I. Yitro’s Visit As Response:

This week’s reading is a momentous one, it contains the narrative of the revelation at Mt Sinai and the giving of the Ten Commandments, as described in the longer essay below. What is striking is that this week’s reading doesn’t begin with that crucial section, it actually begins with a family visit of Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro, and in fact, this central reading is not known in traditional circles as “Sinai” or “Giving of the Torah” but as Perashat Yitro, by the name of an outsider, described as a foreign Priest!

Even if the division of the weekly readings is viewed as accidental, still, why is this the section immediately preceding the central section of the Torah, in fact, some of the medieval commentators argue that the meeting with Yitro actually happened after Sinai. Thus placing Yitro’s visit ahead of the revelation of Sinai is meant to be intentional.

The Tiferet Shelomo sees this meeting with Yitro as a prologue to Sinai, in a Buddhist like teaching.  The Tiferet Shelomo explains that we must be like Yitro in the way we approach Torah.  Every day, we must approach our Torah study and observance as though this moment is the first time we are hearing Torah; we must eternal present ourself to study as though we were complete outsiders with no preconceptions, in a state of  humility and with an open mind.

Credit: Creative Commons/Svadlifari.

From before I started my bar mitzvah training, I was terrified of Christians. I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and grew up with the specter of anti-Semitism in the air. For better or worse, I didn’t actually get to know any “live” Christians throughout my childhood in an overwhelmingly Jewish part of Los Angeles, so my stereotypes of Christians as Jew-haters was left largely intact until I moved to Berkeley for college in the early 70s.

It was as much a shock to me as to my kosher-keeping grandma, then, when at the end of my college years, I was baptized Roman Catholic. I had been taught to be proud of my Jewish heritage, and I was, but the “religious” part had seemed to my youthful, arrogant mind largely obsolete and rather ridiculous. Here it was, the late 20^th century: how could one actually take seriously ancient stories of miraculous manna and mountaintop encounters with God? I was not looking for God or religion. Yet, after a pair of powerful experiences of an inbreaking Presence, I found myself on a quest to discover if and who God might be.

Christianity was about the last place I expected to end up. I grew up knowing nothing at all about Jesus or the New Testament. All I “knew” were rumors and suggestions. Discovering Jesus was an exciting surprise. And, of course, he was Jewish, from the day of his birth until the day of his death.

It seems appropriate that sitting down and finally get this particular shiur down on paper seemed like an impossible mission. Several times I fired up the computer and stared at the untitled document in front of me, jumped to the couch, came back, checked email, ate, and then tried again. For this shiur is about the near impossibility of writing, particularly original writing, specifically poetry.

I will attempt a presentation of the void that must be crossed, or split if you will, in order to create a new utterance, a phrase as of yet unheard, a new thought. I suspect that to many of the Hasidic thinkers I will cite, there is no difference between poetry and what they were endeavoring to say in their readings, other than a formal one. Hence, only because I am construing from my own experience, I can’t help but hope that in some sense there is human truth, perhaps ‘universal’ autobiography in these readings, as close that Hasidic masters came to revealing their own truth in creative struggle, a truth of one’s own that they sensed is also true for everyone, a description of how these masters grappled with their own need for, and fear of, their own creativity.

The next several articles will focus on what has become an increasingly important issue within the Jewish community: What does pro-Israel really mean?

For Atlanta Jewish Times publisher Andrew Adler, pro-Israel means calling for Israel’s Mossad to consider assassinating U.S. President Barack Obama. Thankfully, Adler’s addled response to Obama’s supposedly anti-Israel policies and actions was widely denounced within the Jewish community and resulted in a U.S. Secret Service investigation of Adler’s views. Hopefully that investigation will be more conclusive than the effort to define what it really means to be pro-Israel.

Is AIPAC’s pro-Israel definition different from ADL’s, AJC’s, J Street’s or Christians United For Israel’s? What about the Emergency Committee for Israel’s pro-Israel? Or Obama’s? Or Newt Gingrich and Sheldon Adelson’s, Gingrich’s Israel puppet-master?

