In a 2017 New York Times article, author Ann Patchett wrote about her endeavor to do just that. At the start of the experiment, she created a list of rules for herself: she could purchase groceries, go out to restaurants, and replace any product that she had used up, but only after ensuring that she didn’t have an extra lying around the house. The results were astonishing. In lieu of running to the store to buy a new lip balm, she opened her cabinet to discover that she already owned five. She saved countless hours, as her two-day searches for a perfect new outfit were now out of the question. She expressed her love in meaningful ways, offering to clean a friend’s home or to watch their child instead of purchasing them an item of clothing. It turns out that gifts of time can be more valuable than those of money.
Though we live in a society largely focused on material consumption, Patchett quickly adjusted to her new lifecycle. “It doesn’t take so long for a craving to subside,” she reflected. “Once I got the hang of giving shopping up, it wasn’t much of a trick. The trickier part was living with the startling abundance that had become glaringly obvious when I stopped trying to get more…I could see what I already had, and what actually mattered.” Indeed, her life changed in such incredible ways that she has yet to end her experiment.
But 3,000 years before Patchett’s experiment the Torah taught us about the joys of limiting our frantic consumption. In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Behar, we receive an interesting set of instructions about agriculture in the Land of Israel:
“When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a sabbath of the Eternal. Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of the Eternal” (Lev. 25:2-5).
Much as modern industrial societies center around consumption, the society of ancient Israel revolved around agriculture. To suspend all agriculture for an entire year must have seemed unimaginable to the Israelites. Indeed, in next week’s Torah portion, God outlines the harsh punishments for violating the laws of the sabbatical year (called shemita in Hebrew), showing us just how tempting it was to keep farming, to keep producing, even when God said to stop. God also anticipates the very real concern of how the people will sustain themselves during this seventh year: “And should you ask, ‘What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?’ I will ordain my blessing for you in the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufficient for three years” (Leviticus 25:20-22).
Millenia later, we now know the practical wisdom of this policy, as research and experience has shown that over-farming leads to soil erosion, habitat loss, and water waste. Land that is over-farmed will eventually become arid, and the soil will be unable to sustain the growth of crops. But there is a spiritual purpose to the shemita system as well. By ceasing production for an entire year, the Israelites were able to discover and appreciate the abundance that already existed in their lives. They could eat what they had harvested in past years, and it would be enough. They could curb their desire to consume without end. They could honor the needs of the land, and thereby honor themselves.
Our impulse to consume is not unique to the modern era; humans have always wanted the latest and greatest version of anything, from wheat and grapes to phones and fashions. But the Torah reminds us that there are times to stop pursuing the next best thing. We already have the bounty we need, if we only stopped seeking, stopped searching, and simply noticed.
The Jewish festival of Shavuot begins at sundown on Saturday night. Shavuot, which means “weeks” in Hebrew, is the culmination of seven weeks of counting days from the second night of Passover until now. It is the two month period between the Exodus from Egypt and the journey to the top of Mount Sinai where, tradition teaches, Moses received the Torah from God. Shavuot is the third of the three “pilgrimage” festivals in the Torah, which, along with Sukkot and Passover, hold central to their observance a number of ethical mandates which are essential doctrines of Jewish civilization.
One, that the God of the Universe freed the Jewish people from slavery under Pharaoh with “an outstretched arm and signs and wonders.” Remember the Ten Plagues from your Passover Seders seven weeks ago? For more than 3,000 years we’ve re-enacted this drama in order to teach the values of remembrance, freedom and deliverance to every generation. Memory is a strand of Jewish DNA.
Two, that there is no such thing as freedom without the Law. Total freedom is chaos, not unlike the “formless and void” of the pre-Genesis universe. Jewish Biblical creation mythology posits that the creative process at the beginning of all time was a process of Divine ordering. It is structure, forming, shaping, naming—that is the real work of creation. It is why the rabbis of the Talmud argued that this process is an eternal, ongoing covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people. Unlike the Jeffersonian American ideal of a God who starts a clock and then steps away, Judaism’s notion of creation is one that requires constant attention, ongoing work, the sanding and smoothing and polishing of the stones of human existence. The road to the good and the making of peace is our job here on Earth. Rabbi Tarfon said in the first century, “You are not obligated to complete the task but neither are you free to desist from it.” We are all obligated to do our part, in every generation. From Mount Sinai to the Talmud to today, the work of understanding God’s will, of discernment and enactment, is, well, a process. Law is dynamic, evolving, adaptive. It is a structure that requires constant maintenance in order to provide the undergirding necessary to build a just society.
The third ethical mandate teaches us the importance of empathy and understanding the other. It insists that while the Jews have their own unique story to share with the world, so do others with whom we share this planet. “Be kind to the stranger because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt,” is a phrase repeated thirty-six times in the Biblical narrative, a commandment repeated more than any other. Indeed, the number of mentions it receives is a marker of its centrality to what it means to be a Jew. Put differently, because we have suffered in our own history, we are commanded to be cognizant of the suffering of others. And further, such awareness aggregates empathy and understanding, kindness and compassion, hope, and justice and peace. Call it ancient Near Eastern crowd-sourcing at its finest.
