Though the great Abraham Joshua Heschel's theology places him firmly outside the view of nondualistic conceptions of God, his writing remains a constant source of inspiration and challenge to me. The following are two quotes from him which, while not theological, present a deep sense of the struggles of observant Jewish life. Both regard prayer, an activity with which I struggle frequently in two ways: 1. because of my nondual theology, I do not suppose that my prayers are efficacious in any external sense. In a traditional Jewish view of prayer, especially from the Hasidic perspective, an individual's prayer can cause cosmic change. I miss that power even though that power comes with much philosophical and ethical baggage that I cannot abide. 2. Given my understanding that prayer is really an internal meditative practice, it is often difficult to "make" myself pray the three daily Jewish services (shacharit, mincha, and maariv) even though I know that my resulting mindset will be improved. The question of, course, is: why do I feel obligated to "make" myself do them in the first place? This leads to a discussion too long for this particular post, but suffice it to say that I have adopted halacha as the basis of order and meaning in my life and seek to live by it and for it and through it and of it. In any case, I think that Heschel's words speak to both of my concerns:
1: "A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought: to surpass his needs, to do more that he understands in order to understand more than he does..."
2: "I am not always in the mood to pray. I do not always have the vision or the strength to a say a word in the presence of God. But when I am am weak, it is the law that gives me strength; when my vision is dim, it is duty that gives me insight."
Shabbat Shalom.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Passover/Freedom/Providence
The Third Oven
My Torah for Pesach 2010
There is a sense of schizophrenia at the heart of the Jewish educational experience. No where is this disorderly mindset more evident than in the Jewish history of ovens.
From as early as I can remember, my Hebrew school class would make an annual trip to the local Chabad bakery in the weeks preceding Passover. Filled with the excitement that always comes with a field trip and a sense of wonder and confusion at the long beards and sense of urgency of the Chabadniks, we learned the rules and procedures of making our own matzo. We also learned the elaborate halachic guidelines these bakers had to follow to make and keep their ovens kosher for Passover. Here’s a summary from the Orthodox Union website:
Kashering an Oven: 1. Clean walls, floor, door, ceiling and racks thoroughly with an abrasive cleaner (for example, Easy-Off ) to remove tangible chametz. Pay special attention to the temperature gauge, the window in the door and the edges of the oven chamber. Black discolorations that are flush with the metal do not have to be removed. 2. Once the oven is clean, it is preferable that it remain unused for twenty- four hours. 3. Place the racks back into the oven, and turn the oven to broil for one and-a-half hours. 4. Pesach food or pans may be placed directly on the door or racks once the oven has been kashered.
Note, we pay such careful attention to how to do this koshering that there are even divergent opinions about how to do this. Here’s one of my favorite: “The method of kashering described above is based on the ruling of Rav Aharon Kotler zt’l. However, Rav Moshe ruled that the oven must be kashered with a blowtorch.”
Now in all honesty, as a child, who was paying attention to these Rabbis drone on about how to kasher the oven? My friends and I just wanted to get our dough and start rolling it out. We wanted to use the roller which creates the perforations in the piece of matzo. Most importantly, we wanted to try and retrieve the piece of matzo that WE made from the oven when it was done.
Despite the fact that we live in another state, last year, my son, attending our Modern orthodox preschool, made the trip to the local Chabad house and went through the same process. He brought his matzo home. I told him I was proud of him. And I was touched by the continuity of Jewish education.
The second ovens we learn so much about in Hebrew school are the crematoria of the Nazis. We sit, fifth and sixth graders, hearing these fantastically foreign synonyms for death: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belson. The ovens in these camps were used with just as much urgency as the ones in the Chabad bakery: Initially, 340 corpses could be burned every 24 hours after the installation of the three furnaces, but after a fourth furnace was installed, 1,440 corpses could be burned in this crematorium every 24 hours.
These cremations were horrifying to Jewish people for two reasons. First, because of the halachic expectation in the resurrection of the dead in the messianic era, cremation was a direct affront to Jewish hope in redemption. Second, and perhaps more important to our modern sensibilities, the horror of the crematoria was that the mounds of ashes they produced served to destroy human individuality and familial and communal history. In being reduced to ashes, our individual human value was negated. There would never be any visiting lost relatives at a peaceful graveside. There would never be any leaving of flowers or rocks on headstones on a breezy Sunday afternoon. There would be no speeches extolling the deeds of the lost; a child’s ready but mischievous smile, the way this father was always so patient when teaching his son how to tie his shoes, the way that mother’s laugh filled the house whenever she remembered how her friend Gittel tripped down the stairs on the first day of school. The crematoria reminded us that we go from ashes to ashes, dust to dust a bit too literally.
So what do we make of this dissonance?
It’s important to state the paradox clearly:
We are sitting here at the Passover seder. We have just read the “maggid” or “retelling” portion of the Haggadah. Passover (and its associated ovens and matzo) is a holiday in which we retell the story of God’s miraculous redemption of the Jewish people from slavery. In the Exodus story, God PHYSICALLY and OVERTLY intervenes in human history to alleviate suffering and injustice. We re-tell this story every year, and for many (though some Rabbinic authorities beg to differ) this re-telling is the centerpiece of the seder. On the other hand, we’re taught about the crematoria and The Shoah: We’re taught a story in which God IN NO WAY intervenes in human history to alleviate the tremendous suffering and injustice of our world. Some Jews in the camps prayed vehemently for God to intercede, yet God hid his face. At the height of paradox, there is the story of how a group of Jews in one particular camp, during Passover, requested from a Nazi guard that he procure them some matzo so they could observe the mitzvah of eating matzo on Pesach! They wanted to observe a holiday in which God’s power and justice is evident in the midst of a real life situation in which his silence was deafening.
And here we sit with the knowledge of both ovens. What are we doing?
I would like to suggest that one answer may lie in learning about a third, famous Jewish oven. In the Talmud, (Bava Metzia 59a and 59b), we are told the story of “The Oven of Achnai.” So as not to bore you with the halachic minutiae of the argument in the Talmud, suffice it to say that the Rabbis were having a machloket, a Talumdic debate, over the proper ritual construction of a particular oven. The content of the dispute is beside the point here. The radical part of the story comes with the disputation. It pits R. Eliezer against “The Sages.” We are told, “R. Eliezer advanced all the arguments in the world but the sages did not accept his arguments. R. Eliezer said to them, if the halacha accords with me let this carob tree prove it…whereupon the carob tree uprooted from its place and moved one hundred yards. Unconvinced, the sages said, ‘you cannot bring proof from a carob tree!’ R. Eliezer then said, if the halacha accords with me, let the water canal prove it, whereupon the water in the water canal flowed backward. The sages said, ‘you cannot bring proof from a water canal.’ R. Eliezer then said to them, if the halacha accords with me, let the walls of this study hall prove it, whereupon the walls of the study hall leaned and were about to fall. The Sages remained unconvinced. So R. Eliezer went big: If the halacha accords with me, let heaven prove it, whereupon a Heavenly voice went forth and proclaimed: “what argument do you have with R. Eliezer…the halacha accords with him!” Upon hearing this, R’ Yehoshua jumped to his feet and declared: “The Torah is NOT in Heaven!!!” then R. Yirmiyah said: “This means that we pay no heed to a heavenly echo in matters of halacha for the Torah was already given to man at Mount Sinai.” How does God respond???? “God was laughing and saying ‘My children have prevailed over me, My children have prevailed over me!”
What a radical story. The Torah is not in heaven, and in the story, God is pleased by this human initiative this human chutzpah!
So how does this help with our paradox? We don’t live in the world of the Exodus. We tell these Bubbamanses every year about God’s powerful hand and about his mighty word, but we know about the ovens of Auschwitz, we know about the babies who die of cancer, we know about the people afflicted with diseases who suffer daily and desire to be whole. We know about the violent child sex trade in east Asia. We see unabated and unpunished injustice and suffering in our world every day.
Presented with this paradox, Jews have posited some answers: we’re waiting for justice when the Mashiach comes—it is then when justice will be upheld!. We wait and wait and wait. But, to quote Rabbi David Hartman, this is living a life in deferral. This is not living life at all. This is waiting for life to begin!
Another option is to just keep telling the bubbamanses about when everything was better. Keep living in memory. Let the memory that God ONCE may have done these things be enough! In this vein, we read the Torah as a kind of scrapbook of great times we had with God, not necessarily as a promise about the future.
BUT, I’d like to offer a third option. We are enjoined, we are COMMANDED to live this seder night and tell this Exdous story as if it had and has and is happening to us! It is the foolish son in the Haggadah who separates himself from the community and sees these events as distinct from his own personal experience! He sees it as a mere memory, as part of the past. So what do we do?
We might maintain hope, but we live by the lesson of the Oven at Achnai. The Torah is not in heaven!!!! God is not coming to help us! WE are the keepers of justice. We are the makers of society. We are responsible for helping the orphan and the widow. When the Jews left Mitzrayim all they brought was matzo. When they ran out, they were sustained directly by the hand of God in the form of manna that fell from the sky! But we don’t do that. Look at our seder table! We are supposed to act as if the Exodus is happening to us! Look how much food we’ve prepared! By all rights, we should pack a backpack with matzo and go hike the Appalachian trail with no supplies! Certainly that would make the message of the Exodus more real to us! But we don’t live on Manna. We live on well stocked tables and preparation because we know that the story of the Oven of Achnai is true! We know that the Torah is not in heaven. We know we have to pack sandwiches when we’re going on long trips and that we need to buy life insurance to make sure our widows and orphans are cared for.
What role can Jewish ritual and spiritual life play then? There is value in the Bubbamanses. There is value in memory. There is value in hoping for redemption. But maybe the ashes belching forth from the crematoria of Auschwitz were smoke signals telling us that our Jewish lives were not to be lived in deferment without action, Manna without kugel and brisket. We remember, we hope, but we also know that proof cannot be brought from a carob tree, or from a water canal, or even from God’s voice. Proof and order and meaning must be brought by us. Tonight we celebrate freedom. Freedom from physical slavery yes. But also freedom from the psychological slavery of being trapped in memory and adrift in Quixotic hope. We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork, not because of the memory of someone else doing it—how long can that sustain practice in our own contemporary world??? We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork not because of the eternal hope that one day, putting on tefillin will bring the Moshiach or that one of prayers will cure a baby of cancer. No! If we do that, we ignore the ovens of Auschwitz and toil in the fields of Egypt. Were their prayers and hopes and dreams any less valid than our own? Is it ethically plausible or acceptable that God hid his face from those millions but will answer us? No, that’s a self-idolatry!
