Category Archives: Judaism

A Song of Ascents for Rosh Hashanah

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My new take on Psalm 126 – it feels just right for Rosh Hashanah.

Shanah Tovah U’Metukah – May you and may we all be blessed with a sweet and renewing New Year!

Psalm 126
My song of assent
I will return from this exile
wake up
from this bad dream
my crazy laughter’s busting out
I’m learning to sing
all over and over and over
again
only now do I know
you were there all along
coaxing me along to this
place of my return oh yes
you’ll bring me home
like water
roaring down dry river beds
I’ll be coming home
those who sowed with tears
will reap with joy
those who bury their pain deep
will soon gather
their bountiful harvest

More Poetry for Elul

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From the great Canadian-Jewish poet, Shulamis Yelin (1913-2002):

In your image,
in your image, God,
You made me in your image,
and I reach upward, seeking –
to be like You, God.

Just? Like You I’m vengeful.
Merciful? Like You I seek an understanding heart.
Jealous? Yes, I’m jealous
and iniquitous
and long suffering –
and like You
I dream to make a world,
(in miniature, God),
to do my bidding.

And loving I can be, yes, loving,
to a penitent, punished child.

Yet clearly, God, most clearly,
do I see in me your oneness,
your all-oneness,
your aloneness –
in my heart.

For Elul: All Things Must Pass

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ATb5FNci8%5D

For your Elul viewing/listening pleasure:

Here is a clip from the “Concert for George,” which was held in November 2002 on the first anniversary of George Harrison’s death. It was a star-studded affair organized by his family and arranged as a benefit for Harrison’s charitable foundation.

Among the many memorable moments in the concert was this performance of Harrison’s solo classic, “All Things Must Pass” sung by Paul McCartney. I find it quite moving to listen to the spiritual message of the song, doubly meaningful on this particular occasion. (Not to mention watching Harrison’s son Dhani – the spitting image of his father – playing backup guitar.)

All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
None of life’s strings can last
So, I must be on my way
And face another day

Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It’s not always going to be this grey

My Father, the Wandering Aramean…

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In this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, God instructs the Israelites, upon entering the Promised Land, to offer up the first fruits of their harvest. They are then to recite a short narrative of their history, beginning with their earliest ancestors and ending with their own arrival at the land.

This narrative, made famous by its central place in the Passover Haggadah, begins thus:

My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation…” (Deuteronomy 26:5)

The opening words of this passage have been the subject of considerable controversy for centuries. According to most commentators, the “wandering father” is identified as Jacob. This would certainly fit neatly into the Biblical narrative, as Jacob did indeed go down to Egypt with his sons during a period of famine.

In the traditional Passover Haggadah, however, the Rabbis translate the Hebrew “My father was a wandering Aramean” (“arami oved avi“) very differently.  By changing the vocalization of the Hebrew “oved” (“wandering”) to “ibed” (“destroyed”), they render the text to mean: “An Aramean sought to destroy my father.” (The Haggadah identifies this would-be murderer as Laban who, by threatening Jacob, “sought to uproot us all.”)

So which is it?

In true Jewish fashion, the debate rages on. Among the classical commentators, Rashi supports the Haggadah’s reading, while others, including Ibn Ezra adhere to the conventional interpretation. Rashbam accepts the “wandering Aramean” interpretation as well, but identifies the wanderer as Abraham rather than Jacob.

Beyond the fancy hermeneutics, however, I’m struck by the two spiritual models suggested by these respective translations. One highlights our wanderings, identifying our peoplehood with our collective seeeking – our desire to journey toward a better and more blessed future. The second model suggests we are essentially a hunted and hated people, forever on the run from those who would seek our destruction.

These two readings illuminate a critical question that inform our collective Jewish self-understanding to this very day.  Centuries later, the question remains: with which narrative will we identify?  The narrative in which we are the perpetual victim or the spiritual seeker? Does our story forever pit us against an eternal enemy – or does it ultimately celebrate our sacred purpose and the promise of blessing?