Beyond the faith structures of Jewish civilization are the historical underpinnings of Shavuot. It is alternately called the Festival of First Fruits because in ancient Israel, this is the season in which the land begins to bring forth its produce and for ancient agrarian societies, this was worthy of festive celebration. Shavuot was a joyous celebration on kibbutzim in early modern Israel, where the land and its cultivators partied on tractors, danced with floral wreaths and consumed milk and honey to amplify the glory and the blessing of bounty. Of course, for many years now, the vast majority of agricultural workers in Israel are foreign, making for new challenges in the interpretation of the law and what it means to till the soil. How these workers are treated is not only a matter of Israeli policy but of Jewish ethics and morality. History, text, tradition and the ongoing evolution of the Jewish people from one generation to the next demands no less of us. “Be kind to the stranger,” not just because she is farming your fields and providing the food that you eat, but because “you were strangers in a strange land.” The narrative thread continues.
Early Israeli Kibbutz celebration for Shavuot
Foreign worker on Israeli Kibbutz, 2015
I’m not sure what it is about this year but the proximity of Shavuot to D-Day had me thinking about the connections between these grand narratives. The themes of liberation and the law, of the fight for freedom and the sacrifice endured by millions in order to defeat evil, runs deeply between these two singular, historical events.
David Chrisinger has a powerful piece in the New York Times about the World War Two reporter Ernie Pyle and the transformative and tragic experience he had landing on Omaha Beach seventy-five years ago. His story is not to be missed. Already hard-driving and hard-drinking, Pyle was shattered by D-Day and after a short respite back in the States, returned to the war in the Pacific only to be killed by a Japanese sniper in Okinawa. Of the D-Day landing Pyle wrote, “Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, Bibles, hand grenades. Here are the letters from home…” In a letter dispatch he wrote, “Sometimes I get so obsessed with the tragedy and horror of seeing dead men that I can hardly stand it. But I guess there’s nothing to do but keep going.” Pyle’s words bring to mind the midrash about the Israelites dancing in victory on the shores of the Red Sea. God upbraids them saying, “The dead Egyptians are my children, too.” Even in victory, there is profound loss, bodies the detritus of brutal battles.
Ernie Pyle
The only American photographer to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day was the Hungarian Jewish refugee Robert Capa, another hard-driving, hard-drinking artist who was traumatized by what he witnessed and who, like Pyle, died in battle in an early skirmish in 1954 in the First Indochina War. In his memoir, Slightly Out of Focus, Capa introduces D-Day in the following way:
“Once a year, usually sometime in April, every self-respecting Jewish family celebrates Passover, the Jewish Thanksgiving. The Passover celebration proceeds along the well-known lines of Thanksgiving, the only difference between the two being that the Passover feast has everything and turkey too, and that the children of the very old world get even more sick than the children of the very new world.
When dinner is irrevocably over, father loosens his belt and lights a five-cent cigar. At this crucial moment the youngest of the sons—I have been doing it for years—steps up and addresses his father in solemn Hebrew. He asks, ‘What makes this day different from all other days?’ Then father, with great relish and gusto, tells the story of how many thousands of years ago in Egypt, the angel of destruction passed over the firstborn sons of the Chosen People, and how, afterwards, General Moses led them across the Red Sea without getting their feet wet.
The Gentiles and Jews who crossed the English Channel on the sixth of June in the year 1944, landing with very wet feet on the beach in Normandy called “Easy Red,” ought to have—once a year, on that date—a Crossover day. Their children, after finishing a couple of cans of C-rations, would ask their father, ‘What makes this day different from all other days?’”
Robert Capa Photograph, D-Day Landing, June 6, 1944
I believe what Capa does for us here is bring us back into the Passover narrative in his time, universalizing the war against fascism for his generation and reminding us that the ways in which we identify with the broad themes of what it means to be a Jew in our own day has enormous consequences for the world we inhabit and will leave to our children.
The Jewish story, which culminates this week on the gift of revelation and the law on Mount Sinai, forty-nine days after experiencing the trauma of war and liberation from slavery, flows into a greater river of human narrative where, as the saying goes, there is always more that unites us than divides us.
Each community in the family of humanity, when it uses the trowel of memory to turn over the soil of compassion and understanding, lends its words and deeds to a discourse of freedom and justice for all.
“The Eternal spoke to Moses: ‘Speak at Aaron and his sons: Thus shall you bless the people of Israel. Say to them: The Eternal bless you and protect you! The Eternal deal kindly and gradiously with you! The Eternal bestow Divine Favor upon you and grant you peace!’ Thus shall they link My name with the people of Israel, and I will bless them.” (Numbers 6:22-27)
So that happened, as they like to say.
Somewhere out in the desert, a long time ago, our ancestors were traversing the wilderness, on a forty year journey between slavery and freedom. According to the Talmud, this trip ordinarily would have taken a few weeks, but the forty years was necessary in order to allow time for the generation born into slavery to pass away. And not just forty years, but even the first few weeks after the Exodus (Passover) and before receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai (Shavuot) required rehabilitation. “Rabbi Isaac said that Israel were worthy of receiving the Torah immediately upon leaving Egypt. But the Holy One said, “Because of their servitude in clay and bricks, My children’s look of good health has not yet come back, and therefore they cannot receive the Torah at once. Let My children be indulged for two or three months—with the manna, with the waters of the well, with the quail—then I will give them the Torah” (Ecclesiastes and Songs Rabbah).
A very Jewish God, don’t you agree? First feed them. Ess, mein kind! And then restore their souls with learning. This aligns well with a story we like to tell children as they become bat or bar mitzvah. The one about how in the Middle Ages, some Jewish communities would begin the school year for the little ones by walking them to the house of study in a kind of celebratory parade with garlands of flowers as crowns atop their heads and when arrived in the classroom, the Hebrew alef-bet would be written in honey on a board. The students would learn their letters through taste, licking the letters from the board and encoding in themselves the association between learning and sweetness.
