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Reality Takes a Bite Out of Nostalgia – Vayiqra 5783

I had one very Zionist day this past week. 

It was not Monday, when my older son completed his service in the IDF, where he has been serving as a combat medic for 2.5 years, packed his bags and went home to his kibbutz. He is thrilled to be free, and we are all relieved.

On Sunday, my family and I were in New York City for the 30th anniversary concert of HaZamir, the International Jewish Teen Choir. This is an annual concert at Lincoln Center which brings together HaZamir chapters from all over the United States and from Israel, about 200 teens sing together after having practiced back home for months. Our Pittsburgh chapter sent eight teens to sing along, a healthy representation. It is an event which is extraordinarily powerful and moving to me, and not just because my daughter was singing along with a sea of sopranos.

The concert is a nexus of some of the things which I hold most dear: Jewish life and culture, Hebrew choral music, an unabashed love of the State of Israel and its musical culture, and to some extent a certain nostalgia. Truth is, I wept more tears at this concert than I had in a long time. It was extraordinarily moving. To hear Naomi Shemer’s anthem Lu Yehi, based on the Beatles’ classic Let it Be, in 4-part harmony, sung by the generation of young people who will inherit all of our worldly messes, fills me with a certain yearning and pride and sadness and hope that can only be captured in the language of the Torah, which is very much a living language today:

מה קול ענות אני שומע
קול שופר וקול תופים
כל שנבקש לו יהי
לו תישמע בתוך כל אלה
גם תפילה אחת מפי
כל שנבקש לו יהי

The anguished voices I hear,
The sound of the shofar and the sound of drums,
All that we ask for, let it be,
And if within all of them should be heard,
A single prayer from my lips,
All that we ask for, let it be.

That was Sunday afternoon. Judy and Zev and I spent the morning prior to the concert walking around Manhattan and taking in some of the sights. And it just so happened that we stumbled across a very different form of Zionist engagement going on in Washington Square Park: a protest against the Israeli government attended by a few hundred people, and judging from the Hebrew spoken all around us, most of the attendees were Israelis living in NYC. The park was filled with Israeli flags; there were speakers and chants and signs. They decried the Netanyahu government and the current judicial reforms package with chants of “Bushah, bushah.” Shame, shame. 

The contrast between these two events was quite stark. One was primarily a celebration of Israeli culture and music (OK, so there were a few compositions by American Jewish composers, but a majority of the music was Israeli) and included a brief address by Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN. The other brought into focus all of the challenges and divisiveness facing Israeli society at this moment.

I hope by now that you have heard about these protests. They are taking place all over Israel, as well as in cities all over the world which have significant Israeli ex-pat communities, including London, Berlin, New York, and even Pittsburgh. In Israel, for example, on Thursday, perhaps as many as 500,000 Israelis went into the streets all over the country in what was billed by organizers as a “day of paralysis.” In Tel Aviv, water cannons were even used to disperse crowds who were blocking roads.

Israeli politics are complicated, occasionally vicious, and always in your face. Israelis are not shy about telling you how they really feel on any subject, and it is not unusual to go at it with your cab driver about politics or even with a stranger in a cafe. And given that the governing coalition which has proposed these reforms in the Knesset has a 64-56 majority, the nation is extraordinarily divided right now, to the point where many observers of all stripes are calling it a “constitutional crisis,” despite the fact that Israel has no constitution.

This is, however, the greatest existential threat that Israel has ever faced. Yes, Iran might soon have nuclear weapons. Yes, Hizbullah and Hamas are right nearby, occasionally sending rockets and flaming balloons and digging tunnels under the borders. But Israel has never faced a threat of this nature, and the threat is entirely internal. Half a million protesters on the streets of a nation of 9.5 million people would be equivalent to about 18 million Americans stopping traffic on the streets of our nation. Imagine what it would take to cause that kind of disruption. Military reservists are not showing up for duty. High-tech companies and entrepreneurs are pulling their capital out of the country. High-profile retired politicians and judges and military officers have spoken out against the reforms. The president, who usually plays a ceremonial role, has stepped into the fray to try to bring about a compromise. 

Israel’s enemies are licking their lips at the internal chaos. (See Amos Harel’s piece in Foreign Policy.)

Tel Aviv, March 25, 2023.

This Netanyahu-led government came together at the end of December, and includes not only the center-right Likud party but also Orthodox and right-wing parties, the leaders of some of which are in fact convicted criminals and also express views which many of us find odious. 

They have proposed an onslaught of legislation, including the judicial reforms, the first one of which was passed Thursday, shielding the Prime Minister from criminal prosecution while in office. This particularly benefits Netanyahu, who is currently facing corruption charges.  

But the most controversial legislation on the table would grant the ability to the Knesset to overturn decisions of the Supreme Court and to have a heavy hand in picking Supreme Court judges, thereby dramatically reducing the independence of the judiciary.

Other bills which the coalition has indicated that they will introduce would allow greater political control of the police, increase the authority of rabbinical courts (which of course are Orthodox), and, of greatest concern to Diaspora Jewry, modify the Law of Return to eliminate the current provision that any person with at least one Jewish grandparent, regardless of halakhic status, may become a citizen. 

You may know that this law, the first law established by the State, is guided by the intent to ensure that there will always be a safe haven for Jews; having one Jewish grandparent was enough for the Nazis to put you on a train to a death camp.

While there are certainly arguments on either side of these proposed changes, a healthy segment of Israelis feel that these changes would fundamentally alter the nature of Israel’s democracy, endangering minority rights, elevating religious control in the public sphere, and creating an environment that smacks of dictatorship. Israel has no formal constitution, but democracy requires that majority rule respect minority rights, and this is what many feel the Netanyahu government is threatening to destroy.

Much of what we do as Jews is based on a kind of national nostalgia. We have a theoretical ideal of behavior, identified in the Torah, and a blueprint in the Talmud and later literature to help us attempt to live out that ideal in changing times and circumstances. We read in Parashat Vayiqra about the qorbanot, the sacrifices carried out by our Israelite ancestors in the mishkan, the portable sanctuary used while wandering in the desert for 40 years, and then later, in already changed circumstances, in the Beit haMiqdash, the Temple in Jerusalem.

The very idea of animal sacrifice is anathema to us today. When the Romans destroyed the Beit haMiqdash in the year 70 CE, we ended that practice. Thank God! We have a better method of worship today, with a lot less blood, which is more portable and more sustainable. And yet we still read about the theoretical ideal, which we long ago replaced. And there are plenty of other examples from Jewish life. The reality of Jewish practice today includes, if you will, the nostalgia for what we used to do, even though we no longer do it.

The State of Israel is about to turn 75 years old. And as much as we should maintain our nostalgia for the theoretical ideal of what the Jewish state is, contemporary reality has taken a bite out of nostalgia.

Why am I telling you about all of this? Because all the more so at this moment, we as American Jews who care about Israel need to pay attention. We need to ensure, as much as we can from a distance, that the crisis in Israel does not tear the Jewish state and the Jewish people apart. Several major American Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Federations of North America, have issued statements urging compromise to preserve democracy and minority rights in Israel.

It is not necessarily up to us in the galut / Jewish diaspora to help identify the compromise position which, I hope, the Knesset will hammer out. But we must raise our voices in support of democracy in Israel.

We cannot only play in the nostalgia for the past; we must also be a part of the current moment. We too are part of the picture. We have a stake in the future of Israel – of its safety and security, of its stability, of its presence in our lives as the merkaz ruḥani, the spiritual center of the Jewish people, and, God forbid, as a haven if needed.

Every Shabbat morning here at Beth Shalom, we recite the Prayer for the State of Israel, which we sang just a few moments ago. And we prayed to God that the leaders and advisors of the Jewish state be guided by God’s light and truth, and that the inhabitants of the State and the entire region be blessed with a lasting peace and joy.

Ladies and gentlemen, please pray harder. And also consider the following:

  1. Local Israelis are hosting a weekly protest here in Pittsburgh on Sundays at 4 PM at the corner of Forbes and Murray. All are invited to join.
  2. Beth Shalom will be hosting a public reading of the Declaration of Independence on Yom HaAtzma’ut, in celebration of Israel’s 75th birthday, and in acknowledgment of our desire for Israel to maintain its foundational values.
Pittsburghers protesting judicial reforms in Israel, March 2023. The Hebrew sign says, “Without an independent judiciary, there is no democracy.” Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle / photo credit: David Rullo.

כל שנבקש, לו יהי

May everything that we seek be granted; may peace reign once again in Israel and among all the people who call themselves Yisrael.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 3/25/2023.)

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The Most Beloved Employee of Beth Shalom, Bar None – Ki Tissa 5783

This is the most ironic period of the Jewish year, from a gastronomic perspective. In order to fulfill the Purim day mitzvah of mishloaḥ manot, sending packages of food and treats to one another, as described in chapter 9 of the book of Esther*, many of us pack extensive and sometimes quite fancy bags full of stuff – candy, chips, fruits, nuts, and of course hamantaschen – and distribute them far and wide. And, of course, we get similar packages from others. It’s a lovely, friendly, neighborly project that has a downside: then you have piles of snack food sitting around the house.

Now, as happens every single year, Pesaḥ is exactly one month after Purim. Prior to Pesaḥ, of course, your house should be free of ḥametz, five species of grains identified in the Talmud. The most essential halakhah surrounding Pesaḥ is that from the morning of the day prior to the first seder, it is forbidden by Jews to eat, possess, benefit from and even see ḥametz. So all products containing even the tiniest amount of exposure to wheat, barley, oats, spelt, and rye, which is basically everything you received in those mishloaḥ manot bags, must be eaten (or regifted, although none of your friends are going to want their mishloaḥ manot stuff to come back to them, so to do that you’re going to have to pawn it off on your non-Jewish neighbors).

As I sat at my kitchen table last Thursday evening typing out this sermon, surveying the array of Purim goodies calling out to be consumed, I hatched a great theory about the origin of hamantaschen. Some Jew at some point in the Middle Ages, on the week before Purim realized, “Hey, I have lots of flour that I’m going to have to use up before Pesaḥ. I should make a bunch of cookies for Purim and give them to all my neighbors! Then the ḥametz will be their problem!” It was such a great idea that all the neighbors did it the following year, thus neutralizing the original intent. But a fabulous Ashkenazi custom was born.

