learn, if not the intimation that none of us need face the future alone? The High Holy Days also spotlight the absence of those who once sat beside us but are no more. I hear Kol Nidre and sing Avinu Malkenu in a room filled with people and a space that is resonant with those who once heard and sang as I still do, but who are gone. I am part of a generational chain, dedicated to the promise that goodness, sweetness, and kindness will prevail. 

When artificial attempts at manufacturing eternity are hollowed out by the terrors of time, I remember that no amount of leakage can make actual eternity less than what it is. Take away a million, a billion, a trillion, from infinity, and you still have infinity.  Bombard eternity with however many attacks on the human spirit, and you still have eternity. These days of anger, confusion, and fear, are real. But what keeps me going is the High Holy Day intimation that in my own little way I am part of something more capacious, part of two kinds of eternity that are just as real and maybe even more so. 

[i] William Wordworth, sonnet, “The World is too much with us,” composed c.1802. 

[ii] Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation. Original German, Heimsuchung, 2008. English ed., Susan Bernofsky, trans., New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 2010, pp. 52, p. 51, 54, 55.

[iii] See, e.g., Mateh Moshe, by Moses ben Abraham of. Przemyśl, 1591, Section 693.

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Open Letter to My Students 78: The Excellence of Excellence

Posted on May 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

I am by nature a liberal. But I read conservative authors to keep myself honest.

Anthony Kronman is such an author, whose recent book True Conservatism chides liberals for valuing equality at the expense of excellence.[i]  Surely, he reasons, we want excellence in doctors and carpenters. Why shouldn’t we expect similar excellence in simply being human? Everyone should have equal opportunity to develop human excellence, but as a matter of social policy, we should cultivate that excellence and expect it of people.

Do we have an obligation to foster a society where human excellence is the goal? Religions, certainly, would seem to say yes. The Jewish version is the adage by Hillel, “Where humanity is lacking, strive to be humane.”[ii]

The most immediate liberal objection is the cultural bias inherent in defining “humanly excellent.” We can more easily agree on what counts for excellence in doctors and carpenters (they themselves have criteria for what they do). But who is to say what counts as human excellence? 

We can reframe the question by asking how human beings are unique among animals. What is it that the evolution of human beings has uniquely outfitted us to do? 

I know of several impressive answers to that question.

The first is by Aristotle, who calls human beings rational animals. Only humans can reason their way through thick cobwebs of arguments to arrive at logical conclusions. It would follow that schools should teach the ability to reason wisely; that politicians should demonstrate the art of rational debate and deliberation; and that individuals should dedicate themselves to lives of thoughtfulness.  

Aristotle further believed in a uniquely human form of happiness, not momentary hedonism but “morally virtuous action guided by reason,”[iii] which he thought would produce the long-term sense of well-being that Greeks called eudaemonia. Human excellence lies in “the hunt for the life that is truly worth living”?[iv]

But there are other options. Human reason is an extension of our ability to manipulate language, which philosopher Ernst Cassirer saw as a complex system of symbols. For him, we humans are not so much rational, or even eudaemonia-seeking, animals, so much as we are symbol-appreciating animals. A society that values excellence would imbue its members with an appreciation of symbols — not just language, but mathematics and the various arts as well, for these too are symbolic systems that stretch our human imagination.  

But what about religion, a symbol system whose purpose is to seek the eternal, the transcendent, a “cosmic connection” in which we see the world as “shot through with joy, significance, inspiration.”[v] Hence a third view, represented most forcefully by Mircea Eliade, who pioneered the discipline called History of Religions: Human beings, he says, are religious animals. We should create societies where the search for transcendent meaning is foremost; and where the legitimate religious expression of that human urge for ultimacy can thrive. 

And finally, the view of Karl Marx, who brilliantly redefined human beings as the species that works.Marxism (untethered from Communism) is the commitment to guarantee everyone a form of work that satisfies because it is rewarded and fulfilling. The search for social excellence would transform work itself as part of that “life worth living.”