For Elul: Robi’s Letter

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Some more Elul reading material for you:

In March 2002 Robi Damelin’s 28 year old son, David, was shot and killed by a Palestinian while serving in the Israeli army. Robi has since become a leader in The Parents’ Circle, a group of Israeli and Palestinian families whose lives have been torn apart by violence and now work together for reconciliation and peace.

As part of her own work, Robi decided to take the courageous step of writing a letter to the mother of the man who killed her son.  I can think of nothing more appropriate to this season of our reconciliation than Robi’s profound words.

An excerpt:

After your son was captured, I spent many sleepless nights thinking about what to do, should I ignore the whole thing, or will I be true to my integrity and to the work that I am doing and try to find a way for closure and reconciliation. This is not easy for anyone and I am just an ordinary person not a saint I have now come to the conclusion that I would like to try to find a way to reconcile. Maybe this is difficult for you to understand or believe, but I know that in my heart it is the only path that I can chose, for if what I say is what I mean it is the only way.

Click below for the entire text:

Continue reading →

A Radio Story for Elul

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Your next homework assignment for the month of Elul is to listen to this recent piece from NPR’s “This American Life.”  I chose it because so much of our spiritual preparation during this season focuses on our struggle with change. Is it truly possible to turn our lives around?  How do we hold on to our faith in our ability to change – and the potential of others as well?

The hero of this story is an amazing woman named Ton’Nea Williams who, while working at a juvenile detention facility, befriended a boy named Kenneth and attempted to set his life on the right path. As you will hear, the story takes some unexpected twists and turns. I particularly admire it because it asks the most essential questions, but refuses to provide us with easy answers.

The program lasts approximately a 1/2 hour, but trust me, this story is well worth your time – and is utterly appropriate to our Elul preparations.

A Meditation for Elul: Yes, God Loves You

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As I mentioned in a previous post, during the month of Elul, I’ll be offering occasional “Elul Meditations” that I hope will help with your spiritual preparation for the Days of Awe. This one is an excerpt from a Rosh Hashanah sermon I gave ten years ago entitled “The Season of Our Loving.”

If we don’t relate to a personal, supernatural God on High, what could it possibly mean to pray prayers that say “God loves us?”  Maybe – just maybe – it means that our love for one another is but a hint of something much greater: an infinite place of unconditional love that pervades the universe. Perhaps the simplest way we experience God’s love is when we look into the eyes of our own loved ones. I am reminded of Jacob’s unbearably touching words, the words that come when he finally reconciles with his beloved brother Esau: “to see your face is to see the face of God.” Could it be possible that when we love another, we are tapping into a well that connects us with a transcendent love greater than anything we can possibly imagine?

Ahavat Olam – “with an unending love you love us, Adonai, our God.” I understand this prayer as much more than simply a tribal statement of faith about God’s exclusive gift of Torah to the people Israel. At its most profound level, this prayer expresses our sense that there is a source of unconditional love that surrounds all peoples always – an “Ahavat Olam.” It is reflected in our love for one another, but it is not ultimately dependant upon it. For if love is only a transient feeling or sensation, then it is not truly eternal. Perhaps when we say “God loves us,” we are simply saying that this life force – this love force – is an elemental part of our lives and our world. Like the love we share with true loved ones, it has a transformative power. It connects us in a profound way. It protects and validates us. It helps us to overcome our solitariness. It keeps us safe.

Is The Bible Destroying Creation?

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From this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Shoftim:

When in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy (“bal tashchit”) its trees, wielding the ax against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you in the city? Only trees that you know do not yield food may be destroyed.” (Deuteronomy 20:19-20)

It’s a tribute to the subversive creativity of Talmudic tradition that the Rabbis could take a text such as this – coming from a litany of Biblical laws concerning warfare – and transform it into Jewish tradition’s foundational environmental commandment.

