At the start of the 112^th Congress, with Republicans in the majority in the House of Representatives, members of the House read the Constitution of the United States out loud. The Republicans declared that every bill passed by the House ought to have a constitutional justification. They wanted to use the Constitution to proof text their work. Time has passed. And, here we are six-months into this Congress, standing at the brink of default on our national debt, and apparently the Republicans in the House have forgotten their constitutional responsibilities. Either that or they want to evade them.

According to the Constitution, the Congress has the power to raise revenues. It says: “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.” (Article I: Section 7) The President of the United States has veto power over the legislation. Congress can override his veto with a two-third vote of both House and Senate.

The Constitution says further: “The Congress shall have power: To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States. . . To borrow money on the credit of the United States. . . ” (Article 1 Section 8)

With power comes responsibility. Congress is responsible for raising the debt limit. If the nation defaults, the people ought to hold Congress accountable. Some Republican Congress members have complained that President Obama has not publically stated, in writing, what specific combination of budget cuts and tax revenues he would support. Representative Diane Black (R-Tenn.), after a June 2^nd meeting between freshmen Republicans and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, said she intended to write a letter to President Obama requesting a specific plan that could be scored by the Congressional Budget Office.(http://majorityleader.gov/blog/2011/06/gop-freshmen-call-for-specifics-reject-wh-call-for-tax-hikes.html)

During a decade spent in the Beltway, I was periodically flabbergasted by the striking provincialism of ostensibly highly educated, well traveled and professionally accomplished individuals when discussions turned to the Muslim world. Frankly, in some people, when question of Muslims come up certain parts of the human brain seem to simply cease to operate, with consistency, common sense and rigor temporarily going out the window as a result. Thus, a variety of anachronistic attitudes and essentializing stereotypes return from the dustbin of intellectual history, until a modicum of socio-historical rigor (or at least caution) is restored when attention shifts to some more “normal” and less exoticized community.

Peter Hart points out an especially egregious recent example of this phenomenon on the invaluable FAIR Blog:

The end of a Wall Street Journal article (7/14/11) on a new report on Afghan deaths highlights the peculiarity of their culture:

Of civilian casualties, 2 percent were caused by night raids, slightly down from last year, with 30 fatalities, the report says. Night raids have been a contentious issue between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. military officers and civilian leaders. The raids are sensitive in Afghanistan, because foreign soldiers burst into civilian homes, where strangers are unwelcome in the country’s conservative Islamic traditions.

Parable of the Leaven (etching by Jan Luyken, photo by Phillip Medhurst)

This sermon was preached at the High Plains Church, Unitarian Universalist, on Colorado Springs Pride Day, 2011. The sermon has been modified somewhat to fit the current context.

Luke 13:20-21: And again he said, “To what should I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

In 2009, I went to theannual conference for my Unitarian Universalist district, where singer and activist Holly Near gave the keynote speech, which was really more of a keynote sing with brief stories between the songs. We all sang along and had a marvelous time. When Holly got to “Singing for Our Lives,” which we often sing during pride services, she introduced it with an explanation for a recent change of words in one of the verses.

“The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.” ~ Simone Weil

An astonishing paradox I witness regularly is how, time and again, we long for others’ presence when we are suffering, and yet when others are suffering we reassure, offer advice, change the topic awkwardly, comfort, sympathize, offer our own experiences – anything but bringing our presence. How can we meet those moments with more presence and be in empathic connection with the other person?

Pure Presence

The first step, perhaps, is to release ourselves from the idea that we have to say something. Presence is wordless. It’s about making our being available to be with another person’s experience instead of being focused on our own. I imagine, if we manage to work through the challenges of our current times and survive as a species, that a time may come when we will have language to describe what presence looks like. For now, all I know is there is a high correlation between one person’s listening presence and the other person’s sense of not being alone, and this is communicated without words. We can be present with someone whose language we don’t understand, who speaks about circumstances we have never experienced, or whose reactions are baffling to us. It’s a soul orientation and intentionality to simply be with another. Presence, in this sense, is a sacred act for me.

1. Death and the Maiden

- Here, she said. What does that mean?

He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.

- Metempsychosis?

- Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?

- Metempsychsois, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls.

- O, rocks! She said. Tell us in plain words’.

(from Ulysses, by James Joyce)

Death and the Maiden, Over and Over Again

At the beginning of this week’s perasha, which is really the continuation of last week’s story, we are told of the priesthood given as a reward to Pinchas for killing the insurrectionary leader of the tribe of Shimon and his consort, a Midianite woman. We are also told, finally, the names of the two who were killed. On virtually every word in this episode, there is a midrash which registers the people’s protest against Pinchas’ action. Even the mere narration of Pinchas’ lineage brings about ad hominem attacks, who is this outsider who dares kill a tribal leader? So, what one sees from the various midrashic readings both defending and attacking Pinchas, is a sense of ambiguity about the episode and its potential implications when “learned from” in other situations. One can imagine what countless sermons in Brooklyn and the settlements will sound like. But what seems obvious to lesser minds remains problematic to Hazal. Thus, what I would like to do today is entirely sidestep the idea of supporting or attacking Pinchas, and look at two related takes on this episode, that of the Izhbitzer in the Mei Hashiloach, and that of the Kozhnitzer Maggid in his Avodat Yisrael, both of which utilize the concept of gilgul nishamot, of transmigration, “met-him-pike-hoses”, as Mrs. Bloom pronounces it in Joyce’s Ulysses.

A few words of prologue. This week, on my bench in the lab I found some books on gilgul nishamot, which made me think that the Kabbala Research Center people had come around. On closer inspection, this nouveau Haredi looking book was actually left by the Israeli Hari Krishna society (I suppose, much like Stalinism, certain popular trends take a bit longer to fade in Israel). This idea, of gilgul nishamot is a sort of fringe one in Jewish thought, that everyone knows about but few care to discuss seriously. I’m not really interested in the legitimization of the idea, rather in the lessons that application of the concept leads to. Returning to the India reference, samsara is evoked in order to provide an answer for why the evil prosper and the good suffer–don’t worry, the sinful will get theirs in the next life. While this is very enchanting on its own, it has of course institutionalized racism and mistreatment of the poorer castes, who clearly, were born into that status to compensate for previous live’s sins. Thus, feel free to oppress them, it is for the good of all.

In Judaism, the most developed usage of the concept is in Lurianic Kabbalah. In the writings of R. Haim Vital, student of the Ar’I, there are whole itemized lists of who reincarnated as who over the course of Jewish history. This was popularized in several places, but one of the most widely distributed was in the Hesed L’Avraham, the grandfather of the Hida, and I will quote from there:

Zimri reincarnated as Rabbi Akiva, and the 24,000 people who died in the plague (as a result of the Midianite women episode) were the 24,000 students of R. Akiva who died between Passover and Shavuout (the Omer period). The wife of the Roman general Turnus Rufus, was the gilgul of Cuzbi herself, who converted to Judaism and helped establish the yeshiva of R. Akiva afterwards! The Rama M’Fano adds an intermediate step whereby Cuzbi is also Ahab’s evil foreign wife, Jezebel.

