D’var Torah: Parashat Be-Ha’alotecha

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

This parsha strikes me as an opportunity to think a little bit about prophecy. Prophecy plays such a central role in Judaism that it can be, ironically, easy to overlook. Our entire religious tradition is based on the prophetic experiences of our ancestors as recorded in the Torah. We’re familiar with the prophets, the speakers of prophecy, and with prophecies, the content of their statements. But what can we actually say about the institution of prophecy itself?

We might say that a prophet is someone to whom God speaks. In a certain sense, this is true. When we are first introduced to Moses he is an infant. Flash forward a number of years, and he is a young man enraged at the mistreatment of a Hebrew slave, then a husband and sheepherder in the land of Midian. Only after he hears the word of God calling from the burning bush–”Moses! Moses!”–does his career as a prophet truly begin. And yet, as the rabbis remarked, he was Moses before God had spoken to him, and Moses after God had spoken to him. Might we perhaps regard his slaying of the Egyptian overseer, as well as rising to the defense of Jethro’s daughters at the well, as prophetic acts?

At its most basic level, prophecy is about the right to speak, to innovate, to have one’s words and actions carry authority. For our tradition prophecy represents the wellspring of religious inspiration, the impassioned word that shakes up the status quo in the name of God’s moral imperative and establishes a new order, a new understanding, a new way of doing things. How people have understood this creative impulse has changed over the generations, as has our understanding of who has the right to speak prophetically and under what conditions. Nevertheless the impulse–in one form or another–has been with us throughout history and, I would argue, is with us still today. It is the constant companion of the Jewish people, the itch that refuses to allow us to rest comfortably while there is injustice in the world.

There’s an episode in chapter 11 of this week’s Torah portion where Moses, frustrated as usual by the people’s complaints, complains bitterly to God about the burden of leading such a difficult, intractable people. God responds by commanding Moses to gather together seventy elders “of whom you have experience as elders and officers of the people.” (11:16) These elders will have a portion of the prophetic spirit which Moses enjoys placed upon them, so that they can share in the burden of the people with him. Moses does as God commands, and as the Torah puts it, the elders “spoke in ecstasy, but did not continue.” (11:25)

Meanwhile, back in the camp, two men named Eldad and Medad have not joined the other elders with Moses at the mishkan. Nevertheless, they too begin to prophecy, and this fact is reported to Moses. Joshua, who serves as Moses’ attendant, protests that he should put a stop to this, presumably indignant that prophecy should be “springing up wild,” as it were, among the people, outside of the carefully orchestrated transfer of authority taking place at the tent of meeting. Moses, however, tells Joshua to be still. “Are you wrought up on my account?” he says, “Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD put his spirit on them!” (11:29) And nothing much more is said of the matter.

The lesson I take from this episode is that although the broad sweep of the narrative we find in Torah is linear, focusing on a successive chain of great leaders with uniquely powerful connections to God, whose struggles and triumphs shape us and our relationship of God to this day, we should not assume that everything that can be said about and in the name of God must come from the mouth of a Moses or an Isaiah. Even in the time of Moses, the greatest of the prophets, there were things God wanted the people to understand that God apparently felt were better communicated by other mouths than his.

According to one source in the Talmud, after the deaths of the last prophets recorded in the Tanakh, the holy spirit–that is, the genius for prophecy–departed from Israel. Some connect this with the destruction of the second Temple. According to this narrative, out of all the world only the Temple at Jerusalem was considered a worthy resting place for the divine Presence, and until it is rebuilt in the messianic age we remain cut off from the powerful experience of God that prophecy represents.

Personally, I take more comfort from a statement recorded of R. Avdini of Haifa, who said, “Ever since the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from the prophets and given to the sages.” I think we can interpret this statement to mean that in some small way the prophetic impulse is present in anyone willing to look at the world with eyes eager to better understand what God asks of us. Can any of us ever be a Moses or an Isaiah? Of course not, but neither do we need to. They had their own extraordinary tasks to achieve, and we reap the benefits of their encounters with God to this day. But neither should we ever deny ourselves the authority to speak, to broaden and deepen in whatever way we can the understanding of those who came before.