We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork. We give tzedakah. We go grocery shopping for the elderly. We go to political marches and protests. We celebrate the founding of the State of Israel, we do all of these things because we realize we must seek the divine presence and face (whatever that means for each of us as individuals) because he is no longer (or may have never been) seeking us! This seems fatalistic but it is the opposite. This is the beauty of the human condition. Rav Soloveitchik, perhaps the most famous Rabbi of the 20th century, believed that “hester panim” (the hiding of God’s face) was a great gift—it leads to the intense and absolute dignity of human endeavor. That is the beauty of human freedom. In a world seemingly devoid of justice and divine care, WE demonstrate our freedom and agency and dignity by postulating out OWN justice and care in imitation of the God we love in memory and hope.
This is how Sinai is still happening now! Tonight! This is the definition of the ongoing revelation: we finish His sentences and anticipate His thoughts so he need not speak or do. And like we’re told He was in stories, we will imitate now, like we’re promised he will be in the future, we will create here. We are not slaves.
So which oven are we going to live by? Will we live in the memory of the Chabad house, where we act as if the kosher level of the oven facilitates miraculous redemption? Will we live by the memory of the ovens of Auschwitz in which our redemption was totally subject to the mean apathy of historical circumstance? Where control was totally in the hands of others while we prayed in vain for the actualization of the God of the old stories? Or will we live by the lesson of the Oven at Achnai, where human ingenuity and dignity serves as the basis for the best justice we can hope for. Perfect, Divine justice? Maybe not. But maybe justice and hope created by our own hands, cooked in our own ovens, in our own homes, with our own families trumps a life in deferment of waiting and maybe this is freedom of slavery. Maybe this is the true escape from Pharoah. Maybe this is how we identify and claim the specific piece of matzo that we rolled and baked. Maybe the point of that trip to the Chabad bakery was to teach us to make our own matzo, identify it when it comes out of the oven and live by it.
My Torah for Pesach 2010
There is a sense of schizophrenia at the heart of the Jewish educational experience. No where is this disorderly mindset more evident than in the Jewish history of ovens.
From as early as I can remember, my Hebrew school class would make an annual trip to the local Chabad bakery in the weeks preceding Passover. Filled with the excitement that always comes with a field trip and a sense of wonder and confusion at the long beards and sense of urgency of the Chabadniks, we learned the rules and procedures of making our own matzo. We also learned the elaborate halachic guidelines these bakers had to follow to make and keep their ovens kosher for Passover. Here’s a summary from the Orthodox Union website:
Kashering an Oven: 1. Clean walls, floor, door, ceiling and racks thoroughly with an abrasive cleaner (for example, Easy-Off ) to remove tangible chametz. Pay special attention to the temperature gauge, the window in the door and the edges of the oven chamber. Black discolorations that are flush with the metal do not have to be removed. 2. Once the oven is clean, it is preferable that it remain unused for twenty- four hours. 3. Place the racks back into the oven, and turn the oven to broil for one and-a-half hours. 4. Pesach food or pans may be placed directly on the door or racks once the oven has been kashered.
Note, we pay such careful attention to how to do this koshering that there are even divergent opinions about how to do this. Here’s one of my favorite: “The method of kashering described above is based on the ruling of Rav Aharon Kotler zt’l. However, Rav Moshe ruled that the oven must be kashered with a blowtorch.”
Now in all honesty, as a child, who was paying attention to these Rabbis drone on about how to kasher the oven? My friends and I just wanted to get our dough and start rolling it out. We wanted to use the roller which creates the perforations in the piece of matzo. Most importantly, we wanted to try and retrieve the piece of matzo that WE made from the oven when it was done.
Despite the fact that we live in another state, last year, my son, attending our Modern orthodox preschool, made the trip to the local Chabad house and went through the same process. He brought his matzo home. I told him I was proud of him. And I was touched by the continuity of Jewish education.
The second ovens we learn so much about in Hebrew school are the crematoria of the Nazis. We sit, fifth and sixth graders, hearing these fantastically foreign synonyms for death: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belson. The ovens in these camps were used with just as much urgency as the ones in the Chabad bakery: Initially, 340 corpses could be burned every 24 hours after the installation of the three furnaces, but after a fourth furnace was installed, 1,440 corpses could be burned in this crematorium every 24 hours.
These cremations were horrifying to Jewish people for two reasons. First, because of the halachic expectation in the resurrection of the dead in the messianic era, cremation was a direct affront to Jewish hope in redemption. Second, and perhaps more important to our modern sensibilities, the horror of the crematoria was that the mounds of ashes they produced served to destroy human individuality and familial and communal history. In being reduced to ashes, our individual human value was negated. There would never be any visiting lost relatives at a peaceful graveside. There would never be any leaving of flowers or rocks on headstones on a breezy Sunday afternoon. There would be no speeches extolling the deeds of the lost; a child’s ready but mischievous smile, the way this father was always so patient when teaching his son how to tie his shoes, the way that mother’s laugh filled the house whenever she remembered how her friend Gittel tripped down the stairs on the first day of school. The crematoria reminded us that we go from ashes to ashes, dust to dust a bit too literally.
So what do we make of this dissonance?
It’s important to state the paradox clearly:
We are sitting here at the Passover seder. We have just read the “maggid” or “retelling” portion of the Haggadah. Passover (and its associated ovens and matzo) is a holiday in which we retell the story of God’s miraculous redemption of the Jewish people from slavery. In the Exodus story, God PHYSICALLY and OVERTLY intervenes in human history to alleviate suffering and injustice. We re-tell this story every year, and for many (though some Rabbinic authorities beg to differ) this re-telling is the centerpiece of the seder. On the other hand, we’re taught about the crematoria and The Shoah: We’re taught a story in which God IN NO WAY intervenes in human history to alleviate the tremendous suffering and injustice of our world. Some Jews in the camps prayed vehemently for God to intercede, yet God hid his face. At the height of paradox, there is the story of how a group of Jews in one particular camp, during Passover, requested from a Nazi guard that he procure them some matzo so they could observe the mitzvah of eating matzo on Pesach! They wanted to observe a holiday in which God’s power and justice is evident in the midst of a real life situation in which his silence was deafening.
And here we sit with the knowledge of both ovens. What are we doing?
I would like to suggest that one answer may lie in learning about a third, famous Jewish oven. In the Talmud, (Bava Metzia 59a and 59b), we are told the story of “The Oven of Achnai.” So as not to bore you with the halachic minutiae of the argument in the Talmud, suffice it to say that the Rabbis were having a machloket, a Talumdic debate, over the proper ritual construction of a particular oven. The content of the dispute is beside the point here. The radical part of the story comes with the disputation. It pits R. Eliezer against “The Sages.” We are told, “R. Eliezer advanced all the arguments in the world but the sages did not accept his arguments. R. Eliezer said to them, if the halacha accords with me let this carob tree prove it…whereupon the carob tree uprooted from its place and moved one hundred yards. Unconvinced, the sages said, ‘you cannot bring proof from a carob tree!’ R. Eliezer then said, if the halacha accords with me, let the water canal prove it, whereupon the water in the water canal flowed backward. The sages said, ‘you cannot bring proof from a water canal.’ R. Eliezer then said to them, if the halacha accords with me, let the walls of this study hall prove it, whereupon the walls of the study hall leaned and were about to fall. The Sages remained unconvinced. So R. Eliezer went big: If the halacha accords with me, let heaven prove it, whereupon a Heavenly voice went forth and proclaimed: “what argument do you have with R. Eliezer…the halacha accords with him!” Upon hearing this, R’ Yehoshua jumped to his feet and declared: “The Torah is NOT in Heaven!!!” then R. Yirmiyah said: “This means that we pay no heed to a heavenly echo in matters of halacha for the Torah was already given to man at Mount Sinai.” How does God respond???? “God was laughing and saying ‘My children have prevailed over me, My children have prevailed over me!”
What a radical story. The Torah is not in heaven, and in the story, God is pleased by this human initiative this human chutzpah!
So how does this help with our paradox? We don’t live in the world of the Exodus. We tell these Bubbamanses every year about God’s powerful hand and about his mighty word, but we know about the ovens of Auschwitz, we know about the babies who die of cancer, we know about the people afflicted with diseases who suffer daily and desire to be whole. We know about the violent child sex trade in east Asia. We see unabated and unpunished injustice and suffering in our world every day.
Presented with this paradox, Jews have posited some answers: we’re waiting for justice when the Mashiach comes—it is then when justice will be upheld!. We wait and wait and wait. But, to quote Rabbi David Hartman, this is living a life in deferral. This is not living life at all. This is waiting for life to begin!
Another option is to just keep telling the bubbamanses about when everything was better. Keep living in memory. Let the memory that God ONCE may have done these things be enough! In this vein, we read the Torah as a kind of scrapbook of great times we had with God, not necessarily as a promise about the future.
BUT, I’d like to offer a third option. We are enjoined, we are COMMANDED to live this seder night and tell this Exdous story as if it had and has and is happening to us! It is the foolish son in the Haggadah who separates himself from the community and sees these events as distinct from his own personal experience! He sees it as a mere memory, as part of the past. So what do we do?
We might maintain hope, but we live by the lesson of the Oven at Achnai. The Torah is not in heaven!!!! God is not coming to help us! WE are the keepers of justice. We are the makers of society. We are responsible for helping the orphan and the widow. When the Jews left Mitzrayim all they brought was matzo. When they ran out, they were sustained directly by the hand of God in the form of manna that fell from the sky! But we don’t do that. Look at our seder table! We are supposed to act as if the Exodus is happening to us! Look how much food we’ve prepared! By all rights, we should pack a backpack with matzo and go hike the Appalachian trail with no supplies! Certainly that would make the message of the Exodus more real to us! But we don’t live on Manna. We live on well stocked tables and preparation because we know that the story of the Oven of Achnai is true! We know that the Torah is not in heaven. We know we have to pack sandwiches when we’re going on long trips and that we need to buy life insurance to make sure our widows and orphans are cared for.