It is clearly NOT ironic, however, that foodstuffs and eating are an essential part of Jewish holiday practices, be it Adar or Nissan or Tishrei or whatever. On the contrary, it is hard-wired into the Jewish year. We are the people for whom what you put into your mouth is as important as what comes out of it as words of prayer. 

And it is also therefore not ironic that, as we honor Michelle Vines today, we must acknowledge that she has been the most important member of the staff here for many, many years. I will say a lot more on that in a few minutes, but first a word of Torah, brought to you courtesy of Parashat Ki Tissa, which we read today.

The subject of eating comes up at least six times in Parashat Ki Tissa. 

  • The Israelites’ first act after making the Molten Calf is to declare a festival, and so they offer sacrifices and then they sit down to eat and drink and perform all sorts of horrible acts (Ex. 32:6). 
  • Later on, when Moshe goes up Mt. Sinai a second time, God lays down the law about idolatry and intermarrying with the Canaanites, because it will lead to eating from their unholy, idolatrous sacrifices (34:15).
  •  Immediately after, there is a reminder of Ḥag haMatzot, the feast of Unleavened Bread which we associate with Pesaḥ, when we are obligated to eat matzah (34:18). 
  • In the same holiday passage, we also find a commandment to bring as a sacrifice the biqqurei admatekha, the first fruits of your land, which we associate with Shavu’ot, and in the same verse, the prohibition on boiling a calf in its mother’s milk, a commandment which yielded a whole bunch of practical laws which are in play to this very day (34:26). 
  • And near the conclusion of Ki Tissa we learn that in the 40 days and nights that Moshe was up on Mt. Sinai, לֶ֚חֶם לֹ֣א אָכַ֔ל וּמַ֖יִם לֹ֣א שָׁתָ֑ה, “he ate no bread and drank no water” (34:28). (He must have been quite hungry when he returned.)

You might even say that the latter half of the book of Shemot / Exodus, following the Israelites’ having escaped from Pharaoh’s army at the Sea of Reeds, is food obsessed. No sooner have they chanted Shirat haYam, the Song of the Sea, that they are desperate for water (Ex. 15:24). And then they are pining for the “fleshpots of Egypt” (16:3). And then there are the manna and the quail. And so on.

When we comb through the text for this dietary thread, we see it everywhere. Why does the Torah go out of its way to tell us who is eating and drinking and why, what they are permitted and what they receive, what is forbidden and what is associated with idolatry or with proper festivals? Do those food references further the narrative? 

The theme of food in the Torah reinforces the principle, which we all know, that eating is essential to what we do. Taken together, the episodes of eating and drinking remind us that this most mundane feature of our lives, the physical source of our energy and our spirit, cannot be overlooked. Our holidays surround food; our joy and our grief are expressed over platefuls of cookies and platters of smoked fish. Food is ritual. Food is an opportunity each day to frame an ordinary act in holiness with berakhot before and after. Food is the source of our strength, and our meals punctuate our lives. And, as you may know, it is food that enables us to perform the most fundamental mitzvah of Jewish life: learning Torah. As we learn in Pirqei Avot (3:17):

אִם אֵין קֶמַח, אֵין תּוֹרָה. אִם אֵין תּוֹרָה, אֵין קֶמַח

Im ein qemaḥ, ein Torah. Im ein Torah, ein qemaḥ.
Where there is no flour, there is no Torah; where there is no Torah, there is no flour.

The Maharal of Prague, a 16th-century rabbi, notes that the Mishnah here uses the term qemaḥ, flour, rather than leḥem, bread. Flour is a fine powder, he says, while bread has other characteristics: it can be rough and thick; flour thereby relates to the fine qualities of the soul, while bread, in its thick roughness, does not. Also, flour is a fundamental need, like Torah. If you have no bread, but you have a reserve of flour, you can make bread. If you have no flour in the jar, once you finish your bread, you are out of luck. Torah is the very source of our spiritual sustenance; when we have no Torah, we have nothing left. 

But whether we are speaking of bread or flour or pareve cookies, food, like Torah, is essential to our lives. The Jewish army of God marches on its stomach. And we should remember this all the more so on this day when we are honoring Michelle in her retirement.

Now, this may surprise some of you, but Michelle is not Jewish. Yes, it is true that she knows as much about kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) as any rabbi in the neighborhood, and can almost cite chapter and verse of the Shulḥan Arukh, the 16th-century codification of Jewish law, in the original Hebrew regarding certain Jewish dietary practices. And not only that, she also knows which customs are in play in which communities – which hekhshers (kosher certification marks) are acceptable in which synagogues, who among us allows broccoli and asparagus, etc. And she has an encyclopedic knowledge, acquired over many years of dealing with benei mitzvah, weddings, beritot milah (ritual circumcisions), shiv’ah (mourning rituals), and every other lifecycle and communal event, of every aspect of every party. She has managed the most complex of build-outs for celebrations in the Ballroom; she has poured at least 8 million shot glasses of grape juice for Shabbat kiddush; she has been spotted at every type of affair imaginable, always with a friendly smile and a nod, always with a calm, reassuring attitude of understanding. Members of this congregation and throughout the community know that we can not only trust Michelle, but that she has long been the one to rely on. She is, and has been for half a century, the most-beloved Beth Shalom employee, bar none.

And we are extraordinarily grateful for her half-century of service to Beth Shalom and to the wider Jewish community. We want you to know, Michelle, that in addition to honoring you this morning, the Congregation Beth Shalom and other synagogue friends are also providing a special gift for you, and we hope you will use it to take a nice, comfortable vacation.

Michelle has helped carry us through all sorts of moments, the joyous and the painful, the holy and the mundane. She has been there for all of us; holding us all up. She has been maintaining that figurative flour jar of spiritual sustenance as we have drawn from it, for many years.

And we are so grateful. Kol hakavod! All the glory is yours. 

When you see Michelle at kiddush today, please don’t ask her if we are out of egg salad. Instead, please just thank her for her many years of service, and wish her good luck.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 3/11/2023.)

* Esther 9:22

כַּיָּמִ֗ים אֲשֶׁר־נָ֨חוּ בָהֶ֤ם הַיְּהוּדִים֙ מֵאֹ֣יְבֵיהֶ֔ם וְהַחֹ֗דֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר֩ נֶהְפַּ֨ךְ לָהֶ֤ם מִיָּגוֹן֙ לְשִׂמְחָ֔ה וּמֵאֵ֖בֶל לְי֣וֹם ט֑וֹב לַעֲשׂ֣וֹת אוֹתָ֗ם יְמֵי֙ מִשְׁתֶּ֣ה וְשִׂמְחָ֔ה וּמִשְׁלֹ֤חַ מָנוֹת֙ אִ֣ישׁ לְרֵעֵ֔הוּ וּמַתָּנ֖וֹת לָֽאֶבְיֹנִֽים׃

[The 14th and 15th of Adar were] the days on which the Jews enjoyed relief from their foes and the same month which had been transformed for them from one of grief and mourning to one of festive joy. They were to observe them as days of feasting and merrymaking, and as an occasion for sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor.

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The Future – Tetzaveh 5783

When I consider where we are as a society and where we might be headed, the words of Leonard Cohen, from the title track of his fantastic 1992 album, “The Future,” continue to ring in my ears:

Things are gonna slide
Slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it’s overturned
The order of the soul

We, the Jews, are excellent at history. Regarding the future, not so much. 

Just consider what will be happening, Jewishly speaking, for the next few weeks: 

  • On Shabbat we remember Creation. 
  • On this Shabbat Zakhor, we remember Amaleq
  • On Purim, Monday evening and Tuesday, we remember how Esther saved the Jews of Persia. 
  • On Pesaḥ, we remember how we came from slavery to freedom. 

And so on. We are excellent at history.

But where in Jewish life do we remember the future? The most enduring symbol of the Jewish future to be that one that is right behind me, above the ark. Parashat Tetzaveh opens (Shemot / Exodus 27:20) with the mitzvah of kindling the Ner Tamid, the eternal light, which symbolizes the continuity of our connection with God and Torah from all the way back to Exodus. It is tamid – always burning, always reminding us of our past and the eternity of the future before us, always serving as a beacon to call us back to our tradition.

We frequently invoke yetzi-at Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, in our liturgy. We do so because it serves as a template for our future redemption, the redemption of Olam HaBa, the World to Come. But admittedly, the Olam HaBa model is somewhat inchoate, and frankly, we are in disagreement as to what the real goal in Jewish life is. There are certainly some who understand our performance of mitzvot on this Earth to bring the mashiaḥ, the anointed, supposed descendant of King David, and lead us to Olam HaBa. There are others who see our mitzvot as serving their purpose in the here and now; that is, we fulfill them because it is the right thing to do in the moment, and their reward is intrinsic. (I am in this latter camp.)

But in general, except for mashiaḥ-based ideology, which is somewhat murky and controversial, we do not really speak too much about the future. We are simply not wired that way. Judaism is fundamentally focused on the present.

Which is why Rabbi Danny Schiff’s new book, Judaism in a Digital Age, is so striking. Well-researched and thoughtfully presented, the book addresses not only the future from a Jewish perspective (and in particular, the future of the modern non-Orthodox movements), but also the future from a general point of view, the future of all humanity. And let me say this: the view is mostly pretty bleak.

He opens with a biting critique of the Conservative and Reform movements, explaining in excruciating detail about why movements which emerged “when horses were the dominant means of transportation” are not only no longer relevant, but also destined for continued decline as they confront the “hyper-emancipated” world of the digital age. 

He moves on to take a snapshot of society as it is today, how “modernity” ended in 1990 with the widespread availability of the Internet, and all of the ways that immediate access to information through digital means has changed how we live and think and socialize. He revels in the current thinking by notable futurist authors, including the very real threat to society posed by artificial intelligence, and dangles before the reader the promise of immortality based on so-called “transhumanist” ideas about the blending of technology and the human body, which may ultimately serve to destroy any traditional concept of corporeal human life as we now know it.

And here and there he asks the hard questions about Judaism’s confrontation with post-modernity. What value will there be to having rabbis and teachers when all information is available to us without the intermediaries? How can halakhic principles regarding privacy or leshon hara remain in play when all of the details of every person’s life is available to anybody else through a search engine? How can we confront the challenges posed by rising rates of isolation and economic inequality, the availability of pornography, or the endless amplification of self-importance which social media platforms encourage?