>The X-Files, Faith and Honi the Circle-drawer

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Emily and I have been watching The X-Files together recently. Neither of us watched the show while it was originally being aired. Watching it now, this series strikes me as profoundly dated. by which I mean that it manages to beautifully encapsulate the spirit of the time in which it was created, which also happens to have been the time in which I was growing up. The central themes of the show certainly speak eloquently to anyone who grew up in the nineties: The desperate desire to believe in something bigger than yourself, set against the nagging doubt that the truth you’re looking for might turn out not to exist, or even worse, to represent merely another link in the chain of social control–the oppressive hand of history in another guise.

This simultaneous longing for and suspicion of the miraculous, of the transcendent exception that breaks through the cracks in the real, is not at all alien to the classical roots of the Jewish tradition. Indeed, this appreciation for the possibilities of the miraculous while at the same time holding it at arm’s length might be said to characterize the fundamental metaphysical attitude of rabbinic Judaism. Witness to the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans, the rabbis of the classical period must have felt themselves to be walking an exceedingly fine line. On the one hand, the Temple’s destruction must have stood before them always as an object lesson that history will exercise its harsh prerogatives even at the expense of what is most holy. And yet, to give up on the notion of G-d’s providential intervention in the historical world, to shut the door on the realm of the miraculous, would cut off the Jewish people from its own living roots, dooming Judaism to become a philosopher’s religion, filled perhaps with sound advice on matters of ethics but fundamentally closed to the the genuine, vital encounter with the divine that lies at the heart of religious experience and points the way to the possibility of future redemption. This is why the rabbis, though occasionally anxious to curb the wildest outpourings of mystical enthusiasm, were always careful never to repudiate it utterly.

An example of this tension in action can be found in the mishnaic tale of Honi the Circle Drawer. According to the story, a town was suffering from severe drought and appealed to Honi, well-regarded for his piety and scholarship, for help. Honi drew a circle in the dirt and stood in the middle of it, proclaiming to Heaven that he would not move from the circle until G-d saw fit to send rain. Surely enough, the rain was forthcoming. In an interesting coda to the episode, it says:

Simeon ben Shatah said to him, “If you were not Honi, I should decree a ban of excommunication against you. But what am I going to do to you? For you importune before the Omniscient, so He does what you want, like a son who importunes his father, so he does what he wants.”

As presented in the story, at no point is the efficacy of Honi’s unconventional methods questioned. He claims to be able to basically whine until the Almighty gives him what he wants, and for all intents and purposes this claim seems to be accurate. And yet, far from being welcomed, Honi is sharply criticized by his fellow rabbis for his unorthodox methods and the disrespect they seem to imply. In the end, it is only the level of prestige Honi commands in the rabbinic community that saves him from the fate of excommunication. Certainly one could argue that what we are dealing with here is the suspicion that Honi is perpetrating some kind of hoax, making use of some mundane or magical trick and passing it off as a genuine miracle. I think, however, that what is actually at issue here is the miracle itself, regarded as such.

To put it bluntly, the rabbis are not displeased with the miracle itself, but with its possible social consequences. The danger here is that the people will come away with the wrong message–that the Almighty’s favor can be had for the asking, and that the mark of this favor can be easily determined by the trail of wondrous occurrences that follow the self-proclaimed prophet. But the entire rabbinic enterprise is founded on a rejection of this overly-simplistic mystical worldview. The rabbis of the classical period were, after all, the intellectual descendants of extremely pragmatic men–men resolved, in the face of tragedy and disaster to take what they could get, cut their losses and above all to preserve what they could of the dedicated core of the Jewish tradition and keep it alive for the sake of future generations. This is to be expected and praised–in the world of the early Common Era, a Jewish people that waited calmly in the expectation of a miraculous solution to the problems of the day would have ceased ultimately to exist, massacred and scattered by the might of the Roman legions.

