Tag: Shemot

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What’s My Motivation? – Shemot 5784

Back in December, I attended the convention of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism in Baltimore. I am proud to say that Beth Shalom was well-represented: in total, we had about a dozen attendees, which is a fabulous turnout.

One of the sessions I attended featured a former teacher of mine from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a leading light of the Conservative movement, Rabbi Gordon Tucker. Rabbi Tucker’s talk was titled, “Does Religious Authority Speak to Us Any More?”, and he brought us textual sources about “commandedness,” that is, the knowledge that our tradition endows us with certain holy behavioral obligations.

Rabbi Gordon Tucker

Now, the irony here is that he was speaking to a room full of rabbis, and we toil in the trenches of commandedness every day. You may be aware that the Hebrew word for “commandment” is mitzvah, and although we often use that term in a slangy way to refer to a “good deed,” that is not an accurate translation of mitzvah. Rather a mitzvah is an action performed (or refrained from) according to our understanding of the Torah, as a part of our berit, our covenant with God. 

One challenge that we face today as a people is that of motivation. Some of you might have noticed that I tend to engage with questions like these: 

  • Why should we keep these mitzvot? 
  • What is the value in gathering with our fellow Jews in synagogue on Shabbat? 
  • I am not clearly seeing the benefits of this berit / covenant, nor the downside of letting it go, so why bother?

The question of whether or not religious authority speaks to us today is absolutely fundamental to my work as your rabbi, and how our community understands itself. The struggle within Judaism today highlights the tension between autonomy and what Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century German philosopher, calls “heteronomy” – the idea that we are subject to some kind of motivation and laws outside of ourselves, i.e. the framework of 613 mitzvot. As modern Jews, we feel this tension between what we choose to do – autonomy – and what we know our tradition mandates – heteronomy.

Kant

We began reading today from the book of Shemot / Exodus, and you might make the case that the foundational moment of the Jewish people as a people occurs in this book, and we will read it in a few weeks. It’s the scene where Moshe receives the Torah on Mt. Sinai, and this is the moment when the Jewish people willingly accept their heteronomy – the framework of berit and mitzvot – following their redemption from slavery. As the legal scholar Robert Cover put it in 1987 (“Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order,” Journal of Law and Religion 5:1 (1987) pp. 65-74.): 

The basic word of Judaism is obligation or mitzvah. It… is intrinsically bound up in a myth– the myth of Sinai. Just as the myth of social contract is essentially a myth of autonomy, so the myth of Sinai is essentially a myth of heteronomy… The experience at Sinai is not chosen. The event gives forth the words which are commandments.

Cover does not mean “myth” the way that we often understand it, as falsehood. Rather, he uses it the way that my teacher, Rabbi Neil Gillman, taught us to understand it: a set of stories which help us make sense of our world. So the Sinai myth is the one that sets up this principle that we are commanded, that we have mitzvot to which we are obligated. Commandedness is Judaism’s concrete foundation. 

Now let’s face it: speaking about “obligation” or “commandment” is difficult for us today. Our society is all about autonomy. We love choice! Some of you may recall that I have mentioned the drugstore toothpaste aisle in the past. Apparently we need 85 different types of toothpaste to choose from. But that’s trite. More importantly today, consider how we all consume news: we choose our news sources based on our approach to politics, and we all know how problematic this has become. Objective facts have become obviated by choice – we choose to understand what is going on in the world based on what we want to hear, based on our narratives. It’s all about me. It’s autonomy-squared. 

Nobody likes being told what to do, or what to think, or to be limited by somebody else’s idea of how you should shape your life.

But Judaism actually depends on feeling commanded. No matter where you are on the spectrum of practice, there has to be something there outside of you that leads you to, for example, light Hanukkah candles or Shabbat candles or fast on Yom Kippur or put on tefillin or avoid eating ḥametz on Pesaḥ or sit here in synagogue listening to me. It cannot be purely social, because that is not enough of a basis on which to maintain our traditions and our communities. I suspect that if our tradition were solely based on autonomous choices, we would have faded into history with every other fashion trend. We need at least a modicum of heteronomy for the Jewish people to continue.