This information was used by the Izhbitzer in his reading of our episode. According to him, the structural movement, whereby a foreign woman of noble birth needed to encounter a great leader of the Jewish people, then enter Jewish history in a positive role, was preordained from the beginning of creation. This could very well have been the outcome of the Zimri-Cuzbi relationship. This was almost realized by Zimri himself, who after all, according to our sources was a great leader of an entire tribe and not someone who should have fallen in such an ignominious manner. In fact, to some degree Zimri was being manipulated into this relationship, much the way Yehuda was led into marrying Tamar- the Izhbitzer explains that he was a holy man who was so amazed at the appearance of lust in him that he was certain that it could be naught but part of Gd’s plan! Pinchas, on the other hand, was not privy to such otherworldly operations- he knew that what he saw at that moment was wrong and acted accordingly. Gd reveals to Pinchas later that he didn’t just kill a plotting upstart, but revealed to him just what was at stake here, but agrees with Pinchas that the timing was wrong, rewards Pinchas for his correct reflexes, and reschedules this moment for a more opportune time, at the time of Rabbi Akiva and the ex-wife of the notorious general Turnus Rufus.

What is the underlying message of this approach? I know there are many readers here who have teachings based on this Mei Hashiloach, so I am willing to open this to discussion. I discussed this with R. Shlomo Carlebach several years ago, and to my suggestions about of the role of doubt in the Izhbitzer, he replied, Oh, no, the Izhbitzer was a very confident person, but did not elaborate. Thus, I will leave the issue of doubt for now, and only recall the showbiz adage on how timing is everything. This very same redemptive movement, one which might have been a Torah episode teaching us the beauty of outreach, becomes contaminated with lust and a destructive story of temptation. I might suggest that this failure of proper action is present in the Midianite women episode as a whole. Is it possible that had the people acted differently there might have been an entirely different outcome? A mass precursor of the book of Ruth?

This idea, incidentally, of desire reflecting a pressure instilled in a person as a Divine mechanism meant to obtain certain necessary outcomes, is seen in an interestingly progressive reading of the Ar”I on the subject of the Captive War Brides in Ki Teze. There he explains that the holy soldier, who is only qualified to go out in Torah combat because he is on such a high spiritual level, would never normally have desires of this sort. If, he finds that such a passion is aroused within him after the battle, it means that the woman he is about to bring into the fold is a soul that was meant to be a part of the Jewish people, but just had to come back through a somewhat more complicated route, as suggested in the Saba episode in the Zohar on Mishpatim. (Hence the phrase there says, v’shavita shivyo, a soul that belonged once to the Jewish people).

The Avodat Yisrael adds an interesting twist. He states that while on the one hand this episode was a failure, as we saw above, there was a rectification in this ending, hence the repeated use of the term peace in regard to Pinchas. To the AY, Cuzbi was a gilgul of Dina, and Zimri of Shechem. For Shechem tried to defend his crime of rape by claiming that it was not his fault that he was the son of Hamor, and of bad background, so he could not be held responsible for coarse and violent responses to the awakening of desire, and it was not his fault that Dinah resisted, since she was of holy stock, daughter of Jacob. So, Gd reversed the roles. Now, Shechem got to be the leader of a tribe in Israel, and Dinah a Midianite, yet still, the same action is perpetrated (the Midrash states that Cuzbi was an unwilling victim, dragged by her hair in front of Moshe). Neither genetics nor society is to blame; a person cannot defend horrible crimes such as rape from any other perspective than his own culpability. And, the victim is NOT to blame, a position which I argued earlier in Perashat Vayeshev.

Let us hope for peace, without the need for violence, without the need to prove anything first, speedily in our days. *sigh*

2. Truth, Justice, and the Daughters of Zelophad

After the unpleasant events of the early part of this week’s perasha, we are presented with a census, and then with the following episode: 27:1 The daughters of Zelophad, of the tribe of Menashe, came forward to Moshe, and stood before Moshe, Elazar the Kohen, the tribal lairds, and all the people, at the entrance to the Ohel Moed, and declared that their father, who was not part of the Korach Insurrection, died without sons. They were concerned that only male offspring would inherit in the new land, and their family would be eradicated from the tribe. Moshe, instead of answering immediately, took their case before Gd, who ruled on their behalf, leading Gd to state that “correctly do the daughters of Zelophad speak” (not the kind of legitimation most of us get at any point in our lives’)

Before getting to the central issue, which has something to say to us both in terms of the democratic process and our relation to Oral Law, I can’t resist presenting a teaching by the Or Pnei Moshe that is “cute” in terms of our contemporary fascination with the textuality of lived experience. The Or Pnei Moshe explains that the whole episode of the daughters of Zelophad was brought about because of a textual operation. In verse 26:33, we are told that Zelphad “didn’t have sons, only daughters” and their names are given. However, in 26:46, the verse states simply, “the daughter of Asher was named Serah”, and as the Ramban points out, this is mentioned in order to include her family among those who will inherit land. Now, when the daughters of Zelophad “saw” that they were textualized in a manner different from Serah, that there were written up in the Torah as “only daughters”, they realized they had to act. So which is primary, the event or the text?

While we are sidetracking, it is worth noting that Zelophad is certainly one of those people who get a bum rap. We don’t really know anything about him, but the Jerusalem Talmud quoted in Tosafot reads him as being the fellow who was executed at the end of Perashat Shelach for chopping wood on Shabbat. This has caught on, and while they read the episode in Zelophad’s favor, that he wanted to teach the people that Shabbat laws apply in the Wilderness, its still a bad rap, I think. Hence, I was pleased to see the Bat Ayin reading the verse here in an interesting manner: He explains the name Zelophad as comprising the letters Zel Pahad, which in English would mean Shadow Fear, or as the Bat Ayin explains, it means that this Zelophad was one who was so struck by the transience of human existence (like a shadow), that he died, saintly, absorbed in the contemplation of every word of Gd (thus, his “dying in the midbar”, wilderness, also spelling “dibbur”, word). And Zelophad, we are told, died “b’het’o”, contemplating his sins, always attempting to repent. Just felt compelled to present a vindicating reading for a fellow who can’t stand up against the midrashic accusations against him’

In contemporary political theory, there is a tendency to link political goals with moral ones, rational and universalist in nature. This is certainly the well meaning agenda of Habermas, in which uncorrupted and uncorrupted communication can lead to a rational basis for society. However, with a site set on goals for society, lofty as the dream of a moral society is, lies inherently the risk seen in other ideal societies, as we saw in the Communist workers paradise, or the French Revolution, where ideals take the place of process. Rather than a moral society, or a perfect set of rules, contemporary political thinkers resist imposition of “any attempts at closure”, which will thus “guarantee that the dynamics of the democratic process will be kept alive”. Chantal Mouffe continues (in The Turn To Ethics, Routledge 2000, pp 93):

Instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion, democratic politics requires that they be brought to the fore, to make the moment of decision visible so that decisions and their effects can enter the terrain of contestation, the great virtue of modern pluralist democracy is, as Claude Lefort has argued, its recognition and institutionalization of division and conflict.