And yet, much as the rabbis firmly rejected an over-anxious reliance on miracles, neither did they ultimately reject the miraculous as such when it presented itself. To reject utterly the possibility of miraculous occurrences in the present day would be to undermine the spiritual basis of Judaism. A faith so firmly grounded in the memory of divine salvation from the hands of persecution and slavery could never close itself to the possibility of the miraculous–indeed, the flame of this abiding hope, kept alive by the memories of redemptions past, was ever one of the Jewish people’s greatest sources of strength.

What lesson can we draw from the curious tension to be found in the tale of Honi the Circle Drawer? For me at least it is that the perpetual tension between faith and skepticism, far from being a symptom of a terminally conflicted mind, can actually be the most intensely productive point of view in a spiritual sense. To hold on to our sense of the truth and the firm demand of a rational world view based on our own experience, while simultaneously keeping our minds open and alive to the realm of what Agent Mulder calls “extreme possibility,” can be intensely challenging. And yet it is precisely this synthesis of faith and skepticism that can drive us forward in a way that neither can hope to achieve alone.

Reward and Punishment

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Okay, I’m posting this before it gets any longer. Feel free to comment.


I think it’s impossible to be a Jew in this day and age and not be uncomfortable with some aspect of the prayer service. The way the siddur is constructed–layer upon layer of songs, devotional literature, biblical and talmudic passages representing virtually every period of Jewish history and every school of Jewish thought–is such as to virtually guarantee this. Each of us probably has a passage that gives them pause, which they find themselves either hesitating before reading or discretely skipping over. For me, at least, it’s prayers having to do with restoration of the temple sacrifice. Which is a pity, actually, since on the whole I find the general idea of a universally redemptive messianic age compelling, and this is one of the primary forms these sentiments tend to take in our liturgy.


But that’s a subject for another post. Today I want to take a look at a passage from the second paragraph of the Shema:


I will give rain in your land in its season, the early and the late rain; and you shall gather in your grain, wine and oil. I will give grass in your field for your cattle, and you shall eat and be satisfied. Be careful lest your heart be tempted and you go astray and worship other gods, bowing down to them. Then the LORD’s anger will flare against you and He will close the heavens and there will be no rain. The land will not yield its crops, and you will perish swiftly from the good land that the LORD is giving you. (translation from the Koren-Sachs Siddur, which is the one I tend to use at the moment)


The connection between obedience and reward, disobedience and punishment, in this passage is so clear-cut and unambiguous that it might make us uncomfortable. How do we reconcile this promised with the many, many examples of undeserved suffering we encounter every day, in the pages of history, in the news and in our own lives? One might be tempted to mentally classify it as the artifact of an earlier, more primitive understanding of G-d and His relationship and creation, holding little relevance for us today.


I think the best way to make sense of this is to examine the differences between this passage and the first paragraph that precedes it. This comparison is especially useful because these passages are so similar. They come from the same part of Deuteronomy, only a few chapters apart, and yet both in terms of content and of language used they are virtually identical. It’s easy to wonder why the framers of this section of liturgy found it necessary to incorporate both passages. The two significant differences between the two are that:


  1. The second paragraph incorporates the passage promising prosperity in return for obedience and threatening punishment for disobedience. The first does not.
  2. Grammatically, the first paragraph is written in the second person singular whereas the second is in the second person plural.


Point B doesn’t come across so well in translation since modern English lacks a 2nd person plural, but it’s important to my understanding of what is at work here. The first paragraph addresses itself to the individual, and in it I am commanded to love and serve G-d, to obey His commandments, to teach and remember them. Conspicuously absent is any mention of reward for such behavior. The second paragraph addresses not I, the individual, but the people as a collective body, but otherwise contains much the same set of injunctions, expressed in a virtually identical way. It is only here, however, that mention is made of any positive benefit associated with performance of the mitzvot. 


I think there’s a sort of brutal honesty to be found here: Individually, it seems to say, I may lead a moral life and suffer while others behave wickedly and prosper. This, while hard to come to terms with, is indisputably true and speaks to our experience of life and history. The more important point, however, is that collectively we can draw a link between morality and prosperity that does not hold true on the individual level. 