Indeed, the sages of the Talmud would eventually apply the term bal tashchit (“do not destroy”) to apply to issues far transcending concern over fruit-bearing trees during wartime.  The concept “bal tashchit” eventually became a Jewish legal term referring to the destruction of natural resources on a wide scale, ranging from the wanton killing of animals (Talmud Hullin 7b) to the wasting of fuel (Talmud Shabbat 67b).

Since the Jewish imperative to care for the environment is Biblically based, it might come as a surprise to learn that many in the environmental movement blame Biblical tradition for promoting the exploitation of the earth’s natural resources.  I still remember well when Time Magazine promoted environmental concerns by choosing Earth as “Planet of the Year”  in 1989.  In its cover story, Time made the following pointed observation:

Humanity’s current predatory relationship with nature reflects a man-centered world view that has evolved over the ages. Almost every society has had its myths about the earth and its origins. The ancient Chinese depicted Chaos as an enormous egg whose parts separated into earth and sky, yin and yang. The Greeks believed Gaia, the earth, was created immediately after Chaos and gave birth to the gods. In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature — the soil, forest, sea — was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it.

The Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a radically different concept. The earth was the creation of a monotheistic God, who, after shaping it, ordered its inhabitants, in the words of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” The idea of dominion could be interpreted as an invitation to use nature as a convenience.

Ouch.

In fairness, it should be said that the key word phrase in the above is “could be interpreted as.” We might say it is not Biblical tradition per se, but rather a corrupt misinterpretation of the Bible (specifically the oft-quoted Genesis 1:28) we might blame for introducing this “radical new concept.”

If Genesis 1 teaches us anything at all, it is that creation is the sacred product of a divine process. In this context, God does not simply hand the earth over to humanity so that we may run roughshod over creation as we see fit.  In this regard, the Torah’s use of the term “dominion” (“kivshuha“) clearly denotes mastery as responsibility, not exploitation.

This point is powerfully driven home by the interpretation of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who commented on the Deuteronomy verse above by saying that humanity’s careless waste of God’s creation is nothing short of idolatry:

Yea, “Do not destroy anything” is the first and most general call of God… If you should now raise your hand to play a childish game, to indulge in senseless rage, wishing to destroy that which you should only use, wishing to exterminate that which you should only master, if you should regard the beings beneath you as objects without rights, not perceiving God Who created them, and therefore desire that they feel the might of your presumptuous mood, instead of using them only as the means of wise human activity – then God’s call proclaims to you, “Do not destroy anything!

Only if you use the things around you for wise human purposes, sanctified by the word of My teaching, only then do you have the right over them which I have given you as a human. However, if you destroy, if you ruin, at that moment you are not a human but an animal and have no right to the things around you. I lent them to you for wise use only; never forget that I lent them to you. As soon as you use them unwisely, be it the greatest or the smallest, you commit treachery against My world, you commit murder and robbery against My property, you sin against Me!”  This is what God calls unto you, and with this call does God represent the greatest and the smallest against you and grants the smallest as also the greatest a right against your presumptuousness…

…In truth, there is no one nearer to idolatry than one who can disregard the fact that creation and its creatures are the property of God, who presumes also to have the right, having the might, to destroy them according to a presumptuous act of will. Yes, that one is already serving the most powerful idols – anger, pride, and above all, ego, which in its passion regards itself as the master of things. (Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb, 56:397-398)

As Rabbi Hirsh would have it, it is not Western religious tradition, but rather the idolatrous twisting of this tradition that has led humanity to its “current predatory relationship with nature.” If we do indeed “use nature as a convenience,” it is not the Torah, but rather own “anger, pride, and ego” upon which we must ultimately lay blame.

“As Long as There are Slaughterhouses, There Will be Battlefields”

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When the Lord enlarges your territory, as (God) has promised you, and say. “I shall eat some meat.” for you have the urge to eat meat, you may eat meat whenever you wish. (Deuteronomy 12:20)

Though the Jewish dietary laws of kashrut allow for meat-eating, Jewish tradition is generally ambivalent about humanity’s carnivorous inclinations. To wit, the verse above from this week’s Torah portion Parashat Re’eh: note that it does not command but rather permits the consumption of meat.