Whatever happens in the future, we will certainly respond by (a) failing to consider adequately the full consequences of new technologies, and (b) managing to eke out a new way of living despite dramatically changed circumstances. Rabbi Schiff cites David Zvi Kalman, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, regarding the way we passively accept potentially harmful innovations:

There’s a new technology in town. A few years ago it seemed like a pipe dream, but it’s now arrived on the commercial market in a big way. Large corporations are lining up to use it even as watchdogs point out serious potential for abuse. Reporters look into it, agree that there is a problem, and pen dozens of articles fretting about the downsides, demanding regulation and responsible use. The public grows concerned, and then they grow resigned. Meanwhile, the technology is adopted. Sometimes it is well regulated, more often it is not. There are a few horror stories. We learn to live with it. We move on. This is the ethical life cycle of modern technology, and its major problem is that it doesn’t know how to distinguish between technologies that complicate morality and those that destroy it – this is, it lacks the ability to say no, absolutely not.

We are seeing this tale play out over and over; consider facial-recognition technology, which is now widespread. Our response, according to Rabbi Schiff, must be to accept that the world has changed, and respond within the new paradigm:

Viewed from a Jewish perspective, the digital age is no longer about adapting Jews and Judaism to a slowly opening world of belonging and enlightenment; it is about asking how human beings should optimally function within the cacaphonous tumult of an accelerating epoch of hyper-emancipation, hyper-connectivity, and hyper-individualism.

And this is where I believe that the modern movements have the greatest potential. We are particularly well-positioned to engage with the Jewish future, perhaps in ways that more traditional forms of Orthodoxy cannot.

So first of all, I want to reassure you all that reports of the Conservative movement’s death are highly exaggerated. People have been declaring us dead for years, but I do not think that you have to look around too much here at Beth Shalom to see that this is a thriving, multi-generational community that rejoices and grieves together, that cherishes life and celebrates Jewish living and constantly engages with Jewish text and ritual. And while our membership decreased slightly during the pandemic, we are gaining members once again, continuing to buck the national synagogue trend. 

I am grateful for our excellent and committed staff. Our lay leadership is in fine shape, and we are preparing for a capital campaign so we can make much-needed repairs to our building. חזק חזק ונתחזק / Ḥazaq, ḥazaq, venitḥazzeq. Be strong, be strong, and we will be strengthen one another.

And even Rabbi Schiff concedes that if there is a new model for how to be Jewish, we have not yet found it. So meanwhile, while we are waiting for that new paradigm to emerge, we are going to continue to do our traditional-yet-contemporary thing. We will continue to pray together, to learn together, and to offer imaginative new programming through Derekh and otherwise.

Now onto the thorny questions about the future: 

  • Will we all soon be immortal cyborgs? 
  • Will the chips planted in our brains which connect us all to the shared data storage of all of human history extinguish our individual personalities? 
  • Will the AI machines we have created overthrow us or imprison us or simply exterminate us all when they realize that we are weaker and far less efficient than they are? 
  • What will happen to Judaism in a future in which God seems powerless compared to the technology we have created?

Jews have lived through many centuries of change, of social upheaval, of wars and genocides and life-changing innovations. We have made the transition from hand-copied documents to printed books to instantly-searchable gemara on smartphones. And yet, here we are, still reading Torah from a scroll produced essentially the same way for thousands of years, still basking in the glow of a Ner Tamid that – OK, so this one is electric, not an olive-oil lamp – but it is still shining as a beacon, here on Beacon Street.

We have navigated a changing world, and we will continue to do so. We will determine whether halakhah permits us to eat cultured meat that was never actually attached to any animal. We will find a way to grapple with the potential immortality awaiting us in the near future; as Rabbi Schiff points out, our sources do speak here and there about immortality. We will manage to make minyanim a few times a day, even when our physical presence and our consciousness are not in the same place. We will ask the hard questions and answer them within the Jewish system, just as Jews have always done.

Rabbi Schiff lands in a somewhat reassuring place. Regarding the AI-infused future, he says, “No matter how animated, intelligent, responsive, or reliable our AI creations might become, AI will never attain the combination of qualities that will merit the status of being ‘created in the image’ [of God].

We can do this. We in the Conservative movement are especially well-placed to do this. We have been addressing cultural, societal, and technological change for a while, and we will help us all make this transition to whatever awaits us. I’m counting on that Ner Tamid to continue shining, to continue reminding us of the turbulence of our past, the constancy of our present, and the brightness of our future. Our unofficial historical slogan has been, “Tradition and change,” and I expect that we will continue to balance the two successfully.

In the Talmud (BT Avodah Zarah 2a), Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said, “All the good deeds Israel does in this world will bear testimony in Olam HaBa.” Perhaps Olam HaBa will not look quite like what R. Yehoshua ben Levi envisioned, seventeen centuries ago. But whatever form it takes, Jews will be there, still meditating over our words yomam valaila, day and night, and looking to the Ner Tamid as a reminder of past and future.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 3/4/2023.)

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God’s Pronouns – Terumah 5783

Have you ever felt misunderstood? Mis-characterized? Mis-judged? Yeah, so that happens to all of us, and probably almost every day.

Do you think God has ever felt misunderstood? Well, if we accept for the moment the anthropomorphic projection of human feelings onto God, absolutely. (Let me say right up front here, and many of you know this already, but I have some fairly unorthodox ways of understanding God, so I will be the first to say that it is extraordinarily unlikely that God “feels” like humans do. We’ll come back to that.)

Earlier this month, the Church of England’s General Synod announced that they are currently evaluating ways of referring to God which reflect contemporary perspectives on gender. Now, for the Jews, this is nothing new or surprising. If you have been paying close attention, you might have noticed that the siddur/prayerbook we use here at Beth Shalom, Siddur Lev Shalem, avoids using gendered pronouns when referring to God in English, and avoids gendered terms such as “King,” “Lord,” and “Master,” instead using “Sovereign,” or leaving the Hebrew untranslated. I have tried to avoid gendered terms in English when referring to God. This was actually something I first heard my childhood rabbi, Rabbi Arthur Rulnick, do when I was in high school, all the way back in the 1980s.

But of course, the reality of Jewish text is that in Hebrew, the vast majority of references to God are undeniably masculine. And not only the names or descriptors for God, but every adjective, verb, pronoun including suffixes is gendered as well. And there are no gender-neutral forms in the Hebrew language. (The English use of “they” as a non-gendered pronoun does not work in Hebrew.)

Just as a quick example, consider the berakhah recited before engaging in the mitzvah of Torah study:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’ אֱ-לֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּ֒שָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסֹק בְּדִבְרֵי תוֹרָה:

Barukh Attah Adonai, Eloheinu Melekh ha’olam, asher qiddeshanu bemitzvotav, vetzivanu la’asoq bedivrei Torah.
Praised are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe, Who sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to be engrossed in the words of Torah.

Of the 13 Hebrew words in that berakhah, seven of them, more than half, refer to God as masculine. Changing them to, for example, feminine language would require major surgery, and would be quite awkward. And no non-gendered terms exist. While we may choose to translate to English however we want, in Hebrew there is no getting around God’s apparent male-ness, at least as far as our ancestors understood God as they wrote these words.

And yet, despite the language, can we really think of God as masculine? 

In the first Creation story of Bereshit / Genesis (1:27), when humans are created betzelem Elohim, in God’s image, they are created as “zakhar uneqevah” – male and female. There is even a midrash which describes the first human as having a male side and a female side, which were subsequently split apart (an idea also presented, by the way, in Plato’s Symposium in Aristophanes’ speech on the origin of love). 

So if people were created in God’s image and as both male and female, we can only deduce that God certainly has male and female aspects as well, and therefore God can be considered neither entirely male nor entirely female, so neither feminine language nor masculine language accurately applies to the Qadosh Barukh Hu*, even if all three of those words are decidedly masculine.

As the Talmud mentions from time to time, “Dibberah Torah kilshon benei adam.” The Torah speaks in human language. Since our language is limited, and Hebrew has no neuter forms, the default for God became masculine. The human mind has this silly habit of wanting to compartmentalize, to categorize neatly. But God, unequivocally, cannot be put into any kind of box.

But one of the most marvelous things that I learned in rabbinical school from my teacher Rabbi Neil Gillman z”l is that God language is by necessity metaphorical. God’s “mighty hand and outstretched arm”? Metaphor. The noise God makes while walking through the Garden of Eden during the breezy time of the day (Bereshit / Genesis 3:8)? Clearly metaphor. God’s voice when “speaking” to Moshe at the beginning of Parashat Terumah (Shemot / Exodus 25:1)? 

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר ה’ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר׃

Vaydabber Adonai el Moshe lemor.
God spoke to Moses, saying…

This one is so metaphorical that the second verb, lemor, to say, reinforces the fact that God is not speaking in any conventional way. God is communicating with Moshe, but since God has no mouth as we understand mouths, the Torah adds the second verb lemor / “to say” to demonstrate that “vaydabber” / “speaking” does not actually mean speaking the way that humans speak.

Ein lo demur haguf, ve-eino guf, we sing cheerfully during Yigdal, which is a summary of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. God has neither the form of a body, nor any kind of physical body at all. Lo na’arokh elav qedushato – we cannot even estimate the extent of God’s non-physical holiness. It is unlimited, unfathomable, unconfined.

If all God language is metaphor, then clearly God’s gender is also metaphorical in addition to being limited by human language. In a conversation I had with Rabbi Rachel Adler, whom you heard in this space last week, I suggested that we could understand that God has no gender; she replied that God encompasses all genders.

And in her landmark book from 1998, Engendering Judaism, Rabbi Adler also speaks of the power of metaphor. Metaphor is ideal for tefillah / prayer because it is, she said, “complex, multi vocal, full of resonances, because it is the language of discovery and metamorphosis, the language that points toward the unknown, the language that lights up the darkness.” The metaphorical language we use for God leaves room for human creativity in interpretation. It creates a space for us.