An overly simplistic reading of this text might lead us to believe that society has little vested interest in caring for the poor, the sick, or the outsiders because we can ultimately trust G-d to reward those who deserve His favor. But we already know that this cannot be the case, as it conflicts with the positive commandments to be found throughout the Torah to feed the stranger, the widow and the orphan, to take care of the sick. 


I think the actual message being communicated to us here is precisely the reverse: The Holy One, it is saying, does not guarantee that the good will be rewarded and the wicked suffer in this world. Why this is so we do not and cannot know, but sometimes we may be called on to carry on being moral despite circumstances that seem to actively punish such behavior. But because this is so, that makes it doubly important for us a society to take care of the less fortunate. 


In Pirke Avo there’s a passage that talks about four kinds of human beings. The first one mentioned is the one who says “What is mine is mine, what is yours is yours.” This kind of human, say the sages, is the normal kind of person, “though some say that this is the Sodom kind.” The message here is, I think, that a society conceived solely in terms of self interest will quickly devolve from the merely selfish to the truly hellish. By working to create a just society (conceived in Jewish terms as one that reflects the ethical vision embodied in the Torah), we are acting in partnership with G-d to fill the moral gaps we encounter in the world. And by doing so, we are actually helping ourselves more than any kind of narrowly-defined self-interest could hope to promise. 

D’var Torah: Parashat Mishpatim

/ Leiah Moser / 1 Comment

Here’s the text of the d’var torah I gave today, if anybody’s interested:

Our parsha for this week is rich in commandments that attempt to regulate human relationships at their most problematic. Absent is the assumption that God’s chosen people will be free of conflict. What we find instead is a nuanced awareness of pain–of pain inflicted by one human being against another, and of the necessity of establishing social mechanisms to address this pain in a way that doesn’t destabilize the community. Reading the laws concerning redress of grievances, one can sense a careful balance being struck between the rights of the victim, the perpetrator, and of society as a whole. Of central concern throughout is the question of responsibility. Amidst a litany of injury, theft and even death inflicted by one member of the community upon another, we are asked at all times to keep the all-important questions in the forefront of our minds: to whom am I responsible, and for what, and to what extent?

The question of responsibility is complicated, and no single answer can capture its essence. Nevertheless, I would like to look at one understanding of responsibility suggested by an episode that occurs toward the end of this parsha.

In chapter 24, in a passage beginning with verse 9, we find the following:

“Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel ascended; and they saw the God of Israel: under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. Yet He did not raise His hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they beheld God, and they ate and drank.”

Exodus 24:9-11 
When contrasted with the hard-nosed legislation that makes up the majority of this Torah portion, the poetic effect of this mystical vision is quite striking. And yet its meaning in this context may seem hard to fathom. 

The opinion of Rashi was that the sapphire pavement is meant to signify the suffering of the people Israel. Just as the Israelites were enslaved and forced to make bricks in Egypt, so the memory of their suffering takes the form of brick-work laid out beneath the feet of God. In his ethical treatise, “Hokhmah U-Mussar,” Rav Simha Zissel describes this as an “imaginative projection,” the concrete form of a spiritual truth. But what is the truth that God wishes to convey? Doesn’t it seem out of place to insert a reminder of Israel’s recent suffering into this moment of supreme joy, this celebration of the newly-forged covenant between God and Israel?

For Rav Zissel, the answer to this question lies in a particular understanding of morality based on responsibility for others. A devotee of the ethical discipline of Mussar, his primary concern is with how people can better understand and strengthen their ethical selves. God, in appearing to the leaders of the Israelites with His feet resting upon a pavement of the sorrows they have just escaped, is expressing a profound solidarity with the people that goes beyond the simple relationship of master and servant. In other words, God is not so much reminding us of our suffering as He is reassuring us that He is aware of our suffering and willing to share in our burden. In this way, we can regard the sapphire pavement as a dramatic illustration of the fact that every genuine community, even that existing between God and His people, is founded on our ability to identify with the other’s pain, and our corresponding willingness to shoulder the burden of another. God’s willingness to share in the burden of His people can be taken as an illustration for our responsibility for the burdens of our fellow human beings.

