Tikkun ally and policy analyst M.J. Rosenberg looks at the recent behavior of the right wing pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and detects an agenda of undermining and discrediting Obama, not to mention anyone seeking peace between Israel and Palestine. Meanwhile, Obama says he will veto the Palestinians’ attempt to get UN recognition, because he thinks they should instead go back and negotiate with Netanyahu who meanwhile is building more and more Israeli presence in the West Bank. That demand for “negotiations now” is shown to be a non-starter in the editorial today in Ha’aretz newspaper and in the analysis provided by the moderate King of Jordan. Please read this to understand why, unless Palestinians get more leverage through the UN, no move toward peace is going to happen as long as Netanyahu or his right-wing supporters are still shaping Israeli policy.

by Alicia Ostriker

GHAZAL: AMERICA

My grandfather’s pipe tobacco fragrance, moss-green cardigan, his Yiddish lullaby
when I woke crying: three of my earliest memories in America

Arriving on time for the first big war, remaining for the second, sad grandpa
who walked across Europe to get to America

When the babies starved, when the village burned, when you were flogged
Log out, ship out, there was a dream, the green breast of America

My grandfather said no President including Roosevelt would save the Jews in Europe
He drew out an ample handkerchief and wiped away the weeping of America

“[Fred Rogers] is the only human being on TV to whom you would entrust the future of the world.” –Gloria Steinem

When it came to understanding and communicating with people of all ages, Fred Rogers was a genius.

Fred Rogers knew what really made people tick. First, he was a life-long student of human development. Indeed, he studied under some of the best child psychologists and psychiatrists of his time. Second, he had a natural gift for relating to people. Third, and most important of all, he was not afraid to talk with children about the most difficult subjects such as death and divorce. As a result, he helped people of all ages face and surmount their deepest anxieties and fears. This alone makes Fred relevant for today’s world where straight talk about difficult problems is the exception.

In short, Fred was a rare mixture of calm reason, constant reassurance, and never-ending emotional availability. Very few have all three, let alone each to a high degree. I know this for a personal fact. I was not only fortunate to meet Fred on numerous occasions, but to have many discussions with those who worked with Fred’s TV production company. In addition, I have studied his work intensively.

What then if Fred were President? What would he say to reassure Americans in this time of great economic pain and turmoil? While of course none of us know for sure, and I will undoubtedly be accused of putting my words and thoughts into Fred’s mouth, I believe he would say something in the spirit of the following:

What do we understand about desire? Other than being led around most of our life by desire, we have a hard time attempting to understand it, and harness it. A popular teacher has built an entire career around explaining and analyzing it; students of all sorts gathered around him to perhaps get a handle on “desire”, the “holy erotic”, etc, until this teacher himself entirely self destructed (taking some victims along with him down an ugly path). It is no wonder then, that Hassidic teachings on desire are found where one might least expect them, perhaps its an area that must always be approached by sneak attack. We too will begin with a classical teaching and then move carefully towards a more direct encounter with the subject, in two essays that grapple with the concept from different angles. (In fact, a third essay on this thorny subject, is in preparation, dealing with the line about Moshe being more humble, anav, than all others).

There is an often cited teaching of the Magid of Mezeritch, in teaching 32 of the Magid Devarim L’Yaakov. Verse 10:2 presents a command to Moshe, in which he should forge two horns, hatzoterot, made of silver, for various communicative purposes, such as calling the leadership together, or moving the camps, during the Israelite’s sojourn in the desert. The Magid presents an entire teaching based on three words in this verse that appear to be totally removed from any connection to the actual narrative. He suggests that the term hatzotzerot is derived from the phrase “hatzi tzurot”, which means “half forms”–man alone, material man, is only half formed, only half actualized, is only “dam”, blood, physicality. However, with the introduction of Gd consciousness into one’s life, symbolized by the Hebrew letter “aleph”, which is commonly read to stand for the term “alufo shel olam”, meaning leader or teacher of the world, the word adam is formed (as opposed to simply dam), thus formulating a fully formed form. Thus, it is in the coming together of these two halves (dam and aleph) in themselves lacking, that a much greater unity is created. This, the Maggid explains, is achieved through “kesef”, silver, (the hatzotzrot are made of silver), the word kessef being derived from the term kissuf, desire; a properly directed desire towards Gd leads to a union, a state of oneness and wholeness, a mutual resolution of the yearning by both sides of the relationship.

This theme, of the unity being formed as the balanced encounter of two disparate elements which need one another, is developed in another section of the perasha by the Kedushat Levi in his discussion of the manna (I adopt the anglicised form rather than the Hebrew term man, due to its confusing homonymity). The manna is described in the text as having the taste of the “Gad” seed, “Gad” to the Kedushat Levi being an acrostic for Gomel Dalim (redeeming the poor): The manna is described by Talmud in Yoma 75. as bearing any flavor the eater desired for, thus, to the Kedushat Levi the manna was an meeting of a physical object, the raw substrate of the manna, in encounter with the desire of the Israelite eating it; one side provides the physical, one side the spiritual, just like in the interaction of the rich man and the poor man- the rich man gives a physical item, and receives spiritual quanta in return. So the manna is like the redemption of the poor, which is actually mutually constructive to all parties involved.

The problem is, that the awakening of desire can lead to unforseen results–in English the phrase “awakening of desire” can be rephrased using the term “arousal”, which suggests a whole other class of wants. “Desire” is a central concept to Lacanian analysis, in which “desire” is defined as a want that can never be fully satiated, as opposed to a “need”. “Desire” is a complex phenomena which arises out of the eternal insufficiency of post castration development, with the remnants of the presymbolic Desire for the Mother manifesting themselves as eternally unfulfilled desire, after the process Lacan labels “the Name of the Father” has symbolized amorphous baby existence into the construct and constraints associated with Language. The “symptom”, the unfulfilled desire manifested, is to some degree a manifestation, an overflow, of elements of this presymbolic desire, which can, by definition, never be fulfilled. In other words, the early baby period, in which the baby sees the world and the mother and food and itself all as one big unseparated unit, is left behind once the infant learns to see itself as an individuated autonomous entity, a process that involves language and a recognition that being part of the world means seeing one’s self as one might be seen in a mirror, from “without” rather than “within”. Yearnings for the earlier predifferentiated state are manifested as “desire”.

