Climbing the hierarchical ladder to the wall / B'haalotcha

The images from the Kotel Plaza in Jerusalem on Friday, May 10, 2013 are simultaneously wonderful and sad. Two weeks before, in a landmark ruling, Judge Moshe Sobel of the Jerusalem District Court ruled that women wearing tallitot at the Kotel do not contravene “local custom.” Prior to this ruling, the women who have convened monthly since December 1, 1988 to celebrate Rosh Chodesh, were subjected to disruption, heckling, and physical threats by the haredim. They were regularly arrested and harassed by the police and accused of disturbing the public order. Judge Sobel’s ruling put an end to this perversion of civil justice and religious freedom. This past Friday, the police protected the women, thousands of whom gathered to pray and sing and give thanks.

How have we gotten to the point where Jews charge into battle against Jews who want to pray?

In this week’s parashah, B’haalotcha, God instructs Moses to prepare and ordain the Levites to serve in the Tabernacle. Here we find a curious claim:

You shall bring the Levites forward before the Tent of Meeting. Assemble the whole Israelite community, and bring the Levites forward before the Lord. Let the Israelites lay their hands upon the Levites, and let Aaron designate the Levites before the Lord as an elevation offering from the Israelites, that they may perform the service of the Lord. (Numbers 8:9-11)

The Levites are themselves a sacrifice of sorts. Just as the priests will lay their hands on the animals designated for sacrifice, so the Israelites lay their hands on the Levites and designate them as the people’s sacrifice. Pretty heady stuff to be a levitical priest: God’s chosen among the chosen, intermediary between Israelites and God, the ones with the authority presented as mere animals for sacrifice.

Every society creates a hierarchy that lends power, authority, legitimacy, and privileges to those at the top. In the haredi world men run the show. Consider this charming passage from the Babylonian Talmud, which relegates women to the status of servants to men:

A heretic said to Rabban Gamliel, “Your God is a thief! As it is written, And God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the human, and he slept (Genesis 2:21).” [Rabban Gamliel’s] daughter said: “Leave him, for I will answer.” She said to the heretic, “Bring me an officer of the law.” He said to her, “Why?” “Thieves came upon us last night, took a silver vessel from us, and left a gold one in its place.” He said to her, “Would that he would come every day!” “And was it not favorable to Adam, that God took one rib from him, and gave him a maidservant (shifkha) to serve him?” (B.Sanhedrin 39a)

Many generations have had no difficulty recognizing the historical and social context of this passage and have refused to ascribe prescriptive authority to it. Haredim, in contrast, have enshrined it on their altar of regressive fundamentalism. Claiming that their views are the only ones God sanctions, they have done everything from attempting to force segregationon buses and sidewalks in Israel, to spitting on 8-year-old Naama Margolese, whom they deemed inappropriately dressed, on her way to school. (For the record, Naama’s family is modern Orthodox and she was dressed in long sleeves and a long skirt.)

And, of course, the haredim have claimed that their style of prayer, in which women have no role, or even presence, pertains in the public square, specifically the Kotel (the Western Wall).

The Jerusalem Post covered the Rosh Chodesh service last Friday, reporting that police formed a human barrier to protect the praying women, and three haredi men were arrested for disturbing the peace. Finally, basic human and religious rights are protected. How long it has taken the Israeli courts and politicians to begin to reject haredi misogyny and recognize the rights of half the population. While it is a wonderful step forward, it comes shamefully late.

The haredi are confronted with a new reality: Jews who no longer use Torah as a sledge hammer to elevate themselves to the pinnacle of an unjust and unrighteous hierarchy. They find themselves in pitched battled with Jews who refuse to allow an antiquated interpretation of Judaism to dominate in the Jewish State in the 21^st century. Quoting directly from the Jerusalem Post article:

Rabbi Susan Silverman, comedian Sarah Silverman's sister who prays with the Women of the Wall, was at the protest where she said that haredi men spit globs of spit on her three daughters, she told The Jerusalem Post. Silverman also said that the haredim threw coffee at the Women of the Wall activists and that a little girl next to her was hit in the head with something hard.

Spitting? Throwing coffee? Pictures from Friday show men throwing chairs and stones, as well. To interpret Torah as countenancing such boorish and dangerous behavior is blasphemous. (Oh, and happy birthday, Susan! What a marvelous way to celebrate your 50^th.)