What role can Jewish ritual and spiritual life play then? There is value in the Bubbamanses. There is value in memory. There is value in hoping for redemption. But maybe the ashes belching forth from the crematoria of Auschwitz were smoke signals telling us that our Jewish lives were not to be lived in deferment without action, Manna without kugel and brisket. We remember, we hope, but we also know that proof cannot be brought from a carob tree, or from a water canal, or even from God’s voice. Proof and order and meaning must be brought by us. Tonight we celebrate freedom. Freedom from physical slavery yes. But also freedom from the psychological slavery of being trapped in memory and adrift in Quixotic hope. We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork, not because of the memory of someone else doing it—how long can that sustain practice in our own contemporary world??? We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork not because of the eternal hope that one day, putting on tefillin will bring the Moshiach or that one of prayers will cure a baby of cancer. No! If we do that, we ignore the ovens of Auschwitz and toil in the fields of Egypt. Were their prayers and hopes and dreams any less valid than our own? Is it ethically plausible or acceptable that God hid his face from those millions but will answer us? No, that’s a self-idolatry!
We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork. We give tzedakah. We go grocery shopping for the elderly. We go to political marches and protests. We celebrate the founding of the State of Israel, we do all of these things because we realize we must seek the divine presence and face (whatever that means for each of us as individuals) because he is no longer (or may have never been) seeking us! This seems fatalistic but it is the opposite. This is the beauty of the human condition. Rav Soloveitchik, perhaps the most famous Rabbi of the 20th century, believed that “hester panim” (the hiding of God’s face) was a great gift—it leads to the intense and absolute dignity of human endeavor. That is the beauty of human freedom. In a world seemingly devoid of justice and divine care, WE demonstrate our freedom and agency and dignity by postulating out OWN justice and care in imitation of the God we love in memory and hope.
This is how Sinai is still happening now! Tonight! This is the definition of the ongoing revelation: we finish His sentences and anticipate His thoughts so he need not speak or do. And like we’re told He was in stories, we will imitate now, like we’re promised he will be in the future, we will create here. We are not slaves.
So which oven are we going to live by? Will we live in the memory of the Chabad house, where we act as if the kosher level of the oven facilitates miraculous redemption? Will we live by the memory of the ovens of Auschwitz in which our redemption was totally subject to the mean apathy of historical circumstance? Where control was totally in the hands of others while we prayed in vain for the actualization of the God of the old stories? Or will we live by the lesson of the Oven at Achnai, where human ingenuity and dignity serves as the basis for the best justice we can hope for. Perfect, Divine justice? Maybe not. But maybe justice and hope created by our own hands, cooked in our own ovens, in our own homes, with our own families trumps a life in deferment of waiting and maybe this is freedom of slavery. Maybe this is the true escape from Pharoah. Maybe this is how we identify and claim the specific piece of matzo that we rolled and baked. Maybe the point of that trip to the Chabad bakery was to teach us to make our own matzo, identify it when it comes out of the oven and live by it.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Choosing Your Calendar...
I discussed Parashat Bo (last week's haftarah) with my Rabbi and we came to this fascinating and beautiful place...
The commentaries of the parasha focus much on the different "starting points" of the Jewish Calendar. Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the "world" or creation, while this Hebrew month (Nissan) marks the first months of the year. In other words, there are several simultaneous calendars going on in Jewish life (lunar, solar, weekly, liturgical etc...)
What we opened up was that there are lots of calendars in every person's life and that the calendars we value most or incorporate most in our lives say much about our values and interests. There is the school calendar, the natural calendar, the familial calendar, the sports calendar, the National calendar, the Marital calendar, the biological (especially for women) calendar etc...The question arises: what do we do when events on our calendars conflict? What do we do when the NCAA finals are on TV during the night of the Passover Seder? What do we do when choosing between attending a funeral and maintaining joy on Shabbos?
Moreover, which calendars serve merely as reference and which are lived? Do we simply check in on sports scores in the paper or internet, or do we live each win and loss with our favorite teams? Do we take note of the changing seasons so that we can change our clothes, or do we smell and see each change in nature in a visceral way. Do we note the Jewish holidays so we can see when we're off from work and when we have to eat matzoh, or do we dance in the rhythm of the Jewish year--from the heights and ecstasy of the High Holidays in the Fall to the beauty of Sukkot, to the hope in the darkness of Hanukkah? Do we live for the weekend or does Shabbos live for us?
Modernity has increased the volume of calendars exponentially; these choices are difficult and complex and often, if you're like me, idiosyncratic. But even in so being, they always say something deep about a choice that seems so banal.
The commentaries of the parasha focus much on the different "starting points" of the Jewish Calendar. Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the "world" or creation, while this Hebrew month (Nissan) marks the first months of the year. In other words, there are several simultaneous calendars going on in Jewish life (lunar, solar, weekly, liturgical etc...)