An interesting application of this concept of “desire” and its relation to the realm of general culture is found in Zizek’s “The Sublime Object of Ideology”. In his discussion of Lacan’s neologism for the symptom, sinthome, (which is defined by Zizek as “a certain signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment: it is a signifier as a bearer of jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense”), Zizek discusses antisemitism as being a result of the failure of society to live up to the people’s desires. In other words, all sorts of people have all sorts of demands on society, in terms of how it should function and what it should accomplish. When “society” fails to provide that which everyone wants from it, for the real can never adequately fulfill all the contradictory demands that desire demands of it, then a “reason” for this failure must be created, that reason historically frequently being “the Jew”, guilty of whatever inadequacy causes the given society to “not work”. Currently, we can see this in the ways that certain failures in Israeli society are frequently blamed on the “Haredim”, etc.

At any rate, the idea is that once desire was awakened within the manna itself given that the manna could support any taste format “desired”, this “desire” aroused all sorts of other more problematic and eventually even lurid desires, as the BT Shabbat 130. and Yoma 75. inform us- suddenly the people had (probably false) memories of fish as described later in 11:5, which led, as derived by the Talmud from verse 11:10 describing the crying over families , to the people yearning for incest! It was prescient of the Noam Elimelech to point to this latent message in the otherwise straightforward sounding demand (in other words, why would the Talmud insinuate a yearning for incest when the text specifically tells us what it was the people seemed to be clamoring for) as a trace evoked in Moshe’s prayer reflecting off their demands, an early example of transference.

So what we have here is an example of a poor balance or match between the two hatzi tzurot, the twin aspects of reality and desire, ruchani and gashmi, that need to be coordinated. Where can we see a proper alignment to serve as a positive example? Right at the beginning of the perasha.

The Meor Eynaim begins his exposition on the first verse of the perasha, dealing with commandment to Aharon to light up the menorah, by explaining the meaning of the teaching in Avot 4:2: The reward for doing a mitzvah is a mitzvah. What this means, he explains, in anticipation of Franz Rozenzweig, is that by perfoming any “mitzvah” one achieves a state of “tzavta” (same root to the two words in Hebrew), which means “communion” with Gd who commanded. In fact, the word “mitzvah” itself, contains the last two letters of the name of Gd overtly (vav, heh), and the first two letters (yud, heh) as well covertly–if you flip the mem and tzadi of the word mitzvah, via the gematria function called “atbash” (aleph= tav, bet= shin, etc), you get yod and heh, which together with the vav and he originally at the end of the word “mitzvah” spells out the Tetragrammaton. The need for this message to be stated in a reading requiring an overt and a covert deciphering is to teach us that true fulfillment of every action requires this same linkage of overt action and covert intention. This is linked to the opening statement of our perasha- Behaalotcha et hanerot: When you light up the nerot, (mitzvot are called nerot in Mishle 6:23), you must strive toward the pnei hamenorah, that is, to the penimiyut, the inner essence of the mitzvah, which is ultimately establishment of tzavta, of communion, between Gd and man. When praxis and ideology are in proper alignment, then world transformation can be effected. When desire is still subject to fantasy, the symptom is unleashed. The Zera Kodesh (R. Naftali of Ropschitz) points out that those who clamored for meat are labeled asafsuf, rabble. He explains that these people griping must have been rabble and not good citizens, because people of faith do not have false desires, as their faith they would lead them to recognize the superfluity of unnecessary desires (the man of faith would think “if I’m lacking something, it must be part of a greater plan and I probably don’t have this now for a reason”).

Once “desire” is aroused in an uncontrollable manner, then even the leadership is at risk–the Tiferet Shelomo reads the final episode of this perasha, wherein Miriam and Aharon accuse Moshe of improper family life and are then punished, as also being a result of the awakening of desires by the manna failure. According to his reading, the fact that there was an awakening among the people of a desire for forbidden sexual activity implies that there was an equivalent failure in Moshe’s home life, for had Moshe, as the leader and tzaddik, had a perfected home life then that desire would have been quarantined and deleted, thus neutralizing the desire so that it would not be possible for the people to yearn for it! Of interest, being a unique reading of the word “anav”, humble, The Tiferet Shelomo reads into the Torah’s defense of Moshe, which states that Moshe was “anav meod mekol ha’adam”, humble beyond any person, was meant to suggest that Moshe’s home life was correct with respect to “onah”, familial obligations, which contains the same letters as anav’).

Perhaps, recognition of the theme of properly directed desire running through several segments of this perasha, is involved in the Zohar’s beginning its teachings on this perasha with the quote from Psalm 19:6, describing the sun as being “like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber”. The Zohar describes the sefira of Tiferet, core sefira of the supernal worlds, as the “groom”, signified by the sun, as emerging with enlightenment from transmitted from the higher sefira of Binah. Having been elevated to this high spiritual state, Tiferet brings about a correct alignment of all the divine emanations and thus achieves unity with the lower worlds, the Shekhina, the “bride”. This alignment of upper and lower, inner and outer, is the goal of the Cohen when he lights the menorah in the proper conjunction of outer practice and inner feeling. Properly channeled desire must be coupled with transformative human practice, like the bride and groom. Perhaps this is reflected in the verse’s astronomical image, of the perfect sphere arced by the sun. The perfect sphere is the fulfillment of the coming together of the two half spheres, creating a mathematically perfect whole, a circle. Is this not, as well, the symbolism behind’ the wedding ring?