And while wrestling with the challenges of masculine God-language and in particular the archaic nature of the ancient metaphors which we still use, she also concedes that these metaphors continue to hold their power because they point beyond themselves and are incomplete. “Incompleteness,” she writes, “preserves metaphor’s truthfulness; rhetorical processes that distort metaphor are those that hide or deny its incompleteness.” 

In other words, the moment we understand the language as making God male, we have limited and thereby weakened God. The incomplete metaphor retains its mystery and its power. 

By instead reaching out to God with our imagination, which transcends language, we are drawn closer. By leaving space in the metaphor, we can ascend higher.

I remember so clearly when Rabbi Gillman, speaking about the language of tefillah, distinguished the Conservative movement’s approach from that of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, who created the first Reconstructionist siddur. Rabbi Kaplan simply changed the Hebrew in passages which challenged his theology, substituting for the second paragraph of the Shema, and the blessings over the Torah, and parts of Aleinu. 

Rabbi Gillman characterized Rabbi Kaplan’s approach as, “If I don’t believe it, I don’t say it.” 

And then he added, “I’m a liturgical traditionalist.” I’ll tinker with the translation instead. And that has been the Conservative movement’s philosophy regarding liturgy for nearly a century. Perhaps 97% of what we say in our tefillot here at Beth Shalom is exactly the same as what they say in Orthodox synagogues; where we differ more concretely is on the English side of the page, and in our hearts and minds.

What Rabbi Gillman taught, and Rabbi Rachel Adler also addresses, is that the ancient Hebrew has power, even when the literal translation does not work for us. But we use our imaginations to get to the place where those metaphors continue to function in our contemporary spiritual landscape.

And that is an essential message of Jewish life. What did we read about today in Parashat Terumah? That we must build a mishkan, a dwelling-place for God on Earth. And that metaphor is presented to us in the Torah in excruciating detail, spreading over five parashiyyot. And what will this mishkan do? It will enable the in-dwelling of God. Shemot / Exodus 25:8:

וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם׃

Ve’asu li miqdash, veshakhanti betokham. 
Make Me a sanctuary, and I shall dwell among the Israelites.

More metaphor, of course. 

And where is this mishkan today? Where is the Temple, the Beit HaMiqdash today? Where are the sacrifices that much of this central part of the Torah reference? We build it inside ourselves, and that is where God dwells. 

Even in its great detail, the idea of the mishkan is fundamentally incomplete in the Torah.

It described a place for worship, but did not capture the entire range of how we can understand the mishkan and the sacrificial mode of worship. Parashat Terumah speaks, silently and with no physical mouth, about the way we worship today; about prayer and synagogues and moments of silence and joyous singing and wailing grief and beating our chests and prostrating ourselves and all the imaginative ways in which we reach toward God.

We have dramatically changed the mode of worship, but we are still within the Torah’s metaphor of the mishkan. And we see this over and over in rabbinic Judaism: re-imagining the Torah’s language so that it applies to us here and now, wherever “here and now” has been throughout Jewish history.

In reading these passages, we must concede that our ancestors have re-imagined so much in Jewish life. And we continue to re-imagine God, the God in whose image we are all created, the God who cannot be limited to a body, or a single gender. The mystery is more powerful when we lean into our imaginations, and do not toil in the mundanities of inadequate human language. How dare we even think that masculine terms for God can limit the Qadosh Barukh Hu to such a narrow understanding of masculinity?

Our intellect and creativity must be greater than that. Human language is limited; but metaphors leave space for all of us to be seen within. God encompasses all genders.

So is God misunderstood? Clearly. But in not entirely understanding God, we leave room for an inestimable holiness, one which is only limited by our imagination. It is in that realm, and beyond in the infinite, where God dwells.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 2/25/2023.)

* הקדוש ברום הוא/ haQadosh Barukh Hu, a term for God, literally means, “The Holy One, Blessed be He.” Both qadosh and barukh are also male-gendered terms. Some translate this term as “the Holy, Blessed One.”

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Action is the Goal: Engaging More Jews in Jewish Living – Bo 5783

“Actions speak louder than words.”

We think of that in particular surrounding gestures of kindness or generosity. Physically showing up to help a friend in need is often much more valuable and appreciated than verbal expressions of sympathy. 

In Jewish life, actions transmit more than words. Lighting Hanukkah candles; blotting out Haman’s name; cleaning out the hametz; tashlikh; fasting; dancing with the Torah. Yes, all of those things come with a story. And there’s so much more background and history and ideas and textual sources that go along with the story. 

But Jewish life requires action. Our tradition wants us to do something, not just think or talk about it. God wants you to get off the couch, get out into the world, and perform a physical action. And carrying out the actions of Jewish life – Shabbat, kashrut, holiday rituals – is why we are all still here. 

“But rabbi,” you might be thinking, “What about Rabbi Akiva, who said that study is greater than action?” (BT Qiddushin 40b)

I would respond by saying, of course you are correct. Who am I to disagree with Rabbi Akiva? But Rabbi Akiva’s reasoning is that study leads to action. So action is still the ultimate goal. The reason we learn is that study helps us bring meaning to the action, which makes it more valuable, which makes you more likely to do it.

In the opening words of Parashat Bo, from which we chanted this morning, included the following (Exodus / Shemot 10:1):

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר ה֙’ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה בֹּ֖א אֶל־פַּרְעֹ֑ה כִּֽי־אֲנִ֞י הִכְבַּ֤דְתִּי אֶת־לִבּוֹ֙ וְאֶת־לֵ֣ב עֲבָדָ֔יו לְמַ֗עַן שִׁתִ֛י אֹתֹתַ֥י אֵ֖לֶּה בְּקִרְבּֽוֹ׃

God said to Moshe, “Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display these My signs among them.”

Now, what is most curious about this verse, and in particular the word that identifies the parashah, is בֹּא / Bo. If you’ve learned any spoken Hebrew, you probably know this word: it means, “Come,” as in, “Come over here and check out this very interesting verse.” So when God tells Moshe to בֹּ֖א אֶל־פַּרְעֹ֑ה / Bo el Par’oh, he is saying, “Come to Pharaoh,” where we might expect לֵךְ, “Go to Pharaoh. 

One commentator, R. Yosef Bekhor Shor, who lived in central France in the 12th century, reads this statement as God saying, “Come with me to Pharaoh.” That is, Moshe should understand that he is coming along with God to request freedom for his people; he is not going alone.

When performing any holy action, just like Moshe, it is up to us to see that God wants us to come along. God wants us to recite berakhot over eating; God wants us to refrain from physical labor and dine luxuriously with family and friends on Shabbat; God wants us to recite words of prayer, Shema and Amidah daily; God wants us to light candles and give tzedaqah and shake the lulav and etrog and wash our hands before making motzi and of course wear a tallit and tefillin at appropriate times. 

And when we perform these actions, when we connect our hearts and minds to our hands and feet and mouths in all those moments of holy opportunity, God is coming along with us. 

And, by the way, it does not matter if you fulfill the mitzvah of handwashing before making motzi in the Grand Ballroom of a palatial synagogue or in the humblest of kitchens, you still get all the credit. And God is right there with you no matter what.

Now, something which we might run up against in performing the actions of Jewish life is that some of those mitzvot and customs were historically only reserved for men. In particular, positive, time-bound mitzvot – positive, meaning things that you do (as opposed to refrain from doing) and time-bound, meaning that there is a particular time-frame in which they must be performed – from which women were traditionally exempted, and, one might say, even excluded. Think of tallit and tefillin, or leading the congregation in tefillah / prayer, or reading from the Torah or taking aliyot. 

I know that it is hard to believe, now half a century after the ordination of the first female rabbi by the Reform movement, and approaching forty years since the first Conservative female rabbi was ordained, that this gender differential still plays out. It is hard to believe that in this congregation, where many women lead us in prayer and in teaching. 

But there certainly remains a stubborn gender gap in performing fundamental Jewish actions, not only because many of us in this room grew up in a non-egalitarian world, but also because of the resurgent influence of Orthodoxy. 

And so as part of this vision of increased commitment to action for all Jewish adults who are benei mitzvah, the Religious Services Committee this week decided that we are going to gently begin to try to nudge all of us to take action on these positive, time-bound mitzvot, and in particular to encourage the most outward signs of commitment to our tradition.

Now, we are not ready to force anybody to do something that they do not consider themselves obligated to do. However, please consider the following:

In 1984, Rabbi Joel Roth, one of my halakhah teachers at the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote a landmark teshuvah / rabbinic responsum which permitted the ordination of women as rabbis, but it mandated that in order for this to happen, women must “self-obligate” to all the positive, time-bound mitzvot from which they have traditionally been excluded.

Thirty years later, however, in 2014, Rabbi Pamela Barmash, who herself was permitted to be ordained due to Rabbi Roth’s teshuvah, wrote her own teshuvah on the subject of women and mitzvot. And Rabbi Barmash said something which, I think, should be broadcast loudly and proudly throughout the Jewish world.

She reasoned that the traditional exemption of women from those positive, time-bound mitzvot was solely due to their historically subordinate status. That is, they were not men, and were not equally obligated to men. And then – this is the best part – she pointed out that (wait for it!) “times have changed.” She concludes with the following statement, which is absolutely revolutionary:

The halakhah has recognized that when social customs change significantly, the new social reality requires a reappraisal of halakhic practices. The historical circumstances in which women were exempted from time-bound positive mitzvot are no longer operative, and the Conservative movement has for almost a century moved toward greater and greater inclusion of women in mitzvot. In Jewish thought and practice, the highest rank and esteem is for those who are required to fulfill mitzvot. We rule therefore that women and men are equally obligated to observe the mitzvot. 

We call upon Conservative synagogues, schools, and camps to educate men and women in equal observance of mitzvot and to expect and require their equal observance of mitzvot.

In other words, says Rabbi Barmash, all adults are invited to and indeed should strive to fulfill all of the mitzvot of Jewish life.

Now, as I have already stated, we are in the stage of encouraging here at Beth Shalom, not requiring. In addition to the new tallitot in the back of the room meant to encourage people who have not taken on this mitzvah, we will also have an upcoming series featuring Rabbi Dr. Rachel Adler to introduce tallit and tefillin to those who are unaccustomed or perhaps anxious about taking the next step. Even sooner than that, the Men’s Club’s World Wide Wrap is two weeks from tomorrow; we will be teaching tefillin (and tallit) here and at JJEP, and of course there will be breakfast. And the Religious Services Committee will continue to discuss how to encourage the performance of these mitzvot during our services moving forward.