Variations of this tradition abide. At a kiddush lunch following a morning bat mitzvah, the community shares a meal so that learning, the transition into teenage years, Torah, and Shabbat can all be honored as one expression. And don’t roll your eyes but it’s why we give children gifts of money on such occasions as well: to honor their duty and responsibility as they take the crucial steps into adulthood. You can’t finish the Passover Seder without finishing the afikoman, hidden at the start of the meal. The tradition of “finding it” and rewarding a child with money for doing so plays a similar role. Cleverness, intuition, persistence and negotiation are all rewarded. And why not? They clearly aid survival in an often tough and brutal world.
The odious anti-Semitic trope that “Jews are good with money” derives in part from the notion that we have traditionally valued it as an essential resource for living life, providing for ourselves and those we love, as well as performing acts of tzedakah, generosity and loving-kindness. The first century rabbis had a great phrase on this score: “If there is no flour there is no Torah and if there is no Torah there is no flour.” Material well-being relies upon a system of values rooted in goodness, justice and peace. It is not “either/or” but rather “both/and.” It is the two-fold system of one and the other that makes a whole.
And it is not just happy occasions where food works. Jewish mourning practice requires a meal of consolation and food for visitors at shiva, the seven-day mourning period. Food eases the way into social connection, conversation, openness to authentic interaction.
I thought of this last week at a shiva call, watching guests gather around a table, schmear up a bagel, and merge into the lane of talking to one another. Or when, on Shavuot, we served ice cream to little ones in our space on Duane Street to celebrate the sweetness of Torah. It is not a redundancy to say that food creates community. It is axiomatic and speaks to an inherent materiality of Jewish culture. I do not mean materialism (a challenge in its own right) but materiality. The reality of the material world and the ways in which we as Jews understand the intersection of the spiritual and the material inside of the values matrix of Torah. Simply put: we live in a world of matter and so the question for us is how we use it and to what end?
At the beginning of the Torah, God is quite clear. We are assigned the task of being God’s partners, stewards of Creation. But when our relationship to matter becomes excessive, there are cataclysmic consequences. A sinful Earth merits the flood; the violent and inhospitable behavior of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah forces God to wipe out the towns. And later, once Jews are settled in the land of Israel, the Mishnah delineates very clear guidelines and laws for sharing the yield of the field with the poor, establishing charity funds and food banks, and ensuring that no one is enslaved to debt and a life of irreversible poverty.
We can be interested in this two-fold moment in Torah: while the Israelites are gaining strength with sustenance (the manna, the water, the quail) they pause to be blessed by Aaron with the most intense of all blessings the Torah has to offer. “The Eternal bless you and protect you! The Eternal deal kindly and gradiously with you! The Eternal bestow Divine Favor upon you and grant you peace!” We share this at birth and brises and baby namings; at bat & bar mitzvahs and weddings; and around the Shabbat and holiday meal table. It is suffused with meaning for protection and grace and peace, decidedly non-material categories of their own accord but when combined with the Torah’s commandments to live lives of justice and peace as a responsibility to matter of the matter around us, it roils and boils into the perfect recipe for the perfect storm for a perfect world.
June 14 being Flag Day, these ideas roll into what it means to be a Jew in America and those wonderfully peculiar Latin phrases, written on our currency: E Pluribus Unum, From Many, One; Annuit Coeptis, Favors our Undertakings; and Novus Ordo Seclorum, New Order of the Ages. The Founders, though deeply flawed in their understanding of racial and gender equality, not to mention their inexcusable tolerance of slavery, were also brilliantly imaginative and aspirational about what America could eventually be.
In Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote that the “cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” Like the Hebrew prophets of the Bible, Paine was able to articulate an attachment to both peculiar and universal ideals. America would not be a place for one but for all. Not one into many but from many, one.
These Latin phrases appear on what we call in American civic life, “the Great Seal.” And while America to the Founders was decidedly not a monarchy, the newly developed seal of the republic would encode in its design the notions of pluralism, shared destiny and the ongoing discovery of a world in constant renewal and improvement toward an ideal perfection.
So as Jews on this Flag Day, let us kick off the summer season not only with the sustenance of hot dogs and apple pie but the values that have sustained us—love for our neighbors; generosity toward those in need; and protection of the refugee, the homeless, our “wretched refuse,” as we continue to build a city and nation and world of peace worthy of God’s blessing.
My middle name is Norman. This fact hides somewhere in the small data between my first and last name on official documents like my passport, driver’s license and social security card.
Norman Mueller, for whom I am named, was my mother’s father. We never met. In fact, my mother barely knew him. Norman was murdered in 1939 by a man in a workplace shooting at the Wisconsin Gas Company in Milwaukee. After a medical absence, my grandfather’s killer came back to work looking for his job. He wasn’t yet well enough. My grandfather had to break the news. The man didn’t like the answer that he needed more help and so he killed my grandfather and then killed himself. My mom was six years old. And in the heart of the Depression, with America perched at the edge of war to stop Hitler’s march through Europe and genocidal plan to exterminate Jews, my grandmother went to work to support her two girls—my aunt, who is still alive and my mother, who succumbed to cancer in 2012.
I have a few black and white, sepia-tinged photos of my grandfather. That’s about it. A handful of photos, and the memories of my mother going silent each year on the anniversary of his death. I’d come downstairs for breakfast and she’d be staring through the kitchen window, looking out at the apple trees in our backyard, crying. Every year. Like a memory clock that never needs winding and never stops. That’s the thing about trauma: when you are fortunate enough to heal, it still leaves a permanent scar. It’s always sensitive to the touch.
Edith and Norman Mueller, circa 1938
As children, toy guns weren’t allowed in our house. As adolescents, we were schlepped along to political campaigns our mother worked on for candidates who understood that sane and responsible gun laws were a necessary antidote to unnecessary violence and death in an open, thriving democracy. And as an adult, I cringe, then boil, then rise to speak and write whenever gun violence claims lives in our nation. In Milwaukee, where I grew up, gun violence ravages the segregated, Black parts of town. There have been 39 gun murders so far in 2019, 50% of them claiming victims between the ages of 18-29; 94% under 50 years of age. Wisconsin is a “concealed carry state.” Meaning you can walk into a place with a gun and keep it hidden on your body. You don’t need a permit if you buy the gun from an individual. Governor Scott Walker and his supporters in the Wisconsin legislature passed that law in 2013. Walker’s no longer governor but the law still stands. Politicians can have that kind of impact. It reminds us, as my mother used to say, that every vote counts. For a long time.
New York, on the other hand, has relatively strict gun laws. Governor Andrew Cuomo has been a supporter of such legislation and uses his office to restrict access to weapons. This is a matter of his own principle but it is also a result of political expediency. That’s how public service works. It’s you and your voice combined with the people you represent. And it is why I am a regular supporter of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. According to their mission, NYAGV aims to “strengthen gun safety laws in New York State; defend and preserve New York’s strong gun safety laws; and strengthen federal gun safety laws, since illegal guns from states with weak laws continue to flood New York communities.”
I can get with that.
I will let you in on another secret: I don’t find prayers to be particularly helpful in moments like this, unless those prayers are uttered in quiet humility alongside a survivor of gun violence who seeks love and comfort in the fog and terror-filled hours following the hellish spectacle, such as those we bore witness to this weekend in El Paso and Dayton. In Gilroy and Las Vegas. In Parkland and Sandy Hook. In Charleston and Orlando. In Pohway and Pittsburgh. Prayers work when we sit silently beside a mourner; when we are with them in their grief and sorrow. But when we arise from that low place and go out into the world, it is our own obligation to act that rules the day. Our Sages knew this principle quite well, which is why they created the legend of Nachshon’s daring feat of wading into the Red Sea, up to his throat, ultimately what caused the waters to part. From his own actions, from the steps he was willing to take, he made a path from the Sea to Sinai, where legislation was written that said, “Thou shalt not kill.” Nachshon got that law passed. Not by words but by deeds.
The man in the White House (well, not quite a man but a spoiled, narcissistic, racist adolescent), our president, Donald J. Trump, bears some responsibility for the current carnage. When immigrants and African Americans are demonized during rallies, blood-curdling screams rising over applause from rabid masses; when the press is under attack by crowds and the man himself; when one so irretrievably bound up in his own self-regard as to pronounce that the cause of these targeted massacres is “mental illness” and not raw, xenophobic racist ideology, it is time to declare the man not a man but an incompetent individual who is now permanently tainted by his own narrative of destruction. More wisdom from the Sages: “Hillel said, ‘In a place where there are no men, strive to be one.’”
A mere child in 1939, my mother was powerless to change the course of history in the moment when it hit home. But she raised me to believe that our fate was truly in our hands. And to wake up to news of mass killings, of White Supremacy and hate, fomented by our president day after day, is to realize again and again that we have the power to change what is to come.
There is Moms Demand Action; Everytown for Gun Safety; New Yorkers Against Gun Violence; March For Our Lives. You can call your City Council member; your State Assemblymember; your State Senator; your Congressperson; your U.S. Senator. You can let them know what you think about guns and hate. You can attend a vigil, talk to your children, reach out to your neighbor. You can turn inward, you can reach out to God and pray. But then you must act. Do your part. Root your values in deed, shape the future with the work of your hands.
And don’t do it for me. Do it for yourself, for your children, for our country. Do it for Norman and let his memory be a blessing.
It’s a funny thing being the oldest guy in the office. The last time it happened I was executive director of the Bronfman Center at NYU and while I was 35 years old at the time, the students were mostly college-age or in graduate school, making me the elder Jew on site. And now today, with JCP’s administrative offices in a coworking space downtown, it’s déjà vu all over again.
We made the decision to move our offices to save money on rent, and the open, collaborative work environment is actually a pleasant bundle of energy to encounter on a daily basis. The passion and creativity are quite real. It’s Start-Up Land, a certain idealistic slice of the American capitalist universe where venture funds, ingenuity, cleverness and coding make for a potent mix of innovation. There are two young educators building a new model for subscription based child-care; several fashion designers and bloggers and social media influencers; coders developing apps for accessi-ride vans and DIY head-hunting formulas for leveraging connections on sites like LinkedIn. The water cooler, which in point of fact is curated neatly with pineapple and lemons cut in the shapes of stars and half-moons, makes for its own fountain of new information each day. And still, despite all the new thinking, the men’s room floor remains a challenge to navigate. In basketball terms, the paper towel-to-garbage can ratio hovers just above 20%. No one is winning any titles in that department.
All this newness. All these fresh ideas. It’s exhilarating, to be sure. But it can also be rather alienating. For instance, nearly everyone’s ears are adorned with the Apple Airpods, nodes of pure white plastic homing in, linking person to person dialogue via satellite, 5G and wifi. Elevator doors open and close with neighbors rarely looking up from phones, their faces aglow from radiant screens, not the serendipity of human encounter. So to be a Jewish organization, witnesses to an ancient tradition, inside such a contemporary work environment, can be entertaining, if perplexing.
A couple weeks ago, Rabbi Deena and I were having meeting while behind us, a start-up Christian church was doing a prayer meeting for a pregnant member amidst the tumult of the shared space. Hands on belly and shoulders of the expectant mother, spiritual aspirations and supplications sent heavenward while the invisible future floated above, measured in bytes, data and other ephemera of the digital age. A couple days later JCP hosted a Friday “happy hour” which included hard cider brewed in Bushwick, Brooklyn and a quick seminar in how to blow a shofar. The human has been making intoxicating beverages since the dawn of civilization and the ram’s horn sounding in this season is, well, as old as the hills.
Driving out to Bushwick that morning to pick up the cider, I weaved in and out of traffic as deliveries were being made, road construction kicked up dust and detritus, Hasids prepared for Shabbos, children jumbled and jostled on playgrounds tucked next to schools which leaned into warehouses and there was noise, noise, noise. The family making the cider are Koreans who learned the craft from Basques in Spain and the young man who helped me load my car with a few cases of cider was a new immigrant from Mexico City, trying to make his way in the New York City food scene. I knew I needed to make it back to the office in time for our happy hour and while Google Maps was telling me it would take me 45 minutes, my “been living in Brooklyn for the past 29 years” told me otherwise. I silenced it, took the route I knew best, and shaved 10 minutes off the race. Damn the satellites sometimes, you know?
But really, I want to tell you about one moment that afternoon, when we started blowing the shofars. A ram’s horns with the plaintive, almost rusty cries; the larger Kudu horns, regal, moving, august. Start-up heads lifted from phones and laptops; Airpods popped out of ears; eyes blinked in slow motion. It was kind of like that moment after the rain, when the clouds clear and the sun comes out and we see the world, however briefly, in a new light. It was, dare I say, almost magical. Not unlike the wonder I saw throughout the Holy Days when visiting classrooms with shofars or Torah scrolls and watching our youngest ones gaze in marvel at the mystery of the material world and its ability to transport us beyond where we are to another place, unnamable, almost ineffable, but real.
It’s a kind of paradox of Jewish civilization that we begin again each year in autumn, as the leaves wither, as ground hardens, as rain and snow lurch forward. But we Jews have generally been a counter-cultural people, doing things our own way. And so we begin at the end and end at the beginning, finishing up our Torah scroll on Simchat Torah and in that very same instant, starting over all over again.
This soothes me. It makes me feel not like the oldest guy in the office, but one in a long line of other women and men who came before me, who saw to it that once in a while, history and perspective had something valuable to share in the grand scheme of the immediacy of things.
“In the beginning,” the Torah commences as it begins again each year. And what do we learn from this, fundamentally, except to say with confidence that in fact each year is a new beginning, and each new beginning is a new start, a new moment, a new day. From the ten days of turning and repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to the nesting and sheltering required as we build our Sukkot to the end/beginning of Deuteronomy to Genesis on Simchat Torah, Jewish civilization comes to teach us that personal and communal renewal are within our grasp at every moment. The idea of beginning, in Jewish time, is not a linear notion but rather is a cyclical one. Time is not a train that we may have missed but a process, an ongoing reality, always inviting us to be open, present and ready for the possibility of change.
So as our learning begins again with another year of reading Torah, of immersing ourselves in the values derived from generations of readers and doers and innovators who have come before us, let us remain open and inspired to respond to what is possible, to the needs around us, and to building a community and a world of kindness and justice and peace.
The Torah teaches that there were 10 generations between Adam and Eve (the first humans) and Noah (the human God picks to build an ark and save humanity). In only 10 generations, the Torah tells us, the “earth became corrupt before God, the earth was filled with lawlessness.” In response to this corruption and lawlessness, God decides to put an end to the human race and save only Noah and his family along with a select grouping of other species.
The Rabbis are curious as to what kind of corruption and lawlessness provoked God to such an extreme response. Rashi, one of our tradition’s most famous commentators, gives a fairly predictable answer from a scholar and a Rabbi—idolatry, violence and lewdness. The people were acting out in a Biblical fashion—turning their back on monotheism and forgoing modesty and moral, common decency.
Ibn Ezra, another Medieval commentator, gives a different response. He picks up on the Torah’s emphasis on the words “corrupt before God” meaning, in his interpretation of the words “before God”, corruption in private, the kind that only God really knows about because it’s done in secret.
Perhaps this is the kind of corruption we are becoming more and more familiar with in our time. As “truth” and “facts” become slippery, murkier, harder to discern and even harder to prove, we can relate to the kind of corruption that Ibn Ezra understands—the kind that feels impossible to bring to light and hold to account.
But unfortunately, as we marked last week, the one year anniversary of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, we also know the kind of corruption that Rashi describes. Overt violence and hatred, behavior of humanity at its worst.
So we are left with a question: when faced with corruption and violence, both insidious and blatant, what should our response be—as Jews, as citizens of the United States, as proud members of the human race? Should it be to build an ark and save ourselves? Or swear off humanity as hopeless and flawed altogether?
I can certainly relate to God’s feelings of both despair that humanity would ever change its ways and also wanting to shake the Etch-a-Sketch clean and start over with a new human population. But even God learns from God’s own mistakes. Just a few weeks ago on Yom Kippur, we read the story of the prophet Jonah, sent to Nineveh to give its population a chance to repent, to learn, to grow and to improve their behavior. And they do. They successfully change their ways. Instead of wiping them out as in the story of the flood, God offers them another path. Forgiveness and mercy.
So perhaps there is for us too a middle path when it comes to thinking about society and humanity as a whole. Yes, there is corruption and violence in our world. And we hope and pray that there will also be justice for the world’s lawlessness. And yet, in the face of corruption and violence, it is also our job to hope and pray that we will be able to maintain our own humanity and be able to forgive and be compassionate and merciful in our own lives. For as our Rabbis teach us from the Noah story, in a place where there are no human beings (or in a place where people aren’t acting like human beings), you should strive to be a human, a mensch.
These are the words of Ari (formerly Ali) Pfefferman, one of the main characters in the television series, Transparent. Throughout the series, all of the Pfefferman children (now adults) are forced to reconsider their identities and their place in the world after the person they have known as their father, Mort Pfefferman, comes out as trans and begins to live her life as Maura Pfefferman.
Ari, who toward the end of the series identifies as gender non-binary, spends a great deal of time lamenting the fact that they never became Bat Mitzvah. Maura, who was at the time of Ari’s ceremony, self-absorbed and concerned with her own, secret questions of identity, quickly relents when her teenager has a moment of rebellion and refuses to go through with the ceremony. “You don’t want to do the Bat Mitzvah? Fine, you don’t have to,” says Maura. The Torah portion that was to be read that day (and this week’s Torah portion), Lech Lecha, haunts Ari for the rest of their life, and they interpret the Torah’s words in the dream-like song above. What will it mean for Ari to leave their father’s house?
This question has puzzled scholars throughout the generations. Our Sages are quite confused about the strange grammatical structure of this phrase and what exactly it means. While we usually translate the words “Lech Lecha” to mean “Go forth,” its literal meaning is: “Go unto you.” Some scholars, like the 13th-century Spanish figure Nahmanides, say that this is merely a literary formality and that there are many examples of this construction in the Hebrew Bible. But others, like Rashi, the 11th-century French scholar, claims that it means: “Go for yourself, for your own benefit, for your own good.”
But Rashi’s statement leaves us with a larger question: How can such a radical break from the past be a good thing? After all, one of our foundational principles as Jews is that we transmit the Torah and its teachings “l’dor va’dor,” from generation to generation. Some Jews recite these very words each day during morning prayers. The Torah instructs us to teach God’s words to our children at every moment of every day; for if we don’t, the enduring chain of tradition will break.
However, this particular Torah portion teaches us that our transmission of tradition must often be balanced with a radical break. The story of Judaism’s founding begins not with a parent passing on a tradition to his child, but rather with a child leaving his father’s home, going to a brand-new, unknown place, guided only by God’s cryptic words: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Here we see that Judaism starts with an act of revolution, a radical departure, and not an act of continuity. Abraham can bless all of the families of the earth only when he leaves the old traditions behind.
Perhaps this teaches us that the habits, teachings, patterns, and traditions that we receive—both religious in nature and not—from our parents, teachers, and society need to be examined before we pass them down to the next generation. In order to convey what is truly helpful and good, we need to separate it from the hurtful and counter-productive messages that we all receive from those around us. We can transmit what’s important, we can be a blessing for the next generation, only when we figure out which lessons we will keep and pass on, and which ones we will discard or alter.
At Transparent’s conclusion, Ari decides that their individual journey will be to become Bart (combination of the masculine “Bar” and feminine “Bat”) Mitzvah, in order to give themselves the gift of this Jewish tradition that Maura was so quick to discard.
Ari sings: “When you get home, you won’t be alone.” Abraham wasn’t alone when he went on this journey away from the land of his birth and toward the unknown. He was accompanied by his wife, his nephew, all those in his household, and most importantly, by God. Ari also goes through their journey accompanied by their siblings, their rabbi, their community, and maybe even by God, too.
May we all have the strength to evaluate the legacies that we receive from those around us, to decide what we want to preserve and what we want to revolutionize, and to pass even greater blessings on to the next generation. And may we never do so alone.
“…it was not always goodness of heart which produced all these good works, but one of those unwritten laws common to so many families of the nobility. Their far distant forebears might indeed, centuries before, have practiced charity, help and support of their people out of pure love. Gradually, though, as the blood altered, this goodness of heart had to some extent become frozen and petrified into duty and tradition” (Joseph Roth, “The Bust of the Emperor,” 1935).
Joseph Roth was a journalist and writer who chronicled the demise of liberal European civilization between the two world wars, leaving a literary legacy that still haunts us today, 80 years after he died prematurely from alcoholism and despair as Nazism and Fascism destroyed his world. From his depictions of the Austro-Hungarian empire in its final decades to his searing and incisive observations from hotel bars and cafes spanning from Paris to Vienna and Berlin, Roth stands alone as one of the most prolific and critical voices of modern Jewish life. He had a way, as the above quote indicates, of capturing in a few brief sentences, the predicament of the Jew in modern times. Hardly one to glorify an often violent and disastrous past, Roth, though not observant, was keenly aware of the ways in which modernity eroded Jewish bonds of connection and obligation.
Liberated from the ghettos and the pale of settlement by 18th and 19th century Enlightenment rulers in France, Prussia and Vienna, the Jews began a process of acculturation and assimilation throughout much of Western and Central Europe. Jews gained citizenship along with natural and civil rights to become, if not fully realized, then at least aspiring members of national civic life throughout Europe.
This acceptance of the Jew as citizen reached its greatest expression in America. “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” George Washington wrote to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” What an extraordinary document of Jewish history indeed, marking the exceptional place of the Jew in a pluralistic society that remains unmatched throughout the world.
Of course the American experiment in representative democracy remains a work in progress. The luminary abolitionist Frederick Douglass knew this when he said in his famous “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”: “Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America!”
Baltimore Rabbi David Einhorn, who while serving Har Sinai was a vocal abolitionist, was drawn into the slavery debate on the eve of the Civil War, writing and preaching his opposition to this inhumane treatment of God’s creatures. Christian preachers and even some rabbis, most notably Rabbi Morris Raphall of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City, argued that the institution of slavery was biblically sanctioned. What disturbed Einhorn was that some Christian preachers argued that slaves were descendants of Ham, Noah’s son, who was relegated to a cursed existence. Other clergy, like Rabbi Raphall, deplored the abuse of the institution and using Talmudic law, argued for its “just and humane” application.
This was nothing less than evil to Rabbi Einhorn. “God created man in his own likeness,” Einhorn wrote. “This blessing of God has higher standing than the flood or Noah’s curse,” two Biblical texts often used by pro-slavery clergy to justify the treatment of the “sub-human” Africans brought to America in chains. His faith and belief in American exceptionalism meant he must argue with America and its immoral institutions. This was a belief rendered out of love. “There are enough churches and synagogues and temples, but there is little religion, little morality.” Rabbi Einhorn saw it as his moral duty to correct his nation and for this he was driven from his pulpit by a mob who chased him from Baltimore under threat of being tarred and feathered. He eventually served Keneseth Israeli in Philadelphia where presumably he found more “brotherly love” for his views.
The willingness to stand for what one believes, even to the point of arguing with God and the Torah traditions, has long been one of the most admirable, sustaining, and at times even vexatious manifestations of what it means to be a Jew. We don’t mean to be difficult; we argue out of love! And this, I believe, is an important lens through which to understand Abraham, the Biblical patriarch, who has the courage of his convictions and love of God to not only argue with but repudiate the Creator of the Universe.
In this week’s Torah portion, when God sees the evil being committed in Sodom and Gomorroh and seeks to wipe its inhabitants from the face of the earth, Abraham firmly objects. “Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you indeed sweep away and not forgive the place for the fifty righteous people there? Far be it from You to do such a thing! To slay the righteous with the wicked so that the righteous shall be as the wicked! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?” (Genesis 18:23-25)
A defense lawyer who prosecutes God as Judge, Abraham remains in that regard the quintessential Jew, the loyal patriarch, the faithful prophet, who serves Truth and Justice as categorical and Divine manifestations of the God he serves out of love.
It is interesting to think of Joseph Roth’s remark in this context. When we think of those with weakened Jewish ties, or those who distance themselves from community; or when we think of the ways in which America can be so overwhelmingly hospitable as to make particular declarations of Jewishness to be at best unnecessary or at worst embarrassing, even shameful, Roth’s line rings true. A petrified or rote Jewishness is a danger to survival. “This goodness of heart had to some extent become frozen and petrified into duty and tradition,” Roth wrote in part because his observation stood as a reminder that there is always a place in our identities to claim Jewishness in the service of our yearning for and fealty to ideas like justice and love.
Who are we as Jews; indeed, who are we as Americans, without justice and love?
While it is undeniably true that none of us alone is capable of turning the tides of history, of parting seas, of saving towns, of reconciling one to the other, we are—with questions piled upon questions and arguments built upon arguments and listening hearts ever-open—in possession of the sacred bonds of hope that are beacons of light even in the darkest of days.
Abraham reminds us of our duty to bear witness, to testify when history challenges us. Living under Roman rule in the first century, Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel said, “The world endures on three things: justice, truth and peace, just as the prophet Zechariah taught, ‘These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth with your neighbor; execute the judgement of truth and peace in your gates; and let none of you devise evil in your hearts against your neighbor.’”
These texts and stories, harvested from history, are humbling reminders to us that the work before us remains to create a world, a nation, a community and a home founded on justice, peace and love.
Here’s a literary trivia question: If a poem doesn’t have a title, how do we refer to it? Answer: The first line of the poem becomes its title. This is a logical convention; usually the first line of a poem gives us a general sense of its contents.
Torah portions are similarly named. Because each weekly portion is not given a formal title, the ancient rabbis used to refer to each one by using the first significant words found within it.
This usually makes sense. Bereshit, which means “In the beginning,” is the name of the first portion in the Torah-reading cycle, and, fittingly, it is about the creation of the universe. Noach, or “Noah” is about, well, Noah and his ark. Lech-Lecha, or “Go forth,” is about Abraham’s journey from the land of his birth to the Promised Land.
If we follow this convention, we might think that this week’s Torah portion, Chayyei Sarah, or “the life of Sarah” is about Sarah’s story. After all, she has been an obscure character for most of the Torah up until this point. She is silent as she leaves her homeland and accompanies Abraham on his grand adventure to the land of Israel. Abraham has signed up for this journey; she hasn’t. She acquiesces when Abraham tries to pass her off as his sister when they sojourn in the land of Egypt. She is nowhere to be seen when Abraham takes their son, Isaac, and nearly offers him as a sacrifice to God. The only thing we do know about her is that her behavior can be vicious when she is vulnerable. Maybe now, in Chayyei Sarah, we will be allowed to hear her thoughts, and learn about her life.
How ironic then that in this week’s Torah portion, we read about Sarah’s death, not her life. It begins: “Sarah’s lifetime—the span of Sarah’s life—came to one hundred and twenty-seven years. Sarah died in Kiryat-arba—now Hebron—in the land of Canaan; and Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her.”
While Sarah might not have been able to share the details of her own life with us, this account of her death teaches us how to handle a fact of all of our lives: the death of our loved ones. Sarah is the first person in history to receive a Jewish burial. Abraham mourns for Sarah, but then gets to work. At this point in the story, Abraham is dwelling in the land ruled by a people called the Hittites. He could have carried Sarah’s body to an isolated area and buried her there, but instead he buries her in the land of the Hittites, in order that she be laid to rest quickly and close to where he lives. While the chief of the Hittites, Ephron, tells Abraham he can bury Sarah without paying for the burial plot, Abraham insists on purchasing it. This is to ensure that in future generations, there will never be disputes about the ownership of this plot. We can still visit the cave of the Machpelah, the place where Sarah, and later where Abraham and the other matriarchs and patriarchs, are said to be buried. Sadly, it is one of the most contested and contentious areas of land in the world, located in Hebron, which is in what some people call the West Bank and what some people call Judea and Samaria.
Abraham’s actions have served as guides for how Jews bury their dead. At the moment of a death, when we are bereft and unprepared, it is difficult to know what steps to take. From Abraham’s example, we learn much of what we need to do to give our loved ones a dignified burial. We bury the body quickly and efficiently. We mourn, but we don’t allow the mourning to get in the way of the task at hand. We make sure that we own the plot that we use. This is why, when Jews came to America from Europe, the first pieces of land they bought in their new nations were their burial plots. You can still see some of these plots when you walk downtown.
We never learn the details of Chayyei Sarah, the life of Sarah. She never tells us her story in her own words: what it was like to be married to Abraham, the first Jew, and to accompany him as he followed God’s every command. But in her death, she teaches us about a fact of all of our lives: what it means to be buried with love, care, and dignity—a lesson which serves us even to this day.
In the new season of The Crown, we learn about the tension between the future Queen Elizabeth and her sister, Princess Margaret, when Elizabeth is told that she is the next heir to the British throne. Margaret, the more charismatic and popular of the two sisters, thinks she is much better suited for the job. When she tries to make this argument to the powers that be, she is told: “The order of succession to the Throne is determined by the Act of Settlement of 1701, not the wild and irresponsible whims of young princesses. Princess Elizabeth’s destiny is to accede the Throne. Yours is to serve and support…We all have a role to play. Princess Elizabeth’s will be center-stage, and yours, ma’am, will be from the wings.”
This modern drama between the Elizabeth and Margaret is similar to the ancient one we find in this week’s Torah portion, Vayetezei. It tells us:
“Lavan had two daughters; the name of the older one was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah had weak eyes; Rachel was shapely and beautiful. And Jacob loved Rachel.”
In his book Self, Struggle and Change, Rabbi Norman Cohen points out the fact that Rachel is described not as the younger sister, but as k’tanah, the smaller one. What she possesses in beauty, she lacks in gratitude and wisdom.
Leah has both internal wisdom and fullness – she is g’dolah, the greater of the two. But we do know that something in her external appearance is missing when compared with Rachel. Rachel wins affection from her husband; Leah hungers it.
One sister desires external traits, the other seeks to cultivate inner ones. But what unites them in these stories is the paths they take to attain what they lack: bearing Jacob’s children. They each believe that giving birth to Jacob’s children will fulfill those opposite desires. Leah believes that her children will help Jacob see her worth and finally give her the attention and affection that she desires. Rachel believes that her children will fill an inner longing for which her beauty and the complete devotion of her husband cannot substitute.
When Leah names her first son Reuven, she says “God has seen my affliction” and “Now my husband will love me.” Her second and third sons are also named to express Leah’s search for affection. Shimon means “This is because God has heard — Sh’ma — that I was unloved and has given me this one also.” And Levi means “This time my husband will become attached to me — Yeilaveini — for I have borne him three sons.” And yet, Leah never wins the affection of her husband, despite the children she has given him.
Rachel sees her sister’s children and says to Jacob: “Give me children, or I shall die.” And when Rachel does finally give birth to a child of her own, she immediately requests another. She names him Joseph, which means “May God add another son for me.”
Neither sister achieves her goals using her children as the means. Leah’s sons do not incline Jacob to see her as an object of his desire, and although Rachel’s womb has been opened, her heart is still barren and unsatisfied; she gets a son, and her first instinct is to request for another.
Leah makes peace with her fate. By the time she has a fourth child, she no longer asks for Yaakov’s affection. Instead, she praises God by naming her son Yehudah and claiming: “This time, I will praise God.” After Leah accepts her lot in life, she conceives again. She becomes the matriarch who produces six of the twelve tribes of Israel, and the mother of the tribe of Judah, from which King David will come.
Rachel, on the other hand, continues to see her existence as a challenge. Later in the Torah, she gives birth to another son and names him Ben Oni, which means “son of my struggle.” When she dies shortly after giving birth to him, she is buried on the way to Bethlehem.
Leah’s strength and beauty is internal. She does not get the affection of her husband, but she praises God and appreciates what she does have, even when she does not necessarily get all she seeks. Her faith is stronger than that of Rachel, who always wants more and never acknowledges God’s role in her life.
Leah is the weak sister who is actually strong, the unloved sister who is actually satisfied. Hers is a story of acceptance of her fate and her circumstances.
It’s hard to be in second-place. But just like Elizabeth and Margaret each have their strengths, so do Rachel and Leah, and so do we all. Both Leah and Margaret realize that they can wield power, exert influence, and provide wisdom from the wings. It’s all a matter of the perspective they choose.
Join us on October 20th for a meaningful evening of reflection and connection as we welcome Liat Atzili, a former hostage taken by Hamas, and family of hostages from Kibbutz Nir Oz. After hearing their powerful stories, we’ll dive deeper with our incredible breakout session facilitators.