And from where I sit, surveying the patterns of Jewish observance today, and how that has changed in the context of the last 200 years or so, it is not too hard to see that autonomy is winning. Fewer of us are showing up to, or even joining synagogues. Fewer of us incorporate Jewish practices at home.

But the challenge that we face, as those who value autonomy, is that it is clearly getting more difficult to transmit our tradition to our children. When I was 12 years old, it was a synagogue requirement that I attend services every Shabbat morning, and my friends and I all did so. Such requirements have become more rare today, as parents and children juggle so many more options. If we were to impose such a requirement at Beth Shalom, I fear that we would lose many families, who know that they can go to another congregation with less stringent requirements for their children to be called to the Torah as benei mitzvah.

And yet, if we do not have any expectations at all – for education, for synagogue attendance, for holiday observances, for familiarity with our rituals and our texts – the Jewish landscape becomes merely a race to the bottom. “Being Jewish” becomes nothing more than just those two words, a meaningless identity.

When I was a rabbinical student at JTS, my teacher Rabbi Bill Lebeau gave me a journal article published in 1994 by economics professor Dr. Laurence Iannacone called, “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” The article demonstrates, using data collected from a range of churches, that the greater the expectations of a faith group, the more successful the organization is with respect to commitment. That is, by setting the bar higher for religious behavior, by expecting more from your adherents, the more engaged they are, the more committed they are to the tradition, to the wisdom found therein, to the organization, to the community.

In other words, if Congregation Beth Shalom required that you attend services every Shabbat morning to be a member, or mandated regular kashrut checks of your kitchen, or even required every adult to wear a tallit in synagogue, yes, many folks would resign or be removed unceremoniously from the membership list for non-compliance. But the ones who remain would be much more highly engaged, and some who might be on the margins will work harder to meet the standard, creating a greater sense of community in our fulfillment of Jewish rituals.

Now, obviously, we are not going to do that, because we want to be a community that welcomes all who want to join, regardless of their personal observance of mitzvot. Part of the contract of choice to which we are all so committed as a society dictates that we cannot judge anybody about their choices. 

But all of these ideas lead me back to one simple suggestion, one that is ancient and comes from the Talmud (BT Pesaḥim 50b):

דְּאָמַר רַב יְהוּדָה אָמַר רַב: לְעוֹלָם יַעֲסוֹק אָדָם בְּתוֹרָה וּמִצְוֹת אַף עַל פִּי שֶׁלֹּא לִשְׁמָהּ, שֶׁמִּתּוֹךְ שֶׁלֹּא לִשְׁמָהּ בָּא לִשְׁמָה

Rav Yehuda said in the name of Rav: A person should always engage in Torah study and performance of mitzvot, even if he does so not for their own sake, because it is through the performance of mitzvot not for their own sake, one gains understanding and comes to perform them for their own sake.

In other words, you may not always understand why to do a Jewish thing or why it is at all meaningful, but if you do it with some regularity, you come to appreciate those mitzvot. They become part of you. You do them lishmah, for their own sake. While putting on tefillin on a weekday morning might feel strange and uncomfortable and might mess up your hair if you are unaccustomed to it, after doing it for a while, you come to understand the meaning and value of tefillin.

Ḥevreh, the reason that the Jews are still on Earth today, that you are all sitting in this sanctuary at this moment, is that we have continued to inculcate our children with our texts, our values, our traditions. We have passed that berit, that covenant of behavioral expectations, those mitzvot on from generation to generation by teaching and learning and most importantly, doing.

Has that process always worked? No. Are there always going to be people who make bad choices, regardless of what they learn in Hebrew school? Yes.

But we must continue to expect more, to reach higher. I have been telling you all for years now that I am a “fundamentalist,” by which I mean that the fundamental aspects of Judaism – gathering for tefillah / prayer in synagogues, learning the words of the Jewish bookshelf, setting aside Shabbat as a holy day, and so forth – are what we need to help make better people and a better world. 