This understanding of the sapphire pavement as an imaginative projection of God’s shared concern for the the suffering of Israel is underlined by the conclusion of this passage. There is a breathless transition here between three distinct moments: “… He did not raise His hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they beheld God, and they ate and drank.” These three moments present us with the ideal picture of a peaceful relationship with God. In contrast with other moments in the Torah where we see the people shrinking away from a direct experience of God in fear for their lives, here we find God and Israel united in the simple face-to-face of community. The non-violence of this moment, already implicit in the untroubled gaze of the people’s leaders on one side and the restraint of God who does not “raise His hand” on the other, is sealed by the final moment, wherein “they ate and drank.” 

There is some question in the tradition as to whether eating and drinking in this passage are to be taken literally or metaphorically. In the Zohar Rabbi Yose suggests the passage should be taken to mean “feasting their eyes upon [God’s] radiance.” Rabbi Yehudah, on the other hand, claimed that “They actually ate, nourishing themselves!” I would suggest that perhaps “they” in this case refers not only to the leaders of Israel, but to God as well–not in the sense of eating and drinking, but of engaging in the kind of fellowship best represented in our experience by sitting down together to share a meal. The power of this moment lies in the significance of the shared meal as the primal moment of community–God and Israel, sitting at the same table, united by the experience of a shared burden. In such a moment, even the infinite gap between God and humanity can be bridged in fellowship, providing us with the model for a non-violent relationship, not only with the divine, but with our fellow human beings.

Hardened Hearts- Parashat Vaera

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We had a discussion in class a while ago about the section in Exodus (parashat Vaera) where G-d tells Moses that he “will harden Pharaoh’s heart, that I may multiply my signs and marvels in the land of Egypt.” This is a difficult passage that has been challenging rabbis for centuries, and the Rambam’s explanation in the Mishneh Torah–that habitual evil left unchecked for too long can eventually rule out even the possibility of repentance–seems no so much to resolve the issue as to focus and intensify it. To put it bluntly, is it possible that in this instance G-d was willing and able to suspend the free will of a human being, even a habitually wicked one, to make a point? And if it were possible in this instance, then why not others, also? Does this passage not call into question the very meaning of free will in the shadow of a transcendent G-d?

We would all like to believe that we are ultimately free to choose between good and evil. To do otherwise would be to take an ironic stance toward our own moral commitments. And yet, those of us who strive to resist the deceptive attractions of moral irony must find some answer to its claims, particularly because they seem so often to come from the mouth of experience and worldly knowledge. As Emmanuel Levinas wrote in the introduction to Totality and Infinity, “Everyone will agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are duped by morality.”

I’m not sure whether I can answer the challenge posed by the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, but some thoughts did occur to me today which seemed to help put the question in perspective. As far as I can see, the theological possibility of free will does not necessarily exclude the psychological observation that peoples’ behavior tends to be influenced by their environment. If what we mean by free will is some sacrosanct, inviolable thing, utterly insulated from its surroundings, then it’s hard to even imagine such a thing existing, or having any effect on the world if it did. Doesn’t a great deal of our behavior toward others express a certain fundamental assumption that what we say or do may have an effect on how they think, or feel, or at least behave? How else is an argument, or a threat, or a word of comfort supposed to work?

In order to make a difference in the world around you, you have to be open to being changed in return. This is true with regard to our fellow human beings, and it is true of our relationship with God. If we believe that God has an active role in creation (and this is a belief I find strongly persuasive), then we have to at least entertain the possibility that the way we think and feel has been strongly influenced by the ongoing conversation with the Eternal that has been at play in the events of our lives.

Where then does this leave Pharaoh? Raised in a society that treats him like a god, surrounded by sycophantic admirers and steeped in a culture that sees itself as the pinnacle of human civilization, it is not hard to imagine the kind of egocentric character that might be formed by such a biography. And into the middle of this carefully circumscribed world strides Moses, the scruffy, bearded, sun-baked representative of an enslaved people and its unknown god. There was little in the Egyptian king’s life that could have prepared him for this radical challenge to his smug self-regard.