Remember that all of this is in service to the goal of getting you all to do something Jewish. Not to be a passive participant, because it is the actions that bring meaning and frame our lives. It is the mitzvot of Jewish life which bring its value to heart. We cannot just talk about it; we have to live it. And God has invited us all to come along.

Rather than “compete” with the empty, material aspects of contemporary life, we have to demonstrate the value of what we do. And we have to do it.

It is through these actions that we are all – every single one of us – fulfilled in a rich and varied way, and it is through the performance of the mitzvot of Jewish life that we will continue to cast light on our generations into the future.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 1/28/2023.)

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Be One of the Good Guys! Thoughts on Avatar: The Way of Water – Vayḥi 5783

Over the December vacation, I was fortunate to be able to see a couple of movies in theaters, something which I rarely have time for. One that my family and I saw was the new Avatar sequel, and it was quite good (although, I must confess, about an hour too long).

If you saw the original film from 2009, you know that there is a good deal of subtle, yet identifiably Jewish content. First, the one god of the Na’vi people on the planet Pandora is called Ehua, which is a thinly-disguised rearrangement of Yahweh, the likely pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton.* (Aside: the letters YHWH are all matres lectiones, consonants which often function as vowels in ancient Hebrew; hence the name is entirely breath, suggesting that Yahweh is the spirit which flows through us all.)

Another Jewish theme clearly referenced is that of the Etz Hayyim, the Tree of Life which is the spiritual center of the Na’vi people. It is clearly echoing the role of the Torah as our spiritual center.

And, of course, it is clearly not coincidence that the name “Na’vi” sounds an awful lot like the Hebrew word נביא / navi, meaning “prophet.” 

In this newer Avatar, a shofar makes an appearance. As it rang out, Judy and I both called out “Teqi’ah,” perhaps amusing, or more likely annoying some of the other folks in the cinema. Another possibly coded Jewish theme in the new film is that the subtitle is “The Way of Water,” perhaps a reference to the essential role that water plays in Jewish liturgy and spirituality: the seasonally-appropriate prayers we say for rain and dew, the essential connection of water with God’s favor found in the second paragraph of the Shema, the prophet Isaiah’s connection of water with our spiritual redemption: ושאבתם מים בששון ממעיני הישועה / Joyfully draw water from the wells of deliverance (Isaiah 12:3), which we recite every Saturday evening at havdalah.

Now, am I perhaps seeing these movies through a Jewish lens, and reading into them things that are not there? Maybe. But some of these cues are more obvious than others.

Both the films play on the classic cinematic struggle of “the good guys versus the bad guys,” a struggle which is clearly more universal, but certainly also appears on the Jewish bookshelf. Perhaps the most significant such struggle is the story of Israel’s enslavement in Egypt and eventual liberation. (We will begin that story next week, as we move on to the book of Shemot / Exodus.)

In Avatar, the “good guys” are the Na’vi: traditional, native, respectful and in harmony with their natural environment and the flora and fauna of Pandora. They are strong and resilient and zealously loyal to each other, to their elders, and of course to Ehua. They are spiritual people, and remarkably “human” in their sense of love and caring and support of one another and their willingness to fight to protect themselves and their way of life.

The “bad guys,” of course, are the actual humans, who are invaders. On Pandora, they are weak and dependent on technology to enable them to survive. They are portrayed often as uncaring and emotion-less, and of course dedicated to exploiting natural resources for profit, which they pursue to the detriment of other creatures and nature and tradition. 

Now of course, as I am telling you this, it should be clear that the story favors the good guys, the Na’vi. We sympathize with them. They are, most of the time, the things that we want to be: communally-oriented, loyal to each other, and of course in tune with their environment. And we despise the bad guys, the humans, who are only on Pandora to conquer and subdue it and steal its natural resources. We want to be the Na’vi; we loathe the Earthlings. 

And yet, we also know that the bad guys are us. We see ourselves despoiling God’s Creation here on Earth. We see ourselves putting profit over Godliness. We see reflected in the struggle the initial challenge to humanity captured in the two Creation stories of Bereshit: the balance between פְּר֥וּ וּרְב֛וּ וּמִלְא֥וּ אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁ֑הָ / Peru urvu umil’u et ha’aretz vekhivshuha, “Be fruitful and multiply and  fill the Earth and conquer it” (Bereshit / Gen. 1:28) and לְעׇבְדָ֖הּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָֽהּ / le’ovdah ulshomrah, “to till it and to tend it” (2:15). These films are a harsh, if overly simplistic and quite biased, critique of humanity’s relationship with God. But they replay this struggle as it is laid out in the Torah from the very beginning.

An ironic point that my daughter pointed out after seeing the film is that of course we want the good guys to win, for tradition and community and family to win out over greed, but of course, sequels are really only about making more money. So the irony is that the bad guys will never be vanquished. The struggle continues, and we humans will shell out another 12 bucks to see the next one.

A related aspect of the struggle between good and bad is reflected in an ambiguous passage of Parashat Vayḥi. As Ya’aqov lays on his death bed in Egypt, bestowing blessings upon his children, he says something curious to his son Yosef, who is essentially the hero of the last few parashiyyot of Bereshit (Gen. 49:22):

בֵּ֤ן פֹּרָת֙ יוֹסֵ֔ף בֵּ֥ן פֹּרָ֖ת עֲלֵי־עָ֑יִן בָּנ֕וֹת צָעֲדָ֖ה עֲלֵי־שֽׁוּר׃ 

Joseph is a wild ass,
A wild ass by a spring
—Wild colts on a hillside.

That’s the translation you’ll find in the Etz Hayim ḥumash, from the Jewish Publication Society’s 1985 text, which you have here in the Sanctuary at Beth Shalom. However, check out this version of Ya’aqov’s words from the 1917 “Old” JPS translation:

Joseph is a fruitful vine,
A fruitful vine by a fountain;
As branches run over the wall.

OK, so, “wild ass” vs. “fruitful vine.” What gives? Truth is, it could go either way; most medieval commentators tend to the more friendly, fruitful depiction of Yosef. The problem is chiefly “porat,” which could be related either to פרי / peri, fruit, or פרא / pere, wild ass. If the latter, which the NJPS translators feel quite strongly about (for various reasons which I can’t get into here – if you’re interested, check out the JPS Torah Commentary Genesis volume by Nahum Sarna), then Yosef could be as wild and potentially dangerous as he is fruitful.

And so for all of us. Humanity is a mixed bag. We are good and bad. We are deep and complicated. Sometimes we are wild asses, and sometimes fruitful vines. We are certainly not black and white.

But here is the good news: you can be on the side of the good guys in this world, in real time. Right now. In fact, many of us in this room are engaged in that battle right now.

I heard a podcast this week about Shabbat by Ezra Klein, featuring the author Judith Shulevitz, who wrote a wonderful book on the subject more than a decade ago called, The Sabbath World. Apropos of nothing in particular, as far as I can tell, other than our desperate need for a day of rest, the two exchanged thoughts and ideas about the value of Shabbat. 

Klein, who claims that he attended an Orthodox day school for a few years as a child, spoke about the profound effect that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Sabbath, had on him when he read it many years ago. In particular, Heschel speaks about how we spend six days conquering the space around us, and on the seventh day we abandon that project for higher ideals:

Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.

(It is worth noting at this point that this week, on the 18th of Tevet, January 10-11, we mark the 50th yahrzeit of Rabbi Heschel, whose work continues to serve as an incomparable inspiration to many of us.)

God wants you to be with the good guys. To recapture Gan Eden, the simplicity and natural state of the Garden of Eden at least once a week, with your community, with your family. To simplify your life, to set aside your wild nature for fruitful spiritual pursuits. To avoid the tools of construction and commerce and conquering. To connect with the people you love. To be a part of nature, rather than an actor upon it.

The struggle of the Israelites vs. the Egyptians ultimately yields to the revelation on Mt. Sinai, in which humanity is given the seventh day as a holy day of rest, as a day to cease from the domination of the world around us. Even for us today, thousands of years post-slavery in Egypt, the daily struggle of six days necessitates the day which Heschel calls a “palace in time,” which we build from our souls. 

If there is one thing I take away from the “Avatar cinematic universe” (as the kids say today), it is that we always have the potential to be the good guys, and setting aside the 25 hours of Shabbat to do so is a noble pursuit, and healthy for us as individuals and for our world as well.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 1/7/2023.)

* The letters of the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, YHWH (yod-heh-vav-heh) are all matres lectiones, consonants which often function as vowels in ancient Hebrew. Hence the name is entirely breath, suggesting that Yahweh is the spirit which flows through us all.

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Context Matters – Vayyeshev 5783

Trevor Noah Gallery

Perhaps you heard that the South African comedian Trevor Noah recently stepped down as host of The Daily Show, a satirical news program. On his last show, he delivered a kind of sermon regarding some of his lessons learned during his tenure as host, and it was mostly not funny, but delivered in a serious mode, which is unusual for a comedian. Comedians, of course, are good at pointing out the challenges that we all face, and doing it in a way that brings us joy, that enables us to laugh at ourselves.

In the course of this talk, he said something which, I think, is so important: “Never forget how much context matters.” He explained that we live in a world of limitless information, but we are suffering from a lack of context. We simply are not given the tools to understand our world and everything that we are seeing and experiencing.

All of this context-less information has made us extraordinarily susceptible to manipulation, and it does not bode well for the future of humanity. Video clips circulated online are cut or even altered to disguise what came before or after, just to show you the piece that will provoke you the most. The news that travels the fastest and the farthest is the one that makes you the most angry or the most aggrieved.

Throw in the fact that your computer and your smartphone not only know what you want to see, what will push your buttons, what will get you all anxious and upset, but are also effectively designed to keep putting material like that in front of you. And, given that most of us are looking at these screens all day long, we are primed for manipulation. And the algorithms for manipulation are getting smarter and smarter.

Here is the good news: you can combat this by seeking out the missing context. And, by the way, that is what Jews have always done. One might make the argument that the entirety of the rabbinic enterprise of the last 2,000 years or so is to provide context. We, the Jews, are historically talented at both text AND context. And the goal of seeking context is to be reflective, rather than reflexive, in how we approach life and all of its challenges. 

