The Right Place at The Right Time

בס''ד

Parshat VaYakhel

19 Adar I, 5771

February 23, 2011

Last night I met Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the legendary Religious Action Committee – the political arm of the Reform movement.

Rabbi Saperstein gave us the history of the RAC. This took a long time. The RAC was party to the iconic moments of the last half century: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were drafted in the RAC’s conference room. They were the first Jewish organization to oppose the Vietnam War. They provided relief during the Ethiopian famine. They’ve done a lot.

            At one point Rabbi Saperstein was asked how he came to head the RAC. He seemed a little taken aback, and then said, “I was just in the right place at the right time.” Then he regaled us with stories of his activism as a young rabbi.

The Talmud teaches:

R. Joshua ben Levi asked Elijah, the prophet, "When will the Messiah come?" "Go and ask him himself." "Where is he sitting?" "At the gates of Rome." "What will identify him?" "He is sitting among the poor lepers; while all of them untie all [their bandages] at once, and rebandage them together, he unties and rebandages each separately, saying 'I might be needed, so I must not be delayed.' "

--Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98a

Mashiah too will be in the right place at the right time, when redemption finally arrives. I think that Rabbi Saperstein will be rather amused by the comparison, but he might grant me that, in every serendipitous moment, there is a piece of our souls that has been waiting a long, long time to be revealed.

Humor

בס''ד

Parshat Ki Tissah

12 Adar, 5771

February 16^th, 2011

A story:

Rabbi Brokah the Seer was often found in the market of Bei Lefet. Elijah the Prophet (maybe a millennium dead by this point) was often found visiting with him (this is a supernatural story).

Rabbi Brokah said to Elijah: “Are there people in this marketplace who are deserving of the world to come?”

Elijah said, “No.”

After a while, two people walked into the market. Elijah said, “those two are deserving of the world to come.”

Rabbi Brokah went up to them and asked them, “What do you do?”

They said, “we are comedians – we make sad people laugh. Also, when we see two people who have a quarrel between them, we work to make peace for them.”

Talmud Masekhet Ta’anit 22a

One great criticism I have of Americans is that we lack a true sense of humor. Our comedy is plentiful, but more corny than insightful (“take my wife please”). Exceptions are Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, but both came out of disliked minorities.

Others have explained it as an American earnestness that brooks no sense of the absurd. Graham Greene, in both The Quiet American (about Vietnam) and The Comedians (about Haiti, and the most serious book you’ve ever read), wrote about our indefatigable belief that everything is fixable with the right know-how and enough elbow grease. This self seriousness frowns at pointing out that we, our bodies, our natures, and our world are in fact flawed – the source of all humor.

There are in our community, at this particular time, too many people who are seriously ill. Let us pray every day for their health, let us support them in their time of need. Let us also remember that real sickness is not something simply solved with the right combination of doctors and drugs. Real sickness is always a painful struggle. What makes us worthy of heaven is to be able to sit with people, to cry with them, and then to laugh with them at the absurdity of this world.

Spiritual but Not Religious

בס''ד

29 Shvat, 5771

February 3^rd, 2011

            I have heard, even in my short career, one phrase hundreds of times, “Rabbi, I am spiritual, not religious.” Many take it even further: religion, in quite a few people’s minds, is the enemy of true spirituality.

            For years I’ve struggled with how to understand and address this division. I got into Torah and then a life of mitzvot because of deep spiritual affinity. I never understood the separation.

            I believe now that I was incorrect, and that religion and spirituality, while they overlap, are divided.

            Spirituality lives in an individual’s direct, personal connection to God. Its foundation is hitlahavut – passion. It is spontaneous, malleable, and paradoxical. It is self-reliant, charismatic, and brilliant. It makes us feel alive.

But spirituality is also self-centered. It tends to ignore bonds between people, and does not know that God’s voice becomes textured when spread over community and time. Though it is smart, it is not wise: it rarely involves a relationship more than a generation old. In a word, spirituality is thin.

Religion, on the other hand, is as thick as it gets. It incorporates generations of learning and has grown wise and thoughtful. Religion is patient in a measure that spans lifetimes, and knows the depth of things. Its foundations are hesed – care and tzedek – justice. Religion helps us understand life.

It is often so thick, however, that it smothers spontaneity and individuality. It struggles to see people as different from one another. Religion does not thrill with its quickness, and prefers rhythm over syncopation.

The two are indeed different.

But remember that the holy Rambam taught us that apex of life is to be found in the middle of extremes. Remember also that each of us has two sides to our hearts. Enough with the idea that they are exclusive: it is a fallacy; we know it not to be so. Let us fill ourselves with both.

The Hundred and First Time

בס''ד

Parshat Mishpatim

22 Shvat, 5771

January 27^th, 2011

My first Shabbat in college, I, a very Jewishly engaged teenager, proudly walked into Hillel expecting to find my place immediately. This expectation was not to be born out.

Everything seemed wrong: they prayed wrong, services felt wrong, people acted wrong. No one was friendly. Nothing was right. I was then asked to make Kiddush, which, to my mortification, I proceeded to butcher in front of 200 people. I stepped out of that building and didn’t return for two years.