She continues, arguing for a democracy based not on an ethics of harmony, but on an ethics of “dis-harmony”.

Returning to our episode, why is it that Moshe had to turn to Gd to get an answer to query of the daughters of Zelophad? He explains that the goal of the giving of Torah was so that the life envisioned there be carried out in actuality, not as theory. For this to occur, injustice in society has to be recognized, and corrected. The just society is based on the possibility of change, of process, of continually responding to the needs of the oppressed. The Sefat Emet explains that the action taken by the daughters of Zelophad, of altering potential injustice, was the first instance of the Oral Law, of the Torah She’b'al Peh. Thus, the Sefat Emet explains, Gd responds to their appeal by saying “ken benot Zelophad dovrot”, correctly have they spoken, with the word “ken” implying correctness as well as “so be it”–in other words, because of their words so shall the law be. This is what the Jewish Oral Law is meant to be- a process for the better living based on the human striving for justice.

Thus, the operative definition of “Oral Law” is to respond to injustice and create a structure whereby injustice can be minimized, or preferably rectified entirely. The daughters of Zelophad provide the signal case where a legal oversight would have led to suffering, but the outcry led to new legislation. This outcry is institutionalized in the Jewish system, as a preventative against “the expressionless (das Ausdrocklose)”, a phrase found in Benjamin but read by Shoshana Felman as:

…those whom violence has deprived of expression; those who, on the one hand, have been historically reduced to silence, and who, on the other hand, have been historically made faceless, deprived of their human fac- deprived, that is, not only of a language and a voice but even of the mute expression alwasy present in a living human face… (The Juridicial Unconscious, pp 13).

Quoting Benjamin directly:

“In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate”.

This “infinitely more” is what the Hassidic masters opposed in their reading of this episode. The Tiferet Shelomo, also taking note of the unusual phrase, “Ken benot Zelophad dovrot” referred to earlier, points out that the phrase is repeated in the epilogue to this story. The tribe of Joseph, to whom Zelophad was a card carrying member, was afraid that if all these daughters got this land and married members of other tribes, they would ultimately lose this territory. Thus, once again the claim was brought by Moshe before Gd (ultimately, every legal statement, or for that matter, every recorded statement, potentially opens up whole new readings and necessitates new definitions, etc), and Gd once again agreed, using the same language- “ken mateh Yosef medabrim”, “correctly does the leadership of the tribe of Joseph speak”, and suggested that they marry within the tribe. The Tiferet Shelomo reads another message in this unusual language. He reminds us that the tribal ancestor, Joseph, was the archetype of the injustly prosecuted victim, having been locked up on false charges in the Egyptian prisons for twelve long years.In our contemporary conceptions of righteousness, we would imagine that long suffering Joseph, who bore his travails with silence and faith, would be an image worthy of emulation. However, the Tiferet Shelomo reads this differently.He states that the word “ken”, which is normally read as “correctly”, should be, with the rest of the phrasetranslated more as “yippee, the people of Joseph are finally speaking”. Gd wanted Joseph to cry out, to protest the injustice which had been perpetrated upon him. Perhaps had he done so, cried out and fought the unfairness of his fate, the system might have been changed and the whole story would have turned out better. The evils of the system need to be fought, to evoke resistance and transformation, rather than “grinning and bearing it”. Thus, when finally his descendants learned to protest injustice rather than mutely, “expressionlessly” accepting it, Gd was, as it were, relieved. Finally the people had demonstrated that they were ready to begin a new society- when they could legitimately recognize and resist injustice, even when it seemed to emanate from the most powerful authority.

Perashat Balak stands as a unique narrative segment in the Torah. For the first time, we are given a narrative episode which is entirely not experienced by the Israelites; what in the entertainment world might be called a “behind the scenes” presentation, or to use contemporary film theory terminology, we are “sutured in” from an entirely different vantage point, outside of the usual concern with the Exodus. It can be assumed that if the Torah had not told us this story, no one would have ever known it, as it all takes place outside the horizon of the participants of the Exodus.

A quick glance at the way this narrative is presented reveals a preponderance of visual terminology. Again and again terms dealing with sight are used, even down to the description of the Israelite masses as covering “eyn haaretz”, the “eye of the land”. The Daat Moshe (son of the Magid of Kozhnitz, and an important thinker in his own right) suggests that even the name of the king of Moab, protagonist of our tale, Balak ben Zippor, reflects this, as the word “zippor” is akin to the aramaic “tzafra nahir”, inferring a certain type of clarity, as of daylight. I will thus propose that our text is trying to emphasize lessons in how to “see”.

But first, a few textual points. Even if the Torah felt it necessary to give an historical perspective on how the surrounding tribal peoples responded to the emergence of the Israelites on the scene, and even if the resulting positive spin of Bilaam’s blessings are worth preserving, why tell us the odd story of the talking mule? The text never finds it important to present, for example, the rituals or political structures during the period of slavery in Egypt, so why do we need to know the details of Bilaam’s escapades? This type of story seems more reminiscent of those odd Midrashim that attempt to fill in gaps in the narrative, as in the details of Moshe’s adventures in Midian, etc. So what is this episode, and particularly the talking donkey segment, attempting to teach us?

The medieval commentators can be roughly grouped around two general approaches to this question. One, with a strong basis in the Midrashim, is to derisively compare Bilaam with Moshe as leadership paradigms. The other, similar in structure, found in the Ibn Ezra, Abravanel, and others, is to teach us “who created speech in man”, that is, that the ultimate source of the communication is Gd. In other words, the source of the message, and how it is used or misused, is contrasted in the presentation of Bilaam vs. that of Moshe.

Where the medieval thinkers deal with the communication itself , the Hassidic thinkers deal with the challenge facing the individual in transmitting the message. The Beer Mayim Hayim , in a passage worthy of more extended study in terms of postmodern theory, points out that there can be no message without interpretation. There is no platonic absolute message there that occurred at the moment of transmission, not even a divine, prophetic message. The same prophetic word of Gd, as it were, will take on different literary form based on the personality of the individual who presents it. Thus, for example, the BMH explains, King Josiah, when needing a prophecy, sent for Hulda the prophetess rather than Jeremiah the prophet, because he felt that even a negative message from Gd would be softened if it was transferred via the more sympathetic Hulda, as opposed to the more petulant prophet of wrath Jeremiah. For this reason we see that Bilam, who intuited that Gd’s prophecy regarding the Israelites would contain a blessing, the opposite of his own personal wish, pushed hard to be the mouthpiece for the prophecy, knowing that even a positive message can be subverted by the way in which it would be uttered by him. To counter this, we are told in verse 5 that “Gd put the words in the mouth of Bilaam”, which the Talmud reads as not a usual transmission of speech, but as an exceptional case in that Gd placed either an angel or a bridle in his mouth (BT Sanhedrin 105:), suggesting a kind of forced, uninterpreted message, that is, removing this particular message from the grasp of human agency.

Following this line of thought, the Kedushat Levi explains that the presentation of the details of the talking donkey episode was meant to in itself deconstruct Bilaam’s thought processes. Bilaam is trying to go one way, and his animal insists on going a different way. What does Bilaam do? He whacks the animal. The animal, surprisingly, protests vocally, until the angel intercedes by revealing itself, leading to Bilaam’s comprehension of the situation. According to the Kedushat Levi, Bilaam should have come to infer from all of this weirdness, a self-understanding of his own failure in attempting to subvert Gd’s message. One would think that a prophet, whose job it is to transmit Gd’s word to the community, (much like any artist in any media who is trying to present some kind of novel vision), must be engaged with the world, must learn to become, to quote Henry James, “one upon whom nothing is wasted”. He or she must be in constant engagement with all that is transpiring in the world around, always observing, listening, always reformulating. How could a prophet not interpret an event as remarkable as this talking mule episode, as being in some ways relevant to his saga? How could one truly conscious read it in any other way than as a sign not to proceed with his plans? The donkey was, at the end of the day, the truer prophet, attempting to warn Bilaam against going on, but instead of being sensitive to this rather overt omen, Bilaam resorts to violence. I suggest, in this vein, that perhaps Bilaam might have read into his own violent response ,to a donkey, the futility of the use of violence. Perhaps Bilaam should have identified himself with the donkey, who veers off the path in order to avoid confronting the divine presence and as a result gets beaten, and understand in his own case that veering off the path and attempting to distort his prophecy would result ultimately in violence.

An extreme reading concerned with the means of transmission as critical to the message itself is that of R. Zadok Hacohen. The Zohar links the three “mouths” found in these perashiyot- the pi habe’er (“mouth of the well”), the pi ha’ aretz (“mouth of the earth” formed to swallow Korach and his gang), and the pi ha’aton (the talking donkey of our story here). R. Zadok explains that these three mouths represent three routes back to Gd, derived from three forms of transmission. The pi habe’er, the watery oasis, is representative of the Oral Law, the divine transmission that incorporates the need for mutual dialogue; Gd transmitted the law as text, the way that it is actualized in a living society is dependant upon the way in which the community chooses to “read”. The pi ha’aretz, the mouth of the earth created to swallow Korach, is a divine transmission which symbolizes punishment, a route which can awaken one to legitimate self-correction, even when evoked at the last moment; we are told that repentance would have been accepted even as the Korach co-conspirators were tumbling downwards through the abyss. The third type of divine transmission is that symbolized by the pi ha’aton, the donkey’s speech. This “speech” which derived from an agent normally without speech, implies that to every moment of consciousness, if only we were willing to listen, are given signals, which should we choose to interpret, would alter our lives in a dramatic fashion. No truth statement requires validation or legitimation beyond that which the subject chooses in the act of appropriation, then weaving it into their personal narrative. To quote the Peri Zaddik:

…the donkey’s speech teaches us that even in a situation where the speaker himself has no idea what he is transmitting, such as the donkey in our case, there is still truth to be found there…

From this approach, we understand the purpose of the speaking mule to Bilaam. However, we still do not understand the interest this episode has for the reader of the Torah. What lesson is meant to be transmitted to the reader by the episode of Bilaam’s donkey? I will propose a possible approach, derived from the specifics of the episode as it is presented in the text. Let us look at the conversation between Bilaam and his donkey. After Bilaam gets annoyed with his animal’s evasive maneuvers from the angel that has as yet revealed himself only to the donkey, the text relates that he whacks the poor animal with his staff. After this Gd opens the donkey’s mouth, but no brilliant penetrating discourse emerges- the donkey whines, “what did I do to you to deserve being beaten thrice?” Bilaam doesn’t act surprised, he simply answers the question and threatens his wonder-donkey. The animal continues to kvetch, “do I deserve this after so many years” and Bilaam responds, simply: “No”. Bilaam doesn’t jump with surprise and yell, “hey, what’s going on here, my animal is talking!” The lack of surprise here is noteworthy. As we learn in psychiatry rotations, surprise is an important clinical finding. How do I know that the schizophrenic calmly informing me in the emergency room, of how he was transported across the universe by alien bats from hell, isn’t telling the truth? If something that horrifying were to happen to a “normal” individual, one would guess that they would be in terrible shock. This is akin to Gregor Samsa’s non-response upon finding out that he had been transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin. He doesn’t spend any time aghast at this horrible violation of nature; he is more concerned with possibly getting fired from work. Yet, Kafka didn’t intend Gregor Samsa to be merely schizophrenic. There is a much wider social phenomena operative in the story, and I suggest that same deeper operation is present here as well.

What I am arguing is that presented here by the text is a descent by Bilaam into the realm of the animal, into “animality”. Bilaam and his animal have a “routine” conversation, man and domestic animal, because at this point they are at the same level of discourse, the level of “being animal”. What typifies this level of “being-animal”? George Battaile in the opening chapter of his Theory of Religion defines animality as immediacy and immanence, the paradigm of which is the situation of one animal eating another- there is no autonomy of one and dependence of the other, no yearning for revenge, no analysis of motivates, it is simply a response that occurs when a larger animal needs to eat and a smaller one is present for eating:

The apathy that the gaze of the animal expresses after the combat is the sign of an existence this is essentially on a level with the world in which it moves like water in water…

Perhaps we can characterize it in another way:

1. Animals don’t think of themselves historically. They do not make long term plans and do not look back at their past.

2. Social interactions among the animals are not geared towards transcendence. They do not yearn for enlightenment or higher spiritual achievement. They band together in some situations for food, but do not hesitate to kill one another en route to a female in heat.

Deleuze and Guattari interpret Freud’s Wolf man case study in terms of this kind of animality. They say it is not castration which the wolf man (as a child) was fearing when he imagined seeing all those wolves in his tree, as thought Freud; rather, it was a fear of “becoming animal”, of losing personal individuality and uniqueness and “becoming herd”. This animality is what Bilaam must experience before his encounter with the Israelite tribes, whose emergence from the animality of slavery into unique peoplehood, will serve in all of history to teach two unique responses to the continuing human threat of a descent back into animality. The two counter-animal phenomena are introduced into this episode by the Midrash, which notes the use of an odd phrase regarding the triple beating by Bilaam “three times”; instead of the more usual “peamim”, the term used is “shalosh regalim”, which can also mean “three legs” and “three festivals”. The Midrash explains that this phrase used here is meant to encapsulate just those two alternate meanings:

1. The “legs” upon which the community stands are the three forefathers of the people, Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov; and

2. the three major festivals the Jewish people celebrate, formerly accompanied by pilgrimage and gathering in Jerusalem.