What about the Israeli government’s pro-Israel definitions? Which one gets chosen depends to a large extent on whether you are part of the ruling Likud party coalition or a member of the opposition, led by the Kadima party.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s definition leaves little room for nuance: Israelis know what’s best for Israelis and the free pass to rigorously disagree stops at the border. He won’t recognize or engage with pro-Israel groups if he feels they offer too much dissent from his government’s policies.

Yet, Tzipi Livni, Kadima’s leader, welcomes dissent as valuable and representative of the diverse nature of the pro-Israel Jewish Diaspora. She has even argued that by allowing for disagreement, Israel actually encourages more of the Diaspora to remain interested in providing support. (Gideon Levy, an Israeli columnist, goes a step further: He says if you are really pro-Israel, if you really love Israel, then you “must criticize Israel as it deserves.”)

The old frog leaps

Into the silent pool

Splash!

-Basho

Everyone from childhood is familiar with the story line of the Ten Plagues. We are familiar with them from childhood because they are almost amusing. God smites the fierce Egyptian people not with Godzilla and King Kong, but with bugs, hail, and frogs. Frogs! At any rate, it is hard to envision just what kind of ‘plague’ throwing frogs around might be. Other than some minor damage to agriculture, they aren’t particularly pesky little fellas. So our goal is to discover what other meanings may be inherent in this plague of frogs.

Before thinking about the relationship between animals and plagues, perhaps it might be valuable to the relationship between animals and us, or the concept of animality, in general. The initial impulse would be to try find the Freudian frog, situate frog symbolism in some sort of psychoanalytic way. The frog would follow the the horse in the manner of Freud’s Little Hans case; the reaction of the child to the mistreatment and death of the horse would be understood as ‘really’ referring to underlying drives. Or the wolf, in the Wolfman case, which wasn’t about wolves at all but about castration. Thus we would have to find some neurotic process which could be adequately symbolized by a frog. In the classical psychoanalytic viewpoint, then, interpreting the frog would be interpreting some signified process or drive in man, but would have very little to do with the actual frog or ‘frogness’.

Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative reading in these cases. They argue that there is a more immediate relation to animality that is more than just a signifier for an unconscious drive. Here is their dissension from Freud:

‘The horses blinders are the father’s eyeglasses, the black around its mouth is his moustache, its kicks are the parents’ ‘lovemaking’. Not one word about Hans’s relation to the street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a child to see the spectacle ‘a horse is proud, a blinded horse pulls, a horse falls, a horse is whipped” Psychoanalysis has no feeling for unnatural participations’

Deleuze and Guattari postulate that the relationship to animals is that of an ‘assemblage’, that is, a structuralist construct whereby aspects of animal behaviour are abstracted and incorporated into the individuals being. Their language is wonderful and thus hard to summarize, a summary would sound something like: the individual’s abstract machine (abstract here being a verb, that is, the person unconstructs the actual thing observed and takes from it certain structures and relations) reconstructing for themselves a Body Without Organs, these new behaviours would become lines of flight, deterritorializations. This appropriation they call the ‘becoming-animal’. When an actor barks like a dog, he is not metamorphosizing into a dog, or trying to, rather, he is taking on to himself an abstracted characteristic of dogs. This process is identical to other becomings, such as the ‘becoming-woman’. Images and stereotypes of what woman means are what are assumed by the individual who ‘becomes-woman’. Becoming woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it… The child does not become the adult any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman of each sex, just at the child is the becoming-young of every age…

This analysis leads in several interesting directions, for example, they point out that these becomings tend to be of minorities, there is less becoming-man than there is becoming-woman, or becoming-Black or becoming-Jew. These becomings, since they are by nature acts of reterritorialization, tend to relate to ‘minoritarian’ processes. Thus:

In the case of some terms, people might have doubts as to whether they’re names or descriptions; like “God”—does it describe God as the unique divine being or is it a name of God? (Saul A Kripke, Naming and Necessity, p. 27)

Our text seems to be preoccupied with names. Moshe (Moses) went to Pharoah as instructed, and instead of freeing the slave people, Pharoah makes their life even more miserable. Moshe complains to God about the suffering of the people and the failure of his mission, but God wants to talk about names. The text relates (Shemot 2:6):

And God spoke to Moshe, saying: I am ADNY. I have revealed myself to Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov as El Shaddai, but with the name ADNY I had not revealed myself to them.