 The irony, of course, is that I’ve found my home in Torah and Judaism, made a grateful life out of its practice. Those people who weren’t friendly (who were actually just giving me space) are good friends.

There is a beautiful teaching that helps me to understand my experience. “There is no comparison,” teaches the Midrash, “between one who has studied a chapter a hundred times and between one who has studied it a hundred and one times.”^Ö

            I cannot deny the power of the newness of things and the attraction of love at first sight. However, it seems to me that first sight is also where we’re the most blind.

            Torah is almost ridiculously in favor of second sight: not of reading, but re-reading; not of experiencing, but rather re-experiencing. Its wisdom is that our lives regularly turn out in ways that we could not have dreamed of previously, and that we often make treasures out of what we initially reject: even ma’asu habonim haitah l’rosh pinah – the stone that the builders rejected has become the foundation. Psalm 118

May the wisdom of understanding through repetition become part of your spiritual practice.

Shalom u’Verakhah

Peace and Blessing,

Rabbi Scott Perlo

           

^Ö Midrash Zuta, Kohelet 9

It Takes Two

בס''ד

Parshat Yitro

16 Shvat, 5771

January 21st, 2011

When you walk into a synagogue during the Torah reading, you will always see multiple people crowding around the bimah. This is not, as most would suppose, only about correcting the reader. Rather, says the Shulhan Arukh, “since Torah was given through a mediator (Moses), so too do we use a mediator to read Torah.”*

Basically, the giving of Torah (coming to you this week at shul) wasn’t a solo act. It was, rather, a duet.

We have a weakness for solo leaders: the hero alone, the one who stands against many. We are all, always, waiting for a messiah, and when we find a likely candidate for the post, we’ll often load our deepest expectations onto that one person. And then we wait for our dreams to come true, or be disappointed.

But that is not the model that Torah and life experience present us: God and Moses gave Torah, Moses and Aaron led the people, Abraham and Sara created us, Esther and Mordehai saved us. The most successful, the most effective, the most creative and vibrant of our ventures are developed in partnership. “Havruta o mituta,”** teaches the Talmud, “partnership or death.”  Redemption comes in twos.

*Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim 141:4. The original source of this quote Talmud Yerushalmi, Masekhet Megillah 74d

** Talmud, Masekhet Taanit 23a

Metaphorical Danger

בס''ד

Parshat Beshallah

9 Shvat, 5771

There was, in my first full year in Israel, a point when I began to get frightened. The year was 2005, and the Disengagement from Gaza was rapidly approaching. In the media, on the buses, in public places I started to hear a repeated phrase about the prospect of the withdrawal: “it’s like Sharon is coming to rape my sister.” This statement terrified me.

            It terrified me because this peculiar metaphor means something to Jewish ears. There is a  law in the Talmud called the rodef – the pursuer. It describes a person who is coming to murder or to rape another human being. The law states that it is permitted, perhaps even commanded, to kill such a person before they accomplish their crime. What I was hearing was the religious justification for political assassination.

            What I was hearing also wasn’t true. Ariel Sharon was attempting to leave Gaza, and forcibly remove Jews from their homes. But no matter one’s opinion on the Disengagement, he was not, in fact, coming to rape anyone’s sister.

            Using metaphor this way is damned dangerous and irresponsible. Hitler was Hitler – not the leader of the political party we despise, who isn’t in fact a genocidal terrorist. Nazis are Nazis – not the au courant favorite political insult both here and in Israel. And a blood libel is the false belief that we used the blood of Christian children in baking matzah – a lie for which we died by the tens of thousands – not the response of a criticized politician.

            Torah is unequivocal about our responsibility to watch our words: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Proverbs 18:19 We are awash in metaphor, and it’s time to stop.

Blasphemy

בס''ד

1 Shvat 5771

January 5^th, 2011

The Governor of the Punjab, Salman Taseer, was assassinated this week by his own bodyguard, incensed by his employer’s opposition to a law that condemns those who insult Islam to death. Facebook pages in support of the assassin are sprouting up faster than Facebook can take them down.

This presents a problem for us Jews, though it is not the problem you might think.

The problem is that Torah contains a commandment identical to the Pakistani law:

“And a fight broke out in the camp and…The son of the Israelite woman pronounced the Name of God, cursing it, and he was brought to Moses…

And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: take the one who cursed God outside the camp; and let all who were within hearing lay their hands upon his head, and let the whole community stone him.”

Leviticus 24:10-13

You may have noticed that even in the most earnest of Jewish circles we no longer stone people to death for blasphemy. Have we then abandoned Torah?

We have not. But we have brought revolution to religious ideas. And we do believe that those revolutions bring us closer to God. The relevant revolution here is what my teacher, Rabbi Sharon Brous, teaches as the central Torah of her life: that God’s dignity is expressed through human dignity; that injustice harms the image of God. So we’ve learned that to kill a person for cursing God degrades God’s holy Name even more.

Fundamentalists are forever attempting to uncover the Torah (Bible, Koran) in its immaculate form. But only dead things don’t change. Etz hayyim hi – Torah is a living tree. It is eternal because lives beyond change. To ignore our own spiritual evolution is to ignore God’s plan for the world.