Torah explains the elevation of the Levites this way:

Now I take the Levites instead of every first-born of the Israelites; and from among the Israelites I formally assign the Levites to Aaron and his sons, to perform the service for the Israelites in the Tent of Meeting and to make expiation for the Israelites, so that no plague may afflict the Israelites for coming too near the sanctuary. (Numbers 8:18-19)

In the twisted thinking of these fundamentalists, God has designated them the true Jews, the only ones who understand and follow God’s will, the only ones capable of interpreting God’s will. Rabbi Silverman is quoted in the article as telling the reporter that haredi protesters represent "a fundamentalism and a belief in a single and very narrow view of God that I believe is idolatrous."

Rabbi Silverman’s charge of idolatry is entirely fitting. The haredim expend their energies protecting and worshiping their prerogatives and privileges — their position at the top of a ladder they have skillfully built with countless perverse interpretations of Torah. They do not enlarge Torah, they narrow its scope of justice, righteousness, and kindness. They are concerned only about themselves, not fellow Jews who are not part of their insular community, and certainly not anyone beyond the Jewish community. This is not Torah; this is idolatry.

Men who do not work to support their families, yet expect their wives to bear 8, 10, 12 children and work while raising them, men who refuse to serve in the army that protects them and their families, men who live off the largess of society in the form of millions upon millions of dollars worth of Israel welfare — this is not traditional Judaism. This is a new and frightening fundamentalism. Rabbi Silverman is quite correct: it is idolatry.

The first time Women of the Wall came to daven and read Torah at the Kotel, on December 1, 1988, men screamed, cursed, and threatened them from the other side of the barrier, yet Kotel Administrator Rabbi Yehuda Gertz refused to shut down the service. At the time, he stated, that they are “not violating Halakhah.” The haredim are retreating further and further into misogyny and fundamentalism. It’s not that they’re going back in time. There was never a time in Jewish history when women were treated this way.

The verses the women can be heard chanting in the video that accompanied the article are prescient:

Or chadash al Tzion ta’air / a new light will dawn on Zion…

Od lo avda tikvateinu, ha-tikvah sh’not alpayim / We have not lost our hope, the hope of 2000 years…

© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

Gezuntheit!, Mr. Spock, amulets, and comets / Naso

How are “Gezuntheit!”, Mr. Spock, jewelry, and a comet crashing into earth and causing the extinction of humankind related?

How often have we said or heard, “Gezuntheit” or “God bless you” after a sneeze? We have been taught to say it, but do we think about what it means? Probably not — we’re being polite.

This week’s parashah, Naso, includes the most famous blessing of all time. In fact, its words comprise the earliest inscription of biblical text that has been found. Nearly 15 year ago, two amulets dating to the late seventh century B.C.E. were excavated in Ketef Hinnom outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon wrote of them:

This is now the earliest occurrence of a Biblical text in an extra-Biblical document, significantly predating the earliest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is also the oldest extra-Biblical reference to YHWH, the God of Israel. (In Life in Biblical Israel by Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, 1987, p. 306.)

Today, you can find pendants inscribed with this blessing, facsimiles of the Ketef Hinnom amulets.

Ketef Hinnom amulet

The blessing on the Ketef Hinnom amulets was invoked by the Priests in the Temple as they held their hands in a particular position. Leonard Nimoy used this hand position for Mr. Spock’s Vulcan Hand Salute in Star Trek. People who trace their descent from the kohanim of old sometimes have it carved into their grave markers.
 

 

This blessing has been invoked by many people in many situations. On the big screen, the president of the United States, as played by Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact, invokes this blessing when he informs the nation that an approaching 7-mile wide comet may lead to the extinction of humanity.

By now you may have guessed that I’m talking about Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Benediction of Numbers 6:22-27.

God spoke to Moses saying: Speak to Aaron and his sons saying, Thus shall you bless the Israelites: Say to them:

May God bless you and protect you.
May God cause the divine light to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May God raise the divine countenance to you, and grant you peace.

Thus they shall link My name with the people of Israel, and I will bless them.

The Priestly Benediction: Numbers 6:22-27 (The first letter of verse 25 is a letter missing from this graphic image of the Torah text. I don't know why.)

 

Birkat Kohanim has been studied, discussed, analyzed and explicated more times than I can count, through the lenses of history, halakhah, linguistics, psychology, Kabbalah, and even geometry. I won’t review them here, but rather note the structure I see and three things I learn from it.