Moshe wants to know how the people will be freed, and God answers with a seemingly irrelevant discourse on names. Why does it matter with which name revelation was conducted in the past? In attempting to find meaning in this emphasis upon ancient names, we will find ourselves confronting very contemporary issues regarding faith and science.

Even as we focus upon the centrality of names in the current verse, we can’t help noticing the preoccupation with names in the early part of the book of Shemot (Exodus). This book begins with an enumeration of the names of the tribes, then Moshe names his children, then Moshe is concerned in his first dialogue with God that the Israelites will ask of him what God’s name is, and here again, in this speech announcing the deliverance from Egypt, God begins by announcing a new previously undisclosed name. It is fitting, I suppose, that this book, called Exodus in Greek, is traditionally known as Sefer Shemot, the Book of Names, in Hebrew. What’s all this business about names?

Courtesy of SoulAviv

.As Administrative Director for Sounds Write Productions, a major publisher and distributor of contemporary Jewish music, a lot of CDs comes across my desk. Most of them are very nice, a few I really like – but most don’t stand out from the crowd in any way and after a quick listen it’s on to the next, with no significant lasting impressions. When I first popped SoulAviv’s third recording, “Soul Service,” into my player, though, I knew right away that we were in completely different territory.

SoulAviv is staking out new ground in spiritual Jewish music. Their unique blend of folk, Motown, gospel, Memphis soul, and world-music grooves is different, fun, inspirational, and engaging. Singing in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish, SoulAviv blends Jewish heritage, spirituality, and celebration with a little California sunshine for a musical experience that is contemporary, yet timeless. It’s different than anything else I’ve heard – and I’ve heard a lot – and it’s working.

This week’s essay is very timely, as it deals with the role of women in society (in this case, revolutionary society), offering a set of traditional readings whose authors would likely be horrified at the recent events in Bet Shemesh, and perhaps provide for us a Torah viewpoint on the subject of “biopolitics”, the way health and access to healthcare has become a central issue of modern society, and some hints about bio-control and gender.

The opening sections of the Book of Shemot (Exodus) sketch the rapid transformation of the mighty tribes of Jacob into the despised slave chattel of Egypt. Within a few short sentences, we are told how the new administration of Egypt decides to transform a group of successful outsiders into a subservient drone class. This societal transformation was so successful that it continued for hundreds of years without resistance, until a Moshe arises and ignites emancipatory fervor. However, there is one episode, apparently towards the end of the enslavement epoch (though the text itself does not provide a date), which details an apparently small pocket of resistance led by two women, described as Israelite midwives named Shifra and Pu’ah.

Given the importance of the Moshe narrative immediately following, less attention has been given to these few verses. Given current developments in history, and with the growing centrality of issues related to autonomy of the body, the time has come to award these passages a more careful reading. I was initially drawn to these verses by a curious Midrash and its interpretation by the Tiferet Shelomo. However, upon further examination of this problematic passage and some of the classic Hasidic expositions upon it, I found myself overwhelmed with an entire set of positions regarding martyrdom, death, bio-ethics, government control of medical resources, definitions of truth, the overall ethical position of the Other and the power of the sovereign and society.

When Jon Stewart is called a “smug, self-loathing Jew” by a right-wing Jewish personality (who is often called upon by conservative pundits to wax political), it’s tempting to dismiss the comment as a disgusting tribal dig.

When Jon Stewart is called a Judenrat who “would have been first on line to turn over his fellow Jews in Poland and Germany” by this same hawkish voice, it’s tempting – even though this voice has a visible platform – to just ignore the comment as the product of the Republican, FOX-inspired echo chamber.