In a biblical world, in which God is always seen to be lurking behind the wings, breathing the breath of a transcendent outside into the otherwise airtight box of history, is it so difficult to detect in these circumstances of Pharaoh’s life the means by which God “hardened his heart?” When weighed against the calcified accumulation of historical necessity, what can be the significance of “free will,” of the inward exception that exempts itself from the prerogatives of the past? It is precisely this conflict, and its surprising conclusion, that lie at the heart of the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh. For Moses himself, though not to as great a degree as Pharaoh, had tasted what the most sophisticated civilization in the world had to offer, but gave it all up in reaction to the injustice he saw taking place in front of him. If the meaning of free will is to be found anywhere in this story, I think it is in the fact that this decisive moment in Moses’s life, this moment of uncontrollable rage at the mistreatment of one human being by another, happened long before he is likely to have even heard of the God of Israel. Perhaps this is what Rashi is trying to tell us– that the meaning of free will in a God-haunted universe is that the decisive encounter with God will only happen-whether we are Pharaoh or Moses–once our choices have already been made.

>Morality must begin at home

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Here’s a proposition I’m experimenting with: Morality must begin at home. At the moment, I’m not sure if this is a Jewish proposition or a philosophical proposition or both. I’m not even sure if it’s true or not but I’m going to explore it a little bit and see if it begins to grow on me.
The reason I’m going to explore this proposition is, first of all, that it makes me really uncomfortable. On the face of it, it would seem to be an argument in favor of a tribal ethic, one that assigns moral priority based on proximity. “This person is closer to me, and therefore more valuable,” it would seem to say. But at this point a whole host of buzzers and lights begin to go off in my mind. I’ve caught myself, red-handed. The crime? Consideration of a point of view that is insufficiently universal.
There’s something to be said for a universalistic ethics. Indeed, it has been said, quite a lot and in a lot of different ways. There’s a reason that nearly every ethical thinker in the history of Western philosophy has adopted a universalistic point of view–it’s a hell of  a lot easier to justify from an abstract standpoint. Consider: The two great branches of modern ethical thought, duty-based on one side, utilitarian on the other. Both, in their own way, argue for an ethics grounded in that great principle of liberal society, that all human beings are to be treated as equally. From the utilitarian’s point of view, this equality is thought of in terms of the individual as the subject of pleasure and pain. Duty ethics chooses to consider ethical subjects in their abstract universality as the bearers of rational subjectivity. In either case, the interchangeability of ethical subjects is taken, not for granted, but as an explicit axiom on which the whole edifice is based.
And yet… A universalistic ethics, as useful as it may be in thinking in negative terms about the justice and injustice, for example, of laws enacted by a State, doesn’t do me a whole lot of good in making sense of the positive ethical obligations I feel in my own life. It can help me decide what’s fair, but it doesn’t do me a lick of good in prioritizing in fundamentally unfair situations, where there’s a limited amount of good to be spread around and I have to decide how to parcel it out. And this kind of unfair situation isn’t a rare, extreme limit case. No, it in fact represents the status quo, the normal, inescapable predicament which every one of us is forced to deal with every day of our lives, because our time and moral attention are limited resources which we must ultimately decide how to allocate!
There’s a peculiar problem experienced only by those who’ve spent a large amount of time thinking in terms of “social justice,” one that can occasionally seem rather counterintuitive and even inhuman to people who don’t spend so much time worrying about global issues. This problem is the paralysis that grips you when you become so focused on the universal that you lose sight of the particular. How can it be moral, a person like this asks themself, to devote the majority of my care to those closest to me? Is this not a form of bias, a kind of tribalism? Shouldn’t I rather devote my time to fixing the world at large, to addressing the problems of people who are certainly suffering more than anyone close to me?
The problem with this point of view is that, seductive as it can be, it is ultimately destructive in its one-sidedness. Of course we’re all obligated to speak out against injustice in the world wherever we find it. And of course we should spend at least some of our time concerned with, and helping to fix, large-scale problems. We should always be sensitive to the plight of communities other than our own. And yet, in the same way that no-one can be as sensitive to the needs of a particular child as that child’s own parents, no one can be as sensitive to the needs of a particular community as a member of that community. This, as I see it, may be the most convincing argument for a certain kind of limited tribalism: When it comes to genuinely helping people, it is absolutely necessary to have an understanding of who they are and what they need. We very much require understanding in order to be make the jump from ineffectual worry to genuine care, and the only place to begin to understand others is with the others who are closest to us.
For this reason, I hesitantly advance the principle that morality must begin at home. A sensitivity to global issues, as well as to the suffering of people in communities outside our own, is absolutely necessary to living morally in the larger world. But when it comes to actually helping people, we need to be unafraid to look to those nearby.

>Authentic Judaism

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>Just read an article by Jay Michaelson on the Jewish Daily Forward website titled “The Myth of Authenticity.” His basic point is that an “unstated assumption” runs through a lot of our discourse about the various groups staking their claims within contemporary Judaism, that “real Judaism” is characterized by fidelity to a certain image of Orthodox traditionalism and all other forms of Jewish identity must be judged by their relationship to this ostensibly “authentic” Judaism. As he puts it,

…there persists in the American Jewish imagination an anxiety of inauthenticity — that someone, somewhere, is the real Jew, but I’m not it.

When you’re a convert to a religion (I imagine it must be similar for those who’ve immigrated to and become citizens of a country not of their birth), the question of authenticity is one that tends to cause you to lose quite a bit of sleep. Lacking a sense of identity grounded in birth and upbringing, you are thrown back upon your own religious practice as the sole signifier of belongingness to the chosen group. In theory, this should not be much of an issue in Judaism, given the halachic principle that converts are to be regarded in all respects as having actually been born as Jews. What convert has not drawn comfort from the rabbinical pronouncement that all Jews, past, present and future, were equally present at the giving of the Law at Sinai? Nevertheless, in practical terms things are rarely ever that simple, and in light of heated debate both in the US and in Israel concerning the status of conversions performed by the various movements one can hardly be blamed for occasionally yearning for a bit of simple, incontrovertible “authenticity.”

What Michaelson’s article reminds us of is that this concern regarding the authenticity of one’s own Judaism is hardly a phenomenon unique to the convert. Indeed, it might be said that the central question of contemporary Judaism is that of who can “speak” for Judaism in its true, essential character. Michaelson takes the view that this concern with authenticity is ultimately mythical, “a false projection of particular historical quirks onto an imagined ideal of “realness” that artificially freezes culture, and thus spells its demise.” In his opinion, an authentic Judaism is quite simply one that resonates meaningfully to the individual. While I agree with him that progressive strains of Judaism must ultimately reject the attempt to portray them as a “watered-down,” “less authentic” or “more secular” version of neo-Orthodoxy, I wonder if his ultimate rejection of the very question of authenticity  doesn’t end up ignoring the root of the problem, rather than addressing it.

The question that concerns me in this regard is a simple one, but unfortunately lacking in any kind of simple answer: Are we approaching a point where maintaining even the polite fiction of the Jews as a unified people will become impossible? In response to the challenges and opportunities presented by modernity, a variety of new responses began to develop, from the strict traditionalism of Neo-Orthodoxy to the rather abstract ethical monotheism of classical Reform, from the Zionist understanding of Judaism as a national community united by language and custom to the renewed emphasis in some quarters on its fundamentally religious character. In light of the proliferation of conflicting definitions of what it means to be a Jew, it becomes all the more important for the different camps to cling fast to the bedrock of common courtesy of good faith which would recognize at least the legitimate place of the different points of view at the table.

>Cheshbon ha-Nefesh

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I love opening the mailbox and being greeted by a media-mail envelope filled with books I’ve ordered. This is seriously one of the greatest pleasures in life that are polite to talk about in mixed company. Today I received my extremely tiny and cute copy of Cheshbon ha-Nefesh, a nifty tome by R. Mendel of Satanov (who is now right up there with Gregor Mendel on my list of Greatest Mendels of All Time–pea plants and moral psychology, FTW!).
I ordered it as part of this mussar kick I’m on. I had actually never heard about mussar until recently. I ran into the term in a brief bio of R. Ira Stone on the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College website, of all places. For those who, like, me, have been in the dark, mussar is a spiritual practice developed by R. Yisroel Salanter in the 1800’s. It starts from the idea that knowing what is good isn’t going to do you a lot of good if you’re so thoroughly mired in bad habits that you can’t manage to behave properly. Mussar therefore attempts to correct the nasty inclinations of the practitioner through a process of study, self-discipline and psychological self-inquiry–kind of like Freud for people who aren’t passionately anti-religious. It relies heavily on classic works of Jewish ethics such as Chovot ha-Levavot (Duties of the Heart) by Bahya ibn Paquda and Tomer Devorah (The Palm tree of Devorah) by Moses Cordovero. And, of course, Cheshbon ha-Nefesh. From what I’ve been able to determine so far, the thread unifying these works is a sophisticated form of Virtue Ethics, which classifies ethical behavior according to a number of distinct virtues (occasionally regarded kabalistically as being grounded in corresponding attributes of God) and attempts to cultivate them within the self.
This is really exactly the kind of formalized spiritual discipline that appeals to me. As a practice of self-examination grounded in moral psychology and applied ethics, it seems like a perfect compliment to the study of the Torah: An examination of the spiritual message embedded in Torah, combined with an attempt to integrate the teachings contained therein into one’s everyday life. I’m looking forward to studying this fascinating branch of Jewish practice and hopefully incorporating a little of it into my daily life. I’ll keep you posted, dear readers, on my progress.

Dag Gadol

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

I’ve always had a soft spot for the book of Jonah because he’s such a terrible jerk and yet completely against his will ends up doing more actual good in the world than most of the other, more well-intentioned prophets put together. True, it’s not as if any of the prophets would necessarily have chosen their role in life if given the option–even Moses protests strenuously before assenting to serve as God’s representative to the rebellious and “stiff-necked” people Yisrael, and complains every step of the way from the Sea of Reeds to the promised land. Indeed, it’s this quality of the Jewish understanding of prophecy that serves to reinforce over and over again what Emmanuel Levinas calls the “transcendent” quality of religion–the sense that the ethical mission, the sense of responsibility for the other than serves as the beating heart of every truly inspired religious point of view is something imposed on us from without and, as it were, against our will.

Jonah, however, is something else entirely. I mean, what can you say about a guy who objects to God’s decision to send him to Nineveh precisely on the grounds that the mission might succeed and result in the Ninevites repenting and escaping destruction? You have to get up pretty early in the day to achieve that level of supreme douchebaggery. And yet I can’t help but wonder if that reluctance, the crazy degree to which God had to send him through the wringer to get him to the place he was supposed to be and to do what needed to be done, wasn’t somehow necessary to the success of the whole undertaking after all. Could it be that the king of Nineveh, a city admittedly so steeped in wickedness that God was about to pull a second “Sodom and Gomorrah” on the place, could not have been persuaded of the necessity of repentance by anything less than the spooky intensity of a man who’s just been dragged half-way across the world, against his will, inside a fish? Surely at the very least the state of the messenger would serve as a potent indicator that this God meant Serious Business.

The way I see it, in this world, at this time, we’re all Jonahs to one degree or another. Steeped in a political climate in which compromise and sympathy for another’s position are looked upon more often than not as the most grave sort of weakness, we would rather rave and thrash against the hand of God himself than show the slightest concern or consideration for those we regard as “them.” Given how “stiff-necked” humanity has been for as long as anyone can remember, and how grave the various crises we are faced with today, isn’t it just a little comforting to imagine that God might occasionally be willing to deal with our own uncompromising stubbornness with the same divine lack of patience he showed Jonah? May we all have the enlightenment and presence of mind to learn the lesson the first time around, but barring that, may we be fortunate enough that God continues beating us over the head if need be until we get the picture. I mean, what are a few bruises compared to the possibility of going through life with our eyes closed to the moral reality of the people around us?