Bilaam, and we the readers contemplating this odd text, are reminded of the purpose of human, social and Jewish existence. Human beings, as opposed to animals, have a history, implying beginnings and future goals. Humans ought congregate and interact not merely as herd, and should be engaged in mutual dialogue geared for the betterment of society and universal transcendence. The people Bilaam is about to encounter have broken away from the terror of animality, the cruelty of slavery, where human beings have their history and their dreams taken away, subject to an existence entirely in the immediacy of responding to another’ orders, the master’s untransformed desire. Perhaps in this context, the image the text presents of an angel with a sword blocking the animal’s path, is meant to parallel the image of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden as narrated in Genesis, another road blocked by a sword carrying angel, the expulsion from Eden representing (in the Rambam’s reading) the birth of subjectivity and un-transcendent desire. Mankind may in the course of history, descend to animality, but a path upward to enlightenment from this situation, to becoming human, is the message of the Exodus out of slavery and toward the “promised land”.

This also explains the purpose of presenting this “behind the scenes” story at this point in the text. These chapters making up the end of the book of Bamidbar and on through the Book of Devarim, mark the transition from the Exodus and the Desert experience to the next phase of Israelite experience, that of settling the land, as the Sefat Emet points out. Part of the process of becoming a free nation, is to rise above simply being a band of slaves running away from a bad situation, but a People, with a distinctive and meaningful social existence, with a past, and with a dream, a future critical to the unfolding of human history, as we shall see in Perashat Massei, to “see” a different future, no longer looking at existence with the apathetic gaze of the animal or that of some hopeless anomic Kafkaesque figure. Bilaam comes to recognize this attainment of the “becoming human”, as can be seen by the nature of his visions and blessings (with their emphasis upon issues such as the social arrangement of the people, as in the reading of “ma tovu oholecha Yaakov”, “how goodly are thy tents”), and so must we from time to time, especially in dark times where becoming-animal appears to be the order of the day.

by Paul Buhle

We are now exactly a year since Harvey Pekar’s passing (born in 1939, he passed away on July 12, 2010). The traditional religious ceremonies and Hebrew phrases would have been nothing to him, but perhaps it is time to think more about his life and accomplishments.

I am in the unusual position of being one of Harvey’s last collaborators, the only one who is a historian, or for that matter anything besides an artist, or Harvey’s widow Joyce Brabner. And, of course, the only Yiddishist.

British actress Helen Mirren observed, at the San Diego ComiCon of 2010, that the comics he had created in his own American Splendor series (always drawn by artists in collaboration: Harvey did not draw) and carried on in a series of books had proven what comics could do and thereby went far to create and validate a genuinely new art form.

One can quibble in many ways with the “new,” because comic art blossomed in the daily papers more than a century ago, and for that matter, comic books, that lowly and despised genre, reached by the middle 1940s more readers than any other periodical in the US. Harvey himself despised superhero comics, the one genre that hit biggest during the Second World War, and has hit biggest again in adaptation to film. Harvey’s ideas went elsewhere, not only to his own blue collar life in the Veterans Administration where he worked for thirty some years, but also to Russian literature, jazz, and even history. That is, to my end of things.

Photo of Dominique Strauss-Kahn by Guillaume Paumier.

The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a camera’s lens giving us a sharply focused picture of American justice.

We begin with the circumstances and the facts. I cite only corroborated information. Dominique Strauss Kahn was staying alone at the Sofitel, a luxury hotel in New York City. He was then the chairman of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He resigned because of the scandal I describe. The IMF decides whether and how to give desperate nations the economic aid they want in order to survive. The IMF is known for the conditions of “austerity”, i.e., economic suffering, it imposes on its debtor nations. Strauss-Kahn was in a suite. The price for such a suite at the Sofitel is $3,000 per night. No austerity for him.

A Guinean cleaning lady emerged from Strauss-Kahn’s suite crying. She had bruises on her neck and breasts. She reported to other maids that Strauss-Kahn had grabbed her breasts, thrown her on the floor and forced oral sex on her. Strauss-Kahn denied it.

Bail and Bond

Strauss-Kahn is photographed in his rumpled expensive suit as he did the “perp walk” to a police car off to Rikers Island.

Within days his wife, Anne Sinclair, arrived from France with over a million dollars to assure the bondsman a return of the six million dollars needed for Strauss-Kahn’s bail bond and his release. You may notice that his case is now looking, shall we say, atypical.

Greta Christina argues that a personal belief in God will make you more likely to harm others and embrace an “extreme, grotesque immorality.”

In her rebuttal to my article “5 Myths Atheists Believe About Religion,” (reprinted on Alternet.org) Greta Christina claims that I’ve reproduced religious privilege and oppression. How? Because I used the word “myth” and associated it with atheists. According to Christina by using the word myth (which I could easily interchange in this case with “have wrong,” or “incorrect”) I’m in the same category as all of those people who attack atheists with harmful slurs. “Bigoted myths about atheists abound — myths that we’re amoral, selfish, hateful, despairing, close-minded, nihilistic, arrogant, intolerant, forcing our lack of belief on others, etc. — and many of us experience real discrimination as a result.” Thus, by me calling Christina’s claim that all religions are equally crazy a myth I am somehow in the same boat as someone who hates and oppresses atheists. While myth may not be the grammatically correct word I’m uncertain as to how my article would cease to be oppressive if I had merely used “have wrong” or “wrong belief” instead of myth. Again, the substance of what I wrote is not an issue for her. Rather it’s one word, myth. Her logic entails that if I called Malcolm X’s early belief that all white people are devils a myth then I am supporting or contributing to all racist and white supremacist myths about black people. I don’t follow this line of thinking.

I am deeply concerned about religious privilege and the dehumanization of atheists. I recently wrote an article “If I Were an Atheist I Wouldn’t Trust the Religious Either” describing the problematic nature of trying to incorporate atheists into interfaith work. I’ve also previously written how religious people need to defend atheists against attack and dehumanization. In using the word myth it was synonymous with untruth or incorrect. It is possible for atheists or anyone else to believe wrong things about religion. Pointing this out is not oppressive or discriminatory. Otherwise all religious people must remain silent and not critique atheists. Nor is using the term myth to describe a wrong belief. Maybe it isn’t the best choice of words or the most grammatically correct, but myth isn’t a dirty word nor does saying the word invoke all other awful myths associated with any given category. We use it everyday very commonly despite it perhaps not being the accurate choice of word at the time.

by Arlene Goldbard

I have taken a poll of my friends, and the results are in: no one who actually knows me finds me intimidating. In fact, it seems I have a reputation for putting people at ease in conversation.