And as a community, we must continue to uphold these standards, particularly in the contemporary way in which we do so here at Beth Shalom: in an egalitarian fashion which acknowledges the realities of the contemporary world. We cannot allow our standards to be abrogated because we perceive them to be too hard for people, or even because they may be occasionally off-putting. On the contrary, we should work harder as a community to raise the bar. 

So here is a challenge: allow yourself be commanded. Seek out the heteronomy, the external motivation for reaching higher. It’s good for you, and good for the world.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 1/6/2024.)

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Be an Upstander – Shemot 5777

You know the old joke about how I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out? There is a related Jewish story. It’s an old fable about two brothers (Zev Vilnay, Legends of Jerusalem, JPS 1973, pp. 77-78):

One brother had a wife and children, the other did not. They lived together in one house – happy, quiet, and satisfied with the portions which they inherited from their father. Together they worked the fields with the sweat of their brows.

And the harvest came. The brothers bound their sheaves and brought them to the threshing floor. There they divided the crops of the field in two parts equally between them, and left them.

That night, the brother who had no family lay on his bed and thought: I am alone, but my brother has a wife and children. Why should my share be equal to his? And he rose from his bed, went stealthily out into the threshing floor, took from the stalks of his own sheaf, and added them to the sheaf of his brother.

That same night, the other brother turned to his wife and said: “It is not right that we have divided the crop into two equal parts, one for me and one for my brother. He is alone and has no other joy or happiness, only the yield of the field. Therefore, come with me, my wife, and we will secretly take from our share and add to his.” And they did so.

In the morning, the brothers went out into the threshing floor, and they wondered that the sheaves were still equal. Each one decided to himself to investigate. During the night each one rose from his bed to repeat his deed. And they met each other in the threshing floor, each with his sheaves in his arms. Thus the mystery was explained. The brothers embraced, and kissed each other.

And the Lord looked with favor on this threshing floor where the two brothers conceived their good thoughts… and the children of Israel chose it for the site of their Holy Temple.

An Israeli variant is about two other brothers who lived on a nearby hill, and did exactly the opposite: each stole from the other in the middle of the night. And that was where the Israelis chose to build the Knesset. (#Rimshot!)

I have become very concerned about the state of our society. I think that something that we have lost is a tangible sense of togetherness. On the contrary: the level of mistrust seems to me higher than it has been in my lifetime. And a related contemporary challenge about which I am particularly concerned is the lack of civility in our public discourse.

On Monday, as part of Community Day School‘s celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of the themes invoked was the principle of being an “upstander.” To be an upstander means, according to the website of the educational and professional development organization Facing History and Ourselves:

“A person who speaks or acts in support of an individual or cause, particularly someone who intervenes on behalf of a person being attacked or bullied.”

This word was just added to the Oxford Dictionaries in 2016.

Given our history and our tradition, we Jews have a special obligation to be upstanders: to speak out against that which we know is wrong, to intervene on behalf of those who are being persecuted, to call out hatred and racism and anti-Semitism when we see it.

Martin Luther King Day is always an opportunity for us to recall that Jews were there when the civil rights movement in this country was forged. It is a reminder that one of the greatest Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, walked with Dr. King on the latter’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Afterwards, Rabbi Heschel declared, “I felt as though my legs were praying.”

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.; DR. RALPH BUNCHE; Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. links arms with other civil rights leaders as they begin the march to the state capitol in Montgomery from Selma, Ala. on March 21, 1965. The demonstrators are marching for voter registration rights for blacks. Accompanying Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (fourth from right), are on his left Ralph Bunche, undersecretary of the United Nations, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. They are wearing leis given by a Hawaiian group. (AP Photo)

When Rabbi Heschel marched with Dr. King, the level of mistrust in America was also quite high. Society was changing. The established orders were being upended. People who had been historically oppressed were throwing off their yoke.

