The Current

בס''ד

Parshat Hukat

27 Sivan, 5771

June 29^th, 2011

            On the boat ride out to our dive site, the divemaster mentioned that the current around Cozumel (it’s an island) was stronger than usual, and that we should be prepared.

            I’m not much of a scuba diver, but the Mexican Carribean is considered to have some of the best diving in the world. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

I did not, however, grasp what the divemaster was telling me.

            As my guide and I descended, the current grabbed us and basically threw us along the ledge of the trench that lies between Cozumel and Cancun. When we surfaced forty minutes later, we had traveled so far our starting point could not be seen.

            Please know that I wasn’t in danger. I am not trying to convey the appearance of risk. It was the experience of being pushed along by the current that I want to share.

            It felt like nothing so much as flying. Sixty feet under the water, I was flying.

            Every once in a while, we are blessed with the experience that we are connected with something infinitely greater than us. This experience of the numinous gives extraordinary perspective on life; we understand in an instant the great forces that propel us forward, so large that we were unable to see them for their vastness. We realize that much of who we are and who we become is in hands much larger than our own.

            Some reject these great hands that push us and would rather the choices over our fate be left to individuals, but in them I have found a surprising freedom and beauty. I often pray that they sweep me up along their way. Without them I would not be able to fly. 

Do The Heavens Sing?

 בס''ד

Parshat Shlah

13 Sivan, 5771

June 15th, 2011

     A friend and I have been cracking our teeth over some Medieval Jewish philosophy. It’s a good metaphor, cracking teeth; we leave every session with our heads ringing.

     The book is An Essay on Teshuvah, and the author Rabbi Menahem Meiri - a brilliant student of Maimonides whose work on the Talmud was recovered after being lost for centuries.

     And here is the question he poses.

     Are the heavens (in the physical sense: stars, constellations, comets and such) beautiful simply because they exist, or are they beautiful because human beings recognize them as beautiful?*

     This question is part of a central philosophical disagreement between essentialism and nominalism: do things like beauty and love actually exist, independent of us? Would they be there even if we were gone? Or does beauty only exist because a human mind names something beautiful?

     To be honest, I have always preferred the purity of the first way of thinking. I would like to think that the Grand Canyon is just as grand without us having to call it so, and that the majesty of so much of God’s creation remains majestic whether or not we’re around to say such. I believe that the stars sing praise to God of their own accord.

     But I also have thought how lonely and quiet the universe would be without us to stick our minds in every nook and cranny of it, asking, judging, chattering, arguing. Whether or not beauty exists independent of humanity, beautiful things are best enjoyed in company. The world is a warmer place because we are here to love it.

* The literal phrasing of the question is more religiously elegant, but more philosophically abstruse : do the heavens sing praise to God simply by through their existing, or is it through our recognition of their movements that the song of praise is created. The first understanding he attributes to the Rambam, the second to Ibn Ezra. Proposition 2, Ch. 2

Knowing Everything

בס''ד

Parshat Naso

29 Iyyar 5771

June 2^nd, 2011

45^th Day of the Omer

A story was once told to me about the famously brilliant founder of Agudath Israel in America, Rabbi Eliezer Silver. In the early 1900’s, Rabbi Silver came to America and found work as the rabbi of a congregation in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. One night the president of his shul walked by his house one evening and saw him learning Torah.

The president convened a meeting of the board, which promptly fired Rabbi Silver. The reason given was that Rabbi Silver was, apparently, still a student. A real rabbi would know everything.

Part of the inheritance of American intellectual history is, when it comes to learning, an impatience with the space between novicehood and mastery. This is certainly not unique to us, but as the first of the modern democratic nations, we have a heaping dose of it. The time between starting along the path of learning and reaching its apex is considered a waste of time. We would certainly shorten the road could we manage it successfully.

Our impatience with the discomfort of learning has particularly unfortunate side effects for contemporary Jews. A person can come to Shabbat, every Shabbat, for 30 or 40 years and feel no more knowledgeable about our tefillah than when she came in, nor feel that he really knows the content of Torah despite hearing it read every week. Something is amiss.

Patience, my friends, I urge patience. Rabbi Silver had it right – the process of learning is so fine a thing, even if prickly at first, to be worth stretching out over an entire lifetime. Our desire to learn quickly and be done with it has brought us to the place where we never have the time to learn anything. We deserve better than the freneticism of our culture.

“In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks.” Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

The Majesty of Brokenness

בס''ד

Parshat Bamidbar

38^th Day of the Omer

22 Iyyar, 5771

May 26^th, 2011

God knows our yetzers (urges), and remembers that we are dust

Psalm 103:14

A man pulled up next to me on Westwood, and gestured that I should roll down my window. Then he started yelling.

            It’s the reason he started yelling that prompts this retelling. I had not cut him off, nor had I blocked his way, or done anything having to do with traffic. Rather, his anger was prompted by a political bumper sticker on my car (a fairly parve one, at that).

            Almost every day, during Shaharit, the guys at the Minyan and I pray the words above. They are meant to remind us of our frailty, our overwhelming tendency to give in to our temptations and inclinations, and the fact that so much of what we want is prompted by our basest instincts.

            These words are also some of the most life-giving I know.

            Pirkei Avot teaches that what defines a hero is conquering of one’s urges, and this is true. Restraint is heroic because our yetzer never tires of convincing us that it is in fact warranted, that it is justified. Anger’s genius is its success at explaining why other people deserve ours. Be it politics, or family issues, or perceived slights, or work disagreements – more of us are like the Westwood yeller than we might admit. The yetzer hara is an implacable foe.