I felt the need to conduct this research this because I have been getting some strange results in online dating world. I wanted a reality-check. I wrote back in January that I’d changed my online profile to be less about likes and dislikes — the usual stuff — and much more a straightforward statement of what I was seeking. In January, I wrote about the first of five qualities I listed there, “Vitality and Chemistry.” Here are the other four (which share profile space with sections on work, music, and so on:

Across California, 6,600 prisoners have joined in the hunger strike that began July 1 with prisoners held in security housing units, a sanitary term for solitary confinement, inside Pelican Bay State Prison refusing food and issuing demands that include adequate food and nutrition, an end to group punishment and abuse, as well as compliance with the 2006 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons recommendations on ending solitary confinement practices. On the outside, demonstrators and coalitions have shown their solidarity with the prisoners through rallies in various cities, online petitions and calls to action. So far, the California Department of Corrections and “Rehabilitation” (CDCR) has refused to negotiate or show any signs of addressing prisoners’ demands.

I wrote about the start of the Pelican Bay Prison hunger strike in a July 2 posting;in the meantime, solidarity with prisoners has expanded both inside and outside the prison. There are ways to get involved and express solidarity: call the CDCR or your elected officials and urge them to honor the prisoners’ demands. You can also tell them you are a person of faith and why you support human rights and true justice for all people. (Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity, the coalition of organizations outside of prison speaking on behalf of and supporting the striking prisoners, even has a sample script and list of phone numbers to make it easy for you to do yourself and share with friends.)

While many people of faith reject the death penalty, solidarity with prisoners has been a difficult pill to swallow for many people of faith on the outside, particularly those of us who believe ourselves to be personally disconnected from the prison system or not “having friends who are felons.” Similarly, we may have thought at some point that having solidarity with prisoners is to turn our backs on victims of violence. There are facts and statistics that can help us deal with this discomfort. For instance, prison sentencing for nonviolent crimes has expanded heavily in just the past few decades. Also, solitary confinement has been practiced under the auspices of deterring violence inside prison, not because of original crimes committed outside (and that method has its fill of unjust procedures, like the debriefing rule, which the hunger strike and the video linked below help to illuminate). Still, something stops a large number of us from saying “yes” to solidarity with prisoners and no to solitary confinement. Luckily, many of us rely on traditions and sources of moral wisdom, which for centuries, have called for human dignity, liberation and freeing the captive.

Hannah Arendt

Gertrude Ezorsky is a retired professor of philosophy at the City University of New York and a member of the editorial board of the radical socialist journal, New Politics. For some reason, Prof. Ezorsky recently sent her nearly half-century old critique of Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” and “The Origins of Totalitarianism” — originally published in New Politics in 1963 — to a colleague of mine. Because of his awareness of my recent article on Arendt, he passed it along for my perusal.

It’s noteworthy and heartening to me that a radical leftist like Ezorsky includes a section that shreds Arendt’s contention that Eichmann had “Zionist” sympathies. It’s also perhaps a comment on the times (then and now) that a progressive would publish an unabashed “pro-Jewish” piece in a journal of the radical left. Ezorsky is at her most caustic in this paragraph:

One of Miss Arendt’s troubles is her conception of Zionism. … Miss Arendt does not find Eichmann’s 1939 Nisko project inconsistent with his Zionist opinions – although that project called for a “Jewish state” in an area without water and ridden with cholera, dysentery and typhoid. The earlier Nazi policy was to rob Jews and let them emigrate to Palestine for there were few countries which would accept Jewish emigrants. This is the stage that Miss Arendt consistently characterizes as “pro-Zionist.” Were the anti-Semitic hooligans who chased Jews in the streets of Eastern Europe yelling “Go back to Palestine” also pro-Zionist? The directive to allow Jews to leave Germany for Palestine came from Hitler after he had studied not the Zionist classic, Der Judenstaat, but a Nazi tract of Alfred Rosenberg’s on the racial question. Was Hitler also pro-Zionist?

Ezorsky’s criticism of Arendt’s view of Eichmann as “banal” is devastating. For one thing, she points out that the only real evidence Arendt uses to contend that Eichmann wasn’t personally anti-Semitic, are his own self-serving words while being prosecuted in Israel. Ezorsky’s article also reinforces my conviction that Arendt was shockingly unfair to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by her wholesale attack on the so-called Jewish councils (the Judenräte), and her unseemly and factually flawed claim of Jewish complicity in their own destruction. I post (below) parts of the second of the three major sections of Prof. Ezorsky’s sharply argued article; click for the entire piece online, but be advised that it’s a long one. My edited abridgment is much shorter:

Chris Stedman is an Interfaith and Community Service Fellow, Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and Managing Director, State of Formation at Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue. He is also a columnist for Huffington Post Religion and blogs at NonProphet Status. He tweets from@ChrisDStedman. The following has been reprinted by permission:

This year, two notable controversies have been brewing in Tennessee: a proposed bill that would forbid educators from using the word “gay” in the classroom, and a court battle to determine whether or not Islam is a religion. (The verdict? Islam is in fact a religion – for now, anyway.)

These two issues may seem unrelated, but I believe they’re actually symptoms of the same problem – our nation’s historical difficulty with those who are seen as disrupting the status quo. Intolerance against Muslims and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) individuals isn’t exclusive to Tennessee; with a fever-pitched debate over Park51 (or the “Ground Zero Mosque”) and headline-grabbing concerns about anti-LGBTQ bullying, these issues are a national concern.

Last month, I went to Tennessee for the first time. I spoke at Vanderbilt about the need for the religious and the nonreligious to find better ways of engaging with one another and identifying action-oriented shared values, sharing some of the experiences I write about in my forthcoming memoir, (F)a(i)theist: How One Atheist Learned to Challenge the Religious-Secular Divide, and Why Atheists and the Religious Must Work Together (working title, Beacon Press 2012).

The Zohar, like many other Jewish mystical texts, is veiled in a shroud of secrecy. Part of its power resides in its illusion of exclusivity, its silent challenge to the novice who dares to break open its pages. Artist Michael Hafftka animates stories from the Zohar in the context of his personal life, inviting all of us to search for an element of the sacred within.

Book of Concealment 16: " The Ancient One to the Short-Tempered One - separated and cleaving, not really separate..."

To see more of Michael Hafftka’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

In conservative Jewish tradition, there is an aura of spiritual elitism surrounding the Zohar; access to the Kabbalah is limited to those over the age of thirty-five, settled down, and married. Hafftka rejects these regulations. “I think those rules are nonsense, they were instituted specifically for control,” he says. “There’s nothing that I’ve read in the Zohar that shouldn’t be read by anybody and everybody.”

For Hafftka, the poetic Zohar inspired a much stronger emotional connection to Judaism than prayer, services, and the requirements of religious ritual. He believes that the poetry of the Zohar has the potential to reinvigorate a more fluid side of Judaism that might have greater appeal for young, questioning Jews like me. It also offers fodder for artistic creativity. I agree that the Zohar has a special resonance for my generation. In a 2010 survey by LifeWay Research, 72 percent of young adults aged 18-24 characterized themselves as less religious than their parents, yet more spiritual. The Zohar, Hebrew for “splendor” or “radiance,” explores the relationship between the “universal energy” and man. The fierce self-examination and personal growth it inspires is relevant to both Jews and non-Jews, theists and secularists.

The good news is that President Obama has the power to end the potentially disastrous battle over raising the debt ceiling! The bad news is that he has yet to act on it.

If Obama could end this crisis, why wouldn’t he? Why would he instead propose taking money out of the economy during a recession by cutting spending and raising taxes? This will only make things worse, which is obvious if you know anything about the basic principles of Keynesian economics.

Again, the President has the power to solve the debt ceiling crisis without capitulating to the Republicans, who seem determined to tank the economy. What am I talking about? Well, according to the Washington Post, the President could simply rule the debt ceiling unconstitutional because Section 4 of the 14^th Amendment says the “validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned.” This tactic has been suggested by “law professors, Democratic senators, and liberal commentators,” such as Katrina vanden Heuvel, as well as by Secretary Geithner as far back as May.

The vast majority of religious and spiritual people don’t really care about atheists and that’s why if I were an atheist I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw a Bible. At worst, many religious people and their associated institutions are responsible for a long history of dehumanizing atheists. A most recent example is that of the atheist senior high school student Damon Fowler. After objecting to the illegal publicly sponsored prayer scheduled for his graduation ceremony he was “hounded, pilloried, and ostracized by his community; publicly demeaned by one of his teachers; physically threatened; and thrown out by his parents, who cut off his financial support, kicked him out of the house, and threw his belongings onto the front porch.” At best, progressive religious organizations may include articles from authors that are atheist, advance viewpoints that are humanistic or attempt to engage atheists in interfaith work. This may be stepping in the right direction but it should be viewed for what it is; tokenism. Until the real-life social and political struggles that atheists face are taken up by religious and spiritual people in a serious manner I doubt any genuine progress will be made.

While there are some atheists who are willing to work under the rubric of an interfaith movement and other atheists who identify as religious such as Buddhists and Unitarian Universalists it seems that many atheists don’t want to integrate into religion. Can you blame them? Why would these atheists want to integrate into the very thing they feel is oppressing them? Yes, common goals of challenging religious fundamentalism and community service can be shared by both groups but why does it have to be done under the guise of religion as interfaith organizing?

Yesterday was the 4^th of July, a national holiday of independence in the USA. I am drawn to reflecting on the topic, and especially how it plays out in the North American culture within which I live and work. Independence is one of the highest values in this culture. Its two interweaving strands of meaning appear as a rejection of dependence, of being in need of others, at their mercy. Both interfere with conscious interdependence, the practice of collaborating with others to create outcomes that work for more and more people.

Moving toward Inner Freedom
On strand of meaning is about the freedom to make choices without having to consult with others. I often see this showing up as a somewhat rebellious stance: “You can’t tell me what to do.” I have had this particular experience enough to recognize that it comes with some kind of satisfaction, some sense that I am standing up for myself. I can so understand the appeal of this response.

This widespread experience has far-reaching consequences for our ability to create a livable future. For a prime example, our material possessions are a sacrosanct institution. We are given the right to dispose of the resources we own as we see fit. This idea is part of the core allure of the modern commodity-based economy, despite all the hardships so many of us experience. We have the carrot of believing that if we accumulate enough resources than no one can tell us what to do. This is the consolation prize for the separation, scarcity, and powerlessness that we experience so often.

Away with boundaries, those enemies of horizons! Let genuine distance appear! –Czeslaw Milosz

This weeks perasha begins with the laws of ritual purification mandated by contact with the dead. The ceremony, in days when the Temple stood, involved the ashes of a red heifer, which were reconstituted by the priest with purified water (an early “not-from-concentrate” product, I suppose, and in which no downer cattle could be used) and sprinkled upon the individual or object that needed purification. Curiously, while the formerly ritually defiled individual was now ritually pure, the priest that performed the ceremony became himself temporarily ritually defiled, as the Talmudic phrase goes, “the ashes of the red heifer purify the defiled and defile the pure”.

This ceremony is uniquely bizarre and the Torah itself identifies it as such, in the opening verse of the section, labeling the ceremony as a Hukka, traditionally translated as a “law which is beyond any kind of sense or interpretation”. While there are other laws, generally ritual ones, that are categorized this way, the red heifer ceremony is considered the archetypal Hukka. In fact, the Talmud and Midrash understand the passage in Kohelet 7:23, “I thought I would become wise but wisdom remained distant from me”, as being an admission from King Solomon, wisest of all men, that making any sense of this commandment was beyond his ken.

Needless to say, the moment a statement is categorized as being inexplicable, all the commentators will immediately rush to offer explanations. Rashi, after the expected disclaimer about the red heifer rituals being beyond comprehension, presents a complete reading of the ritual down to its small details, derived from an earlier source, R. Moshe Hadarshan.

So how far beyond reason is this ceremony? Perhaps not far. The Midrash states that Gd gave Moshe a complete analysisof the meanings of this ceremony, but confidentially, asking Moshe not to reveal it to the people. Thus there are meanings, according to the Midrash, just they are not given to us at this point. In fact, the Sefat Emet, derives from this Midrash a viewpoint more commonly known from Buddhist theology- he states that a hukka like the red heifer ceremony is a commandment that cannot be understood prior to its experience- its performance is, as it were, the Vehicle to its understanding.

From the very beginning of the Hasidic movement, the hermeneutic challenge attributed to the Baal Shem Tov was to make every letter in the Torah relevant to the contemporary reader searching for deeper meaning (a sort of reverse fundamentalism). There could be no passage without some message for any present moment, and this odd passage must be no exception. The Baal Shem Tov’s approach, as reported by his disciples, involved meditation upon this section, even in the present time when the possibility of actually performing the ceremony was non-existent, as a technique for achieving humility and countering excessive pride, among other concepts, as we will see at the end of this survey.

The early Hassidic master who seems to be particularly interested in this text, is the Noam Elimelech, R. Elimelech of Lizensk. Generally, his written comments are fragmentary and terse, but on this subject, we have several pages of discussion, with multiple different possibilities presented. As an example, he suggests that the word hukka does not mean a law that is inexplicable, as commonly translated, but in fact the term is derived from a different etymology entirely, from the homonymous verb, lahkok, which means to engrave; that is, performance of this ritual causes a message to be engraved upon ones heart. That message which must be engraved upon ones heart is not, however, specified in that particular teaching.

Of interest to us is another approach found in the NE, which builds upon the Midrash quoted earlier regarding King Solomon’s inability to comprehend this ritual. The Noam Elimelech catches the use of the word distance, rehoka, in the cited verse, referring to the distance which understanding kept from him, or perhaps an implied distance being the message of this ceremony, since the root of distance, rehoka, is similar to hukka.

The NE notes that the phrase distance appears in other texts dealing with sublime spiritual moments, for example, in the episode of the binding of Isaac, we are told that at the third day, at the height of the spiritual challenge, Abraham sees the place from a distance. Thus there is implied a connection between distance and the spiritual.