And people were angry. The civil rights movement inspired many Americans, including many Jewish volunteers, to do some really wonderful, holy work. But it also caused many others to behave badly in public, to scream and burn and even murder to try to prevent change.

In 1965, there was no Internet. No Facebook. No Twitter. So people actually had to confront each other in person. Not so today.

One can hardly read an article of any sort on the Internet without being assaulted by a blast of name-calling, hyperbolic accusations, and general disregard for others. And whether we are participating in these troll-fests or not, even those of us who read the comments sections on popular news sites are somehow metaphorically guilty of standing idly by the blood of our neighbors (from Parashat Qedoshim, Leviticus 19:16).

The relative anonymity of the online environment makes it far easier for us to cut each other down, to trade insults, to grandstand with impunity. And our online behavior is ultimately reflected in our feelings for one another offline.

We read this morning about how the new pharaoh “did not know Yosef.” (אשר לא ידע את יוסף – Ex. 1:8) Rashi points to a disagreement in the Talmud between Rav and Shemuel about whether this was, in fact, a new king or not. And if it was, in fact, the old king, then suddenly he was pretending not to know Yosef.

It is perfectly normal, perfectly human, and definitely Jewish to disagree with each other. And it is completely appropriate for us to stand up for the principles in which we believe. But a functional society depends on our willingness to be able to disagree with each other and continue to talk to each other and work with each other. We are, as I have mentioned in this space before, faced by many contemporary challenges; we will never solve them by demeaning each other.

And, indeed, we cannot be like the pharaoh who pretended not to know Yosef. We cannot pretend not to know our fellow Americans. We cannot dismiss the people with whom we disagree, as if their feelings and opinions cancel our ability to perceive any and all traces of decency.

On the contrary, says the Torah. Ve’ahavta lereiakha kamokha (Lev. 19:18). Love your neighbor as yourself. Even if they believe things that you find absolutely odious. The Torah clearly does not say, love your neighbor as yourself, but only if she thinks like you do. We, the Jews, must lead by example; we must continue to be or lagoyim, a light unto the nations.

I offer you the following piece from the Talmud for your consideration:

ת”ר: לא יסקל אדם מרשותו לרה”ר. מעשה באדם אחד שהיה מסקל מרשותו לרה”ר, ומצאו חסיד אחד, אמר לו: ריקה, מפני מה אתה מסקל מרשות שאינה שלך לרשות שלך! לגלג עליו. לימים נצרך למכור שדהו, והיה מהלך באותו רה”ר ונכשל באותן אבנים, אמר: יפה אמר לי אותו חסיד מפני מה אתה מסקל מרשות שאינה שלך לרשות שלך.

Our rabbis taught: “A person should not throw stones from his property into public grounds.

It happened that one man was throwing stones from his property into the public domain. A pious man passed by and said to him, “Foolish one, why are you throwing stones from property that does not belong to you onto ground that does belong to you?”

The man laughed at him. As time went by he had to sell his field and when he was walking on those public grounds, stumbled over his own stones.

He then exclaimed, “That pious man was right when he said to me, “Why are you throwing stones from ground that does not belong to you onto ground that does belong to you?” (Bava Qamma 50b)

We have to work hard to protect not only our physical public spaces, but our political, social, spiritual, and emotional public spaces as well. Throwing insults and epithets as a form of discourse into the online cloud is like tossing rocks into the street. We’re all going to eventually trip over them.

If we truly want to be upstanders, we must work hard to rekindle our civility. We cannot allow differences of opinion to fragment our democracy. We have to build a temple to love and compassion in that metaphysical public space. We have to remember and invoke our shared values.

That does not mean we have to agree. That does not mean that we have to tolerate hatred, bigotry, intolerance, or shaming of any kind. But it does mean that we have to speak nicely to each other, and occasionally give our produce up for the benefit of the other, so that we may build that temple.

 

~

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 1/21/2017.)