Let me explain: 

The Torah is a particularly difficult document to understand. To begin with, it was written in a language that nobody has spoken for thousands of years. It is also filled with contradictions, gaps, ambiguities, apparent grammatical errors, and obscure words which can only be understood by speakers of that language (i.e. nobody). (Worth noting here that Israelis, speakers of modern Hebrew, are just as befuddled by the Torah’s language as we are.)

And yet, the Torah is the foundational document of Judaism, the basis for much of our tradition. So the only way we can actually understand it is through context, and in particular, the context given by rabbinic tradition: the Talmud, midrashim, the commentaries of medieval and contemporary rabbis, from Rashi in the 11th century until today. 

What do these commentators do? They place the context alongside the text, to help us see how the terse words of the Torah make us better people. They interpret ancient verses, which we sometimes barely understand, to show us how they apply to us in our day, in our context. They give us perspective.

For example, Parashat Vayyeshev, from which we read this morning, tells the story of our hero Yosef, who, after being sold into slavery and brought to Egypt, ends up in the house of a wealthy man named Potiphar, whose wife takes more than a passing interest in their new, handsome slave. She attempts to seduce Yosef, and there is a moment of hesitation before he rebuffs her. The suggestion is that he is certainly tempted to take her up on her offer.

A midrash, however, tells us that as she takes hold of his clothing with lascivious intent (Bereshit / Genesis 39:12), and Yosef struggles with his conflicting fear and desire, he has a vision of his parents, watching through a window behind Potiphar’s wife. And his father Ya’aqov says to him, “Your brothers’ names will be inscribed on the ephod, the breastplate of the Kohen Gadol [the High Priest in the Temple in Jerusalem, which is at this point in the traditional chronology many centuries in the future]. Do you want your name to appear there with them, or not?” (Babylonian Talmud Sotah 36b) And that is the point when he runs from her.

The point of the midrash is that context matters, that our moment-to-moment decisions should be shaped not by immediacy, not by what is happening exactly right now, but by the past and the future. And of course, that is not always so simple. 

Many other moments in the Yosef narrative require context. Yosef does not see the larger context when he boasts to his brothers about the dreams in which they all bow down to him. The brothers are missing context when they throw him in a pit, and then sell him into slavery, and then lie to their father Ya’aqov about what happened.

All of these moments are, you might say, reflexive choices, made quickly and without considering the consequences. Reflexive, rather than reflective.

When we act impulsively, rather than taking time to reflect on the context, we cause damage and pain. When we respond in the anger of the moment rather than waiting, breathing deeply, and thinking carefully, we usually make things worse. When we pile onto the most hurtful, most anxiety-inducing news or online content with more frustration and more insults and more aggression, the lack of context usually leads everybody down the wrong path.

What makes the Yosef narrative work is learning the complete story. Although none of the characters involved could have known this, every choice along the way, good and bad, ultimately brought Benei Yisrael, the children of Israel / Ya’aqov, down into Egypt, where they would become slaves, and then ultimately become a free nation, destined to receive the Torah and to inherit their own land. And in the context of all of that, the series of reflexive moves is woven into a context which has shaped our people for thousands of years. So in this case, you might say it worked out well.

But we all know by now the corrosive effects of the social media platforms through which we all receive our information about the world. And we all know about the potential of these platforms, and to some extent even legitimate purveyors of news, to rile us up. We have seen their ability to enable the id, the unfiltered, most primitive piece of our psyche, to speak for us, and to easily spread hateful ideas of all sorts. 

I am grateful that the Biden administration gathered a group this past week to discuss strategies on anti-Semitism, chaired by the Second Gentleman, Doug Emhoff. But I am also not too optimistic that such discussions will yield anything productive. Hatred of Jews has been with us far too long, and I lament the fact that it will never go away.

However, what we all can do is to try to move society to a place that is more reflective, rather than reflexive. Labeling people as anti-Semites, or racists or trans-phobes or snowflakes or RINOs or whatever, diminishes the humanity of those with whom we disagree. 

Teaching history, however, and giving context and the opportunity for reflection is the way to go. Jon Stewart, who was Trevor Noah’s predecessor at The Daily Show, has said that hearing anti-Semitism spewed out loud is better, because then it is an opportunity for teaching and providing context, kind of like cleaning a wound by opening it. I am not entirely sure I agree with him, but certainly meeting people and talking with them in-person, especially people with whom you do not necessarily agree, is the way to build bridges, to change minds.

Another observation that Trevor Noah shared in his “sermon” was that “the world is a friendlier place than the Internet wants you to believe.” Perhaps if, when we are tempted to respond in a way that is unhelpful, we remember our parents, and we remember the lessons which they attempted to impart to us about being better people, then we might be more likely to see the humanity, or even the Divine spark, in those who say hateful things. And maybe we have a better chance of allowing that Divine spark to bring that person to a more reflective, more contextual place.

A final thought: One of the best ways to slow things down, to bring context to our lives, to help us become more reflective and less reflexive, is to take one day a week to separate ourselves from the outrage machines of Big Tech. If I had one wish for our society, Jews and non-Jews, it would be to shut down your digital devices for 25 hours every Shabbat, and spend time with your family, your friends, and your Qehilah Qedoshah, your sacred community. I do it; you can too.

Context matters.

חג אורים שמח / Ḥag Urim Sameaḥ! Happy Ḥanukkah.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 12/17/2022.)

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Seeking God in this Liminal Moment – Toledot 5783

It is a special pleasure to read Parashat Toledot on this day, when we have named two baby girls, cousins who will surely get along better than Ya’aqov and Esav.

There was a moment up front in what we read this morning where Rivqah, their mother, is suffering miserably as the two baby boys are wrestling within her. (I’m picturing them pulling classic entertainment wrestling moves: Esav is executing a “pile-driver” on his brother.)

The Torah reports that the experience is so miserable for her that she cries out to God (Bereshit / Genesis 25:22):

וַיִּתְרֹֽצְצ֤וּ הַבָּנִים֙ בְּקִרְבָּ֔הּ וַתֹּ֣אמֶר אִם־כֵּ֔ן לָ֥מָּה זֶּ֖ה אָנֹ֑כִי וַתֵּ֖לֶךְ לִדְרֹ֥שׁ אֶת־ה’׃

The boys struggled in her womb, and she said, “If so, why do I exist?” And she went to inquire of God.

The JPS translation of lidrosh in the above quote is “to inquire,” but the verb לִדְרֹשׁ “lidrosh” really means to seek: Rivqah went to seek God. 

This verb is most familiar to us in the context of interpreting words of Torah. You may be familiar with various forms of this verb: one gives a “derash,” a brief interpretation, or perhaps a lengthier “derashah,” a sermon. “Midrash” is a story which fills in the gaps of the Torah’s text, and of course a “beit midrash” is a house of study, wherein we seek the deeper meanings of our ancient texts, as we attempt to discern the wisdom therein.

Rivqah, in her misery, seeks God.

Right now, we are in a time of seeking, and in particular, we should be seeking God right now. I’ll come back to that.

I was away at the convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, the professional organization of Conservative Rabbis about three weeks ago, and I had the privilege of spending several sessions learning with Reverend Susan Beaumont, an ordained Baptist minister who works as a leadership consultant to houses of worship. Speaking to a room full of rabbis, she introduced concepts in a language that, at least at first, was effectively Greek to scholars of Hebrew and Aramaic.

The theme of her remarks was “Leading in a Liminal Season.” “Liminality” is the period of uncertainty in between; when the old paradigm is gone, and the new reality has not yet revealed itself. Right now, a few years of pandemic have in many ways altered, if not fundamentally changed, the landscape for many institutions, including houses of worship like this one. The challenge for all of us in this liminal season is how to move forward in this in-between period.

An appropriate parallel from Jewish life is the concept of “bein hashemashot,” the part of the day between sunset and dark, when you are not sure if it is still day or night has fallen. This is particularly important on Saturday nights, at the end of Shabbat. Is Shabbat over when the sun goes down? Or when you can see three stars? The answer, as you all know, is the latter, but there is a period of about 30-45 minutes of in-between, when it’s not clear if it’s still Shabbat. We wait until at least three stars are visible so we are absolutely sure. But there is, at least in theory, a period of discernment when we are waiting for those stars to appear, just to make sure we are safely into Sunday, before we recite havdalah, the prayer of separation from Shabbat.

You might make the case that pregnancy is also a liminal season, that Rivqah seeks God not only because the twins are struggling within her, but also that it is a time in which she has clearly left behind her life before motherhood, but has not yet entered the next phase of her life.

According to Rev. Beaumont, one of the keys to finding our way in a liminal season, in leading when we do not know what is coming next, is to seek to understand the soul of your congregation, and to tend that soul as we seek Divine guidance for the future.

And when she said that, the room full of 30 or so rabbis immediately thought, “What on Earth is she talking about?” Soul is a concept about which Christians talk a lot, but the idea is sort of mystifying for the Jews. She explained that a congregation’s “soul” exists outside of the individual members; it is a collective sense of who we are. Not culture, not rituals, not the organizational culture, not the collective voice of lay or clergy leadership, but the truest sense of self of the institution, that which is based in our relationship with the Qadosh Barukh Hu / the holy, blessed One. The soul of this congregation is, as she put it, “the source of the Divine calling and character, and the protector of institutional integrity.”

I’m pretty sure I have seen the soul of Congregation Beth Shalom on display from time to time. I know I felt it when, two months ago on Rosh HaShanah, I could hear the hundreds of people in the room singing “Berosh haShanah yikkatevun; uvyom tzom Kippur yeḥatemun” (On Rosh HaShanah God’s verdict is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed in the Book of Life), singing those words together for the first time in three years in such numbers. That was an incredibly soul-filled moment; it brought me to tears. I might have caught a glint of Beth Shalom’s soul last Saturday night as we honored all of our past presidents.

But I do not think I could describe the soul of Beth Shalom. When pressed further on how to seek and find the soul of our congregations, Rev. Beaumont explained that it is not so simple. She described sitting alone in the sanctuary of her own church for six months in silence, waiting for some kind of revelation, and it did not come to her. So this is not easy work, but it is essential for leading in a liminal time. It is our soul which will guide us into the future. 

“We cannot presume,” writes Rev. Beaumont, “to strengthen an organization, its culture, its processes, its structures, without engaging its soulfulness.”

Considering the state of our wider society, we need to seek God right now because there are just so many struggles, so many ways in which we are wrestling with each other. The recent mass shootings are only one particularly tragic sort of manifestation of this struggle; the eruptions of anti-Semitism in pop culture is another. I am sure you can think of many such ways in which American society is struggling with itself. Some of this is clearly due to the fact that we are in a liminal period, that we are seeking leadership and in need of discernment. The soul of America is hidden from view, and we do not know what is coming next.

The Torah, the rest of the Tanakh, the Talmud, and all of the greatest works of rabbinic literature always see God as an essential actor in the Jewish story, in collaboration with the Jewish soul. We have always sought God in times of crisis, in times of pain and of joy. 

תהלים קל, Psalm 130 is one of my favorite psalms. It is one of the standard offerings of Taḥanun, the brief prayers of supplication which we recite on many weekday mornings. It opens with a reminder that the world is filled with, and has always been filled with, to use the polite term, tzuris. (That’s the Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew tzarot, meaning trouble.) 

שִׁ֥יר הַֽמַּעֲל֑וֹת מִמַּעֲמַקִּ֖ים קְרָאתִ֣יךָ ה’׃ 

Out of the depths I call You, O LORD. (Psalm 130:1)

We call out to God every day, throughout our history. We are waiting for God’s presence, waiting for God to be revealed, because we know that we are in the ma’amaqim, the depths.*

But there is an even better line in the psalm, a little further down, v. 6:

נַפְשִׁ֥י לַאדֹנָ֑י מִשֹּׁמְרִ֥ים לַ֝בֹּ֗קֶר שֹׁמְרִ֥ים לַבֹּֽקֶר׃

Nafshi ladonai mishomerim laboqer shomerim laboqer.

I am more eager for the Lord than watchmen watch for the morning

What is curious about that verse is the repetition of shomerim laboqer. And I have seen some translations merely repeat the words, i.e. “I am more eager for the Lord than watchmen for the morning, watchmen for the morning.” But that is a poor translation. More accurately, the metaphor is the shomerim laboqer, the morning watchmen who are shomerim laboqer, watching, waiting eagerly for the morning.

What we hear in that verse is the painful waiting for God. The silence, punctuated by the ticking of a clock running on a geologic scale. Where is the Qadosh Barukh Hu? When will our redemption come?

When I hear that verse, I hear my Israeli son, serving guard duty, being a shomer, at his IDF base in the middle of the night, calling me out of sheer boredom, waiting, watching, waiting for morning, for the shift change, so he can go to sleep.

The metaphor speaks powerfully across the ages. We need redemption from all that ails us; to borrow from Psalm 121, we continue to lift up our eyes to the hills expectantly; from where will our help come? 

It is that yearning, the ancient Jewish desire for God’s presence in time of need, which helps us be better people, which will ultimately guide us through the liminality of this moment. We need the sense of Divine action in the world, even if we cannot easily perceive it. We need the sense that help is on the way, even as we struggle with one another, and we have to hold ourselves together in the meanwhile, to find our way through the darkness. We wait eagerly for the dawn, and as we continue searching for our soul, we can reassure ourselves that we are not alone. That it is going to be OK. 

It was Voltaire who said, “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”

If God did not exist, it would have been necessary for us to invent God, so that we may seek God during liminal times. It is through seeking God, through the source of Divine calling to the soul, that we will find our way into the future.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 11/26/2022.)

* One of the most captivating features of medieval Ashkenazi synagogue architecture, visible (for example) at the Altneuschul in Prague, the oldest continuously-functioning synagogue in the world, is that the sheliaḥ tzibbur (prayer leader) stands in a depression in the floor, a few inches lower than the rest of the congregation. This reflects the fact that we are crying out to God mima’amaqim, out of the depths.

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In Tension with Tradition – Noaḥ 5783

In 1958, Esquire published a graphic version of the story of Noaḥ, called “The Deluge,” by Jewish satirical cartoonist Jules Feiffer. He depicted one Harvey W. Noah, government employee, who is contacted by an angel in a dream to build an ark.

The angel instructs Mr. Noah more or less according to the story we read today in the Torah. Feiffer wrote:

“What a screwy dream,” thought Harvey W. Noah, and he went back to sleep, only to be awakened the next morning by a telegram being slipped under the door. “This is to confirm your hallucination of last night. Proceed as directed re conversation pertaining to deluge, etc.”

So Mr. Noah goes to work and speaks to his government supervisor, who proceeds to alert the Navy, which contacts the Atomic Energy Commission, and a series of committees are launched to respond to the message, which is soon hopelessly garbled. 50 boats are launched, one for each state, containing lawyers, doctors, philosophers, and atomic scientists, but no animals, and no Harvey W. Noah. So he heads home. 

And then it starts to rain.

Harvey W. Noah is caught in the tension between a message from an ancient God, and the response of modern institutions. And of course, Feiffer’s work is satire, so we can chuckle at the mess of it all, and maybe be grateful that we have never had such a dream, or all the more so received a follow-up telegram.

But we all live in tension between the ancient and the modern. In fact, we are all doing that right now, as we celebrate today with a young woman who was called to the Torah as a bat mitzvah, something which did not happen until 1922, but is an idea with truly ancient roots. The first indication that a young boy becomes an adult with respect to the mitzvot at age 13 is found in Pirqei Avot (5:21), which dates to the 2nd century CE.

The idea that we are in tension of any sort with our tradition is not a new one. You can actually find it just about anywhere you look on the Jewish bookshelf. 

Consider just the first verse of Parashat Noaḥ (Bereshit / Genesis 6:9)

אֵ֚לֶּה תּוֹלְדֹ֣ת נֹ֔חַ נֹ֗חַ אִ֥ישׁ צַדִּ֛יק תָּמִ֥ים הָיָ֖ה בְּדֹֽרֹתָ֑יו אֶת־הָֽאֱ-לֹהִ֖ים הִֽתְהַלֶּךְ־נֹֽחַ׃

This is the line of Noah.—Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age; Noah walked with God.

Noaḥ was a tzaddiq, a righteous man. Had the Torah stopped there, everything would be fine and dandy. But then there is a qualifier: תָּמִ֥ים הָיָ֖ה בְּדֹֽרֹתָ֑יו. He was blameless in his generation. 

So what’s the problem with that? The world at the time, as we learn in the subsequent verses, was filled with corruption and lawlessness. So when the text says, “in his generation,” what does it mean?

Rashi, the 11th-century French wine merchant, might have been sampling his product a little too hard when he wrote his commentary for this verse. On the one hand, says Rashi, this qualifier suggests a compliment: if he was righteous when everybody around him was corrupt, then how much more righteous would he have been in a righteous age! He would have been a saint! (Not that we have saints, of course.)

And then Rashi offers exactly the opposite. In his own generation, he says, Noaḥ was the most righteous. But in Avraham’s generation, Noaḥ would have been considered a nothing.

In other words, it could go either way. Thanks, Rashi, for clarifying that.

And there is even more tension in the verse, related to the curious end: 

אֶת־הָֽאֱ-לֹהִ֖ים הִֽתְהַלֶּךְ־נֹֽחַ

Which is generally translated as, “Noaḥ walked with God,” but that actually obscures the grammatical impossibility of what the text says, which, if translated somewhat more literally, might read, “Noaḥ walked God.”

Don Yitzḥaq Abarbanel, the Iberian commentator of the 15th century, tells us:

והיה זה לפי שאת הא-להים התהלך נח ר”ל שעם היות שדר בתוך רשעים לא הלך בדרך אתם אבל נתחבר ונדבק אל הא-להים לא נפרד ממנו כל ימיו

Being that Noaḥ lived among wicked people, he did not go along with them; rather, the text is telling us that he cleaved to God for all of his life.

In this case, resolving the grammatical tension leads to a different sort of tension, the problem of what it could possibly have meant for Noaḥ, who would have lived ten generations before Avraham and many centuries before Moshe received the Torah on Mt. Sinai, to “walk with God.” So what guidance did Noaḥ have that led him to be such a tzaddiq?

It is an intrinsic anachronism. We, the readers, know what it means to be righteous in our day. But how could Noaḥ have known?

The idea of living in tension with our text, with our traditions, is really an essential feature of being Jewish, and all the more so in the Conservative movement.

In 2005, Rabbi Neil Gillman, one of my teachers at the Jewish Theological Seminary and, perhaps coincidentally, the grandfather of our bat mitzvah, addressed the convention of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism in Boston. His talk was titled, “A New Aggadah for the Conservative Movement,”* and in it he attempted to reframe what it means to be a Conservative Jew.

Now, many of us tend to think of Conservative Judaism as being neither Orthodox nor Reform, but rather somewhere in-between with respect to practice and approach to Jewish life. And that is a somewhat over-simplified view. 

Rather, we prefer a definition which includes our adherence to halakhah / Jewish law. We like to refer to ourselves as being similar to Orthodoxy in that we respect and maintain (i.e. “conserve”) halakhah, the laws which govern our observance, while also sharing some similarities to Reform in that we seek lenient positions which allow for adaptations to modernity.

A perfect example: calling a girl to the Torah as a bat mitzvah can only happen because we are egalitarian – we count men and women as being equal under Jewish law, an idea which is not acceptable in mainstream Orthodoxy.

But Rabbi Gillman rejects calling our movement halakhic, even as he states that our conservation of halakhah is a foundation stone of our movement.

Rather, he says, the primary way we should describe ourselves is as being “in tension.” And he pulls no punches in describing the ironies of our movement. 

Our approach to halakhah is a superb paradigm of living with tension. Why do some laws change and others don’t? Why can we drive to worship on Shabbat but not to a museum? Why are all cheeses now kosher but oysters still treif? Why can a kohen marry a divorcee, but a Jew can’t marry a non-Jew? … Why change some portions of our liturgy but not others? I concede that these distinctions are real and important and I and my rabbinic colleagues can defend each of them, but for the layperson who has neither the education nor the time to study and speculate about these matters, the impression we make is total confusion. Our message is complicated… In contrast, the messages of the movements to our right and to our left, their aggadot [back-stories] are relatively clear. Polar positions are always clear. Center positions rarely are.