            Salvation lies in the consciousness that our urges are both flawed and fleeting. We are more than our impulses. Beyond the acceptance of brokenness lies majesty.

The Beaver

בס''ד

Parshat Behar

23rd day of the Omer

7 Iyyar, 5771

May 11th, 2011

I’m likely about to make the least significant principled stand of my career. I have tried to resist for months, but a man does not always defeat his yetzer hara and pique has taken over my soul.  I ask for Jodie Foster’s forgiveness ahead of time.

Please boycott The Beaver.

Our Rabbis thought incessantly about public space. They knew that the realm of publicity changes the laws of psychology. The reactions of an individual and those of group are quite different, and it matters not how crazy, baseless, or offensive behavior is - if it survives long enough in the public eye, it will have carved out a perverse longevity for itself. There is a tenacity to public evils, when given enough of our shared attention.

For this reason people who have made bad names for themselves cannot serve, say, as representatives of the community to God during prayer. (Shulhan Arukh, Orekh Hayyim 53). The Sages knew that the best way to destroy notoriety is to kill the attention that feeds it.

Now, I have no special expectation of the rectitude of celebrities -- I was, after all, raised in Los Angeles -- but just how far does a person have to fall before his career is a non-starter? Anti-Semitism, racism, domestic abuse -- are there any shoes left to drop?

I realize that by writing these words I work against my own purposes. So don’t boycott the Beaver, just don’t see it. Don’t talk about it; don’t discuss it; don’t review it; deal with it in the only manner effective in our sadly corporatized society: let it die the ignominious death of the box office flop.

In fact, I refuse to let my words add to his notoriety one whit -- this Torah will self-destruct in 30 seconds.

Osama

בס''ד

Parshat Emor

16th Day of the Omer

30 Nisan, 5771

May 4th, 2011

     Of the unbelievable volume of e-articles, blog posts, and facebook status updates in response to the killing of Osama bin Laden, there is one argument - almost an obsession - that stands above all the rest: how should we feel about his death? Is it appropriate to be happy that he is dead? Does celebration somehow mar our dignity or give in to baser impulses?

    This ambivalence is fascinating. That the world is better without Osama brooks no debate, yet many have deep concerns (and very strong opinions) about what kind of emotion people should express in response to his execution. 

     Even Torah is conflicted about this.* The book of Proverbs, the seat of Torah wisdom, says, “When the wicked perish there are shouts of joy.” (11:23) It also says, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, nor let your heart be glad when he stumbles. (24:27)

     Those two quotes come from the very same book.

     I understand the root of our concern. We consider that the emotion we display is the sign of why we killed him: celebration means that we were pursuing revenge; stoicism means that we were upholding justice.

     I believe, though that how we feel after such an event is irrelevant to understanding its rightness. What matters are the emotions that preceded the act - the motivations that led us to kill him - and the fact of the action this country took. Actions and motivations cannot somehow be emended by how we respond after the fact.

     That our emotions were murky cannot be denied. Is it possible to edit out the rage that a parent feels for a child’s murderer? that a spouse feels for the killing of a partner? We are not dispassionate creatures.

     The comfort I offer is that, in the final accounting, killing Osama bin Laden was a moral act. Though our Torah envisions a future of perfect peace, it was born with a very earthy justice, and it says:

“Whoever sheds the blood of a man, by a man his blood will be shed, for in God’s image did God create man.” (Bereishit 9:6)

Osama bin Laden set the destruction of God’s image as his life’s work. His death is just. 

* In this, I find the proof of Torah’s wisdom, for to be decisive one way is to be too ethereal, ignoring basic realities of what human beings are. To be decisive the other is to condone the basest of sentiments.

God's Voice

בס''ד

Parshat Kedoshim Tihiyu

8^th day of the Omer

23 Nisan, 5771

April 27^th, 2011

Next month marks the 400^th anniversary of the King James Bible. Charles McGrath writes in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/weekinreview/24mcgrath.html?_r=1&ref=charlesmcgrath) that not only was the King James written by committee (usually an excellent recipe for mediocrity), but it was intentionally written archaically. Nonetheless, it remains one of the masterpieces of the English language.

            McGrath, himself an atheist, spends some time belittling modern Bibles that render into more colloquial English. Apparently, the God he does not believe in is very formal.

            However, he asks a profound question: how does one translate God’s voice? It is a question worth investing in.

Translating Torah well is essential. Connection to Judaism depends on being drawn into a world of holy words. If such words are opaque, the handicap both to students and teachers is enormous.

But as a student of the Rabbis, I want to contradict a basic assumption of biblical literalists – that God’s voice can be directly translated. In fact, the opposite is true: God’s voice is inherently difficult to understand. Take this midrash for example:

            “Said R. Yose ben R. Hananiah: according to each person’s individual capacity did [God] speak [each of the ten commandments]. Pesikta d’Rav Kahana 12:25”

Or this one:

            The commandment to remember Shabbat and the commandment to keep Shabbat were said the same utterance…something that human beings are incapable of doing (i.e. God said one thing, but human brains can only understand it as two separate things). Midrash Tannaim 25

            There are those who assume that if we just followed what God told us, the world would be a better place. Jews believe, though, that the trick of it is first trying to understand what God was saying. Looking at the world, I’d say we have yet to hear the Holy One right.