What we opened up was that there are lots of calendars in every person's life and that the calendars we value most or incorporate most in our lives say much about our values and interests. There is the school calendar, the natural calendar, the familial calendar, the sports calendar, the National calendar, the Marital calendar, the biological (especially for women) calendar etc...The question arises: what do we do when events on our calendars conflict? What do we do when the NCAA finals are on TV during the night of the Passover Seder? What do we do when choosing between attending a funeral and maintaining joy on Shabbos?
Moreover, which calendars serve merely as reference and which are lived? Do we simply check in on sports scores in the paper or internet, or do we live each win and loss with our favorite teams? Do we take note of the changing seasons so that we can change our clothes, or do we smell and see each change in nature in a visceral way. Do we note the Jewish holidays so we can see when we're off from work and when we have to eat matzoh, or do we dance in the rhythm of the Jewish year--from the heights and ecstasy of the High Holidays in the Fall to the beauty of Sukkot, to the hope in the darkness of Hanukkah? Do we live for the weekend or does Shabbos live for us?
Modernity has increased the volume of calendars exponentially; these choices are difficult and complex and often, if you're like me, idiosyncratic. But even in so being, they always say something deep about a choice that seems so banal.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Redemption Can Be Simple?
There are many long treatises in Jewish philosophy about ways of bringing about redemption and what this redemption will be like. But I read the following in the introduction to my English translation to the Ishbitzer Rebbe's book Mei Hashiloach. This is the same text I quoted from before this shabbos about not believing in "graven principles."
Listen:
"Thus through personal refinement in accordance with [a person's] illumination...he develops the consciousness of the presence and intentions of God. In this way, redemption is really just a change of consciousness."
Friday, March 5, 2010
Nothing Is Carved In Stone: The Ishbitzer Rebbe on Parshat Ki Tissa
So this is one of my favorite interpretations not only of the breaking of the first set of commandments but also of the injunction that one shouldn't make graven images. Particularly relevant in this week's Torah portion because of the story of the Golden Calf, Jews (and others) have long taken the "graven image" commandment to be a prohibition regarding making idols. The Ishbitzer Rebbe, however, interprets this commandment differently (here and elsewhere in the Torah). In his Torah Commentary Mei Hashiloach or, Living Waters, The Ishbitzer writes:
"'Do not make molten gods.' (exodus 34:17)
"Molten or graven images means principles."
How revolutionary!!!! Elsewhere, he writes, "do not make any carved form, meaning positive commandments, and any image, meaning the prohibitive commandments, for nothing is revealed to man until it reaches its completion [and the Ishbitzer doesn't believe ANYTHING can 'reach its perfect completion' except God itself]"---
So...another way of saying this is: don't believe anything so much that it's as if carved in stone--not even that which is actually carved in stone! Jewish law bears this out--all mitzvot can be negated for the protection or preservation of life for instance, or for the preseravtion of human dignity (lying so as to not embarrass someone publically etc...) What a deep idea to think about. The question of course, is whether the rule about not interpreting anything in a "graven" or "fixed" way, is in itself, a graven law!
This also helps partially explain the decision by Moshe to destroy the Golden Calf by throwing the original tablets of the ten commandments at it--the commandments themselves (and the stones they are written upon) are not nearly as important as the dignity of the people who were humiliating themselves by supposing that God was ONLY in one place--the sin of the golden calf, from a nondual perspective, is not that they believed that the molten calf was God and that they prayed to it--because indeed, if all is God, so is the Golden Calf--the problem was in the supposition that God was ONLY in the Golden Calf, or more clearly, that God could be MORE in one thing than another. The Zohar and the Chassidic masters constantly teach us that Hashem both "fills and surrounds" the world.
Good Shabbos.
"'Do not make molten gods.' (exodus 34:17)
"Molten or graven images means principles."
How revolutionary!!!! Elsewhere, he writes, "do not make any carved form, meaning positive commandments, and any image, meaning the prohibitive commandments, for nothing is revealed to man until it reaches its completion [and the Ishbitzer doesn't believe ANYTHING can 'reach its perfect completion' except God itself]"---
So...another way of saying this is: don't believe anything so much that it's as if carved in stone--not even that which is actually carved in stone! Jewish law bears this out--all mitzvot can be negated for the protection or preservation of life for instance, or for the preseravtion of human dignity (lying so as to not embarrass someone publically etc...) What a deep idea to think about. The question of course, is whether the rule about not interpreting anything in a "graven" or "fixed" way, is in itself, a graven law!
This also helps partially explain the decision by Moshe to destroy the Golden Calf by throwing the original tablets of the ten commandments at it--the commandments themselves (and the stones they are written upon) are not nearly as important as the dignity of the people who were humiliating themselves by supposing that God was ONLY in one place--the sin of the golden calf, from a nondual perspective, is not that they believed that the molten calf was God and that they prayed to it--because indeed, if all is God, so is the Golden Calf--the problem was in the supposition that God was ONLY in the Golden Calf, or more clearly, that God could be MORE in one thing than another. The Zohar and the Chassidic masters constantly teach us that Hashem both "fills and surrounds" the world.