Liberals might still object that these definitions of human excellence are by white men who are part of the classic philosophical heritage which denied equality to women, condoned slavery, and colonized native peoples worldwide. And there is some truth to that. Aristotle taught Alexander the Great who “colonized” a good deal of the entire known world. Eliade once flirted with his native Rumania’s nationalist but anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Marxism was concretized in Communist states that suppressed everyone around them. As a Jew who fled Germany and denounced both hero-worship and racism, Cassirer seems the least implicated, but until Hitler came along, he certainly was part of the European intellectual establishment.  

Still, shouldn’t the claim for human excellence be judged on its own merit? 

A related charge is that advocating excellence as the ultimate human goal sounds elitist, especially in a society with chronic inequality and rampant poverty. But these human ills are heinous precisely because they run counter to the right of every person to aspire to the excellence for which being human is intended.   

What can possibly be wrong with a national agenda that demands 1. rational conversation as a path to ongoing happiness; 2. the right to be at home in the distinctively human symbol systems of language, mathematics and the arts; 3. access to religious systems that provide transcendence and religious meaning; and 4. work that is rewarded and rewarding? In fact, I see no reason why any of this need be a specifically “conservative” doctrine. Liberals too should claim as their own. 

Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher whose Jewish parents imbued her with the leftist doctrines that were commonplace among Jews who hailed from eastern Europe. Her recent book, The Left is Not Woke, attacks the woke doctrines that are currently popular on campuses and distinguishes them from true liberalism, the point of view that traces its roots to the Enlightenment, esteems rational discourse, and seeks to better the lives of human beings everywhere. 

Defining human excellence as I have may not be compatible with wokeness, but it is perfectly in keeping with Susan Neiman’s liberalism, which is my brand of liberalism too.

True liberals should demand this kind of excellence. We should insist on a national conversation on how to reframe our institutions, government, and culture to embody and to emphasize a life worth living — the virtuous, peaceful, and universal sense of human dignity toward which human equality of opportunity should aspire. 

[i] Anthony T. Kronman, True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).

[ii]  Avot 2:6. Literally “Where there are no men, strive to be a man.” Avoiding the sexist “men” is difficult here. But I think I have captured the idea correctly.

[iii] A nice turn of phrase I borrow from Riin Sirkel, review of Øyvind Rabbås, Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Tuominen (eds.), The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness(Oxford University Press, 2015). https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-quest-for-the-good-life-ancient-philosophers-on-happiness/.

[iv] Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, Eds., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), Introduction, p. 14.

[v] Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Cambridge and London:  Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2024), p. xvi.

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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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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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The Plague Zone

Posted on January 11, 2019 | 1 comment

“A season of Darkness”: that’s how Charles Dickens describes the reign of terror that gripped revolutionary France under the spell of the guillotine. He might equally have had in mind the plagues that seized Egypt, one after the other. Plagues are nothing, if not death-like in their darkness.

And not just metaphoric darkness either. Abravanel notes that all three plagues in this week’s reading — the last and the worst, compared to which the first seven plagues were child’s play — have darkness in common. The locusts arrived in droves so thick that “the land was in darkness” (10:14). Locusts come and locusts go, however – Egypt had experienced them before. So the next plague upped the ante: just deep darkness; lasting and inexplicable; “thick darkness that can be touched, for three whole days” (10:21-22). Still, no one died from it; people huddled together, holding hands, perhaps, until it was over. The final plague, therefore, added death to darkness: every first-born killed, precisely at midnight.

No one willingly enters a plague zone. Even if you think you are personally exempt from danger, the horror of being there is just too much to bear. That is why, with the locusts about to arrive, Moses had to be “brought,” to Pharaoh (10:8) – he would not come willingly. Blood, frogs, boils and the rest – those he could handle. But not pure darkness, the sun and all the stars in total eclipse. Not that! “Let someone else tell Pharaoh that three stages of increasing darkness are on their way,” Moses must have hoped.

He should have paid closer attention to God’s command: “Come,” not “Go,” to Pharaoh. “We can never distance ourselves from God,” says Menachem Mendel of Kotsk, “When God said ‘Come,’ God meant, ‘Come with Me. I, God, will accompany you.”  God would not send even Moses all alone to announce the plagues of escalating darkness.

I think of this when I visit a dying patient. We picture plagues as mass diseases, spreading person to person, home to home. But terminal illness is equally a plague for the person suffering it. It too spreads, limb by limb, organ by organ. It may start with the metastatic proliferation of murderous cells that consume the body like locusts devouring a landscape. Then comes darkness of despair so thick it can be touched; and, finally, death at what may as well be midnight.