According to Jewish law, the meat referred to in the verse above is known as b’sar ta’avah, “meat of lust.”  By all indications, the Rabbis did not consider meat-eating to be a necessity for life; it was, rather an accommodation to our “lesser angels.”  Orthodox rabbi and Torah scholar, Rabbi J. David Bleich puts it well: “Jewish tradition does not command carnivorous behavior.” Likewise, noted Torah commentator Nehama Leibowitz comments on the above Torah verse by pointing out that the Torah grants permission to eat meat rather grudgingly. She concludes that while humanity has been granted dominion over the animal world, we may not treat them with wanton disregard – and that God allows a “barely tolerated dispensation” to slaughter animals for our consumption. (“Studies on Bereshit,” p. 77)

It’s particularly noteworthy that Adam and Eve, the world’s first humans who lived in an idealized Edenic world, were in fact vegetarians. (Genesis 1:29) It was not until after the Great Flood that God told Noah and his descendents that they would be allowed to eat meat:

Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I give you all these.  (Genesis 9:3)

Even here, however, God makes it clear that animals cannot be eaten along with their blood (a commandment that is repeated in this week’s portion.) Later in the Torah, more explicit dietary rules will be commanded through Moses.

It might be said that one of the lessons God learns from the Noah story is that humankind has, if you pardon the expression, a taste for blood. Some posit that this new permission to eat meat was a kind of divine compromise – allowing humanity to satiate its bestial, carnivorous desire, while at the same time restricting our blood lust so that it will never again run amok à la the generation of Noah.

At the end of the day, however, it’s worth asking: can we even conceive of such a thing as “restricted blood lust?” If Torah considers vegetarianism the ideal, could it be that b’sar ta’avah really just little more than an oxymoron at the end of the day?

Noted vegetarian Leo Tolstoy famously stated,

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.

A more contemporary writer, Jonathan Safran Foer, has become an eloquent advocate for the socio-ethical imperatives of vegetarianism. Click above and below to hear him discuss these ideas as explored in his latest book, “Eating Animals.”

The Shema: A Parsing

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Listen Israel, “YHVH is our God, YHVH is One!” (Deuternomy, 6:4)

Listen Israel:  The most central prayer in Jewish tradition is not a prayer at all. Prayers by definition are directed to God. These words are directed collectively inward. They indicate that we are about to read a statement of faith, of purpose, a sacred mission statement, if you will.

YHVH is our God: “YHVH” is God’s ineffable name, the unpronounceable, unknowable proper name of the God that in ancient times, the Israelite nation claimed as its own.

Indeed, in the theological marketplace of the ancient Near East, every nation had its own national god.  In its original context, then: “Listen, Israel, there may be many gods from which to choose, out there, but YHVH is our god.”

ADONAI is One!: Some choose to translate the word“echad” (“one”) as “alone.” This suggests an imperative: the Israelites must worship YHVH as God and no other.

Others understand this phrase as a statement of theological chutzpah. According to this reading, “YHVH is One”  means that there actually is none else: “You know those other deities the nations call “gods?” Well they’re not actually gods at all. At the end of the day, Israel’s god is the only God there is.”

Religious exceptionalism? Some might choose read these words that way. But on a much deeper level, the words “YHVH is One” express a profoundly universal world view. Our sacred mission statement is a reminder that while we live in a universe of diversity and multiplicity, this variety is ultimately part of a much larger sublime Unity that moves through us all.

Parsed thus:

Listen! Amidst the raucous, cacophony that resounds throughout our world, we may yet discern one Voice ever calling to us.  This voice goes by many names; we call it YHVH. Let us attune ourselves to it with all our heart, all our soul, and all our might.,.