However, ignoring these comments wouldn’t just be dangerous, it would be to allow a growing brand of hatred coursing through America’s veins – produced on the fringes – to continue infecting our public discourse (and public opinion) on matters both foreign and domestic.

It’s a hate-filled islamophobia that masquerades as patriotic, as anti-terrorism, as proudly American and Zionist (as though the two are synonymous). It’s a brand of hatred that the current GOP seeks, a hatred it feels it needs, a hatred it foments for perceived political gain at great cost to civil society. And, as much as it pains me as a progressive Jewish American to say, it’s a hatred right-wing American Jews are often solicited to be spokespeople for on venues like Fox News, with claims of anti-Semitism at the ready should they be critiqued by people such as, well, Jon Stewart.

“Disclosure, however, does not simply result in something disclosed as unclosed. Instead, the dis-closure is at the same time an en-closure…. Disclosure- that now means to bring into a sheltering enclosure….” Heidegger, Parmenides pp133.

Nothing regarding Torah goes unnoticed and unexamined by the commentators, not even spacing on the written line. This week’s Perasha (Torah reading) begins, “Vayehi Yaakov B’eretz Mitzrayim“; And Yaakov (Jacob) dwelled (lit., “lived”) in the land of Egypt. The authors of the Midrash note that normally there are nine letters between the end of one perasha introducing the perasha that follows, whereas here there are no extra spaces at all. This perasha is thus “setuma”, closed off, oblique, which is unique, usually there is some form of spacing in the written text that marks off the beginning of a new portion, here there is none. Is this lack of indentation itself a commentary, does it signify a silence or hidden-ness within the context of the story of the death of Jacob and the beginning of the enslavement of a people?

Courtesy of Michele Machles

As a supplementary Hebrew School teacher, I had only seen my students on an average of about four and a half hours a week. Most of the students are together in the classroom on Sunday mornings, one afternoon a week after school, or when they attended the synagogue Shabbat service or holiday gathering during the year. (Realize that this is the maximum school time allotted, and many of my students often had to leave early to participate in sports or theatre programs.)

During out allotted time together, Supplementary Hebrew School teachers are expected to teach 5000 years of history, life cycles, the holidays, instill values, and help to shape their relationship with God – all the while being sure that when our students leave the synagogue and return home, we have implanted a strong connection with our community. Because of this limited amount of time devoted to synagogue study, many congregations are also finding ways to address this by creating family education programs. My way of bringing a bit more Jewish culture into our Jewish home was the creation of Visual Prayer Posters.

A mosque in Dearborn, MI attended by members of the reality TV show, "All American Muslim." / Photo Courtesy of TLC

We are community leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths who don’t normally look to reality TV to teach lessons of faith and religious freedom. But TLC’s new show, All American Muslim, is doing just that. It’s also come under recent attack from Islamophobic extremists who seem to have forgotten the values on which this country was founded. Rather than tune out in protest, as Americans, it’s time to tune in.

This week’s  perasha (Torah portion) begins at a moment of climax- All seems lost. An innocent descent to Egypt to purchase food has ended up with youngest brother Benyamin in prison, and it seems that due to the actions of the brothers, the children of Rachel are at risk of total decimation (with Yosef believed dead and Binyamin in a place worse than death), which they know would compound their father’s already unrelieved grief to beyond mortal tolerance.

In an act of desperation, Yehudah steps forward and begins to plead with the hostile sovereign for his brother’s life. The text uses some unusual language- its says  Vayigash Elav Yehudah, Yehudah “encountered” him. The use of the term vayigash, from the root hagasha, (to come close, also to prepare) is somewhat unusual, both linguistically and even in terms of the action, given that they were in the same room. And to whom is the  second word in the phrase, Elav, “to him”, referring to?