Perashat Beha’alotcha II

Trumpets revisited

(in which I reread similar teachings in a different manner)

Among the many options upon which one could build a shiur, I have chosen to return to the same verse in this week’s perasha, 10:2, in which Moshe is commanded to make for himself a set of hatzotzerot, usually translated as trumpets, of silver, with which he could communicate with the people and the leadership when necessary.

As I noted in the previous shiur, this verse is the occasion for an important teaching by the Maggid of Mezeritch, presented in the “Maggid Devarim L’Yaakov” chapter 33, widely cited in the later Hasidic texts. The Maggid’s innovation is to split the word “hatzotzerot”, which is the word used for trumpets, in two, resulting in “hatzi tzurot”, which means “half forms”. Last year I read the teaching in terms of the “desire” and the two incomplete aspects of the individual, everyone is composed of “hazi tzurot” which when aligned create a unity which is greater than the individual elements; and read that theme into several other episodes in the perasha.

In the history of Hassidic thought, the phrase “hatzi tzurot” struck a nerve, and led to further readings in a different direction. The Ohev Yisrael of Apt states that he heard this teaching of the Maggid, regarding the hatzi tzurot, but did not hear the full explanation of what the Maggid meant by this, and thus he offers his own reading of this radical reading. According to the Ohev Yisrael, every soul, but particularly a great soul such as Moshe’s has within it two aspects, a masculine and a feminine one (as suggested by Kabbalistic teaching). Thus, in order for the soul to be maximally theurgically effective, these two elements must yearn for one another, which is why the text specifies that they must be made of “kesef”, silver, which is also the root of the word “kissuf”, longing. As a result of this unity, built upon spiritual yearning, the individual will manifest a unified spiritual front capable of overcoming all the challenges presented by improper desires, etc. Thus, according to this reading, the conflicting elements, the two halves, are within each individual psyche and must be reconciled by every person to enable greater spiritual achievement.

In the previous shiur I read “desire” according to the lines of Lacanian theory, as a reflection of drives within the individual. This year, I would like to reread this teaching in terms of the relation to the “other”, as reflected in the teachings of Sartre, Levinas, and Nancy.

Sartre, as opposed to the psychologists and behaviourists, believes that “desire” is a central and conscious element in the human existence, not some alienated unconscious activity that requires third person apprehension and translation. Desire is at the core of human freedom, it is the motivation behind the choices that define the individual as such. We act because we want, and acting upon our wants is the freedom which defines us. This operates in three ways: 1. every desire reflects a core “original choice” to be alive and in the world. 2. every desire reflects an underlying central “mode of being”, a way in which we choose to define ourselves as free individuals. 3. the little desires and everyday choices we make reflect the first two elements of individual desire.

This desire is in essence the will to transform all that is given to our experience into something of importance for the self; this is the route to freedom, the transformation of the in-itself to the for-itself, from something outside that exists independently of the self to something that means something, is useful to the self (for example, Mt. Rainier was a sacred imposing forbidden space to the Northwest First Nations, an in-itself, whereas for the contemporary Seattleite it is a recreational park for climbing, bicycling, etc- a for-itself). Freedom is based on this transcendent but negating desire, negating in that it nihilates the objects independent being as it is not of use for me. In this way, in a well known passage, Sartre argues that “to be man means to reach toward being God. Or, if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God”. Being God to Sartre means transcending and overcoming the limiting reality, the reality which presents impediments to the self’s desire to be entirely autonomous and self-defined. Even the existence of other people is a threat to this autonomy, because even the taking of them into account causes one to not act freely, but to act in response to the others.

The Maggid in chapter 33 states that the human being as corporeal being alone is only “dam”, blood (the Hebrew letters Daled and Mem). However, the individual who desires unity with Gd, Gd being symbolized by the letter Aleph, “alufo shel olam”, then becomes a complete individual, an “adam” (letters aleph, daled, and mem). Achieving this state, according to the Maggid, requires a transcendence of all this world’s inhibitions, as itemized in the verse in Ezekiel 1:4, these inhibitions being the great fog and the burning fire (akin to the Buddhist “maya”) which blind the seeking soul. Once these inhibitions are negated, explains the Maggid, one sees (Ez. 1:26) an image of an adam, that is, a state of reciprocating unity between the soul and Gd. At this point, the soul’s desire equals Gd’s desire, as evidenced by the fact that even the loves and wants of the patriarchs make up the text of the Torah. Interestingly, the Maggid quotes Ben Zoma in BT Berachot 58., who was wealthy and used to bless Gd “who created the whole world to serve me (that is, Ben Zoma)”, reflecting Ben Zoma’s total alignment of his drives with those of Gd! This unity of the soul and Gd is the meaning of our verse, Bamidbar 10:2, “make yourself two hatzotzerot of kesef, that is two hatzi tzurot, incomplete elements, of desire for completion”, unify the “dam” of the corporeal person with the “aleph” of Gd, to produce a full adam, a complete individual.

To Sartre, though, the desire to “be God” represents a desire on the part of the individual to subjugate all phenomena, the in-itself, to the freedom of the self, to transform it to the for-itself. For this reason, ultimately, the idea of a merciful beneficent caring God to Sartre is the ultimate example of “bad faith’. What a person really wants is total freedom, yet we posit a fictional higher power to whom we delude ourselves into thinking we submit to. As I mentioned earlier, even the mere presence of other people is cause for discomfort to Sartre. “Hell is other people” because their simple existence hinders our total autonomy in that we must in some way respond to them, we cannot define ourselves purely by our selves.

As we have pointed out in earlier shiurim, in Levinas this conception is reversed. The defining characteristic of our “being” is the recognition and concern for the Other. This reversal is taken to its fullest possibilities in Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Being Singular Plural”, in which the constitution of the concept of Self is in the first place dependent on alterity. As we’ve discussed at more length in other weeks, our own identity is the result of many social and societal forces, which are prior to us (for example, we are born into language, and do not create it all over again for ourselves), against and with which we create our own identity. To put it succinctly, we ourselves are constituted out of difference.

On the other hand, what is yearned for in the Maggid is quite different. By transcending those inhibitory forces, and achieving unity with the Divine Will, we then transform ourselves into the adam as agent for positive change. We can then interact with the world in such a way that even our personal relationships can become Torah, as the Maggid explains. This theme may tie together other parts of Perashat Beha’alotcha as well.

In the manna episode, we are told that this food from heaven had the taste of the “Gad seed”. What is this gad whose seed was like the manna? The Kedushat Levi offers a unique reading, citing the Midrash in which the taste of the Manna reflected the desire of the person eating it. The manna represented a reciprocal, or dialectical relationship between the individual and the surrounding world. The manna would provide the physical substrate, upon which the spiritual yearning of the individual could become actualized. Thus, the Kedushat Levi explains, the “taste” is compared to the Gad seed, “Gad” read as the acronym for “Gomel Dalim”, which is a Hebrew phrase meaning charitable action. The world is the substrate upon which positive praxis can be effected, as symbolized by charity, read as a reciprocal activity between the donor and the recipient, which consequently transforms the entire universe towards the good.

So then, it is true that “man is fundamentally the desire to be Gd”. However, we mean this not in the negating and narcissistic manner of Sartre, rather, our desire to be like Gd means that we are prepared to assume ultimate responsibility for our fellow living beings,to use all of our strength and spiritual energy to alleviate suffering, help those in need, to be Gomel Dalim, actively striving for a world of unity, peace, and social justice.

This is part 2 of a post I wrote last week. This is my continuing exploration. If anyone is looking for answers, I don’t have them. All I know is to keep asking the questions, to keep opening my eyes and ears and heart to more and more input, and to keep taking the next step, whatever it is, knowing full well I don’t know how.

Finitude
Perhaps the most pressing question for me remains the question of the limits of my resources. What does it really mean to care for everyone’s needs, to really care, and also hold clarity about finitude of my resources? When I fully let myself feel the weight of this, I could scream, because I care not only about the people with whom I happen to come in contact. Although in some ways impersonal, my care for all people living on this planet, and for the unspeakable horrors so many experience on a daily basis is large and the level of pain I am in about it often beyond my capacity to tolerate. How do I match that up with my limits?

I derive some solace from a poem written by a friend, Ted Sexauer, who is a Vietnam vet:

I am not responsible
for the movement of the earth
only what I can handle
what I can take in
is the right amount

I find it easier to know my limits with regards to people I don’t know than with regard to those I do. When someone is in front of me, on my path, someone I interact with, whose life is affected directly by my choices, I struggle mightily with knowing when and how to extricate myself. I do it. I am just never sure whether I am truly holding the other person’s needs as I do it, or essentially succumbing to my lack of imagination and closing off, however slightly.

This is a complex issue for anyone with anyone. It gets even more entangled for me when I am the one in a position of power. Honoring my limitations then borders too closely for my comfort with an assertion of my power over others. I don’t know what it means to use my power with others when I am reaching the limits, when there are more people with whom to be in communication about more things and more often than I can possibly handle.

On the evenings of May 9th and 10th, I attended two stimulating events honoring Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day). The first was a discussion between Arnold M. Eisen, the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS, the seat of Conservative Judaism) and John S. Ruskay, the executive vice president and CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, held at JTS. It was not actually a debate because they are both liberal Zionists.

Dr. Eisen’s recent op-ed in the NY Jewish Week, “Appreciating, And Learning To Talk About, Israel,” is a passionate plea for civility and honesty regarding Israel’s flaws as well as its merits, from an unabashed supporter of Israel and a self-described political, religious and cultural Zionist.

Dr. Ruskay has a Ph.D. in political science and served as vice chancellor of JTS for eight years. He achieved a measure of notoriety in the 1970s as a leader of Breira, an organization of “premature doves” regarding Israel, who were largely excoriated and excommunicated by the Jewish establishment at the time. Still, this did not bar him from a highly successful career in mainstream Jewish institutions.

One point Ruskay raised in passing, which was not picked up and discussed any further, surprised me. He was good enough to confirm by email what I thought I had heard:

Asma T. Uddin is a contributor to Tikkun Daily, but she’s more widely known as the founder of Altmuslimah.com. Since 2009, Altmuslimah.com has been fostering online dialogue on the highly emotional and difficult to define subject of gender roles in Islam. This online magazine-style blog “looks at the intersection of female and male sexuality and gender identity with society, politics, economics, and culture” and uses personal, individual narratives from contributors to do so.

Uddin is a Legal Fellow with the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) and an international law attorney with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit, non-partisan, public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C. But it was her own experience growing up as an American Muslim, and her own evolution as a Muslim woman which inspired her to create an online space for free expression and intelligent debate which welcomes Muslims, non-Muslims, men and women to participate.

In a recent interview, I spoke with Uddin about the impetus for founding Altmuslimah.com. “In many ways, Altmuslimah is a playing out of a lot of internal issues and struggles–spiritually and otherwise–I experienced back when I was in college,” she told me.

Up until she went to college Uddin had had a warm and fuzzy view of religion. Growing up as a Muslim in Miami, Florida she was fascinated by comparative religion at a young age and engaged enthusiastically with people about Islam. But after arriving on campus she found a great deal of conflict between American-born Muslims and those who were from other cultures who had vastly different ideas about Islam and women’s roles in the community.

While the media continually underplays the crimes committed by the United States government both in its daily acts of murder against innocents in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and in its flagrant disregard for the well-being of the people of the US by ignoring the pain they suffer as a result of inadequate jobs and health care, polluted air and water, homelessness, etc., nothing is ever missed when a political leader does some lewd sexual act. The current media circus around Rep. Weiner is just another way the media focuses on the trivial and ignores the significant crimes and problems of our time. But since this is happening, we present three very different perspectives on the current reality.

This is the first article I want to share:

Everything Said About Anthony Weiner Is Bull

by Michael Bader

There’s only one legitimate reason to be upset with Anthony Weiner, and that’s because his behavior and its discovery has taken away a bold and effective voice in the Democratic party. Everything else you think and feel about him is bullshit.

By bullshit, I mean it has nothing to do with him, and also little to do with broad generalizations made nowadays about the sex and powerful men. The first is too personal and private for anyone to ever know. And the second is so abstract as to be useless in understanding any individual situation. What it does have to do with is you and me, with all of us, who are repeatedly enticed to either buy-in to or create fictive stories about sexual scandals that are little more than projections of our own forbidden or feared desires.

I have a close friend I walk with every week. We have been doing it regularly for about three years now. The walking and the friendship are mutually reinforcing, and as far as I am concerned, this practice could continue indefinitely.

So I was shocked when, one evening a few months ago, I got an email letting me know that my friend would be taking a break from walking with me, at least for a while, starting the next day. My friend, let’s call her Nancy, asked to know my response to her message, affirmed her sense of connection with me, explained what the reason for the break was (she needed her energy for some major projects in her life, which made total sense to me), and proposed other ways of staying in touch.

As I sat down to write an email response to Nancy, I connected to a deep well of sadness. I knew that the “right” answer was to express my understanding and acceptance and to let it go. Instead, I chose to express the full truth – without holding back, without losing care for Nancy. In the depth of sadness and loss that I was at, this was no small task. I was particularly upset about the unilateral decision she made instead of bringing the issues to joint holding, so we could figure out something together.

This started a couple of rounds of emails, followed by a one-time walk we scheduled to have an in-person conversation about it, which spilled into a second walk, and resulted in a reaffirmation of our shared commitment to the walks. They have since become even more satisfying for both of us.

It’s always easier for folks to prove themselves right than to change their minds. Always easier to make a mess than to clean one up. That’s the pessimists’ advantage historically. Nowhere in modern history has this been as true as in the Holy Land. On May 4, I outlined a plausible battle plan for peace focused on this September when the 66th UN General Assembly will vote to recognize Palestine. Now, let’s consider the probable obstacles and outcomes.

The biggest single obstacle is that the Israelis and the Palestinians both have very bad friends in their respective corners egging them on, validating their worst narcissistic fairy tales about themselves and the other. The Israelis have fundamentalist Christians and Jews. The Palestinians have the fundamentalist Muslims, both Shia and Sunni. Each has their competing apocalyptic visions for which the conflict in the Holy Land is center stage. For the Muslims, especially the Shia in Iran and Hezbollah’s Lebanon, the Palestinians represent the righteous dispossessed, whose legitimate claims are opposed by the unrighteous possessors, the infidels backed by the Sunni elites in the Islamic world. Both Sunni and Shia compete on the Arab street for the title “True Defender of the Faith.” For the Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, Israelis represent the “righteous elect” who are the possessors because of their virtue; their faith and hard work blessed by God almighty. As ever, the elect are beset on all sides by the covetous rabble. As if these dark angels weren’t enough, both sides also have secular bad friends to boot.

The holiday of Shavuot is distinct among the major festivals of Jewish life in that it has no obvious distinctive ritual elements. Whereas Pesach has its seder and marror, and Sukkot has its, well, sukkot, Shavuot is not given any particular unique commandments, not in its Biblical textual source, nor in the halachic sources. In the Rabbinic texts, however, this holiday was considered to be related to the date of the giving of the Torah at Sinai (although even that is somewhat difficult; the Talmud calculates the actual event as being the day after Shavuot).

Over time, however, traditions arose which became strongly associated with this day and lend it its particular mode of observance, and it is Hassidic reflection upon these traditions with which we shall deal.

Given that the holiday was felt to reflect the giving of the Torah, it became customary in many communities to study Torah all night and then read the text relating to Sinai in the morning service at dawn. The source for this is found in the Midrash (Shir hashirim Rabba 1:57 and Pirkei D’Rav Elazar 40), where it explains that the night prior to Sinai was short, and sleep was sweet, so the people of Israel slept that whole night. The halachists (Magen Avraham 494) understood this as a mistake, that they should have been awake in anticipation, and to rectify this, we stay up all night each year on that night.

R. Zadok HaCohen of Lublin doesn’t see where the “rectification” comes in; there is no suggestion in the Midrashic texts that an error was committed by this sleep. In fact, echoing the Lacanian inversion of the Freudian approach to dreams versus reality (which we dealt with at length in Perashat Vayetze), is echoed here. In short, Freud argues that dream work is a defense mechanism by which continued sleep is ensured by repressing thoughts that may be disturbing to the individual, whereas Lacan argues that the opposite is the case–during dream activity we come face to face with our Real, whereas during the day we are able to maintain all our defenses in order to get through the day. Here as well, we will be re-evaluating sleep and awakening.

R. Zadok presents a set of complementary readings of this sleep. The people knew that they would be receiving a whole new code of living, their entire conception of life and destiny would be altered, but they had no way of knowing what this new mission would entail. Thus, they chose total disengagement with the reality they had known until this moment, and abandoned the world to sleep, an act of self-annihilation, as it were, leaving the world in the hands of Gd. On the other hand, continues R. Zadok, there is more than negation here, for the Midrash describes their sleep as “sweet”.

There are two aspects to any transmission–there is the data itself, and the readiness to receive it. The people knew there would be a large body of information transferred to them, a new set of responsibilities with a new world outlook. What they wanted to achieve by sleep was the meaning behind, the anticipation and joy that ought accompany this new revelation. They wanted to wake up transformed, and there is something about the night that has this ability.

We are told that Abraham and Yaakov had significant revelations at night, as “dreams,” dreams that were more real than their awake reality. King Solomon achieves his greatness as response to a dream. There is a clarity at night that allows a more profound understanding. The Talmud in Eruvin 65. points outs that “the night was created for study”. Perhaps the day, in which the sun casts its overpowering light, blinds one to deeper analysis; metaphorically the biblical text is referred to as “day,” for there is only one text, but the “oral law,” which is the human encounter and transformation of the text into lived experience, of which traditionally there are “seventy readings” to every text, is compared to night, to the moon, which reflects light in variegated degrees.

In a sense, this night is the greater moment, for the Jewish people are also compared to the moon, in which every individual’s life–challenges are meant to embody yet another possible reading of the text. This sublime beauty was the goal of the deep sleep that night, and thus it is called sweet–this reading hinges on a pun in Hebrew–the meaning behind the commandments are traditionally referred to as “taamei hamitzvot,” with the term for meaning, “taam” also being the word for taste; hence the night before was meant for acquisition of the sweetness=meaning of Sinai.

This commemoration of anticipation, of Shavuot reenacting the being in “the position to receive,” is developed by the Derech Hamelech (known also as the Piasetzner, or the Aish Kodesh). He begins with a teaching of the Baal Shem Tov based on a verse in the song that ends the book of Devarim. The verse reads, “let my teachings rain down like the dew,” which the Besht takes to mean that Torah is like dew–if you don’t plant good seeds, you will grow weeds. What you bring to Torah influences what you will gain from it. Even the most profound spiritual message can be subverted if the recipient is corrupt within.

Thus, the DH explains an odd Midrash (Shemot Rabba 47), which states that Gd taught Moshe at Sinai all readings that would be proposed in the future, even the questions that a student asks his teacher. Shouldn’t Moshe have been taught the answers, rather than the questions, which seem more important? Rather, answers the DH, the priorities are reversed. In the question, the student reveals his or her desire to get an answer; this yearning to reach a greater level of understanding is in some sense more critical than the answer obtained. The will involved in moving from the state of uncertainty to one of clarity is that which the holiday of Shavuot is meant to commemorate. This moment is not meant to end once the laws are given and the Torah revealed; what matters most is the attempt to continuously seek the deeper meanings through which humanity can realize all the different forms of goodness that lie within and actualize them within the context of society.

I will suggest, based on these readings, an explanation of another custom associated with Shavuot, and that is the reading of the book of Ruth. The book of Ruth tells the tale of a Moabite woman who follows her mother in law, under tragic circumstances, back to the land of Judah, and accepts Gd. At the end of this pastoral little book, we are told that Ruth is a direct ancestor of King David and the Davidic line, meant to culminate in the Messiah, a symbol of world transformation and redemption. There are many reasons given in the halachic and mystical literature for choosing this work to be read in the synagogue on Shavuot, but following our reading thus far I propose another–if the will to receive is in some sense critical to the reception of the message, if the inner spirit determines the greatness of the outer message, then that inner capacity is not limited by anything, not even genetics. Hence, Ruth’s yearning for truth and spirituality, even though she came from the “outside,” is adequate to bring about world transformation and redemption.

We see, then, that Shavuot is meant to celebrate the will to receive, almost more so than the actual message (hinted at even in the Talmudic sources which are ambiguous as to the correspondence of the holiday to the actual day of the event). According to R. Zadok, now that the Torah was given, we need to stay up all night studying in order to get ourselves into the position of yearning to receive anew, as though the message were entirely new. I haven’t read anything in the newspaper lately that makes me think that the message of the possibility of transcendence, of human striving towards the Divine, has been adequately heard yet by anyone in power anywhere.

This second installment of my Tikkun Daily series on “Spoken Word, Video, and Performance Art to Change the World” features multidisciplinary artist Norman Nawrocki of Montreal, Quebec. Nawrocki’s art is about community, it’s about activism, and he doesn’t shy away from taking a critical look at some of today’s most politically charged issues. Like all of the artists featured here, Nawrocki sees art as a means for social change, and he lives this not only in his role as artist, but as an instructor as well, helping to form the next generation of artist/provocateurs.

Incorporating many genres into his work Nawrocki is an author, veteran spoken word artist, violinist, actor, educator, and sex advocate with an international reputation. He has several books of short fiction and poetry (in English, French & Italian), over 50 music albums (solo & with his different bands), and has written several theater musicals and cabarets. He tours the world performing music, poetry, anti-sexist, queer positive ‘sex’ comedy shows, and giving Creative Resistance workshops and lectures about how to use the arts for radical social change. He teaches part-time at Concordia University.

Listen to his poignant piece “Why Am I an Anarchist?” here.

Here’s how Nawrocki describes his work:

One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough. –Hafiz

I am currently writing a book tentatively titled, Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters. The book’s central idea is that the common theme of the enormous variety of traditional and contemporary spirituality is a set of virtues–habits of mind, emotion, and action–which provide long-lasting personal contentment and lead us to compassionate and generous action towards others. Here is a tiny excerpt from the working draft of Spirituality, on one of the most important of those virtues:

Gratitude plays a powerful role in spiritual life–as much in the contexts of traditional religion as in the more eclectic, less traditionally oriented spirituality of the present. Contemporary Catholic spiritual teacher David Stiendl-Rast tells us that “Gratitude is the heart of prayer.” And the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart suggested “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” In gratitude we find an experience, a day-by-day practice, and a way of life. It is a feeling that arises spontaneously within us, something we can consciously cultivate, and a habitual response that shapes our experiences and actions.

For a traditional example, consider how the Jewish prayer book is filled with long and complicated verbal formulas to organize the adult Jewish man’s relation to God, yet the day’s prayers begin with a simple appreciation for being alive: “Thank you God, for returning my soul to my body.” Whatever else the day holds–a mid-term we haven’t prepared for, a medical procedure, seeing our parked car slammed into by a drunk driver–at least for these few moments we will have cultivated appreciation for what we have.

This week’s Spiritual Wisdom is about Shavuot, the Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Ten Commandments (actually more literally translated as “10 Speech Acts”). Shavuot begins this year on Tuesday night, June 7, and goes through June 9. The tradition is to stay up all night June 7th studying, so as to be prepared for the moment of revelation at dawn Wednesday, June 8.

