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 problematic; the Talmud calculates the actual event as being the day after Shavuot).

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 on the part of the people, 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 felt that the source material did not support the idea that there was a sin committed by the people nor that staying awake is meant as a punishment or paybck; there is no suggestion in the Midrashic texts that an error was committed by this sleep. In fact, in a reading echoing the Lacanian inversion of the Freudian approach to dreams versus reality (which we dealt with at length in Perashat Vayetze), R. Zadok flips this reading on its head. 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. This same Lacanian inversion is operative in R. Zadok’s reading.

Nietzche was preoccupied with the question of where the “good” came from, and who was responsible for it, that is, what is its “genealogy”. Here is his summary statement on the matter:

The judgement “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown! Rather it was “the good” themselves , that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebian. It was out of this pathos of nobility and distance, as aforesaid, the protracted and domineering fundamental total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a lower order, to a “below”- that is the origin of the antithesis “good” and “bad”‘ (The Genealogy of Morals, Kauffman edition pp 25-26).

Thus, to Nietzche, those who have power are those who create morals for a society. When, as in the ancient times, according to Nietzche’s myth, the leadership was in the hands of the aristocratic and noble, there was a different conception of morality than the currently accepted one in bourgeois society, which derives from the ressentiment of the herd, “perverted” towards concepts like pity and shame. The idea that morality as a concept and practice is the result of forces of power in society is developed in Foucault and others. Is this definition of power = morality the case in Jewish thought?

I propose that our perasha offers a test case in reading of these ideas. The way one explains the supplementary prohibitions of the kohanim (I don’t like the term “priesthood” loaded as it is with a set of meanings from our European history) in essence situates the concept of an elite within Jewish society.

The textual issues which give rise to this discussion in the commentators is found at the outset of our perasha. Perashat Emor begins with Gd telling Moshe to speak to the Kohanim, the sons of Aharon, instructing them not to be defiled by contact with the dead. The word emor, speak, is repeated twice in the verse. The Talmud Bavli, Yevamot 114. explains this duplication as instructing the priests to caution the adults to educate the children as well in the ways of ritual purity, so that the children don’t defile themselves either. The Hebrew phrase used to explain this is very concise and leads to several alternate readings “l’hazhir gedolim al ketanim”- translated literally, warn the big regarding the small. The Midrash adds that this repetition of the command Emor, is necessary because of the presence in humanity of an evil inclination, and thus, being easily corruptible, requires its warnings in duplicate.

The Kotzker finds this Midrash’s meaning to be adressed to the wrong audience. If a duplicated warning is mandatory for those in a lower state, then duplications should be present in commands relating to the masses, not the priesthood, the spiritual elite, as it is here! So why then is it directed at the Kohanim, instead of towards the masses?

Eyes talked into
blindness
Should a man come into the world, today, with
The shining beard of the
Patriarchs; he could,
If he spoke of this
Time, he
Could
Only babble and babble
Over, over,
Again again
(Pallaksh. Pallaksh)
Paul Celan, “Tubingen, Janner”

The Seventh day of Passover is a holiday, much like the first day. This is true of the fall festival of Sukkot as well, where the last day is a holiday as well, however, in that case, it is considered a new holiday with a different theme and context. The seventh day of Passover, on the other hand, is thematically similar to the first day, dealing with redemption, but celebrates another stage of the deliverance from Mitzrayim (Egypt), that of the splitting of the sea, allowing the Israelites to cross, and then returned to its natural state in order to swallow Pharoah’s cavalry, which had been in pursuit of the former slaves. The goal, of course, of the pursuit by the Egyptians was to bring them back to bondage; once the armies were destroyed it was clear to the people that their liberation was complete, there were no further pursuers, and their new history as a free people had truly begun. As a result of this miracle a song erupted from Moshe (Moses) and the people of Israel, the “Song of the Sea” recorded in Perashat Beshalach of the Book of Shemot.

Most commentators (myself included) deal with this song in its place as part of the book of Exodus. However, given the return of this theme as central to the seventh day of Passover, there is a tendency to deal again with this song, however, this time, in the context of Passover, which, particularly after the seder, is a context of recreating the process of liberation and redemption. We too, will follow this model and examine the role of poetry as liberation, which follows neatly from a central theme of the seder.

The central theme of the seder, celebrated on the first night, is that of re-experiencing the liberation from Mitzrayim- ‘In every generation a person is required to see ones self as though they were themselves liberated from Mitzrayim’. There is the historical redemption of several thousand years ago, however, in the mystical and Hassidic teachings, this Mitzrayim is not merely historical “Egypt”, but rather is equivalent to the Hebrew word ‘meitzarim‘, which means straits, or inhibitions. Those aspects of ones life which restrain one’s spiritual progress and keep one in spiritual servitude must be transcended; one must deliver one’s ‘true self’ from bondage (a bondage which may indeed be generated by the individual him or herself).

The Derech Hamelech (better known by his later book, the Aish Kodesh, written in the Warsaw Ghetto) explains this concept of freeing ones self in every generation, with a valuable set of teachings for self-empowerment. He states that it is clear that when an individual embarks upon a spiritual path, it is often the case that the seeker finds that they have greatly exceeded their own assumed ability. Much as a person in an emergency situation can suddenly summon up unforseen strength and abilities, and are able to undertake physical tasks they would never have attempted under normal circumstances, so too the spiritual seeker in moments of exhilaration can reach heights of unanticipated grandeur. If the physical can be exceeded in moments of need, and the body built up through exercise, the spiritual can be progressively developed and at times reach a state where ‘one’s whole self is annihilated, as though exploding from the great light’. This is what is meant by the mystics when they talk of ‘liberation from Mitzrayim’.

The Torah tells us of four sons…

One of the central passages of the seder involves a presentation of the questions of, and the responses to four paradigmatic sons. We are told of a wise son, a wicked son, an innocent or naive son, and one who does not know how to initiate a question. Each of these “sons”  is uncertain, in one way or another, about the meaning of the ritual observances surrounding Passover, and for each one an appropriate answer is given, depending on the personality of the son.

This haggada aggada is problematic on several fronts, and one supposes that that is the reason for its inclusion; the haggada being zen-koan-like in its textual strangeness and paradoxicality,  a textual device clearly meant to provoke response (and thus perhaps the secret of its enduring popularity). Here, however, a set of responses are already given; what they actually mean remains puzzling.

From whence are these archetypical sons derived? Each of these ‘sons’ comes out of a biblical prooftext in which there is a reference to instructing one’s offspring. However, they are not presented, powerpoint style, in order of their appearance in the Torah, rather they grouped according to subject matter, implying that it is the meaning, rather than the textual derivation, which has priority in this usage.

There are other oddities; the question of the wise son and the wicked son are similar, and the answer to the wicked son and the non-questioning son are derived from the same verse, and these matters are dealt with in the classical commentators; perhaps we’ll elaborate more on them in the future.

I would like to share several interesting readings, followed by a novel reading of my own which synthesizes these in a contemporary context. An interesting reading comes from the Haggada of R. Yitzhak Isaac Haver, a second generation student of the Vilna Gaon, and a major conduit for the Gaon’s teachings regarding aggada and mysticism. This Haggada had been unavailable for a very long time, and was recently republished; as it is published it is somewhat controversial, as the family descendants decided to censor out all the mystical references and present only the non-kabbalistic readings.Even in “expurgated” form it is a text of great interest, in that the Haggada is read by him as a unified text, with a purpose behind its structure. He argues that the encounter with the Haggada is meant to teach two things: