Walking the Thin Line: Elul 5773

 

“I, I Am the One that comforts you; who are you, to be afraid of man that shall die, and of the son of man that shall be made as grass. . .?”

--Haftorah Shoftim, Isaiah 51:12

 

“Righteousness, righteousness shall you pursue . . .”

--Parashat Shoftim, Devarim 16:20

 

“Walking the thin line, between fear and the call; one learns to bend and finally depend on the Love of it all.”

--Noel Paul Stookey, For the Love of It All

The month of Elul started last Monday at sundown, on Rosh Chodesh, the sixth New Moon from the New Year for months.

My Elul dream this year came late, on Wednesday night, and without clarity or drama. In fact, I really don’t remember it at all, except that I dreamed of the current rabbi at our former synagogue, and of a neighbor in need of help finding a lost cat. I awoke to Tippy, my guardian Border Collie cross, pawing at my shoulder in the middle of the night. She feels it is important to awaken me when something unusual is going on. I went out to see an elk buck with eight points standing in the meadow in the deep darkness under a setting Big Dipper handle. Tippy did not bark at the elk this time; she seemed to think the elk belonged exactly in that place. She just wanted me to know he was there and awakened me to see him standing.

 

I don’t have a ready interpretation for the fragment of a dream or the meaning of seeing the elk standing in his place. Their significance escapes me, except that as I stood gazing at the elk in the starlight, I remembered that it was now Elul. 

This Shabbat, as the Engineering Geek and I sat down to study Torah, I was struck by two statements that jumped off the pages and into my mind, one from the beginning of the Parashat of the week, and one from its Haftorah. As I turned them over in my mind, I realized that the two of them together represent that place I have been for the last half-decade: I have been “walking the thin line between fear and the call” as Emmy Lou Harris sings in the Paul Stookey song, The Love of it All.

 

The Torah portion for the first Shabbat in Elul is Shoftim, which means “judges” or “chieftans” in Hebrew. In the first paragraph, which deals with how judgment must conform to justice, we read:

“You shall make for yourselves judges and officers in all your gates, which Adonai your G-d gives you, tribe by tribe; and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment: you shall not pervert justice; you shall not respect persons; neither shall you take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the  eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous. Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live and possess the land that Adonai your G-d is giving to you.”

 

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדּף Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof

The call at the beginning of the Month of Elul—the beginning of the season of our turning, is to pursue justice or righteousness. In Hebrew, the words are the same. Justice means to make a judgment according to honor, standards or the law, meting out to every individual what is right according to his or her rights and actions. Our rabbis taught that there is the justice of the streets—the righteousness with which we must treat every person—and the justice of the courts. If we fail to act with justice in all of our dealings on the streets, then justice must be adjudicated in the courts. In his commentary on the Torah, Joseph Hertz, Ph.D., who was the Chief Rabbi of Britain in the early 20th century, points out that in this sense, the Hebrew understanding of justice differs from the Greek. He wrote that in the Greek, justice implies:

“[A] harmonious arrangement of society, by which every human peg is put into its appropriate hole, so that those who perform humble functions shall be content to perform them in due subservience to their betters. It stresses the inequalities of human nature, whereas in the Hebrew conception of justice, the equality is stressed.”

--Soncino Press Pentateuch and Haftorahs: Hebrew Text, English Translation and Commentary, J.H. Hersch, Ed., p. 821

This is the case because in Hebrew thought, every human being is made in the image of the Eternal, and his life is unique and precious, possessing, as he does, a spark of Infinity. Therefore, as Hersch continues, every person has “the right to life, honor and all the fruits of his labor,” (p. 821). For this reason, Jewish Law demands that every human being be treated with honor in the streets, and with righteousness in the courts.

But if the call of Elul is to justice, then the burden of answering it is fearful, as the prophets show us. For to behave with righteousness towards everyone in the streets and to mete out equal justice in the courts, flies in the face of social conventions and political correctness. One must honor truth, consider the facts, and render judgment accordingly in all dealings. One may not condemn the rich man because he is rich nor excuse the poor man because he is poor (“you shall not respect persons”), and one may not base how one treats another on gifts or flattery (“you shall not take a bribe”). For this reason, acting with righteousness and justice is likely to get a person in trouble socially and legally in an unjust society. And as we currently live in a society that no longer makes judgments based on righteousness and law, but does so on the exigencies of political correctness and the whims of men, acting with justice is a difficult and dangerous thing.

 

And herein lies how I, among others, have been “walking the thin line between fear and the call” as we recognize the truth of what is being done to our civil society and to its values and law. For in my determination—made every Rosh Hashanah for the past four years—to honor the truth and act righteously, I have said and done things that have earned me the anger and contempt of friends and acquaintances. Sadly, this has ended many friendships that were based on my former habit of ignoring the reality of growing differences between our worldviews. Some of the ways in which those friendships were ended, and the accusations leveled against me, have cut me to the core of my being.

 
And in my weaker moments, I am afraid that in stepping out beyond the lines of political correctness and social  and legal convention, I will be harmed not only socially, but financially and/or physically. Because making a stand for plain old justice in a world of collectivist notions of “social justice” is no longer simply bad form, but with the oppression of the surveillance state and the police state being created and solidifying with terrifying rapidity, it is downright dangerous. Speech and action that now can cost one her dignity, property and perhaps, her liberty, may soon cost one her life.


And that fear causes me temporary confusion and wrong action. It creates doubt in my mind and silence in my mouth. And so the Haftorah Shoftim, the fourth in the seven Haftorot of Comfort, also comforts me:

“I, I Am the One that comforts you; who are you to be afraid . . ?

“. . . And where is the fury of the oppressor? He that is bent down shall speedily be loosed; and he shall not go down dying into the pit. Neither shall his bread fail.”

I know that I am one small person. I know that I can err in knowledge, and that I have indeed done so, espousing bad causes and supporting bad means in the name of what seemed to me at the time to be good ends. Moreover, I have obstinately continued in bad courses because I did not have the courage to admit that I was confused, or lacking in knowledge, or that I was downright wrong. And in so doing, I have excused the guilty and harmed the innocent. Of this, I am not proud. 

But to paraphrase Julian of Norwich:

He did not say “You shall not screw up.” He did not say “You shall not be discouraged.” He did not say:\ “You shall not be harmed.” But he said: “You shall not be overcome.”

I suppose what that means is open to interpretation. To me, it means that trials and troubles, and even harm are not the worst thing. The worst thing is to lose one’s honor and integrity; to lose one’s identity and one’s very soul. And if I persist in finding righteousness and doing justice, turning and returning again to walk the thin line, then despite any shame or harm done to me, I will remain who I am, and that is the greatest value to me.

The name of the month of Elul is an acronym in Hebrew that stands for Ani l’dodi, v’dodi li—I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. Elul is the point of turning and returning again in the dance of Shekinah, She who dwells with Israel in our exile, in our eternal betrothal with the Master of the Universe. And here, in my own dwelling place, Elul is the point of turning and returning again in my dance as a Jew, longing all my life for that moment of loving kindness, that betrothal of righteousness and justice, that Place, that shelter in the rock, where I get a glimpse of all of G-d’s goodness passing before me.

 

“For the Love of it all, I would go anywhere; to the ends of the earth, Oh, what is it worth, if Love would be there?

Walking the thin line, between fear and the call; one learns to bend and finally depend on the Love of it all.”

 

It is the love of it all—of life and being—that unites the call to justice and righteousness with the will to overcome fear and fills my heart with strength for the journey. And year after year, I turn and return again to the call in the dance of Elul. I come again to Makom, the Dwelling Place of Israel, only to know that I have been here, walking the thin line, day after day, year after year.

 

So. Maybe I can construct the meaning of Tippy’s silence as she brought me to see the elk. He was standing within his place, his Makom. And so am I, walking the thin line. Here, in this place between fear and the call, is Makom, the Presence of the Eternal. As Israel learned in her exile, as Isaiah reminds Jews to this day in the first Haftorah of Comfort:

הִנֵּה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם

Hinei eloheichem

Here is your G-d.
 