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Bosons, Kafka, and God – Shemot 5776

I tend to follow with great interest any news that comes out about particle physics, mostly because I am fascinated by things which we cannot see, yet are fundamental to understanding our world. But also, I love the theoretical aspects of math and physics that speak to the great theological questions that continue to pester us, even as we discover ever more about Creation. Subatomic particles always bring me back to God.

There was a piece of news two weeks ago from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider, a 27-km circular particle accelerator 100 meters underground outside of Geneva, was the international research facility that demonstrated the existence of the elusive Higgs boson in 2012. Without getting too technical, the Higgs boson is a subatomic particle whose existence had been predicted more than 50 years ago by a British theoretical physicist named Peter Higgs, but since the theory indicated that it would decay in a ten-sextillionth (10^-22 or 0.0000000000000000000001) of a second, it would be very hard to demonstrate that it exists. However, as a key particle in the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, proving its existence was extremely important to scientists in the field. The Large Hadron Collider, at a cost of about $10 billion, was built largely (!) to pursue the mysterious Higgs; finding it would effectively “prove” the Standard Model and thus allow many physicists to sleep comfortably at night.

Large Hadron Collider Makes Comeback After Two-Year Hiatus - Modern ...
The Large Hadron Collider

Scientists were so confident in 2013 that they had witnessed the presence of the Higgs in the data obtained from the LHC that they took the accelerator out of service for two years to do some repair work. It came back on line in 2015, and just a few weeks ago, scientists working at CERN went public with a new discovery: yet another, newly-discovered, as-yet-unnamed and -untheorized mystery particle, perhaps a cousin to the Higgs.

What is captivating about all this to me is that in 2013, everything seemed hunky-dory in the field of physics. Big questions were answered. Great theories were proven. Some have referred to the Higgs boson as “the God particle,” because the idea was that once it was discovered, all questions would be laid to rest.

But that did not happen; not all questions were answered. Apparently, the Standard Model predicts many things about matter, but there are others to which there are no answers. (They are too far beyond the scope of this derashah for me to explain.) But that is what makes it interesting.

Are we getting closer to unlocking all of the secrets that God’s Creation has for us? Or is it possible that each door unlocked will lead to another door, which is still locked, and will require many more years and billions of dollars to unlock?

In my first year at Cornell, I read a short story by Franz Kafka called Before the Law. In it, an unidentified man comes from the country to seek the law, and is met by a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper refuses to let the man through the gate toward the law, but tells him that after the first gate is another gate with another gatekeeper and after that another and another, and each gate is even harder to enter. The man spends his entire life trying to gain access. At the end of his life, as the man is dying, the gatekeeper reveals that the gate was created only for him, and it will now be permanently closed. The man has failed.

When I think of the high-level and extraordinarily expensive research that must be surmounted in order to get answers to truly fundamental questions, I think of Kafka’s series of gates that are nearly inaccessible, and each one is harder to enter. And that, of course, brings me back to God.

Kafka, of course, was Jewish, and grew up in a household that knew Judaism; his father was a shohet (kosher butcher). Although he never wrote about Judaism explicitly in his work, this story to me sounds very Jewish. The man strives for entry to the law (i.e. the Torah) for his entire life, but never succeeds; we too strive to live the ideals and mitzvot of Judaism, and we always miss the mark. Part of the drama of the High Holidays is the acknowledgment that each of us has failed in one way or another; each of us is flawed.

kafka statue in this part of town i came upon a unique statue of kafka ...
Statue of Franz Kafka in Prague

But the series of increasingly challenging gates speaks to me of the way that I approach God. God is not provable by any theory or evidence, and that’s OK. God can live comfortably alongside the so-called God particle, the Big Bang, evolution, and so forth, because that is not the way God works. Does knowing where we come from and how subatomic particles behave answer the really important questions, like, “How do I find meaning in my life?” or “How do I make responsible choices in my interpersonal relationships?” No.

Knowing God and understanding the laws of physics are fundamentally different questions. But they are equally challenging in a way that highlights the impossibility of ever arriving at the conclusion. Just as understanding subatomic particles will be an infinite task, so too will our understanding of God.