Good Shabbos.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
The Robe Not Taken: Levi Yitzchak on Parasha Tetzaveh
One of the reasons I love studying Chassidus is that these Rabbis use the weekly Torah portion merely as a jumping off point for their own philosophical and spiritual exegesis. The discussion of the Torah portion is often so short lived, it makes me laugh. This week is no exception when it comes to Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev's famous book Kedushat Levi. This is all to the good, because Reb Levi Yitzchak has offered us some beautiful gems which once again support my contention that nondualism has been a vibrant and essential part of Judaic thought well before the Neo-Hasidic movement popularized it.
Levi Yitzchak begins his exegesis thusly: "When reflecting...[man] realizes that even opposites possess a common denominator, they emerged into existence as an expression of the will of the One...It follows that they should perceive themselves as being part of the great whole...Unity in our world is the result of the recognition that we all share the same root. The awe inspired by this realization should inspire Unity."
Here we get as plain a statement as we can on the fundamental belief in nondual theology in a very traditional source.
In a nice turn of metaphor, Levi Yitzchak then shows how, though we seem or appear different to one another, this is only on the level of the constricted mind. He does this by discussing the different color robes that different High Priests donned. Apparently, though the details are unimportant to me, Yitzchak wore green, Yaakov wore red and both Moshe and Aaron wore their own particular choice of vestments (he doesn't say what). Then Levi Yitzchak says:
"Similarly, every tzaddik wears a garment tailored to his specific measurements. When these tzaddikim look at the Ein Sof [the most abstract of abstract notions of God, lit. 'without end']., they divest themselves of all that marks them as distinct individuals."
I always, and then is very idiosyncratic to me, interpret the term tzaddik to mean simply, holy person or righteous person. The rabbis surely meant someone who was without sin and in complete perfection. No matter. This line functions beautifully as an image of life as a nondual Jew. Each of us wears the "garments" [self-hood] tailored to our requirements, but in light of the expanded mind and the Unity of God, these "garments" divest! as they are all that mark us as distinct individuals.
Levi Yitzchak even goes on to show how the running and returning, the ratzo v'shov of our constricted and expanded mind, was commonplace among even the most holy tzaddikim:
"There are tzaddikim who after reaching the level of complete self-negation and attachment to the Ein Sof, nonetheless revert to a degree of individuality"
He even holds that with the understanding of the ideal nondual mindset, we get an answer to the long standing Rabbinic question as to why Moshe's name is not mentioned at all in this week's portion.
Levi Yitzchak holds that "it is a compliment to Moshe. It would not have been appropriate to mention his name, which is, after all, a reference to individuality at a time when Moshe had already ascended Sinai to be face to face with the Ein Sof and thus divested himself of his individuality."
When I read these passages, I am so full of fire and light. This is the Jewish life I want. These are the Jewish words that inspire me. These are the Rabbis who light my path. May we all deserve the title of tzaddik through our recognition of everything as One thing
Good Shabbos.
Levi Yitzchak begins his exegesis thusly: "When reflecting...[man] realizes that even opposites possess a common denominator, they emerged into existence as an expression of the will of the One...It follows that they should perceive themselves as being part of the great whole...Unity in our world is the result of the recognition that we all share the same root. The awe inspired by this realization should inspire Unity."
Here we get as plain a statement as we can on the fundamental belief in nondual theology in a very traditional source.
In a nice turn of metaphor, Levi Yitzchak then shows how, though we seem or appear different to one another, this is only on the level of the constricted mind. He does this by discussing the different color robes that different High Priests donned. Apparently, though the details are unimportant to me, Yitzchak wore green, Yaakov wore red and both Moshe and Aaron wore their own particular choice of vestments (he doesn't say what). Then Levi Yitzchak says:
"Similarly, every tzaddik wears a garment tailored to his specific measurements. When these tzaddikim look at the Ein Sof [the most abstract of abstract notions of God, lit. 'without end']., they divest themselves of all that marks them as distinct individuals."
I always, and then is very idiosyncratic to me, interpret the term tzaddik to mean simply, holy person or righteous person. The rabbis surely meant someone who was without sin and in complete perfection. No matter. This line functions beautifully as an image of life as a nondual Jew. Each of us wears the "garments" [self-hood] tailored to our requirements, but in light of the expanded mind and the Unity of God, these "garments" divest! as they are all that mark us as distinct individuals.
Levi Yitzchak even goes on to show how the running and returning, the ratzo v'shov of our constricted and expanded mind, was commonplace among even the most holy tzaddikim:
"There are tzaddikim who after reaching the level of complete self-negation and attachment to the Ein Sof, nonetheless revert to a degree of individuality"
He even holds that with the understanding of the ideal nondual mindset, we get an answer to the long standing Rabbinic question as to why Moshe's name is not mentioned at all in this week's portion.
Levi Yitzchak holds that "it is a compliment to Moshe. It would not have been appropriate to mention his name, which is, after all, a reference to individuality at a time when Moshe had already ascended Sinai to be face to face with the Ein Sof and thus divested himself of his individuality."
When I read these passages, I am so full of fire and light. This is the Jewish life I want. These are the Jewish words that inspire me. These are the Rabbis who light my path. May we all deserve the title of tzaddik through our recognition of everything as One thing
Good Shabbos.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Welcome and "The View From Nowhere"
So I've noticed that this blog now has several followers! I want to welcome everybody and encourage you to comment and question. I have so much to learn, truly. Knowing that I've now opened this blog up to public viewing, I will try to explain my postings and the terminology in them more fully; before, the blog was functioning more as a sort of repository for quotations and ideas I thought were interesting and was meant primarily for my own perusal.
That said, I had a deep moment today. I just finished reading a novel called 36 Arguments For The Existence of God. The title of the novel is meant somewhat ironically as it is the title of an appendix for an imaginary work of philosophy that the protagonist, Cass Seltzer has written in which he destroys all 36 known arguments for the existence of God through reason. This "fictional" appendix actually appears at the end of the very real book that's sitting on my lap right now. There is one scene in particular which I wanted to share as it has to do directly with this blog. Towards the end of the novel, Professor Cass Seltzer debates another professor regarding the proposition: God exists. Cass is arguing from the negative position though he does not see this as inconsistent with religious practice. I decided to quote a bit of what Cass argues about the goal of ethical life because I think it dovetails nicely with all the neo-hasidic and nondual Jewish beliefs I've been exploring here (the brackets are mine!):
"There is a point of view that's available to all of us. The philosopher Thomas Nagel called it the 'View from Nowhere.' When you view the fact that you happen to be the particular person you are from the vantage point of the View from Nowhere, that fact shrivels into insignificance. Of, course, we don't live our life from this perspective [ratzo v'shov!!!!!] We live inside our lives, where it's impossible not to feel one's self to matter. But still, that View from Nowhere is always available to us, reminding us that there's nothing inherently special or uniquely deserving about any of us, that it's just an accident that one happens to be who one happens to be. And the consequence of these reflections is this: if we can't live coherently without believing ourselves to matter, then we can't live coherently without extending the same mattering to everyone else. The work of ethics is the work of getting one's self to this vantage point and keeping it relevant to how one sees the world and acts. There are truths to discover in this process and they are the truths that make us change our behavior...and become moral grown-ups [as opposed to changing our behavior for fear of punishment or gain of reward]."
This was revelatory when I read it. It seems to me that this "View from Nowhere" is synonymous with bittul ha-yesh, or nullification of self that comes with the realization of the Oneness of reality. The "work of ethics" to achieve this outlook that "Cass" refers to is my own rationale for Jewish (or in general, religious) practice. The more one realizes this Unity, that Ein Od Milvado is true, the more one realizes our responsibility to one another and the Earth because ultimately, those differences are illusory even though we LIVE in the going and returning, the ratzo v'shov, of subjectivity and the View from Nowhere. This is beautiful because I think the contemplation of this View, or this nullification of self, informs both our subjectivity and our objectivity and that is the work.
That said, I had a deep moment today. I just finished reading a novel called 36 Arguments For The Existence of God. The title of the novel is meant somewhat ironically as it is the title of an appendix for an imaginary work of philosophy that the protagonist, Cass Seltzer has written in which he destroys all 36 known arguments for the existence of God through reason. This "fictional" appendix actually appears at the end of the very real book that's sitting on my lap right now. There is one scene in particular which I wanted to share as it has to do directly with this blog. Towards the end of the novel, Professor Cass Seltzer debates another professor regarding the proposition: God exists. Cass is arguing from the negative position though he does not see this as inconsistent with religious practice. I decided to quote a bit of what Cass argues about the goal of ethical life because I think it dovetails nicely with all the neo-hasidic and nondual Jewish beliefs I've been exploring here (the brackets are mine!):
"There is a point of view that's available to all of us. The philosopher Thomas Nagel called it the 'View from Nowhere.' When you view the fact that you happen to be the particular person you are from the vantage point of the View from Nowhere, that fact shrivels into insignificance. Of, course, we don't live our life from this perspective [ratzo v'shov!!!!!] We live inside our lives, where it's impossible not to feel one's self to matter. But still, that View from Nowhere is always available to us, reminding us that there's nothing inherently special or uniquely deserving about any of us, that it's just an accident that one happens to be who one happens to be. And the consequence of these reflections is this: if we can't live coherently without believing ourselves to matter, then we can't live coherently without extending the same mattering to everyone else. The work of ethics is the work of getting one's self to this vantage point and keeping it relevant to how one sees the world and acts. There are truths to discover in this process and they are the truths that make us change our behavior...and become moral grown-ups [as opposed to changing our behavior for fear of punishment or gain of reward]."
This was revelatory when I read it. It seems to me that this "View from Nowhere" is synonymous with bittul ha-yesh, or nullification of self that comes with the realization of the Oneness of reality. The "work of ethics" to achieve this outlook that "Cass" refers to is my own rationale for Jewish (or in general, religious) practice. The more one realizes this Unity, that Ein Od Milvado is true, the more one realizes our responsibility to one another and the Earth because ultimately, those differences are illusory even though we LIVE in the going and returning, the ratzo v'shov, of subjectivity and the View from Nowhere. This is beautiful because I think the contemplation of this View, or this nullification of self, informs both our subjectivity and our objectivity and that is the work.
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