Beyt Tikkun synagogue will hold a Sunrise Shavuot service in Berkeley, California, from 5:45 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. (including bagel and lox breakfast) at the westernmost end of the Berkeley pier at the westernmost end of University Avenue. If it rains, it will be moved to 951 Cragmont, Berkeley. All are invited.

The following passage comes from Rabbi Phyllis Berman and Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s recent book, published by Jewish Lights: Freedom Journeys: The Tale of Exodus and Wilderness across Millennia.

Sinai: The universe says “I”

The Israelites stood at the foot of Sinai.

They gazed at the holy mountain, but could not see its crags, its precipices. The clouds enfolded it into an enormous mirror.

More than enormous: Infinite.

In that mirror each one saw a self, and the entire people: saw all who had just trekked out of slavery, and ancient Sarah with her husband Abraham, and many many descendants, beyond the generation that had just fled slavery and on and on, to many centuries later.

The gospel is the good news. We need a little good news right this very minute. So much of the news has been discouragingly awful. Unemployment remains unacceptably high. A strange new bacterium is making people sick. Deadly tornadoes are tearing across the nation. Congress still cannot get its act together. Gas prices are high. Home prices are low. The Arab spring is turning into a violent summer. There is still a stalemate in Israel/Palestine. What is a person to do?

Be still and know that God is God. Be still and know that God is Love, and through it all, God’s perfect unconditional radical love will hold us through the storm. And know that this too shall pass. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6olU1D70eys) This is the gospel that we need at this moment, not only in our personal lives, but in our national and global relationships.

­The Garden and the Bird Bath­

We were late putting in the garden this year. There has been so much rain in the St. Louis area. But, we got it in last week. We planted tomatoes, both red and green bell peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, lettuce, Swiss chard, mustards, turnips, cantaloupe, basil, sweet mint, rosemary, thyme, oregano and parsley. I also planted African marigolds. I have heard that they may keep the insects and the critters out of the garden. This year we planted in boxes. This will keep me from getting blisters on my hands from hoeing rows, trying to fight back the weeds.

So far it is working well. I go out every morning before it gets too hot and I pull the weeds. My 83-year-old father calls it Bermuda grass. I do not know if that is its true name or not. I do know that it has long skinny tough roots that not only go down but to the sides. I have rarely pulled one up entirely from the root. I pull until it breaks. It is a tough little plant. If only the plants I want to grow were as quick to grow and to plants its roots deep into the earth.

Some time ago I wrote about submission and rebellion, the two poles that we have inherited as traditional responses to another’s power. Today I want to return to this topic from a different angle, which is whether and how we can transform power dynamics, so that the statement that “power corrupts” no longer appears so completely like a truism. Another way of asking this question: what does it take for any of us to become “incorruptible,” meaning being so strong in our inner practice that we can withstand the allure of power? I want to believe that we can operate in a way that diminishes and eventually makes obsolete the responses of submission and rebellion.

I am a relatively small fish in the large order of things. I have less than 400 subscribers to this blog, for example. The organization I co-founded has about 10 employees, and I have at most a few hundred former and current students who look to me actively as their teacher. Nonetheless, I am quite aware of at least some of the dynamics of power within which I operate, and have intimate knowledge, even on the small scale at which I operate, of the dilemmas and complexities that come with power.

Credit: Creative Commons/gainesp2003

This weekend I ate lunch with a woman who grew up in Joplin, Missouri.

It was not yet a week since the tornadoes, which we had not met to discuss. We wanted to talk about other things, and we spoke for two hours about what we’d meant to say to each other: about being our fathers’ daughters, navigating the tricky terrain of dating art-making men, the ways that we make things ourselves, stage fright and good music.

But the thing that we couldn’t avoid in our talk was her news of home.

Her sister had called crying the day before. She still lived in Joplin, and after days of driving through the battle zone of ruined buildings, trying to find ways to help, she was beaten by it, and called my new friend from the side of the road, weeping in exhaustion. My friend sat on the phone, impotent here in our big, momentarily safe city, and listened while her sister begged her not to come home.

The transition to a new age in turn necessitates a new perception and a new conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, or envelopes of identity… (Irigaray , An Ethics of Sexual Difference)

This perasha contains within it a series of commandments which have been largely unrelated to normative practice for the last few thousand years. At least regarding one of these episodes, this is probably a positive thing; I’m referring of course to the Sotah text, the depiction of the ritual trial of the woman accused by her jealous husband of adultery. This ritual trial is devised for a husband, who suspects his wife of sleeping with another man, but has no objective evidence for this, rather, being seized by a jealous spirit, has recourse to a trial by ordeal, that is, he brings his wife to the Kohen, the priest, with a sacrifice of flour sans oil, sans incense. Then, the Kohen takes sanctified water, some dust from the floor of the Mishkan, reveals the woman’s hair, makes her swear to accept a series of curses which are written down and then erased into the sanctified water. If she is guilty, there is an immediate physiological reaction of no small nastiness, and if not, she bears a child. How are we to approach this text, if we can at all?

A good deal of contemporary feminist theory centers around the geographical-spatial metaphors, such as the margin, the boundary, the closet, etc., all of these which situate issues relating to the definitions of power and identity. To cite examples which relate to our project dealing with the Sotah text, Harvey, in the Condition of Postmodernity, presents a dichotomy between “real space”, or “material space”, which is concrete, fixed, and stable, and the “non-real” or “metaphorical” space, which is fluid, fertile, unstable, and obscuring. Needless to say, in general “real space” is masculine, and empowered, whereas “non-real” space, connected to the image, is situated lower in the hierarchical space, female, and determined largely by the desires of the masculine real space.