Technorati Tags: Elul,Jewish Identity,Torah Study,T'shuvah

Shabbat Shuvah: The Foreign Gods of Today

Technorati Tags: Times and Seasons,High Holy Days,American Exceptionalism,Torah Study

“The Eternal said to Moses:

You are about to sleep with your fathers,

and this people will rise up and go astray

after foreign gods, where they will go to be

among them, and break my Covenant . . .

and many troubles and evils shall befall them.”

Devarim 31: 16, 17

As Jews, we are now in the midst of the Ten Days of Turning, the days between Rosh Hashanah, when we celebrate the Birthday of the World, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn holy day of the year. The Sabbath that falls between these two holy days is Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath on which rabbis and maggids (preachers) commonly give a sermon on the art of turning and returning to the path of righteousness.

When the Engineering Geek and I took a few moments for Torah Study on Shabbat, with all of what had happened in the past weeks in mind, we noticed a part of Parashat Vayelich that the Women of Reform Judaism’s Torah Commentary remained silent about. Devarim  (Deuteronomy) is set as Moses’ last speech, with some interpolations that move the story along. In Vayelich (He Went), Moses learns that he has reached the end of his long life, and that he will die before the people Israel enter the promised land. The Women’s Commentary therefore focuses on what this means for Moses, and the reasons given and implied for his death at the moment of his people’s freedom.

But given the stark choices that confront us all in the world today, and the contradictory and craven behavior of our Executive  Branch in the face of the renewed attacks on the United States through our embassies--attacks used to threaten our most basic freedoms--the Engineering Geek and I focused on the passage that the commentary passed over. In it, a prediction is made by the Eternal. The people will cross over, and they will build lives in the land, and become complacent (“. . . they shall have eaten their fill and waxed fat. . .”, 31:20), and that is when they will be vulnerable to turning away from their heritage and their purpose, and follow after foreign gods that they have not experienced. When this happens they will, the story predicts, forsake the Covenant, and bring upon themselves many “troubles and evils.”

In encountering this story, we ask ourselves, what are foreign gods in the context of our identity as Americans today? Most of us do not literally bow down to idols of wood and stone made by our own hands. And many of us bow down to no gods at all. Further, this passage is about what happens when many members of a society make a choice to change their basic beliefs about their civil identity, and forsake the heritage given them by previous generations.

In Hebrew, the United States is known as Artzot ha-Brit shel Amerika, ( ארצות הברית של אמריקה) the Land of the Covenant in America. This is a recognition that our unique identity is forged not by blood ties, but that who we are is based on our choice to abide by a set of ideas that are protected by an contract, the Constitution of the United States.

On September 11, 2001, many of us were rudely made aware for the first time in a generation that our ideas about who human beings are and what we define as the good life in our civilization were under attack; that another set of ideas opposes ours, and that proponents of those alien ideas are willing to make war upon us, and to fight and die to see that their ideas prevail in the world. On that day, as the towers fell, we instinctively drew together, and the day after, we put up our flags and remembered that we were Americans.

As the EG and I talked about all this, we realized that we Americans had grown complacent indeed, and that we have been in the process of forsaking our Covenant of respect for individual rights, thereby giving up cherishing the uniqueness of each individual, and had begun to turn away toward concepts foreign to our native values. This hankering after dependency and collectivism, the easing of responsibility and individual liberty, was possible because we forgot the origin of the wealth and innovation that made our comfort and ease possible. In so doing, we were turning to foreign gods, ideas that are in opposition to our Covenant, and cannot possible co-exist with it.

Islamic thought, with its focus on totalitarian submission to a theocratic state, has developed from premises alien to our enlightenment values, and is driven by a civilization that is not at all complacent or passive. Islamic teaching emphasizes the necessity of bringing the whole world into submission to ideas that are incompatible with our own. Our Western forbearers have resisted these idols before, at Tours with Charles Martel, and twice at the Gates of Vienna. 

But now, with our Covenant weakened by dreams of collectivist utopias, we see our leaders actively chasing after alien ideas, appeasing our enemies with apologies, and proclaiming a willingness to surrender our basic rights to foreign gods. We must rethink our liberties, they say, in the face of the Ba’al of the Riot and the Mob. It is our children whose birthright of freedom is to be sacrificed to satisfy the insatiable fires of the barbarian hordes.