First, structure. The three lines confer three separate blessings — protection, grace, and peace — the components of the life we all want to live: safety, comfort, and serenity. The most elemental is protection or security. Without a sense of basic security, life is out of control, chaotic, even savage. With safety reasonable secured, we can dare to hope and pray for grace, the gifts of heaven in whatever form they come (health, family, friendship, prosperity). With protection and grace, we have a shot at shleimut, genuine wholeness or peace.

To offer the Priestly Benediction is to offer what we all want and need, but cannot always assure for ourselves. We can forge loving relationships, pursue meaningful projects, and perform righteous deeds, but we cannot guarantee for ourselves protection, grace, and peace. Birkat Kohanim is all-encompassing; it’s about the really big stuff.

Next, three things I have learned.

First, we might be tempted to ask: why do we need priests to bless us? Why do we need anyone to bless us? The Bavli (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 7a) provides insight here. The Rabbis imagine that God prays, just as we do. They therefore ask, as we would, “What prayer does God say?” Like good trial lawyers who never ask a question they cannot answer, the Rabbis tell us that God prays for the ability to control divine anger and approach us with mercy rather than strict justice. In other words, God prays for self-control. But apparently prayer isn’t enough, because God visits the High Priest R. Yishmael b. Elisha in the Holy of Holies and asks for a blessing. R. Yishmael has the perfect blessing for God, just what God needs and wants: “May it be Your will that Your mercy may suppress Your anger and Your mercy may prevail over Your other attributes, so that You may deal with Your children according to the attribute of mercy and may, on their behalf, stop short of the limit of strict justice.” Even God needs, and benefits from, a blessing. So much more so do we. We all need one another’s blessings — good wishes and expressions of love and caring, reminders of what is important, and the hope that God and the world will meet our needs and desires.

Second, blessings remind us that, in fact, we are already blessed. The trick is to be able to recognize our blessings. The Rabbis speak of hakarat ha-tov, recognizing the good, because the more we do so the happier and more satisfied we will be. Ben Zoma taught: “Who is rich? Those who are content with their portion” (Pirke Avot 4:1). In other words, when we are pleased with what we have, we are rich with satisfaction. Rabbi Julian Sinclair tells a wonderful story of a rabbi whose hakarat ha-tov extended to bushes. In Rabbi Sinclair’s words:

Hakarat hatov extends to inanimate objects as well. Moses famously did not strike the Nile to catalyse the plague of blood for that would have shown a lack of gratitude to the water which had conveyed him in his ark to Pharoahs [sic] daughter. A modern-day example is of the late Rabbi Yisrael Zeev Gustman, head of Yeshivat Netzach Yisrael, who used to water the bushes in front of the yeshivah. For when fleeing Vilna, he had hidden behind some bushes and always felt a debt of gratitude to them, be they in Vilna or Jerusalem. Neither Moses nor Rabbi Gustman credited water or bushes with the will to chose to save them, but they recognised that to destroy or disregard something that once helped you is indeed a base trait.

  

Think for a moment: what are you grateful for? How have you been blessed, and by whom?

Third, counting our blessings leads to anava (humility). Humility is perhaps the greatest and most difficult middah (personality attribute) to cultivate, but the one that is the genesis and nexus of all middot. Ego is part of our natural make-up and, indeed, necessary for survival. We must value and appreciate ourselves. An overblown ego, however, separates us from others and from genuine happiness. It is natural to be proud of our achievements, but it helps to remember that we are all blessed with talent and potential. We didn’t earn them; they came installed with the hardware. We get credit for developing our potential and using our talents productively.

Torah doesn’t say when or how Birkat Kohanim should be conferred. The Rabbis, however, decided that it should be said at shacharit and musaf, as well as at Ne’ila, the closing service of Yom Kippur, ensuring that it is recited every day, year round. Even on Tisha B’Av it is recited at minchah. Not a day goes by that we are not blessed in some way. And perhaps not a day should go by that we do not extend, in some way, a blessing to another.

What blessing will you give someone else today?

© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

Names and Numbers / B'midbar

Sefer B’midbar (the Book of Numbers) opens with two chapters recounting names and numbers related to a census of the Israelites conducted in the second month of the second year of their Wilderness experience. I associate names and numbers, and counting up people, with the Holocaust. Human beings in a moral wilderness reduced to mere numbers tattooed on their bodies, and we now collect and memorialize their names.