In fact, why does the text need to quote Yehuda’s speech at such length? There is seemingly nothing new revealed in terms of the linear development of the plot; we are given no new facts about the brothers’ history, and no new personal revelations. Yet this speech is very extensively analyzed by the Midrashim. The Midrash choreographs entire dialogues lurking behind the words of Yehudah, referring to all sorts of hidden meanings within his every word, both conciliatory and threatening words; the prelude in the Midrash Rabbah (BR 93:3) insists that the words of Yehudah “can be interpreted from every angle”. We will find that the words of Yehuda teach us several useful lessons for the fight against societal injustice.

Thousands take part in a rally against gender segregation and violence against women in Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem.

For years, secular citizens and municipal authorities alike have turned a blind eye as ultra-Orthodox extremists – mirroring the Taliban – have imposed strict gender segregation and modesty rules in public spaces in Israel, forcing women off of sidewalks, banishing them to the back of buses and assaulting those who dare show tiny amounts of skin.

However, after a recent Channel 2 news report on 8-year-old Na’ama Margolis and her heartbreaking story of trauma – a story of the gauntlet of abuse she suffers at the hands of ultra-Orthodox men on her walk to school every morning – few in Israel are turning a blind eye anymore. Indeed, it’s all the country has been able to talk about in recent days.

The news report, which aired on Friday and shows Na’ama crying as her American-born mother shields her while walking to school, immediately galvanized the anger of a nation that for too long has been quiet on the issue of gender segregation and rising religious coercion.

By Tuesday evening, that galvanized anger had suddenly and unexpectedly translated into a massive rally near Na’ama’s school in Beit Shemesh (near Jerusalem), where nearly 10,000 citizens from across the country chanted against religious extremism and offered support to those who, like Na’ama, were suffering at the hands of a tiny, yet powerful religious minority.

Photo Courtesy of Len Radin

When our children were little and pressed their outsider noses against the lighted shop windows of Christmas, I decided we’d celebrate Hanukah. I wasn’t delighted that it commemorated a military event instead of “peace on earth,” but the children could join the season’s merry-making.

Also, the tale of Maccabean rebellion is embedded with legendry appealing to children. The rag-tag Maccabees’ incredible victory over a mighty state, the cleansing and rededication of the great Jerusalem temple, the radiant image of a one day oil-lamp, miraculously glowing for eight days. So, I plunged into candle-lit monorahs, dreidles, fried potato pancakes (latkes), small gifts, and a child’s Hanukah story.

In which the strange actions of Joseph towards his brothers are read as a guide to societal transformation.

This week’s Torah reading begins, as does that of last week, with the recounting of dreams. This time, however, it is Pharoah who has a troubling dream, which is then interpreted by Yosef (Joseph) who is pulled out of prison in order to do the reading. Pharoah likes the interpretation, and by royal edict brings about a rags to riches denouement leading to the sort-of happy end to this story, with a reunion of Yosef and his brothers who sold him into slavery. However, this isn’t the kind of reunion anyone would want to have been invited to. Yosef will put all his brothers and his father through a great deal of grief before revealing himself to them. He will accuse them of being spies, lock one of them up for safe keeping, frame his youngest brother for stealing royal property by placing a goblet in his pack, and then make them drag their old long suffering father all the way from Canaan as terms for the brother’s bail.

It’s a rough story; I feel that the truth is with the classic Yiddish joke about an old woman, who cries the first time she reads this story of the sale of Yosef in her Tzena Urena (the accepted volume of paraphrased Bible stories in Yiddish, back in the days when that was all the learning permitted for women). The first time she read the story, she wept bitterly over Yosef’s being sold into slavery; the next year, when she read the episode, she got angry, because instead of going out to his brothers “again”, by now he shoulda known better.

In other words, our familiarity with the stories breeds an acceptance of things we would not tolerate in reality. Are we comfortable with this “revenge story”, the vengeance Yosef metes out to his brothers and father? (Interestingly, there has been a wave in Korean cinema of “revenge” films based around family tragedies that wouldn’t be far from a literal reading of this passage, just with more slo-mo violence and blood).