It is a terrible thing to watch someone die. “The mind withdraws,” says Louise Harmon, in her Fragments on the Death Watch. “There is a turning in toward the self, a curvature of the spine that directs the remaining life force toward the center. The knees are tucked up under the body. The arms are folded like a praying mantis, a caricature of moot supplication, and the petition is for safety.”

As I say, no one willingly enters a plague zone – because no sane person wants to watch this happen. So when disease approaches hopelessness, and the hospital room becomes a virtual plague zone, people invent reasons not to visit. As the plague advances, loneliness sets in: no one to talk to, even as we lose the light to see them by.

But precisely when final darkness looms, the dying need our visits most, and not just to talk banalities. We come at such a time to share the darkness, not turn on lights. It can be a horrible ordeal to sit, and wait, and do nothing more than lend a loving presence through the moments leading up to midnight. But it can be strangely satisfying too, if we remember that the commandment is “Come,” not “Go.”  “Come with Me,” says God, “I will sit there with you.”

The Talmud locates God’s comforting presence alongside the patient’s head. Visitors too report sensing that presence at times, especially when death finally arrives. And why not? God never dispatches us all alone to endure the darkness.

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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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Do Jews Believe In A Soul?

Posted on March 31, 2017 | 1 comment

Do Jews believe in a soul?

The answer is, “Yes, yes, yes, and “sort-of.”

The “sort-of” arises within the welter of detail regarding the Levitical sacrifices, a system that allowed for different levels of giving depending on personal financial means. Those unable to afford costly animal sacrifices brought a grain offering. Rashi observes that the person offering it is called a nefesh – a word usually translated as “soul.” He wants to know why here, particularly, the Torah calls a “person” a nefesh.

The answer, he says, is that grain is offered expressly by the poor. Objectively speaking, it may not cost much, but for the poor it is so enormous a sacrifice that God says to those who offer it, “I consider it as if you have offered your very soul.”

So nefesh — literally, just “person” – implies, for Rashi, something more. It bespeaks the moral core of our being: the part that overcomes selfishness; the deeply-rooted sense that we must live up to responsibility, doing what we can, as best we can. We ourselves call such people “good souls.” They come through; you can count on them.

Does nefesh mean “soul” in this case? In a way; metaphorically, at least; “sort-of.”

It is the Zohar that provides us with the “yes, yes, and yes” – three affirmatives corresponding to three different biblical and rabbinic words for “soul,” from which the kabbalists deduce the lesson that the soul has three parts.

The first “yes” affirms the highest part of the soul, the n’shamah — what we normally think of as the soul that preexists us and lives on after we die. It is non-material, purely spiritual, so scientific study can neither prove nor disprove it. Brain science may discover the electro-chemistry of how we work, but not of all we are. We sense something more, an inexplicable entity that animates the deepest wellsprings of the “self” we hope to become.

The n’shamah is that “something more,” an invitation to realize the Godlike embrace of morality, creativity, artistry and truth. Being unexplainable scientifically, it appears within us as a mysterious gift from without. Hence the idea of a n’shamah as “heaven-sent”: a glimpse of transcendence; purpose beyond our admittedly paltry – and, conceivably, petty — personal lives, dwarfed as they are by the infinitude of the universe. When the rest of us dies – body, brain, and all – the soul part called n’shamah is what we say lives on.

The second “yes” denotes the second part of the soul, the ru’ach. If the n’shamah is wholly other, utterly ethereal and divine, the part of God that reaches down and pulls us up to greater moral, artistic, and intellectual stature, the ru’ach is the part of human nature that reaches up receptively to embrace the wonder it all.

Even people who disbelieve in the eternality of a separate and non-material n’shamah can appreciate the potential for nobility that lies miraculously within them. In Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, the brilliant but dissolute Sydney Carton sacrifices himself on the guillotine to save somebody else. When he famously declares, “It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done,” he is (Jews would say) acknowledging the upward aspiration of his ru’ach.