And he’s spot on. I spend a lot of my time trying to teach the nuance of what we do as Conservative Jews, and I often wonder how much is absorbed. We are complicated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is hard to relate, particularly in a world with attention spans that stop at 280 characters.

Rabbi Gillman concludes by saying that, rather than calling ourselves “halakhic,”

I suggest that we embrace the tension and ambiguity which has always been at the heart of our reading of Judaism. If we believe that all of God-talk is metaphorical, if we deny the historicity and the literalness of the Sinai narrative as it appears in Torah, and if we claim that the Jewish religion was essentially the creation of the Jewish people, of groupings of Jews at various critical moments in our history, … a notion that I am convinced most of the ideologues of our movement share—then we must conclude that authority in matters of belief and practice lies within the hands of the committed Jews of every generation. To say this is to relativize all of our ideological commitments, and effectively to consign us to a life of tension—which, I suggest we should embrace and which we will find liberating.

Now, I do not have time to unpack all of what Rabbi Gillman said here regarding how our religious tradition came into being; that is a lecture that would require several hours. But the tension which we experience as 21st-century Jews attempting to muddle our way through ancient rituals and texts is nothing new. It has always been a part of the Jewish experience, in every generation. 

And Rabbi Gillman is right on: we should embrace the tension. That is how Jews have always lived, and that is how our tradition, particularly right here in the ideological center of the Jewish world, will continue. This is what keeps our religion alive, relevant. Ledor vador / from generation to generation we wrestle with God.  

So what does that mean to us? How can we act on this today, here in Pittsburgh? 

It means that we can confidently continue living how we live: firmly in the contemporary world, and yet still striving to find the ways in which our tradition still helps us to be better people. It means believing on the one hand that we are still cleaving to the framework of the Torah’s mitzvot, given at Mt. Sinai, because they fill our lives with structure and meaning, and that we also adapt them to our current circumstances. It means that we can celebrate a bat mitzvah, and still see ourselves connected to the spiritual pathways of our forebears.

I am grateful to be living in that tension, and proud to be a Conservative Jew.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 10/29/22.)

* Aggadah: Aramaic, equivalent to the Hebrew haggadah, “telling.” Refers to the collection of rabbinic folklore, as opposed to the parts of rabbinic text that are law-giving (halakhah). The aggadah sits alongside the halakhah, in the pages of the Talmud and other works, giving context and story which often illuminate the halakhic discussion.

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Creating Gan Eden – Bereshit 5783

We are back at the beginning again.

Some of you know that I love Parashat Bereshit, because it opens up all of the big questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Who is this God character, and where did he/she/it come from? How did all of Creation come into being? Why is humanity so complex? 

Not that the Torah alone is equipped to answer such questions, of course, particularly for modern people. On the contrary: Bereshit offers partial answers to some of these questions, but leaves others more or less untouched, and some of those answers are not particularly helpful, given what we know today through scientific inquiry. As is usually the case when we dig into a meaty piece of ancient text, we might come away from the opening chapters of Genesis with even more questions. And particularly for contemporary people of faith, since science addresses the question of “how,” but often leaves off the answer to “why.” That is one reason that we absolutely need Torah.

It makes sense that the Torah starts in Gan Eden / the Garden of Eden; we want our beginnings to be pure. In Hebrew, the term “Gan Eden” is used to mean “paradise,”* but that English term brings with it associations that are not really found in the Torah’s text or Jewish interpretations. Gan Eden is not a place of the so-called “afterlife;” it is rather, you might say, a sort of womb for Creation, a protected, natural space in which God could raise the newly-created plants, animals, and humans. Gan Eden was God’s nursery: fresh and flowering and nurturing.

Our popular conceptions about Gan Eden comes to us from Christianity: that the first humans created there were without sin and immortal, and upon having eaten the apple, experienced a kind of spiritual fall, which made them fundamentally sinful and mortal.

But we, the Jews, read the story in a very different way. Humans were created to be mortal. And, by the way, the Torah never mentions an apple; the fruit is a non-specific fruit, although some Jewish sources suppose that it was a fig or a pomegranate.

More importantly, we do not have the concept of Original Sin, or the Fall. On the contrary, humans were created with the ability to transgress. And of course, they mess up very soon. 

There is a wonderful midrash about the creation of human beings. Prior to doing so, God wisely consults with the angels to see how they feel about this new creature, which will be something like them, and they were not in agreement about humans. (As told in Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, JPS 2003, vol. 1, p. 51):

The Angel of Love favored the creation of humans, because they would be affectionate and loving; but the Angel of Truth opposed it, because humans would be full of lies. And while the Angel of Justice favored it, because humans would practice justice, the Angel of Peace opposed it, because humans would be quarrelsome. 

To invalidate his protest, God cast the Angel of Truth down from heaven to Earth, and when the others cried out against such contemptuous treatment of their companion, God said, “Truth will spring back out of the Earth.”

After consulting with the angels, God’s response was effectively, “Thanks for your opinion. And don’t you worry about that Truth business: it will be with us for sure.” So God creates humans, and places them in this lovely Garden, knowing that they will fail. And they will lie. And they will soon be lying and killing and doing all sorts of mischief.

But God also knows that humans have the great potential to do good, to carry out justice, to love, to till and to tend the Earth respectfully. God knows that humanity is a mixed bag, and that, although people will be a source of much pain and grief, they will also pursue and hold up truth. We are not fundamentally sinful, nor can we possibly be exclusively good. Rather, we are somewhere in-between. We are exactly as God the Engineer designed us.

Gan Eden, in Jewish tradition, is not paradise. It is a point of departure, not a future destination. The beginning, not the end.

Nonetheless, the fantastical idea of achieving paradise meanders through human existence. Many cultures have such a concept in their mythologies. We do, however. have the concept of “Olam HaBa,” the world-to-come, and there are some Jews in the world who work hard at performing mitzvot, fulfilling the opportunities for holiness in Jewish law, so they can attain a place in Olam HaBa. 

Opinions found on the Jewish bookshelf on what Olam HaBa is vary tremendously, from visions of a pleasurable place (like Gan Eden), to denial that there is anything at all after we die. One such vision (Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 17a) sees no Earthly pleasures in Olam HaBa, but rather merely sitting, with crowns on our heads, in the splendor of the presence of God, which will vastly exceed any kind of physical enjoyment. 

I have always subscribed to the idea that we perform mitzvot not for any future reward, but because that reward comes back to us in the present. And I have some good support here: there is a concept in Jewish life of Torah lishmah, learning Torah for its own sake. That is, we do not study our ancient texts and apply them to our lives so that we can get into Olam HaBa, but we do so because it is the right thing to do. The reward is the performance of the mitzvah itself. We read, for example, in Pirqei Avot, the second-century collection of Jewish wisdom(1:3):

אַנְטִיגְנוֹס אִישׁ סוֹכוֹ קִבֵּל מִשִּׁמְעוֹן הַצַּדִּיק. הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, אַל תִּהְיוּ כַעֲבָדִים הַמְשַׁמְּשִׁין אֶת הָרַב עַל מְנָת לְקַבֵּל פְּרָס, אֶלָּא הֱווּ כַעֲבָדִים הַמְשַׁמְּשִׁין אֶת הָרַב שֶׁלֹּא עַל מְנָת לְקַבֵּל פְּרָס, וִיהִי מוֹרָא שָׁמַיִם עֲלֵיכֶם

Antigonos of Sokho, received [Torah] from Shim’on the Righteous. He would say, “Do not be as servants who are serving the master in order to receive a reward; rather be as servants who are serving the master not in order to receive a reward; and may the fear of Heaven be upon you.”

Antigonos was onto something here, a more robust strategy for life. Since we cannot know what awaits us after we die, do good for the sake of doing good now and reap the rewards now. If it helps us in the Olam HaBa, harei zeh meshubaḥ! All the better.

Maimonides, writing in the 12th century, extends Antigonos of Sokho’s words:

The Sages meant to tell us by this that one should believe in truth for truth’s sake. And this is the sense they wish to convey by their expression, oved me-ahavah, “serving from motives of love.” (from Rambam’s Introduction to Pereq Ḥeleq)

We should “serve” our Master (i.e. God) and “fear Heaven” by speaking truth (remember Truth?) and pursuing justice and living according to the mitzvot not because we hope to get there after we die and hang around wearing crowns in God’s court, but rather because we do so out of an act of love for other people and the world. That is its own reward. Torah lishmah, Torah for its own sake, is what we reap, and it is right here, right now.

Gan Eden, ladies and gentlemen, is not some mystical future destination for which we should strive. Neither is it an abstraction. It is, rather, what we can create for ourselves here on Earth, in the present moment. 

We all have the potential to build Gan Eden, a place that is protective and nurturing, a place that is safe and innocent, green and pleasant and refreshing. All we have to do is make it happen by fulfilling the holy opportunities which have been given to us.

We create Gan Eden when we keep the Shabbat. Shabbat is a taste of the refreshment of Gan Eden, but only if you do it right – when you set aside your mundane stressors and focus on being there, being present with your family and friends, on gratitude and all that emanates from it, on the qedushah / holiness all around us.

We create Gan Eden when we reach out to others, when we work toward the common good, when we fulfill the mitzvot bein adam leḥavero, those mitzvot that maintain the qedushah between people: when we treat others with kindness, when we clothe the naked and comfort the mourner and feed the hungry.

We create Gan Eden when we gather in prayer, when we gather in joy and grief, when we fulfill the rituals of Jewish life which color our days with meaning.

One of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s most well-known songs is an ode to Woodstock, from their phenomenal 1970 album Deja Vu, although the song was written by Joni Mitchell (who was actually not at Woodstock because she had a gig on the Dick Cavett Show):

We are stardust
We are golden 
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.

But Joni got it wrong. We cannot get back to the Garden. There is no going back.

But we can make it here. All we have to do is act on the truth that is our spiritual heritage.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 10/22/2022.)

* Interesting etymological note: the Hebrew עֵדֶן / ‘eden means refreshment or pleasure, so Gan Eden might be literally translated as “garden of pleasure.” The word “paradise” seems to have arrived in the English language via Latin and Greek from the ancient Persian word pairidaeza, meaning a garden enclosure.