The Beer Mayim Hayim is not comfortable with this reading; in line with his normal rejection of suffering as acceptable, particularly in the sacred literature. In his extended reading of this episode, he presents a version of Yosef’s actions as revealing truths about how to respond to a world of dissolving identity, and how a community can maintain its individuality in a world of nihilism.

An Edom!
Ein Jahrtausend schon und länger,
Dulden wir uns brüderlich,
Du, du duldest, daß ich atme,
Dass du rasest, dulde Ich.
Manchmal nur, in dunkeln Zeiten,
Ward dir wunderlich zu Mut,
Und die liebefrommen Tätzchen
Färbtest du mit meinem Blut!
Jetzt wird unsre Freundschaft fester,
Und noch täglich nimmt sie zu;
Denn ich selbst begann zu rasen,
Und ich werde fast wie Du. Heinrich Heine

What is the meaning of Chanukka? Is it a religious holiday? A nationalist holiday? Does it mean anything like what we think it does? Given its new place as the major Jewish holiday in the United States, the standard version of the story of Chanukka is now well known. The “Greeks” conquer the Jews, a small gang of freedom fighters repulse them, cleanse the Temple, find a flask of oil which burns for eight days, and now everyone gets presents, and plays a dreidle made of clay. This holiday has taken on a major role, of course, not because of its message, but because of its proximity to Christmas, allowing marketers to broaden their audience as Jewish parents try to create a substitute for the majority holiday, inescapable in particular for children who watch any TV at all. So in a sense, Chanukka, now morphing into Chrismukka, as per the popular TV program, has become a holiday through which the Jewish community can now feel part of the larger community; it has become a feel-good festival of assimilation.

Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism.

What would a non-consumeristic Christmas look like? Here's one vision: a "Christmas Peace Tree" made from post-consumer recycled plastic installed by artists in Washington, DC, as part of Occupy DC's gathering in Freedom Plaza. Credit: Creative Commons/Elvert Barnes.

The symbolism of a homeless couple giving birth in a manger surrounded by animals because the more comfortable people have not been able to make room for them inside a roofed home is akin to the symbolism of the candles lit on Chanukah to celebrate the victory of the powerless over the powerful: both offer a powerful reminder that both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.

All the more tragic to witness how both religions have been twisted in our own time to serve the powerful. Major forces in the Christian world have sided with the war-makers, ultra-nationalists, and the blame-poverty-on-the-poor cheerleaders for vast inequalities and protection of the rich against the needs of the rest. Jews, while retaining their commitment to domestic liberalism, have become tone-deaf to the cries of the oppressed in Palestine, to the huge inequalities of wealth in Israel, and have allowed their American institutions to be governed not by “one person, one vote” but “one dollar, one vote.”

The Jewish cemetery in my parents’ village of Lututow, Poland had disappeared; I walked through the thick forest, vividly green, pushing aside branches that had overgrown what once had been pathways, running my hands through the earth seeking anything – a stone, some mark from a gravesite; but only some fragments of human bones strewn on the forest floor suggested that this had been a burial site for hundreds of years. Somewhere beneath the earth was my family, my kin. How I ached for them. I had come here because of a restlessness I could not understand; somehow I think I needed to bring my parents back to what had been their home. I had, in fact, brought a photograph of them – their marriage picture taken in Germany in a DP camp just after their liberation from concentration camps that had become a kind of demonic home. Here, in this place of absence, I left their picture among some leaves, in the dirt. I said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, as I stood in this emptied, lost space, and wept.

Like so many children of Holocaust survivors, I had flown to Poland to experience my parents’ village. But unlike others who had made such pilgrimages, one trip had not been enough for me. I’ve made three altogether, each a step in a process of healing I could never have envisioned, and each in response to that restlessness that I could not understand.

Great texts are about more than simply telling tales, there is an understanding that there are lessons to be learned, responses to emulate or avoid, and leadership roles to strive towards. In this week’s reading we are presented with two lives developing in parallel, one wise and righteous, the other errant and potentially destructive. Yet, the text does not make the obvious choice of whom to celebrate or who to condemn.