The final “yes” returns to the nefesh, the part of the soul that is actually embodied. Even our bodies are sacred, Judaism says. Torture, enslavement, corporal punishment – we know these to be wrong, because human beings are more than conglomerations of bodily organs to be owned, used or abused. They are, simultaneously a nefesh – neither the n’shamah that is given from on high nor the ru’ach that reaches up from within, but our very earthly selves that must live with the financial loss engendered by the sacrifices we make.

This nefesh is Rashi’s “sort of.” But it is also a “yes,” because the earthly experience of loss comes with the satisfaction of reaching higher. And that is the nefesh talking.

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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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Shabbat Chol Hamo’ed Sukkot

Posted on October 10, 2014 | 1 comment

Shabbat Chol Hamo’ed Sukkot

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

Ma’aseh sheyaha, as the Rabbis say – “Here’s a story for you.”

Several years ago, I was visiting Manhattan’s West Side Judaica -– one of my regular pilgrimages to a place of Jewish books, s’forim, as they are known: not the commercialized products reviewed in the New York Times, but arcane Hebrew texts from long ago that get newly reissued on occasion. With Passover arriving in a week, I decided also to buy a matzah tray for my kitchen table.

Noiach, the lovely man I deal with there, showed me several – one of them particularly beautiful, but so beyond my budget that I opted for something plainer and less expensive. As he began wrapping it, however, I changed my mind.

“No” I said, “I’ll take the expensive one, l’kuv’d yont’f “– literally, “in honor of the holiday.”

“Yes,” he nodded, knowingly, “l’kuv’d yont’f.”

I have no idea where I learned to say “l’kuv’d” anything – maybe from my Yiddish-speaking grandparents when I was little and still spoke the language. Whatever the case, the word l’kuv’d, which I hadn’t used in decades, somehow rose from deep inside my Jewish consciousness – a reflection of a value Jews hold dear.

L’kuv’d is the Yiddishized version of the Hebrew likhvod , “in honor of.” In context here, it meant honoring the holiday by beautifying its observance. The word occurs everywhere, however, in the Jewish conversation of the centuries and in all those s’forim I mentioned. Likhvod hamet (“in honor of the dead”) describes the Jewish instinct to show honor to the dead not just the living. “Honor” is what Torah commands us to show parents and teachers. Embarrassing people is forbidden because it contravenes k’vod habriyot (“the honor due God’s creatures”); we destroy places of idolatry, not for God’s sake, but because their existence is an embarrassment to the people who built them. We Jews are a culture of honor.

How spectacular! Noiach (from the traditionalist world of the Sanz Chasidim) and I (a Reform rabbi) may seem to have little in common. But I justify buying an expensive matzah tray by saying l‘kuv’d yunt’f” and Noiach knows exactly what I mean. Because both of us read and revere those s’forim that he sells and I buy, we share the rock-bottom Jewish commitment to a culture of honor – and we treat each other accordingly.

Reinforcing our loyalty to this culture of honor is central to Sukkot, which features our holding together “the four species”: the etrog; and the palm, myrtle, and willow branches that constitute the lulav. Those s’forim that we Jews pour over liken them to the Jewish People bound together as one despite our differences, likhvod hashem – “in honor of God,” whose People we are.

In this culture of honor, we learn from one another. The very expression, “culture of honor” came from Jonathan Rosenblatt, an Orthodox rabbi in Riverdale, who taught it to some 300 synagogue representatives from all movements convened by Synagogue 2000, an organization dedicated to transforming synagogues into moral and spiritual centers for the 21st century. We shared insight, music, and learning across denominations because as different as we are, we all insist that what God wants for organizational life, and for relationships generally, is honor.

The opposite of a culture of honor, says Rabbi Rosenblatt, is a culture of blame, where people cover their own faults by blaming others. It might also be a culture of nastiness or humiliation where we build ourselves up by tearing others down. But blame, nastiness and humiliation are not the Jewish way.

Sh’ma yisrael, we Jews say; and then: barukh shem k’vod malkhuto l’olam va’ed, which can be translated as “Blessed is the Name [of God]: the glory of His Kingdom is eternal; or better: “The honor [that is typical] of His Kingdom is what’s lasting.” To be a Jew is to construct together a culture that models what the world can be: however much we differ, we treat each other with honor.

 

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