The NE suggests that the red heifer text is really about teshuva, repentance, the coming closer to Gd. It is the nature of the dialectic of coming close, that nearness so often reveals distancing. When one makes the effort to come closer, to abrogate past spiritual failings (the contact with death signifying the ultimate cessation of the spiritual in this worldly affairs), then Gd draws the individual closer in a reciprocated move. However, once one attains such heights of spiritual insight one then realizes how far the individual is from Gd in every way. This distance does not imply a rebuff on the part of Gd, in fact, the opening of this divide is meant as an invitation to cross over to an even higher spiritual understanding, which by the nature of these things would lead to an even more humbling recognition of the chasm in between, which, one presumes, would continue infinitely, sort of like the differential in calculus. A similar structure of closeness equaling distance is seen in the essay by R. Soloveitchik on the central prayer of the Hebrew prayerbook, the Amida. The first blessing implies a very personal historical relationship with Gd, which leads to a reflection upon Gd’s being close at hand. While pondering Gd’s personal omnipresence, one is immediately propelled towards contemplating Gd’s omnipotence, to the point we reach at the close of the second blessing, the most inexplicable concept, Blessed art thou, who revives the dead! There is no way to bridge this distance other than by the resignation implied in the third blessing where we invoke the concept of holiness, with something “holy” being entirely distant and beyond explanatory terminology. However, the importance of striving to bridge the unbridgeable gap is distinctly Hassidic, with an interesting parallel in Levinas, as we will see.

I was startled by the similarity between the Hassidic paradox of distance and the summation of Levinas’ work Totality and Infinity. The “infinity” referred to in the title is the endless number of worlds, of possibilities one can achieve when one begins to perceive of the Other as entirely different from oneself. Levinas then defines:

This distance is then the route to which endless possibilities of human existence present themselves Distance with regard to being, by which the existent exists in truth, is produced as time and as consciousness, or again, as anticipation of the possible. The structure of consciousness or of temporality-of distance and truth-results from an elementary gesture of the being that refuses totalization. In fecundity (to Levinas, the ultimate Othering which is transformative of the self, when being open to all the possibilities one opens towards the future, is that of the relation of parent and child, which he labels fecundity) distance with regard to being is not only provided in the real; it consists in a distance with regard to the present itself. The discontinuous time of fecundity makes possible an absolute youth and recommencement. This recommencement of the instant, this triumph of the time of fecundity over the beginning of the mortal and aging being, is a pardon, the very work of time.

Note the introduction of the concept of pardon, which plays a role similar to that of teshuva in the Noam Elimelech. Pardon acts as a retroaction, an ability to redetermine the meaning of the past in such a way as to open whole new futures. In fact, contra Heidegger, death is not the finitude of being that constitutes the essence of time but rather is an unknown, which is, in a sense, transcended by fecundity-

…the fact and the justification of time consist in the recommencement it makes possible in the resurrection, across fecundity, of all the compossibles sacrificed in the present.

Thus we see a structural similarity, whereby the act of achieving pardon, helps transcends the gap of Otherness which in turn opens up a whole realm of new possibilities of being. It is the experience of the distances themselves which bring about this transformation. What appears to be a distance actually grounds the closest truth to ones own being, in Levinas labelled “fecundity”.

Perhaps the clearest restatement of this concept of the gaps and distances being determinate of one deepest self understanding is found in the Baal Shem Tov himself in a teaching on the verse from Perashat Noach, which states that Gd Hithalech, that is, walked (using a reflexive verb) Noach, implying an accompaniment, a walking beside, that is actually at the same time a leading of, a guidance. The BST explains this “walking of” with a poignant metaphor that of a parent trying to teach a child to walk. The parents holds up the child, the child stands up, and suddenly the parent withdraws and backs away, in order to prompt the child into taking those first steps toward the parent. To the child, or to a distant observer, this backing away may seem to be a cruel distancing, but it is in reality a loving goad for the child to take those first steps. And when the child succeeds in taking these steps, the parent then steps even further away. The BST explains that this interaction is how we need to view our relationships with Gd -and with each other- sometimes, when you sense that you are very far away, this may be a sign that you are in actuality much closer than you ever were before. I suppose in simple terms, sometimes you need the long view, a stepping away from yourself to actually see yourself better.

These are the hukkot, the inexplicable distances, reehuk, we experience, that leave their traces at the most intimate, the most close, or in the words of Chazel, that chakaku, engrave themselves upon our hearts.

The biggest city in the West Bank is 19 miles south of Jerusalem, nestled in the center of four hills near the Judean Mountains. The city is called a few different names. In Arabic, it’s al-Khalil; in Hebrew it’s Hevron. Most English speakers call it Hebron.

The words share a common Semitic root, which means “friend.”

The “friend” that the city is named after is Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Old Testament tells how Abraham came from Ur and passed through these hills.

He admired them and purchased a plot of land from a man living here. When he died, he decided, he wanted to be buried – along with his family – in this green, fertile country.

Local traditions teach that Abraham is entombed, alongside his wife, in a cave, deep below the center of the city. Other patriarchs are buried here, Abraham’s descendents: Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah.

Muslim tradition teaches that Mohammad stopped here on his night journey to Jerusalem, Jewish mysticism teaches that the cave leads to the Garden of Eden (and that you can actually smell the fragrant garden from the mouth of the cave), and there are Christians who believe that John the Baptist was born here, too.

Today Hebron is known for different reasons.

The city is in the West Bank and is split in two. It’s still a Palestinian city, but a group of Israeli settlers lives in the center of the city, their homes surrounded by concrete blockades, barbed wire and heavily armed soldiers.

In the West Bank, sun-baked hills spread into the distance, rocky and dotted with low, gnarled olive trees. To the east is the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, to the south is the desert. To the west are Israel and the shores of the Mediterranean.

It is the 4^th of July, and I am taking a moment before I go outside and fire up the grill and before I start boiling the potatoes for potato salad. This is a holy day of the American Civil Religion when we light fires and offer hopefully not so burnt offerings to the gods of the nation – our Creator, Nature and Nature’s God, the Supreme Judge of the world, Divine Providence. Some of us will picnic, go to concerts and/or firework displays to celebrate the birth of our nation. Some of us will cook our summer food and feast with family and friends. However, this is also a day to pause for a moment to consider the meaning of our Declaration of Independence and the nation that it brought to birth.

I have always loved the Declaration as a piece of fine writing. The words, the ideas were so much larger than Thomas Jefferson and the men who edited it and who approved it. There is a reason that it has been a touchstone of revolutions, a template of human rights from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 18^th century France to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 20^th century world. It has been a continual inspiration for people in the United States who struggle for their own human dignity from women at Seneca Falls, New York to the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, to the radical humanism of Malcolm X and of the Black Panther Party to the new American Dream Movement. Its international children include the young people of Tiananmen Square in China to Tahrir Square in Egypt. The revolutions that partake of its spirit are colored orange and green and jasmine. Its textures are velvet and its sensibilities are poetic. The celebration of the 4^th of July and of the Declaration of Independence is larger than the celebration of the birth of one nation.