God is elusive, and sometimes the more we uncover, the more we see that there is even more to know. And yet, we continue to strive for holiness, to seek God wherever Godliness might be found.

Some of us look at those who are deeper and more rigorous in our observance of religious tradition and think, “That guy – he must understand Judaism and God. He’s got it all figured out.” But you’ll have to trust me when I say, it doesn’t quite work that way. We all continue to seek, no matter where we are on the spectrum of Jewish knowledge or traditional practice. And we all return to the same fundamental questions, for which there will never be complete answers. And the whole array of Torah and our tradition remains before us to dig into along our journeys.

And this brings me back to Parashat Shemot, and in particular a passage that has captivated me since childhood. It comes from the episode with the burning bush (Ex. 3:13-14):

וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה אֶל-הָאֱ-לֹהִים, הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי בָא אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְאָמַרְתִּי לָהֶם, אֱ-לֹהֵי אֲבוֹתֵיכֶם שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם; וְאָמְרוּ-לִי מַה-שְּׁמוֹ, מָה אֹמַר אֲלֵהֶם.  יד וַיֹּאמֶר אֱ-לֹהִים אֶל-מֹשֶׁה, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה; וַיֹּאמֶר, כֹּה תֹאמַר לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, אֶהְיֶה, שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם.

Moses said to God, “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.” He continued, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you.’” (New JPS)

Call me Ehyeh-asher-ehyeh, says God. “I am what I am.” We might expect this from Popeye, but not from God.

What does it mean? What does it tell us about who or what God is, about the nature of the Divine? Is God merely ducking the question, knowing that in 5776 / 2016 we’d still be asking?

The great Hasidic rabbi, Rabbi Levi Yitzhaq of Berdychiv (Ukraine, 1740-1809) reads this as future tense, “I will be what I will be.”  It is as if God is saying, don’t try to pin me down; you cannot fully understand me, and the same will be true effectively forever.

I suppose what was always the most fascinating thing about this line is the translation itself. When I was in Hebrew school, I was taught that “ehyeh” is future tense – I will be – and therefore goes with R. Levi Yitzhaq.

But actually, Hebrew grammar freaks like me know that although modern Hebrew has a tense structure that accords with European languages (past, present, and future), ancient Hebrew does not actually work that way. The Hebrew of the Torah, if you can believe this, has no tense! It has only moods. Those moods are perfect and imperfect. Perfect refers to actions which have been completed; imperfect refers to things that have not yet been completed. Both of these moods can refer to actions in the past, present, or future; although mood can sometimes suggest tense, tense is not intrinsic to the mood.

“Ehyeh” is imperfect. It is an incompleteness, past, present, or future. It might suggest “This is what I am right now, but I will be something different in the future,” or “This is what I will begin to be when we get there.” It could even suggest, “This is what I was being, but I have since changed.”

“Ehyeh asher ehyeh” is a layer of incompleteness on top of incompleteness. It says, “Not only have I not completed who I am right now, but even in the future I will not have even begun to be established.” It’s like Churchill’s statement on the Soviet Union: it was (perfect mood, BTW) “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

God is in an imperfect mood. God is not complete. God is still, even today, fashioning God’s self.

This is an imperfect world, and there is much work to do before we achieve perfection of any kind. Maybe it will never arrive, but we first must acknowledge this. That’s the meaning of “Ehyeh.”

Back to the Times story on the exciting, new boson, cousin to the God particle, the Higgs: the reporter who covered this revelation described the discovery of the Higgs as “not the end of physics,” but rather, “the end of the beginning.” This research is in the imperfect mood. Just as physicists will continue to dig deeper to find more answers, and even more unanswered questions, so too will we continue to attempt to enter one gate after another in search of God, in our quest for Torah, in our journey to ourselves. Kafka and the Higgs boson suggest that this search will never be over; our task is to keep looking.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 1/2/2016.)