It seems to me that this might suggest an approach to the Sotah episode if one wants to maintain the literal sense of the text; we could assert the importance of the male gaze in initiating the chain of events, a purported hiddeness of feminine activity, brought under the male gaze, as symbolized in the revealing of her hair, the ordeal itself with the liquid test, where the male fixity of text is physically erased, made amorphous once internalized by the female; the outcome of the ordeal resulting in either a deterritorialization of the womb or its recentralizing in the realm of childbirth, and so on. However, this reading remains mired in an essentialist conception of male and female as man and wife, with the same unequal power structure still maintained. (Parenthetically, I would add that this inadequately-radical essentialist propagation of male: female power structures is a weakness to my mind of Rav Soloveitchik’s approach to these matters, as in the “Family Redeemed” collection, though I suppose I ought not be too harsh- for his time, in his milieu, and to his credit, he was viewed as pretty far out already). What I would like to do in this essay is present a Hassidic approach to these texts, in which the approach to gender is one transcendent of the essentialist and the biological.

Already in the Toledot Yaakov Yosef, the earliest collection of Hasidic hermeneutics, there is a brief suggested rereading of this episode which reaches beyond a simple male: female gendering. The TYY suggests that the leader of the community, as we are taught in the episode of the Spies (perashat Shelach) is called “ish“, “man” and the masses, being under his sway are called “ishto“, that is, the wife. The sin being diagnosed and treated here, their “ma’al“, as the text calls it, is that they want to be “above” the true leader (ma’al means sin, and is also homonymous to the word “above”, “me’al”), and thus the masses choose to follow an inappropriate leadership who leads the people astray. A detailed reading of all the components of the ritual is not pursued, but it is a positive step in that the gender is more than biological, but on the other hand the power relationship inherent in the male: female dichotomy is still preserved, with “male” signifying leadership.

A very detailed and interesting reading is presented by the Or Pnei Moshe. It was clear to him that he was stepping far beyond the literal reading of the episode, as he actually apologizes to the readers at the end of the segment for rereading in a manner that is clearly not according to the “Truth”… He assigns the following definitions: The “man” discussed here, who starts up the entire episode, represents the soul, the “woman” is the body. Already we have a reversal from the usual template in Western thought, in which the strong, powerful body would be a male term. The tempting “man” with whom the body sins is the evil inclination, is also called “man”, but the soul doesn’t note this second “ish” as foreign, being too deeply enmeshed within it. So, essentially, blame is diffused across all parties, all sides are equally caught within, there is not the sharp definition between the innocent man and the guilty woman of the original text. The scene of confrontation is now entirely restructured. In the OPM’s reading, the Ruach Kin’ah, the “spirit of jealousy” which awakens the man to bring about the ordeal is not sexual jealousy, but a yearning for self improvement; derived from the teaching that “jealousy of the learned brings about more learning”. The “soul” is aroused with the yearning for betterment, and in the process invites the “body” as well to strive for holiness, the body itself realizing that it needs to purify itself. In this now non-confrontational manner they come together to the “kohen”, the priest who, as we’ve seen in previous shiurim, is read as the righteous scholar (the proof text being Malachi 4:7), not specifically related to any genetic lineage. The body and soul come together willingly before the wise to be brought closer to Gd (this is the OPM’s rereading of the term “korban”, the sacrifice brought in the text), willing to sacrifice the “a tenth of an epha”, with the epha meaning the human being, and the number “ten” corresponding to the ten limbs of the individual. However, at this point in the person’s development, this korban, coming forward is flawed, being driven by jealousy, thus not yet worthy to have oil (attainment in Torah study) or incense (good deeds) appended to it. Thus, there must be a corrective step, this corrective being symbolized by the sanctified water given by the Kohen to the penitent body and soul totality. This “holy water”, referring to Torah, is contained within a “kli cheres”, an earthen pot, symbolizing the human form, also formed of earth, but for this coming together of spirit and form to function there must be added the”dust of the Mishkan”, that is, true humility. The OPM explains that its not just a matter of humility being a lofty spiritual state, its just that one cannot learn unless humble, that is, willing to listen. The final ordeal, so terrifying as it narrated in the text, is now reread as a message of hope for the penitent- One might think that repentance, teshuva, this rectification of the body and spirit together is beyond the reach of fallen humanity-, but no, the Torah teaches us that a righteous teacher can indeed stand a person, both “male and female” aspects, before Gd, and remove their sins, symbolized by the revealing of the hair, as shaving of the hair is used in several places as a metaphor for the removal of sin, sin, like hair, being external to the individual. The shaving of the Levites prior to their commencing service is read in this manner. At this point, the “jealous offering” will be transformed into “minhat zikaron”, positive memory of the transformed individual’s journey towards spiritual attainment.

The Beer Mayim Hayim, as he does in the rape of Dinah episode, reads in both a gendered and non-gendered fashion. He begins with a statement that trouble is caused when women travel out of the home too much, but then presents a radical reading, congruent at some points with that presented by the OPM, but with several interesting embellishments. For example, the encounter of the misguided body and soul with the Kohen is not read as representing an encounter with some external figure, but rather the Kohen represents the individuals’ own projection of spiritual growth and attainment, the “inner Kohen”, if you will. That is, the individual is redeemed by his or her own imagined conception of a loftier, better state of being. The “sanctified water in the vessel” is a representation of this improved spiritual state connected to human existence (water=Torah, vessel=embodied existence). Thus, both the body and the soul, stand together before Gd, because neither can to be left behind if the complete individual sincerely wishes spiritual self-improvement. Furthermore, according to his reading, the punishment presented at the end of the trial represents not some supernatural smiting, rather, it relates the expected benefit of an integrated life versus that of the failed life- it is assumed that one who projects their mind: body complex towards the good, will leave behind positive impact on the world in both a spiritual and an environmental sense; whereas one who chooses to live in a sick manner, will beyond a doubt impact negatively also on their physical beings, spiritual space and upon their surroundings(as we suggested in Perashat Behukotai).

Perhaps these readings can provide an alternative approach to a problematic text, readings which subvert the initial difficulties in many positive ways, ways which may be critical for a contemporary re-encounter with Perashat Naso.