Names and numbers: The National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, features a breathtaking exhibit called the “Tower of Faces.” Some 1,500 images taken between 1890 and 1941 of the 5,000 Jews of Ejszyszki (also spelled Eishishok) in Poland (now Lithuania) massacred by the Nazis in September 1941 tile the walls of the tower. The Tower of Faces is the work of Brooklyn College professor Yaffa Sonenson Eliach, who was born in the town. Of the 500 Jews who escaped slaughter, only 29 survived the war. Eliach has “rebuilt” Ejszyszki in photographs, preserving their names and memories.

Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

More names and numbers: At Yad Vashem in Israel, the “Hall of Names” memorializes the Six Million. It houses short biographies of the victims. The center hall has a domed ceiling filled with 600 photographs of the Six Million.

Hall of Names at Yad Vashem in Israel

Both the “Tower of Faces” and the “Hall of Names” try to restore both names and faces to the dehumanized victims of the Nazis. So much time and effort has gone into cataloguing the names of those who perished in order to preserve their sacred memories. This is as it ought to be. We can do no less in response to a travesty that tore people’s names from them and left them only with numbers.

The Nazis are often likened to Amalek, the quintessentially evil nation that attacked the Israelites during their march through the Wilderness (Exodus 17:8-10). Amalek’s unforgiveable sin was not in fomenting war. The Amalekites attacked not the soldiers at the head of the line, but rather attacked from the rear, slaughtering the most vulnerable: the elderly, the infirmed, and children at the back of the line. For this reason, the Amalekites become the paradigm and symbol of unredeemable evil. Torah tells us:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt – how, undeterred by fear of God, [they] surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (Deuteronomy 25:17-19)

What a peculiar and seemingly contradictory requirement: to remember the Amalekites, and yet to blot out their memory. How do we explain this? Purim provides a hint. According to tradition, Haman, who set in motion a plan to kill all the Jews of Persia, was descended from the Amalekites. We read Haman’s name in the Megillah many times but also drown out his name with noisemakers.

What’s in a name? Should we seek to wipe out the names of the worst of the worst: Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Himmler? Do they belong with Amalek and Haman yimach shemam (may their names be blotted out)? Perhaps here is where the Torah’s subtle wisdom rises to the fore: we are also commanded to remember.

Now we have another and surprising reason to recall Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and Hitler. Each of them — the very quintessence of human evil — has a Jewish descendant in his family tree.

Colleen Rosenblatt is the granddaughter of Magda Goebbels, wife of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Colleen converted to Judaism at the age of 24, married a Jewish man, and raised a Jewish daughter. Today she lives in Germany where she designs jewelry.

Matthias Goering, a physiotherapist, is the grandnephew of the Nazi Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. Matthias grew up in a virulently anti-Semitic family yet he found his way to Judaism. He is reportedly in the process of converting. He lives an observant Jewish life, keeping kosher, observing shabbat and wearing a kippah, among other practices. He has said, "I used to feel cursed by my name. Now I feel blessed."

Katrin Himmler, great-grandniece of the SS commander Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust, published The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History in 2007. That same year, she told an interviewer: “Many times during my research it was quite difficult for me to go on. As things were revealed it became more and more shocking. We descendants were left in no doubt about what Heinrich had done. But his actions cast a large shadow that the rest of the family were standing in, many of them hiding in there.” Katrin Himmler married (and is now divorced from) an Israeli, the child of survivors, whose father was in the Warsaw ghetto.

And then there is Dr. Michael Mach, professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, who claims to be a descendant of Hitler. It’s a rather complicated story, so hold on for a rough ride. The account goes like this: Adolf Hitler had a half-brother named Alois. Alois had an illegitimate son named Hans who married a woman named Erna after Erna’s divorce from her first husband. Erna was thrilled to have married into the Hitler family and remained a die-hard anti-Semite throughout her life. Her daughter (from her first marriage) is the mother of Prof. Mach. In order to avoid conscription into the Germany army, Mach pursued a theology degree that brought him to Israel for six weeks in 1970. "I felt at home. I was no longer living in a conflict. I didn't have to reject the older generation. And I thought I had met for the first time a nationality that at that point in history — today it is more problematic — still had good reasons to be proud of itself." He stayed and converted.