And yet, there are those among us who have sounded the alarm that there can be no compromise with those who wish to supplant our values with their own, and no surrender without the total loss of our American identity. Like the prophet in the Haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, they tell us:

“Asshur shall not save us . . .neither will we call anymore the work of our hands our gods . . .”

“Give not your heritage up to reproach, that the nations should make you a byword; Should they say among the peoples: Where is their G-d?”

We cannot make treaties with the alien thought of Egypt and Libya and at the same time retain our own unique identity. Foreign ideas and values cannot be assimilated without destroying our own. Oil and water do not mix, and nobody can compromise with poison and live.
It is one or the other, and we must not listen to those who would so lightly surrender our liberty, our values and principles to those who would destroy us. 

It is amazing how the struggles of old, couched in religious language, are relevant still, and tell the same stories that we experience, although we tell of them differently. 
Just as Israel of old had to choose or be broken on the contradiction between her identity and that of the idols, the same is true for us today. We must choose rightly or be broken on the contradiction between our own values and those of Egypt and Libya and the whole of the Muslim Brotherhood with its Islamist nightmare. Liberty and submission cannot be combined. Individual rights will not co-exist with the Ummah, the collective nation of the Islamic State. 

It is my hope that in this season of turning we gather the courage to say what is real, and  to acknowledge the truth in our hearts. And that we do not close our eyes to the troubles and evils that are about to befall us, and that we recognize that they are a consequence of the fact that we are in the act of forsaking our Covenant, the one that has made us the envy of the world and an inspiration to among the nations.

We need to wake up and to recognize how greatly we have prospered by the values and principles bequeathed to us by our founders, so that we can preserve our liberties and bequeath our inheritance—the Covenant of Rights and Liberties—to our posterity.

This remains my hope in the face of growing darkness.

BO! The Slave Mentality and Freedom

Often, as I study the weekly parashah, the Torah portion, it seems that myth and reality, fact and legend, and past and present become woven together as I struggle with the text on many levels: the plain meaning, hints of something deeper, allergory and myth, and maybe twice a year, transcendance.

This week's portion, Bo! (Go!) is one that I struggle with every year, twice a year.
And, no, there is no exclamation point in the original. The word Bo begins a sentence: "Go to Pharoah." But I see it with an exclamation every time I hear the parashah read.

This portion picks up in the midst of the ten plagues upon Egypt.
And, although the plain meaning of the text is clear, the plagues are a contest between Pharoah and G-d, I still feel the sting of injustice every time I read that "every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharoah to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the millstone." (Shemot 11:4-5). This is myth, of course, and it is the meaning that we draw from myth that teaches something.

But yesterday, as I sat listening to the portion as it was read in Women's Torah Study, I heard a different piece. One that I have heard every year, of course, but one that my mind had not highlighted. (This is the reason that we tell and re-tell the great stories).

First I noted, as I do every year, when I read the Hebrew text, that when Moses and Aaron go before Pharoah, Moses says:

"Thus says YHVH, the G-d of the Hebrews . . . Send my people forth that they may serve me."

This brought my mind to a demonstration of idolatry that I saw on the internet the other day in which various actors and musicians take a pledge to do good in the name of the great and powerful Obama. (One wonders why these people did not until now do good in the name of their own free will.)

The part that I heard again in my head was toward the end of the video, when one of them says: "I pledge to serve Barack Obama . . ." and then they all say together, "I pledge to be a servant of Our President and all Mankind . . ." (you can hear the capital letters in their voices) as their individual likenesses all fade into the Che Guevara kitsch poster of Barack Obama's face.

Then I heard this part of the parashah:

"Pharoah's servants said to him: '. . . Send out the men that they may serve their god, YHVH. Do you not know that Egypt is lost? So Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharoah and he said to them: ' Go, worship your god, YHVH! Who will go forth?" And Moses said: "We will all go, with our underlings and our elders,, we will go with our sons and daughters, with our flocks and our herds . . ." (Shemot 11: 7-9).

But Pharoah says no, that he would be a fool to let them all leave, when if this is just about a religious observance, then only the princes and elders should go. And he sends Moses and Aaron away.

And I began to think about the slave mentality. It is a way of thinking in which the slave's self is divided; someone else stands between a human being and her ultimate purpose. Someone else takes responsibility for the slave's will and being, making him less than a person.

Torah does not say, "Let my people go!" It says, "Send my people forth that they may serve me!"
Why?
Because in Egypt the people are servants to a man. They must worship his every whim. And by accepting their service, Pharoah commits the idolatry of seeing himself as above them in the eyes of heaven. He sees himself as a god. Thus the servant and the master both sacrifice to idols by the act of placing something lesser in front of their freedom.

And what is the sense of the "we will go . . ." piece? If the people are divided, so that some may leave to perform a religious duty permitted by Pharoah, they will retain the slave mentality. They will return to serve Pharoah. There is no half-slave and half-free. Freedom is all or nothing. People cannot choose the nice things about slavery, and refuse the hard choices that make up freedom and expect to remain free.

But if they all go forth, after seeing the signs and wonders, then in the wilderness, they will no longer be servants of Pharoah. And at Sinai, they can choose to make a covenant and accept Torah, placing themselves as servants of the Law of the Eternal.

And what of those signs? They are the plagues.
The plagues are a metaphor in this story for what happens to a land when people accept the slave mentality and must worship at the feet of a king, a master, an idol.
Then, even the innocent son of the slave girl behind the millstone will suffer. As will the mothers of Mitzrayim (the straits), who will mourn the destruction of the future generation in the name of the power of Pharoah and his priests and courtiers.

Free people do not place a person between themselves and the Eternal Law.
They choose to do what is right out of a whole self, not out of the half-being of servitude to others, be those others presidents or "all humankind."
A free human being may not worship at the altar of any man.

Thus I cannot, I must not, pledge to be a servant to Barack Obama or to all humankind.
To do so would be idolatry.
I serve a different covenant.
As an American, I pledge to uphold the Constitution.
As a Jew, I serve only the great I AM.*

*YHVH, the unprouncible Tetragrammaton, is a symbol for the root that conveys the meaning of being. It is a combination of three verb forms: I was, I am, I will be. The Name is unpronouncible because it is both infinite and incomplete. It comes from Moses question: "Who are you?" To which the Eternal replies something like: "Wait and see what I will do. Then you will know who I was, who I am, and what I will be."

Standing at Sinai as Women

Today, after a whirlwind of planning, and not a few political and practical hitches, our women's Torah study group began.

It all started because our Sisterhood had the foresight to pre-order a large number of The Torah: A Women's Commentary about a year ago. In this way, Sisterhood was able to get a really good deal, and sell the commentaries for about half the going rate (this order only). So the Sisterhood board decided that it would be good to begin a women's Torah study group as soon as possible in order to meet the momentum of interest in this unique book at its peak.

One of the members of the Sisterhood board asked me to teach the group. But in thinking about it, we decided that it would be better for me to chair the group, in order to get things started, but in the spirit of the Autonomous Learner Model, transition gradually from being a Sage on the Stage to a Guide on the Side. (Some of you will recognize this, my unschooling mantra). After all, the point is to get women to access Torah and to develop their scholarly and leadership abilities among women.

And today we began.

I started by modeling a group decision making strategy that allowed us to get options for how we would study on the table, let the women discuss it, while I listened carefully. I then reported back to them what I heard to be the sense of the group: that we would meet monthly on Sunday mornings, and study the parashah (portion) of the week, the one that would be read in Synagogue the following Shabbat. That, further, we would all be paying attention to see if some themes developed that would be worth pursuing, and that we would revisit the question of theme as we continued. This was agreed to be the sense of the group, and so the group made its first decision in a women's way.

Then I did take the Sage on the Stage role for a little bit to discuss with the women the place of Torah study in Jewish life. Torah can be translated as teaching (noun), the Hebrew root is the same for the noun 'teacher.' It is related to the root for 'light', and thus could be interpreted as 'enlightenment' as well. Our Rabbis taught that Torah is like a pomegranite--it has many seeds, many meanings. Each Jew has within herself her own seeds of Torah, that must be shared, for Torah to be whole in the world. Therefore, when the Sefer Torah (scroll) is to be read in synagogue, it is first carried through the holy congregation, to demonstrate that it belongs to the people Israel. It is not the possession of priests, prophets, kings, or rabbis. It belongs to each Jew.

We then discussed the basics of interpretation, using the model of PaRDeS, an acronym for understanding levels of understanding. The Hebrew word pardes, is the word for a walled garden or orchard, and is the root of the word 'paradise.' There are four levels of interpretation. The first is peshat--the simple meaning of the text, its context within Torah, and the meaning of the Hebew words. The second is remez--a hint of something more. This is the level of allegory, allusion, and connections by specific words between different texts within Torah. The third level is derash--searching for meaning. Derash lends itself to moral interepretations and midrash (homiletics) and aggadah (stories and parables). At derash, we span exegesis (thinking about the author's intentions) and isegesis (making personal or contemporary meaning). The fourth level is sod--the hidden, mystical meaning of the text. This is the level of mystical understanding in Zohar and Kabbalah, and possible in poetry and art. We also discussed here the tradition of Torah study--that it is done with a partner or group, so that personal understandings are shared and blended with the received tradition.

Then I sat down, as is customary, to study with the group a short bit of Torah from the women's commentary. For this special occasion, the beginning of the women's Torah study group, I chose two passages from parashat Nitzavi'im--'you are standing .' (Each parashah is called after the opening word or phrase).This portion is in the last book of Torah, Devarim (Deuteronomy), and is normally read in the month of Elul (August-September), as well as on Yom Kippur morning. I read the first two verses in Hebrew, and then asked one of the women to read it in English:

"You stand this day, all of you, before your G-d--you tribal heads, you elders, and you officials, all the men of Israel, you children, you women, even the stranger within your camp, from the woodchopper to the drawer of water--to enter into the covenent of you G-d...to establish you this day as G-d's people..." (Devarim 29: 9-11).

There was a gasp from one of the women. She had never heard it read exactly this way. I asked what surprised her. She said: "It sounded different. It sounded as if I was included.As if I was standing there this day."

And I explained what the translators had done. All of the different groups within the people Israel are referred to in this text with the Hebrew possessive ending -chem, which is a masculine, plural possessive. So the literal translation of the Hebrew would be "your tribal heads, your elders...your children, your women..." After pointing out the change, which is explained in the commentary, I asked the women to discuss it. How does it change our understanding of the meaning? Is it valid?

There was much discussion. "It changes the meaning." "The translator interpreted..." "All translation is interpretation." And so forth. With some guidance from me, the guide on the side, and the commentary in the text, we got to the place of discussing the meaning the possessive "your" in the context of the community of Israel. What does it mean to say "your people" or "your synagogue" or "your rabbi." Does it mean that you literally own those entities, or does it mean that you belong to them? A flash of understanding came to the women then, as one said, "So the translator was really clarifying the meaning of "your" as a belonging to, not an owning of!"

"Yes. Translation is always interpretation," I told them. But here, the translator did indeed clarify one received understanding of the text, by replacing the word "your" with the word "you." There was more discussion of how that change made some of the women realize, for the first time, that they, as women, were included in the Covenant, that they, too, were 'standing at Sinai.' So we moved from peshat to remez to derash, and perhaps, since some of us received a new understanding, a new revelation, to sod.

And in the discussion, I heard the Torah of these women. I will never forget the words of one of them: "It is important that the translator did this, because when I hear "your tribal heads, and your elders," I think of them as men who belong to the community of Israel; but when I hear "your women," I think of the women as belonging to the men, because that is how we learned to think. But when I heard "you women," I saw myself actively accepting Torah, actively standing at Sinai."

And I could only say: Yashrah koach! May your strength be straight! Hazak, hazak v'nit'hazek, achoti! May you go from strength to strength, oh my sister!

In this sharing, as Jewish women studying together, we brought forth Torah. We were being Torah.