In previous essays, in dealing with the dull repetitions of the mishkan (tabernacle) narrative, we discussed the idea of boundaries, of distance introduced as a result of the sin of the golden calf. The mishkan structure itself, and the garments of the priests, act as signifiers of, and simultaneously as a means of overcoming the boundaries and distance introduced by the sin of the golden calf. R. Zadok Hacohen adds an interesting comment, which would be incredibly radical except that the source of the quote is the Talmud (BT Nedarim 22: )

“If it weren’t for the sin of the Golden Calf, the Jews would only have received the Five Books of the Torah and the Book of Joshua”.

It was only with the second set of Luhot, not the first set smashed because of the golden calf, that we also received the Oral law. R. Zadok understands this to mean that had there not been the distance introduced by sin, our relation with the Torah text would have been an unmediated one, one that would not have required the supplemental hermeneutics of the commentaries and supercommentaries familiar to the student of Jewish studies. Our understanding of the Torah would have been akin to what Maimonides describes of Adam before his sin, that he would have had a pure objective relationship with God undistorted by subjectivity (which is why the forbidden Tree was known as that of “good and bad”, good and bad being purely subjective categories, liking something or not liking something, as opposed to the Tree of ‘Life’, which he reads as symbolizing empirical, objective knowledge, as in science (science as a medieval thinker would have seen it, including theological speculation).

The question, then, is, what was the ‘allure’ of the golden calf, what was implicit within that error that suddenly the five books of the Torah are no longer adequate and all that commentary is necessary?

I’ve changed my faith or religion or spiritual practice a lot over the years. I was born to parents of Jewish ancestry, but they were Unitarians, or Jewnitarians, as their friends joked. I was born to hybrids.

When I was twelve, we moved to Israel, largely because my Dad felt guilty for not teaching us kids about our Jewish history. It seemed to me to be too much too late. It was an alien country and faith to me. I felt terrible about the holocaust, and I understood Nazis would kill me whether or not I felt Jewish, but I still didn’t feel like kissing the ground when we landed in Israel.

At thirteen, I went to Quaker boarding school in the mountains of North Carolina. As students, we didn’t go to Meeting much, but we spent our days and nights outside in nature. You might say it was in the mountains I found God. I came home to myself and fell in love with the streams, rhododendron, sandy mica paths, and black mountaintops. I loved sliding down rocks in the South Toe river, sliding down mountain sides in the snow, skating and swimming in natural ponds, resting in wild grasses and staring at the stars on windy nights. My house parents had to drag me inside to go to bed at night.

When the Gaza war began in November 2012, American Jews’ lack of an embracing moral language, a language that could acknowledge all viewpoints, sufferings, terrors, humanity, became painfully obvious. To speak of the civilians dying in Gaza was, to many American Jews, to attack Israel and deny its legitimate rights to exist and defend itself from missiles. We seemed to have no language in which we could speak both of Israeli families huddling in bomb shelters as far north as Jerusalem and children crawling through Gaza rubble. Indeed, to judge by the anguished, enraged Facebook and Twitter exchanges I saw, we didn’t even have a language in which we could acknowledge and address the feelings and perspectives boiling among American Jews.

Poets can’t protect families from bombardment, negotiate cease-fires, resolve disputes, make peace or establish justice. But we can expose and stretch the limits of language, and challenge ourselves and our readers to imagine more honest, compassionate, embracing tongues in which to address this unspeakable tangle of fear, injustice, and brutality. The following poem, written during the war, was one attempt. I hope that its shortcomings will provoke other, better efforts to create the language give American Jews need to speak with (rather than screaming at) one another about this distant conflict with which we are so intimately involved.

As is usual with events of the magnitude of tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes, at some point theologians, essayists, and pundits of various sorts will attempt to make some sense out of the catastrophe. One question which arises (usually sometime after the question arises as to who will pay for the damages) is the old theological question, “where was God when all this happened?” or, “how could a God let this happen”?

Usually, what appears prior to any deep sophisticated thought about God and nature, comes the obligatory placing of blame. Since it is always easier to blame one’s political enemies than challenge one’s faith, after catastrophic events invariably “sins” are identified meant to justify the carnage. Remembering that these sins are meant to justify the deaths of over a hundred thousand innocent people in the case of the tsunami, a large number of whom were children, one would require a pretty good whopping sin to justify this kind of mass death. The obvious “explanations”, that the people there are heathens, aren’t worth repeating, but some novel ones have been proffered after the tsunami in Thailand, for example, the area is a popular destination for young Israeli travelers and they shouldn’t leave Israel, or, from Hamodia, that the grievous sin of Jews using the internet has led to God’s wrath extending even among the gentiles. That one at least does not blame the local victims, in that it doesn’t fault the local populace, as did a Moroccan Islamic newspaper editorial, (which provoked riots in support of the paper), which blamed the tsunami on the South Asian sex trade.

It is interesting that in general the “explanations” tend to be very Eurocentric; one notable explanation blamed the Bush administration, even querying whether from God’s perspective wouldn’t it have been more appropriate had the tsunami struck the US, interestingly, there was very little of this sort of speculation when hurricane Sandy hit NYC. I didn’t come across many Western essays suggesting that God had attempted to bring about an end to either the Sri Lankan civil war or the troubles in Aceh; apparently God doesn’t trouble himself to bring about natural disasters to resolve Eastern conflicts that don’t involve the West. At any rate, clearly, there are very few “explanations” that don’t seem ridiculous given the terrible human suffering elicited as a result, much as the various Jewish attempts blaming other Jews (secularists, Zionists, etc) for the Shoah come across as very petty and hollow (The detailed tit-for-tat Holocaust explanation attributed to Avigdor Miller is a manifestation of a form of self-loathing not very different from that of Otto Weininger).

Members of Ohel Hachidusch gather for tree planting at their eco-kashrut garden in Gatow, Berlin. Credit: Brian Swarthout, March, 2012.

The many branches of Judaism confuse me and I dread being asked by non-Jews to explain what it means to be Reform or Conservative, let alone Renewal or Reconstructionist. I’ve looked up the definitions but they just don’t resonate with me. The affiliation of a synagogue means far less to me than the sense of community that comes from sharing Jewish rituals and traditions with friends and family.

But that sense of community can be hard to find, and when it does come, it can be at unexpected times and from unexpected sources. Before our family moved to Berlin in July of 2010, we had spent years debating the benefits of membership in our local synagogue. We were now eager to experience Jewish life in the country of our heritage. We planned to make our way through the city’s menu of Jewish congregations, never expecting to forge a close connection with any particular group.

In a previous essay, http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/02/01/weekly-torah-commentary-perashat-beshalach-on-the-madness-of-creativity/ , we discussed the transcendent nature of the creative experience, how one must reach a unique overcoming of normal consciousness in order to transform a religious experience into an artistic act that can itself be counted as Torah.

In the latter sections of this week’s Torah reading, we have the presentation of two pivotal events; the miraculous feeding of the populace via the “Man”, and a reminder of the never ending cruelty of people against people, as represented by the Amalekite attack on the newly freed slaves.

A brief summary of the narrated events: despite the remarkable event of the splitting of the sea, which was, as the Midrashim point out, gloriously experienced by even the least ‘conscious’ member of the people, very rapidly the people start complaining about the lack of food on their journey. The people kvetch for food, and God provides them with a miraculous food from heaven, a food form which was not recognized by humanity prior to this moment (much like Tang in the 60s, I suppose), which the people named Man, from the Hebrew ‘man hu‘, which literally means: ‘what is this?’. It is clearly described as some sort of supernatural food, which had to be collected daily, as its shelf life was only a day, except for Shabbat, when a double portion collected Friday would stay worm-free and edible through Shabbat. Afterward receiving the man, the people demand water, and this time, the tone of the response is a bit more hostile; God has Moshe hit a rock, and water is procured through this violence. Why does the first request elicit a positive response and the second one elicit a response suggestive of violence?

Credit: Rick Reinhard

On an alarmingly milder-than-normal January day this year, about 100 religious leaders representing Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Islamic, Native American, Buddhist traditions gathered in the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church before processing in a silent march two blocks to the north side of the White House for a “pray-in for the climate.” They were led by NASA scientist James Hansen, a leading climatologist on global warming who was carrying a small inflated globe, and a group of Buddhist drummers. They had just been commissioned by Common Cause CEO Bob Edgar, a former Congressman and Secretary General of the National Council of Churches.

Rev. Edgar spoke about his own conversion in that very church years ago as he listened to Dr. Martin Luther King just weeks before King was assassinated. Dr. King preached that “history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” Edgar said his life changed upon hearing King’s words that day. This month, on the 84th anniversary of Dr. King’s birthday, Rev. Edgar reminded those in the pews that they are the leaders that they have been waiting for.

Perashat Bo I: Dazzled by the Dark

Rabbi Yosef Haim, better known as the Ben Ish Hai (born about 1834), wrote in his Aderet Eliyahu that the ‘plague’ of darkness we encounter in this week’s perasha is the last that Moshe and Aharon are responsible for (he builds around a Talmudic dictum that a prisoner liable for lashing can only receive a number divisible by 3, hence the maximum of 39, and thus the plagues have to be 9), while the tenth one, that of the killing of the firstborn, was a separate entity brought about by God alone, not in the category of plagues.

If the plague of darkness is the final and greatest plague brought about by Moshe, there must be a special and significant meaning intended with this darkness, meant to differentiate between plague level darkness and, say, some garden variety power blackout.

The Midrash does not confuse the plague of darkness with a state of just being dark. The Midrashists note the unusual phrase in Shemot 10:21, vayamesh hoshech, ‘and the Darkness materialised’. The Mechilta reads vayamesh as derived from the infinitive l’mamesh, to feel about, and states that the Egyptians were immobilised by this dark, that if standing, they were unable to sit down, and if standing, unable to sit. In the Midrash Rabba, the verb is derived from mamashut, “matter” (hence my translation above as ‘materialised’). So the Midrash asks, how dense was it, and replies, as dense as a dinar, which is a small coin. This, of course, is meant as a teaching about the blinding nature of money rather than about the ontology of darkness, so the Midrash attempts to understand the actual phenomenon and its source:

I’ve said it for years. Having worked at AIPAC and having worked with it as a legislative aide in Congress for 20 years, I know that the lobby is not really about Israel. It is about exerting influence, pushing our government around and promoting war with Muslims and Arabs, but it hasn’t been about Israel for decades.

Oh yeah. I left out the primary thing it is about. The leaders of all the Jewish organizations that compose the lobby (AIPAC, Conference Of Presidents Of Major Jewish Organizations With No Members, American Jewish Committee, Jewish Council on Public Affairs, etc) make huge salaries (above $500,000 a year not counting the fringe benefits that push their packages above the million dollar mark). That money comes from gullible American Jews who are constantly bombarded with letters and e-mails telling them that without their financial donations, Israel and/or the Jews are doomed.

ENCOUNTERING THE JEWISH FUTURE WITH WIESEL, BUBER, HESCHEL, ARENDT AND LEVINAS
by Marc H. Ellis
Fortress Press, 2011

These five Jewish thinkers are not as concerned about theology as they are with modern history. And it’s no wonder. No religion on this planet has suffered what Judaism endured in the twentieth century. After a millennium of unremitting efforts by Jews to be good Europeans came the Nazi Holocaust, and just four years after Auschwitz was liberated, the state of Israel was founded. These two colossal, mind-boggling events of the 1940s are what this book is really about, with the Holocaust taking precedence. The Holocaust changed the way the West views itself; the founding of Israel, which was in many ways a response to the Holocaust, radically altered the Middle East. It is this vivid and dangerous subtext that informs the thinking of these five thinkers, as each tries desperately, with varying degrees of success, to respond to what has happened.

“Our images of God, man, and the moral order have been permanently impaired,” wrote Richard Rubenstein, Professor Ellis’ first important teacher, in 1966. “No Jewish theology will possess even a remote degree of relevance to contemporary Jewish life if it ignores the question of God and the death camps.” Everything Jews thought they knew about themselves, human nature, and morality was completely turned upside down. To put it bluntly, where was God when six million Jews were asphyxiating in the gas chambers of Europe? If God had a covenant with Jews before, what could possibly be left of it, and why should anybody care?