Korach

I said this out loud on 6 July 2019, on Shabbat morning at Ha Kol Olin, London: 

We read today that Korach and other aggrieved members of the community feel left out.  So they combine against Moses and Aaron and say to them You have gone too far.  All of the community are holy, all of them.  So why do you raise yourself above the Lord’s congregation? And then the Korach rebels are all sucked into the earth together with their entire households. The torah says. ‘They went down alive into Sheol, with all that belonged to them and they vanished from the midst of the congregation.’

These are my issues.

I have a problem that the children of Korach were included in the punishment of their fathers.  Secondly I believe like Korach that all people in the community are holy.  In fact I believe that all people are holy.  So when the high priest wears his sign on his forehead that says Holy to God, I always think, yes, mate, you’re holy because you’ve got a sign on your head but really in reality all people are equally holy to god. In my theology God doesn’t bunch more in some people than in others.  

But that’s on the plain of the ideal.

In real life, society works more peacefully when there is authority and clear leadership.  That’s what makes the second part of Korach’s statement more problematic. He says why do you raise yourself above the Lord’s congregation.  Why indeed? There’s the problem right there for Moses.  It’s true that Moses and Aaron have raised themselves, but did it because they had too.  They had a huge task which was to free the slaves from Pharoah, keep them alive in the desert for 40 years and receive the Torah at Sinai and establish a new kind of society that is based on the rule of law for everyone, loving-kindness and justice.  Moses and Aaron had to steer a very large ship.  Try doing that without proper leadership.  The problem with Korach and his fellows was that they were complaining about the ascendancy of Moshe and Aaron, and complaining about the privileges of others instead of doing something constructive about it.  It was all ego driven and not service driven.

When we face existential issues, climate crisis for example, should we trade individual liberties for clear, ego-less leadership that first consults and then offers decisive action offering stability and ultimately survival?  

Next, why the terrible punishment for the children of Korach?

The Talmud in Sanhedrin 110 is particularly wonderful on this Parasha.  There are many interpretations given including Reish Lakish who says it teaches that one must not be obdurate in a quarrel and Rav who says it teaches that we should not be unyielding in disputes.

But the sweetest of the midrashim in the Talmud is this. It says the children of Korach didn’t die.  A Tanna taught: It has been said on the authority of our teacher: A place was set apart for them in the Gehenna, or a place was fortified for them in Gehenna where they sat and recited songs. Ve-amru  shira.

It comforts me to know that the children of Korach are still in Gehenna singing songs, and if we listen carefully we can still hear them.   

But it’s bittersweet, because they are underground and we are above, where on a day like this, we can still see our beautiful world.

Shabbat shalom

The Golden Age of Babylon

I said this in Assif yesterday 29 June 2019, as part of our learning series on Golden Ages in Jewish History. 

"The beginning and ends of Golden Ages are invisible to the people that live in them.  It’s only from far away can we see a moment when one age ends and another begins somewhere else. 

In fact, a Golden Age only looks golden from a distance. On the ground, people are dealing with in-fighting, jealousies, famines, droughts, persecutions and fall-out from battling empires.  On the ground, people are putting mezuzahs on their doors, going to shul, saying prayers, doing business, lighting Friday night candles, having Pesach Seders, paying taxes and raising their children. 

Then as now.

The only reason I am calling this period between the 4th century and the 10th century, in a place that is today called Iraq, a Golden Age, is because of what came out of it.  Cities with names like Sura, Nehardea, Pumbedita and Mehoza are dust today, but they once housed Jewish scholars who together created a glittering edifice that still stands.  It is a magnificent laboratory of thought that has no match in history.

Those named and unnamed scholars produced an exquisite and self-confident system called the Babylonian Talmud. And that is the tradition we live within today.

This Golden Age started as the best things must, with an end.  Once upon a time, in the 4rd century ACE, the Roman governors ended the powers of the Sanhedrin. (The Sanhedrin was the Jewish court and ruling body in Israel until that time).   So, because of Roman persecution, Israel which had until then controlled the Jewish calendar for the whole Jewish world, and had produced the mighty Mishnah and the Jerusalem Talmud declined, and Jewish centre of the world moved to Babylon.  

Babylonian Jews still faced Jerusalem when they prayed, but they considered their tradition superior to the traditions of their fellows living in Israel.   Top of the pile in Babylon was the Reish Galuta or Exilarch who was responsible for community-specific organizational tasks such as running courts, collecting taxes, providing financing for the Talmudic Yeshivot, and financial assistance to poor.  They were headed by the Rosh Metivta. The Yeshivot ran kallahs or study sessions for hundreds of people during two months of the year.  (I imagine they were like Limmud because they were very crowded)  These were led by the Rosh Kalla.  There were also judges who were called dayane di baba (Judges of the gate) because traditionally justice was meted out before the gates of the city.

There is a lovely piece of evidence for their way of life that lies unused today in our siddurs.   The yakum Purkan prayer was written in Babylon during this period.   I’m fond of it for what it says about the people who prayed for these things; what it says about who they are and what matters to them…

May salvation from heaven, with grace, loving-kindness, mercy, long life, ample sustenance, heavenly aid, health of body,  enlightenment from above, and a living and abiding children, that will not break with, nor neglect any of the words of the Torah, be granted unto the teachers and rabbis of the holy community, who are in the land of Israel and in the land of Babylon; unto the heads of the Kallahs, the Roshei Galuta, the heads of the Yeshivot, and the judges in the gates, and all their students, and all the students of their students…”

How can you not love people who pray for enlightenment from above? In the prayer, you can see the civic leaders that formed the centre of the Jewish world at the time.

But as we know, things fall apart and the centre does not hold. Around the 10th centuries the Golden Age of Babylon started to draw to a close.  The Babylonian community rich in scholarship and culture, no longer globally dominated Jewish life.  The centre of the Jewish world was splintering and rerouting from the Babylon to North Africa and Europe.   But the jewel produced in this period continued to shape what was to come.

The Babylonian Talmud and the means to study it and be changed by studying it, came to define what it meant to be Jewish by every generation, everywhere afterwards, whether they knew it or not. 

There is a story told by Abraham Ibn Daud in his Sefer ha-Kabbalah, written in 1161. It may not be literal but it is true.

It tells of a boat carrying four great Babylonian rabbis.  (In my mind they are each holding the whole Babylonian Talmud)  The boat is captured by a pirate.  They are each sold by the pirate to Jewish communities around the world– one in Kairouan in North Africa, one rabbi and his son, are ransomed in Cordova, Southern Spain and one in Alexandria, Egypt. The identity of the fourth captive and the place where he was redeemed is not stated. They all take with them the means to teach others what they have inherited from their Babylonian tradition.

They do their jobs well because today while there are only eight Jews left in Iraq, there are 15 million Babylonian Jews alive today, including all of us here.


Shabbat Shalom.

Yitro - what we leave out

One of the first things I ever learned in the Talmud was that 2000 years ago, when the Temple was still standing, the priests would recite daily prayers very similar to the prayers we still say today. In an unbroken line, our daily prayers still include the Shema and the Amidah. However, the priests had another part of their daily prayer, and that part was the Ten Commandments.  They would say the Shema, the Amidah and the Ten Commandments.  This makes a lot of sense as the Ten Commandments are the high point in our history at Sinai and they are an excellent executive summary. They are short, pithy and sensible.

However it was decided to take them out of the daily prayers because of Tar Omet Haminim. This translates as the grievances of the heretics. 

Their grievance was that only the Ten Commandments came directly from God and the rest came through Moses. So as not to show any favouritism to one section of the Torah over the other, they were left out of the daily prayers.

Unsurprisingly, the people didn’t like this decision. The Talmud (b.Berakhot 12a) reports many generations of people asking their rabbis (at this stage, not priests any more) to put back the Ten Commandments into the daily prayers. In Israel and later in Babylon, this request was turned down because of Tar Omet Haminim.

But the story doesn’t end there. One thousand years later, people have accepted that it isn’t in their daily prayers anymore, but they still feel there’s something special about the Ten Commandments.

So when they are read as part of the Torah reading, like yesterday in Parasha Yitro, people would stand up. (They did yesterday as well in HaKol Olin where I gave this dvar torah) People would read responsively and often the Ten Commandments would be included in the shul decoration.

We know that people would stand 1000 years ago because rabbis’ told them not to.  Maimonides writes that people should not give any status to the reading of the Ten Commandments such as standing when that portion is read in shul on Shabbat, He states that the custom found in some communities to stand during this part of the Torah reading should be discontinued (Teshuvot Ha Rambam 46)

To this day there is no clear and agreed halakha on the subject.  In Rabbinic Judaism, we can’t even agree on which part of the oral/written law was directly given by God to the people.  Was it the entire Oral/Written Torah? Was it just the Ten Commandments? Was it just the first sound of the Ten Commandments that the people heard?

In b.Makkot 23b and quoted by Maimonides in the Guide to the Perplexed, the part that was directly experienced was only the first two mitzvot of the Ten Commandments. These are: I am the Lord your God, and You shall have no other God’s before me. These commandments are not mediated by Moses because for the Rambam, these are the only mitzvot that can be fathomed by any intelligent monotheist, and need not be transmitted by Moses.

It comforts me to know that we are not the first generation to be bothered by the prayers. I like belonging to a long line and a rich tradition of people wanting things put back and left out. We’ve all got our personal grievances. We don’t like everything we get to hear and say. There are loads of sections in prayers that have bothered me at different times. (Parts of Aleinu, birkat hamazon, some of the Yom Kippur service) but I’m glad they are there to struggle with because what bothers me changes all the time. Nothing is perfect and neither should it be. It would be a pity in our desire for  perfect bubbles of pleasing thoughts that offend nobody ever, we end up only praying the lyrics of John Lennon’s Imagine. 

I like the feeling of power of the people despite the declarations of the rabbis. 

I like that we stand when we should sit, and weirdly we leave out the parts that are most precious to us.

The grievances of the heretics over 2000 years ago mean that the Ten Commandments are no longer said daily, but unlike those heretics who are long dead, we are still standing.

Tetzaveh - humility and majesty

Every day thousands of tourists visit the Tower of London to marvel at the Imperial state crown and the other highly decorated symbols of the British Monarchy. Exquisitely made in gold, velvet and ermine, and encrusted with thousands of diamonds, the crown signifies royal authority to lead the nation.   I find it interesting that interesting the names of the people that have worn this crown are exalted, while the names of the people who created these marvellous objects are unknown. ?

 There is this same distinction in Parashah Tetzaveh. Dazzling ceremonial objects are created for powerful people, while the names of the creators are erased.  Majesty and humility are subtly contrasted. Nechama Liebowitz, an important biblical scholar of the modern age, raises three challenges in this week’s Sedra. She asks: Why is Moses’s name absent? Why does the Sedra go on and on about the clothes of the High Priest and who exactly is asked to make them?

In every chapter in every book after Genesis, Moses is mentioned by name. Only in Tetzaveh is his name erased. With Moses’s name not spoken, the scene is set for Aaron and his sons to become the major players. The second issue bothering Nechama is the amount of space and detail describing the ceremonial paraphernalia. for Aaron and his sons. Among the blue, purple and crimson yarns, is my favourite detail; and that is the description of the frontlets of pure gold engraved with the words: ‘Holy to God’. That sign is placed on the forehead of the high-priest as he goes about his business of being a High-Priest.

The effect of the proto-crown, clothes, breastplate and ceremonial objects must have been dazzling to the Israelites in the desert. .Ramban, an important Spanish Medieval commentator, sees their function to enhance the dignity and prestige of the sacred office in the eyes of the people. In other words, they don’t transform the wearer in any real sense, they simply create a social reality, a majestic, dazzling, powerful social reality. 

The last contradiction in the text as Nechama points out is between 28. 2 and 28.3. Look carefully. Who is being asked to make the clothes? The un-named Moses or the wise-hearted people? I think the key lies in the use of the word Chochmah which is the word used to refer to the wisdom that comes from outside ourselves when we know before whom we stand. It is the wisdom of understanding our small selves in an infinite and intact world of unending creation. It is the essentially modest position with or without a gold crown to remind us of our powers. It is the wisdom of the monotheist who knows that whoever our parents are, or whatever talents we have, we are all equally holy to God.

Liebowitz, Nechama. 1985. Studies in Shemot.  Jerusalem:Haomanim Press.

Book of Job - Book of Wisdom for Maureen Kendler

Assif is doing a learning series in memory of Maureen Kendler, teacher, friend and mentor to many of us here.  She was a literature teacher and one of her favourite books was The Book of Job, and so in her memory we have been learning it together in a six-part series.  We’re half way there.   I’m doing from chapter 22 -till chapter 37. Then Ariel is doing the next section and finally RJW is wrapping it up.

Because it’s been a while since we spoke about it, and because there may be new people here, I’ll do a quick recap. It’s a great book of literature, 42 chapters long.   Basically, Job is an innocent, successful man who fears god and shuns evil.  Then very bad things happen to him.   God and the devil are testing him by making him suffer.  Down on earth, Job’s friends try to comfort him.  They say all kinds of things like if you were truly good, God wouldn’t have punished you.  Although they try very hard, they fail.  Job finally gets it and says therefore I recant and relent being nothing but dust and ashes.  Al afar v’eifar.   Somehow finally the light has gotten in through the cracks.  He passes the test.  He becomes a wise, wealthy man, who fears god and shuns evil.  And for the rest of his life, all is good.

The structure for the middle part of the friends trying to comfort him is intriguing. It has three cycles. In each cycle, Job debates first with Elipha, then with Bildad and then with Zophar.    Andrew Cohen drew the short straw, and he had to explain the first two cycles where the friends are not being helpful. Lucky for me, the section I am looking at includes the third round of debates and chapter 28 which is a beautiful poem on wisdom.  Let’s dive in.

In the third cycle of debates it almost but not quite follows the structure of the first two cycles.  Elipha and Bildad are trying their luck to cheer up Job up with less than useful comments like if you pray to god he will listen to you and the things you ask for will be fulfilled. Thanks Elipha.

Or this sad point of view from Bildad: How can one born of women be cleared of guilt. Unsurprisingly Job sinks into a deep depression.  (As my father would say, with friends like this, who needs enemas)  Strangely, in this cycle, there is nothing from Zophar.  Instead, there is an exquisite poem of wisdom that I highly recommend you read in full, and that is chapter 28.

The pshat version of this chapter is all about going into the earth mining it for treasures.  It says human can take out precious metals from the earth. They can probe the depths of the earth, dig tunnels and take out the gold dust, the sapphires and the iron.  Barzel mei afar yikach.

It is saying:  Man can dig for gold under the earth but man can't just dig for wisdom.  All wisdom and the path to it is sometimes beyond human knowledge. In fact, I’d say for me, wisdom is usually beyond my knowledge.  Wisdom can’t be summoned at will.  It comes when it comes, and it can come to light in the very midst of our struggles and suffering.

To understand this section of the book of Job, I need to explain the difference between wisdom and understanding.

I also need to explain the difference with getting it with your eyes and with your ears.

When I talk, you hear me and what I am trying to say and you understand me.

But really you need to see what I am saying for yourself, like a thunderbolt from the sky as Rambam would say.

I also need to explain the difference between wisdom and understanding.

Bina is the Hebrew for understanding and chochmah is the word for wisdom.

Chochmah or wisdom is the thing that is outside of ourselves.   God is chochmah.

Bina is the human part. We understand profoundly that which is true.

Where can wisdom be found? What is the source of understanding? The book of Job asks.

It is hidden from the eyes of the living.

Chapter 28 ends with this: He said to man:

See. Fear of God is wisdom. To shun evil is understanding.

All wisdom is too big for us. The most we can do is to understand our place in creation and as a consequence avoid doing bad things. In other words, I want to behave well because of my perception of where I fit into the universe.

In other words, it’s a flash of knowing I am not the universe that was, is and every could be, but I am currently in that universe.  It’s an unconditional understanding that there are no personal rewards or prizes for your good behaviour from God. There is no if…then.

It starts with being in the dust, having awe of god, to see we are not the centre of the vast and complex universe that is being constantly created before our eyes.  What we understand from that is that as living actors in this magnificent creation, it’s on us not to do bad things.

The book of Job teaches us that the best thing you can do for a friend who is suffering is to stand by them, and help them specifically with things they may need, foot-cream, meals, and tissues for the tears or a cure for cancer.  That’s the easy part. The hard part is to show up to their pain, without trying to fix it for them or to share your pity.  The worst thing you can do is to point out that they are being punished for their sins by God.  That’s not true or wise.

And now the Maureen Kendler level of interpretation… Maureen’s gift was to see the treasure, the gold and the iron in all of us even when we couldn’t see it ourselves.

When she talked to me, I felt she believed that what I had to say was worth saying. And I believed her and it was life-changing.

I would like to pass on her gift to me to you today. You have gold in you although you might not always see it.  Maureen isn’t alive to see it. But I am. And so are you.

Saying the wrong thing - Behar/Be-hukkotai

The best thing about having work colleagues is that it can force you to have conversations with people with whom you profoundly disagree.

Emily sat next to me at work. She was kind, easy to get along with and worked hard. Occasionally we chatted though, about non-work things as you do, on a long day. 

Somehow we got into the subject of why the Holocaust happened. Her opinion and mine couldn't have been more different.  I believed Emil Fackenheim who noted in a footnote in a book he wrote about Holocaust theology, about a conversation he had with a fellow academic who said that it happened because Hitler wanted it to happen.  

My colleague Emily believed it had happened because the Jews of Europe had not kept Shabbat.

I was profoundly upset by her opinion; that bad things happen to people as a punishment for their sins. I thought of my lecturer who had said whatever claims you make about the Holocaust, you have to say them in front of the pyres of burning children. 
I wanted to say this to my colleague, but I couldn't get the words out. Did she really believe a good god would burn millions of innocent children because their parents hadn't kept Shabbat? I was too upset and offended to reply. 

And a literal reading of the Parasha this week supports her position. Keep the mitzvot and God will reward you, transgress and you will suffer dreadful punishments.  We read that part of the Torah quietly and fast because we don't like it. The sages from Rav in the Talmud to Rashi and Rambam do heavy lifting to generously interpret beyond the literal meaning.    Here are some examples:

Firstly my beloved Rambam who says 'Ra' (bad or evil) results from three things.

Firstly from nature – a flood that washes you away for example.
Secondly from mankind - the wars we wage or crime for example –

and thirdly from the bad we do ourselves like overeating and over drinking.

He says We suffer when we want a different reality than the one we have. And he suggests we seek a true understanding of the world we live in as a remedy for our suffering. 

From the macro to micro:

There is much made  of the repeated use of lo Tanu ish et amito ( Leviticus 25.17) 
Don't wrong/offend/harm/deceive the person who is with you. 

The Talmud interprets it to mean don't cause verbal offense and goes on and on about how bad it is to do ona'at devarim or verbal offense. Don't use nasty nicknames or cause verbal offense for example, is when a person is suffering an illness or burying a child, one shouldn't be like the friends in the book of Job saying 'whoever perished being innocent' 

Rabbi Norman Lamm has something lovely to say.  He quotes a Hasidic master, Rabbi Yitzchak of Vorke who says there are two ways to carry out the mitzvah of lo tonu ish et amitecha- the shurat ha din way is not to harm/offend others.  The higher way of doing this mitzvah or the Lifnim shurat hadin way is not to harm/offend or deceive yourself. 
In other words, be honest with yourself. 

I think that's a good place to start. I've been having interesting conversations with a new work colleague. She is grieving her mother's death from cancer.  She says she's learned a lot from the experience.  Mostly, that people will surprise you. Some will be empathic and some will not. She says you want them to acknowledge the loss rather than not speak about it, even if they get the words wrong. 

It always comes back to empathy- the showing up for another person with awareness of yourself and your own limitations. But it's very difficult to do in real life, isn't it? We've all been there. Someone tells you of their pain, and you can't bear the pain it causes you so you try to fix it for the other person. You hear a friend has cancer and you don't know what to say so you don't call. You hear a child is lonely and you give 12 suggestions before breakfast on how to make friends. Suffering is not accepting your own reality or the person you're speaking to's reality. It's not helpful or comforting.

It’s only with honesty to yourself and with the modesty of not seeing yourself as the centre of the universe, that you can be helpful to another person. 

The liberating truth is that you don’t have to have the perfect words, solutions or answers.

Paradoxically, it’s only with honesty to your own experience that you can offer true solidarity to anyone else.

Words that create reality

When I was a child in Cape Town, negotiating with my friends, my brother and sisters, in complicated scenarios of sharing, I would say to them and they would say to me sometimes:

“Ten fingers on the Jewish Torah” and we would put our hands out with fingers spread wide as we said it. We’d say it to support our truth claims, to show we weren’t lying, to show we would definitely do what we promised to do. “It wasn’t me that broke your doll, I didn’t touch it, I’m telling the truth, ten fingers on the Jewish Torah, or “lend me ten cents, I promise I will give it back, ten fingers on the Jewish Torah”   In the shared community of meaning in the playground, the torah was the external vehicle by which we held ourselves accountable. The statement “ten fingers on the Jewish torah” was what you said to guaranteed trust between two children and it cemented what you said with what you did.  It was probably created by a Jewish child who needed their own version of the Christian: “cross my heart and hope to die” and then it caught on.  Children and adults need something outside of themselves, something shared socially, a higher authority, to hold themselves accountable, something like the Torah or God.

And according to what we read in the Torah today, we are allowed to make vows to God, as long as we keep them.  We read at the beginning of Mattot, “If a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath imposing an obligation on himself, he shall not break his pledge.  He must carry out all that has crossed his lips.” So that’s ok then, right?

But not so fast my friend. What we didn’t know in the playground in South Africa,  and what I do know now, is that there is a world of difference between what it says in the Torah and the Halachic system created by the Rabbis.  It is the vast difference between D’oreita and d’rabbanan, and contrary to what we believed in South Africa, we don’t live in D’oreita times anymore. Far from it. From the Mishna to the Talmud to the Mishnah Torah to the Shulchan Aruch, some of the laws in the Torah have been reduced, limited, ignored completely, changed and extended by a vast and living halachic system.  Some laws are literally made up out of thin air.  In the Rabbinic project that is my community of shared meaning now, the torah is the source of a muscular, living, dynamic, evolving tradition for all who cling to it. 

For example, while it says in the torah, we are allowed to make vows as long as we keep them, the rabbis, or sages were strongly against making them. They did not want people going off piste, and making vows in God’s name about not eating meat, or chocolate cake or telling the truth or even giving to charity.  So the sages created a rabbinic innovation that reduced the power of vows significantly, not just for women but for men too.  The institution of hatarat nedarim (literally, “the unbinding of vows”) allows a sage to annul vows of another person by saying “Mutar lakh” (You are unbound).

The rabbis were well aware that this innovation about releasing other people from their vows was not rooted in Torah law at all.  In the Mishnah (Hagigah 1:8), it says heter nedarim porchin ba-avir",  The laws of Heter Nedarim "float in the air" which means they are not connected at all to torah justification. Those long and complex laws of unbinding of vows in the Mishnah and later in the Gemara have no explicit Torah verses to rely upon.  But they are an essential instrument in the rabbinic system, so that people don’t suffer by promises, vows and oaths they have made, and find impossible to live by.  In fact, we start Kol Nidrei by this communal unbinding of vows and oaths.  

The Shulchan Aruch, the great Jewish law code published in Venice in 1565, that even made its way to South Africa when I was growing up, opens with the following admonition taken from the Talmud, “do not be habituated to make vows, he that makes a vow is called wicked, even vows for charitable purposes are not desirable. It is well that a person not make many vows of self-denial.   Much quoted by commentators is the line from the Yerushalmi- "aren't the laws of the Torah sufficient; must you also impose upon yourself additional obligations?” The rabbinic project opposes individual acts of extreme piety. 

And what about children in the playground swearing ten fingers on the Jewish Torah, is that allowed? Does it count? In the Talmud, Rav Nachman says it only counts if you actually holding a torah scroll when you say it, then you are referring to the letters, the laws and the name of God written there. If you aren’t holding a torah scroll and you swear by the torah, it could just mean you are swearing by the parchment.  Although I never held a Torah scroll in the playground or anywhere ever until I was in my forties, as a child, my statement about ten fingers on the Jewish torah meant something to me and to the people I said it to.  It counted to us.  What matters is what we agree matters.  It’s about shared trust in a system we agree works. It still works that way.  

Strangely, as much as I learn about changes rabbinic law makes to torah law, in my imagination there is still no higher standard or less love and respect for this fantastic endeavour that seeks for us all to live well, to live fairly, to live in community, to seek justice, mercy and to walk humbly with god.  My trust in the system remains and I continue to believe that interpreted torah is the anchor for our best selves. Eiz Chayim hi she machazikim bah.  Ten fingers on the Jewish Torah, as I used to say.