Strangely, the Talmud records that another honorary descendant of Amalek converted to Judaism. Amidst a longer account of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple by the Romans, we are told:

He [the emperor] sent against [the Jews] Nero the Caesar. As he was coming, [Nero] shot an arrow towards the east, and it fell in Jerusalem. He then shot one towards the west, and it again fell in Jerusalem. He shot towards all four points of the compass, and each time it fell in Jerusalem. He said to a certain boy: “Repeat to me [the last] verse of Scripture you have learned.” [The boy] said: And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel [Ezekiel 25:14]. [Nero] said: The Holy One, blessed be God, desires to lay waste the House [i.e. the Temple] and to lay the blame on me. So [Nero] ran away and became a proselyte, and R. Meir was descended from him. (Gittin 56a)

Talmud is telling us that not only did Nero, himself, convert to Judaism, but the great R. Meir was descended from him.

Not long ago we thought the names Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler should be blotted out, yet now they are attached in various ways to Jews. Would you ever have imagined?

What’s in a name? Sometimes just what we thought, but sometimes far more.

© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

Natural miracles / Behar-Bechukkotai

Miracles: You do not have to look for them. They are there, 24-7, beaming, like radio waves all around you. Put up the antenna, turn up the volume - snap... crackle... this just in, every person you talk to is a chance to change the world... (Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, May 6, 2003)

The Israelites have lived for many years in the wilderness, sustained by manna that rains down from heaven six days a week. Each Friday (erev shabbat) God provides a double portion because they rest, and do not gather, on shabbat. In parshat Behar, God tells the Israelites through Moses that their days of dependency will end when they enter the Land.

Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath of complete rest, a Sabbath of the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest of gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. (Leviticus 25:3-5)

This is a description of the sh’mittah — sabbatical year. As we rest every seventh day, the land lies fallow and rests every seventh year. An agricultural society in an arid region depends entirely upon rain this must have been a terrifying idea. It’s hard enough to plow the rocky terrain and weather periodic drought.  If they couldn’t farm the land, how would they eat? Torah addresses this concern in the very next verses:

But you may eat whatever the land, during its Sabbath, will produce — you, your male and female slave, the hired and bound laborers who live with you, and your cattle and the beasts in your land may eat all it yield. (Leviticus 25:6-7)

But will that suffice? God anticipates this understandable anxiety:

If you should ask, “What will we eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?” I will ordain My blessings for you in the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufficient for three years.  When you sow in the eighth year, you will still be eating old grain of that crop; you will be eating the old until the ninth year, until its crops come in. (Leviticus 25:20-22)

In the Wilderness, the Israelites receive a double portion of manna before the Sabbath — just enough to meet their needs. In the Land, when the fields lie fallow during the sabbatical year, produce will nonetheless sprout — more than what they need. Torah considers manna to be a miracle, but what about the produce of the fallow fields? Would you consider this a miracle, a combination of nature and miracle, or nature asserting itself?

The Sfat Emet (Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger, 1847–1905) ponders this question in light of the Israelites asking, “What will we eat?” Does their question bespeak the Israelites’ failure to trust God despite manna, breakfast of champions, delivered each morning to their tents? Or, as S’fat Emet understands it, are the people asking whether they will be sustained by miracle or by nature? He tells us:

The answer was that their sustenance would come about by means of “blessing,” and blessing is somewhat closer to nature [than is a miracle].

He explains further:

Really, Jews should understand that miracles and nature are all one. In fact there is no miracle so great and wondrous as nature itself, the greatest wonder we can know. When this faith becomes clear to Jews, it is no longer any problem to be fed by miracles. Only If you should ask: “What will we eat?’ then I will command the blessing.

The S’fat Emet goes on to confirm that a miracle is, as we would think, an “uplifting; this is the way of conducting the world that is lifted out of the natural state.” He tells us that not all generations are equally deserving of miracles. For those whose trust in God is strong, “nature and miracles were all the same to them. That is why God performed miracles for them.” Perhaps this view is shaped by a passage in the Bavli (Babylonian Talmud) concerning a man for whom a most unnatural miracle occurred: a widower left with a newborn grew breasts to feed the child. The Bavli recounts:

One Rabbi remarked: How great this man must have been that such a miracle was performed for him. But his colleague retorted: On the contrary! How unworthy this man must have been that the order of creation was changed on his behalf. (Shabbat 53b)

Crab Nebula (Hubble Space Telescope)

Rabbi Arthur Green explains the S’fat Emet’s meaning:

This passage offers a glimpse into a very interesting theology of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. The only ones for whom God provides miracles are those who don’t notice them as such, those whose faith is so great that for them nature and miracle are all one. For the rest of us, God does not perform miracles, presumably because we do not deserve them, lacking the faith to take them in our stride. But the upshot is that there are no miracles encountered by their recipient as such. “Miracles” stand out only afterward; the miracle is named as such by a lesser generation. Those of greater faith know such happenings simply as part of the natural/divine whole, a way of being that cannot be divided into “natural” and “supernatural.” (The Language of Truth, p. 204)

The natural order proceeds by it own laws. Miracles are not deviations from nature, but rather the perceptions of people looking back at events that have taken on great significance for them.

Galileo peering through his telescope

Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger (d. 1905) lived in an age of science. Although quantum mechanics was not formulated until the first decade of the 20^th century, at the end of his life, consider this: Galileo proved Copernican heliocentrism in the early 17^th century. Robert Boyle published the gas law in 1662. Isaac Newton had published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, laying out Newtonian Physics in 1687.  Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen and wrote about electricity already in the 18th century (though some consider his greatest feat to be the invention of seltzer). The existence of molecules and atoms were known in the early 19^th century thanks to John Dalton and Amedeo Avogadro. Scientists were exploring and explaining our world on every level: from the grandeur of the cosmos to particles of matter too small for the human eye or even the microscope to view and everything in between — all before the S’fat Emet was born.

 

Depiction of carbon atom, the basis of life on earth

I wonder how being born into a world of burgeoning, vibrant scientific inquiry shaped the S’fat Emet’s theology.  It appears that the S’fat Emet adapted Kabbalistic theology to the new truths of the physical world, as scientists understand it. Or perhaps put better: he understood and explained Torah through not only a Kabbalistic lens, but through a scientific and rational lens as well. He recognized that there is no such thing as a miracle in the sense of an abrupt abrogation of the laws of physics. The physical universe is governed by nature, a marvel so enormous it is miracle enough for us all. What we conventionally call a “miracle” is an expression of meaning that people assign to an event some time after it happens, as they look back and recognize it as unexpected, momentous and significant, and accordingly ascribe particular religious meaning to it.

 

The horrific events in Boston this month reminded many of us that normalcy, including the quotidian of life that we are tempted to brand “boring,” is miraculous when we are able to see the ordinary as a blessing (as Leviticus 25:21 does). The breath of life, our capacity to use our minds and bodies, the safe return home at the end of the day of our loved ones, our ability to put food on the table and sleep with a roof over our heads — these are daily miracles.

The S’fat Emet’s intellectual honesty in telling us that there is no different between nature and miracles does not compromise his spirituality. And perhaps that is one of the most important lessons here. The Scopes Monkey Trial is sadly still being tried in the courtroom. We live amidst an array of fundamentalists who view science as a heresy and try to force “Intelligent Design” into the curricula of public schools, and other absurd ideas in the public square. Ponder this — from December 2010 — for a minute:

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) has proposed a 2012-2013 budget that includes heavy cuts to some key department while giving a $43 million tax break to a massive creationist theme park.

In his plan, Beshear calls for a 6.4 percent cut to Kentucky's higher education department, a 2.2 percent cut to the State Police force and sizable cuts to other agencies in what he calls an effort to cut the budget to the bone. 

No one would have called the S’fat Emet and his Hasidic community (the Ger Hasidim) “modern” or anything but strongly orthodox in their religious practice. Yet the S’fat Emet not only recognizes and respects the reality science reveals, but revels in it, teaching us that science shows us that the world as it is abounds in miracles.

We should take note. There is no fundamental [yes, pun intended] conflict between science and religion unless we choose to interpret our sacred texts to create such a conflict. God’s universe is a unity; the laws that govern it are in and of themselves miraculous.

© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

When honor is unconscionable and dishonorable / Emor

This week’s parashah, Emor, includes a potentially dangerous and toxic verse:

If the daughter of a priest defiles herself through harlotry, she has disgraced her father and is put to death through burning. (Leviticus 21:9)

We are all familiar with the horror of so-called “honor killings”:

Hiyam Souad, 23, of Gaza was strangled by her father and brother in their home because she was there with a young man who lived nearby.

Nilofar Bibi, 22, of India was forced into an arranged marriage at the age of 14. She escaped. Her brother found her, dragged her into the street, and decapitated her saying, “She sinned and had to be punished.” The family supported his effort to uphold the family “honor.”

In Kingston, Ontario, an Afghani couple and their 18-year-old son brutally drowned the couple’s three teen-age daughters (ages 19, 17, and 13) and the husband’s first wife in a polygamous marriage because the girls weren’t obeying all the rules that had been set for them.

Unfortunately examples abound. I cannot imagine anything more dishonorable than killing one’s own child. It is violence erupting from ego, from concern for one’s image above all else — even above human life. It is narcissism at its absolute worst.

The verse with which we began does not use the word “honor” (kavod in Hebrew), but the defilement (m’chalelet) it speaks of affects the father’s honor. When the verse says “harlotry” (liz’not) it could mean prostitution (see Genesis 38:15 and Leviticus 19:29) or promiscuity (see Genesis 38:24 and Deuteronomy 22:21). In either case, Torah makes it clear that the daughter’s unseemly behavior reflects poorly on her father who is a priest. Two observations: First, burning is rare in Tana”kh (the Bible). We find it in three other cases: Judah demands that Tamar be executed by fire; Leviticus 20:14 stipulates burning for a man who marries both a woman and her mother; and we are told that the Israelites both stone and burn Achan and his household for appropriating spoils that had been dedicated to God (Joshua 7:25). The very fact that burning is so rare tells us that Torah considers the kohen’s daughter’s crime enormously significant. Second: the punishment (burning) is not commensurate with the crime. Prostitution and premarital sex are not punishable crimes, and burning is not prescribed for adultery. The concern clearly is, as the verse states, her father’s honor.

We are long past the period of the active priesthood. That ended in 70 C.E. with the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple. No doubt, if there were a Temple standing today, only the most fanatical and psychopathic among us would even suggest that such a “law” could be carried out. For those who insist that we must obey the requirement of the verse, as well as those who are troubled that the verse exists at all, I offer the old and reliable Jewish staple: interpretation. Here is how Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev explains this deeply troubling verse in his commentary Kedushat Levi:

We already know that when someone in our domain of the universe commits a sin that this leaves a corresponding “stain” or defect in the celestial domain. In practice this means that sins committed on earth strengthen the forces of the kelipot (peels), that is, the forces that surround holiness and thereby make it less effective or ineffective, much as a peel prevents us from getting at the fruit within it. The best remedy available to repair this spiritual damage is by burning it in fire. “Burning” need not be a physical process but can be service to the Lord with so much enthusiasm that it bursts into “flames.” (Kedushat Levi, Emor on 21:9)

Levi Yitzhak reads the verse as an allegory. The “daughter” represents a person’s soul that is subject to the influences of the yetzer tov (inclination to do good) and the yetzer ra (inclination to do evil). “Harlotry” happens when we give in to the yetzer ra and make wrong choices. Our choices do not affect us alone; there is a ripple effect to everything we do because everything is interconnected. Ultimately the entire universe suffers the effects of the evil each of us does.

Kabbalists describe God’s holiness, which they understand as having been shattered in a cataclysmic cosmological explosion, as a myriad sparks of divine light or holiness or goodness, each trapped within a kelipah (pl. kelipot: peels, shells, husks — something that traps its content within). Kelipot are the evil that conceals holiness. Another way to think about kelipot is that they are the spiritual, emotional, and psychological obstacles that separate us from our better selves.

Kelipot are often identified with idolatry. In the case of those who engage in violent and despicable “honor killings” the object of their idolatrous worship is themselves and their images: pure narcissism. They hold their self-image more valuable, more important, more sacred than even the life of their child.

It is easy to condemn “honor killings” but how many of us are tainted (as Rabbi Levi Yitzhak put it) with this sort of idolatry? How many of us worry that our children will not reflect well on us, and out of this primacy speak to, pressure, and direct them in matters of love, marriage, education, and career in ways that serve our purposes more than theirs? How many of us worry how our spouse or partner reflects on us? Or how our house, car, clothing, or other material possessions reflect on us?

In the end — after all kelipot, facades, and excuses are stripped away — the only thing that reflects on our honor is us: our choices and our behavior. Are we reinforcing kelipot, and preventing God’s holiness from shining into our lives, or are we obliterating the kelipot and freeing holiness to enter the world, thereby adding to the stock of goodness in the world? Remember that ripple effect? It happens as much with good as with evil.

© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman