Living Contradictions (portion Chukat)

This past spring, Bruce Springsteen gave the keynote speech at South by Southwest, the huge music festival held each year in Austin, Texas.  His target audience: the thousands of young indy musicians who come to SXSW with hopes of winning fame and fortune (or at least a record contract).   Springsteen spoke as an elder statesman of rock and roll, passing his wisdom and experience to the next generation.  His message is, on a literal level, all about music—but it contains important life lessons for non-musicians, too.  Springsteen concluded with these words:

Rumble, young musicians, rumble.  Open your ears and open your hearts. Don't take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don't worry. Worry your ass off. Have unclad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town -- and you suck! It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideals alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn't drive you crazy, it will make you strong.

Of course, long before The Boss, our Sages recognized the importance of living with contradiction.  This is the reality at the heart of one of the most mysterious parts of the Torah, which is found in this week’s portion, Chukat.  The passage concerns the burning of a Red Heifer and the mixing of its ashes in water.  The paradox is this: the same mixture of water and ash that is used to purify those who are made ritually impure through contact with the dead is, itself, a source of impurity for the priests who prepare it.  In other words, as the medieval Italian commentator Ovadiah Sforno notes, “The crux of the mystery is its property of contaminating the pure and purifying the contaminated.” 

Yet this is really not such a mystery at all.  Life is almost invariably full of contradiction—and the meaning of almost everything powerful is almost always determined by its context.  The same medicine can either cure or kill us, depending on the dosage and our underlying condition.  Money, sex, power, religion, politics—none of these things are intrinsically either good or bad; it all depends on how and when they are conducted. 

A few years ago, I took a class with a young Israeli teacher of kabbalah named Biti Roi.  One of my fellow students once pointed to a logical contradiction in a text that we were studying, which troubled him deeply.  Ms. Roi replied: “Either/Or is for simple mathematics, but not for life.  Life—and Judaism—is about Both/And.”

May we live in that world of Both/And, with the confidence that doing so will, indeed, make us strong.

Note: I will not be doing this e-Torah column during the month of July.  But of course the Torah does not stop during this time.  I encourage you to continue reading and learning.  For starters, check out “Ten Minutes of Torah” from the Union for Reform Judaism at www.urj.org

Holiness: Forever Becoming (Korach)

The sacred work of healing the world and creating caring community is never done. 

In this week’s Torah portion, we read of the worst of several mutinies against Moses and his leadership.  The leader of the rebels, Korach, is ultimately swallowed up by the earth, along with his followers—and he remains a symbol of greed and lust for power.

Yet, at least on the surface, Korach’s message seems to raise legitimate concerns.  He confronts Moses and Aaron, saying: “You have gone too far!  For all the community is holy, all of them, (kulam k’doshim) and the Eternal is in their midst.”  Isn’t this in keeping with God’s charge to us earlier: “K’doshim t’hiyu—you, the Jewish people, shall be holy, as I, your God am holy”?  What is wrong with Korach’s assertion that holiness extends far beyond the leadership triumvirate of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam?

A modern commentator, the iconoclastic philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, points to a subtle flaw made manifest in the wording of Korach’s complaint.  The problem is Korach’s assertion that the Israelites are holy rather than on the road to becoming holy.  In other words, Korach’s demagoguery is his message to the community that they have achieved their goal and nothing more is demanded of them.  By contrast, Leibowitz notes, Torah consistently challenges us to become holy.  Holiness is a future goal, not a present boast. 

While we should enjoy our successes, this life does not allow us to rest on our laurels.  There is always more work to do in repairing the world, making teshuvah, observing mitzvot, learning Torah, strengthening community, transforming our cultures and our selves.  In our individual lives, and as part of the Jewish people, we need the goal of the metaphorical Promised Land—but we also need to realize that we never really arrive there.  It constantly beckons, even as it recedes around each new bend in the road.

The founder of the mussar movement, the 19^th century Rabbi Israel Salanter taught:

“A person is like a bird.  A bird can fly very high as long as it keeps flapping its wings.  If it stops flapping its wings, it will fall.  So, too, with us.  The moment we believe that we have reached such a high spiritual and ethical level that we no longer need to work on ourselves, we are likely to fail.”

May we never cease to strive for holiness, even as we enjoy the small gains that we make along the way.

Bringing Up the Rear

Ecclesiastes famously taught: “The race is not to the swift.”  Our culture places a great deal of emphasis on being first and fastest—but sometimes, the most sacred work, with the greatest reward, is done by those who bring up the rear.  

This week’s Torah portion, B’ha-alotechah, describes the marching order of the twelve tribes as they made their way through the wilderness.  Judah took the lead, followed by Issachar, Zebulon and Reuben.  Each tribe had its place, with the division of Dan coming last.

Torah describes the role of Dan as m’assef—the gatherers.  In his commentary, Rashi suggests that their special task was to collect all the lost objects dropped on the way and return them to their owners.  They were also responsible for gathering in straying individuals from the lead tribes that had become lost or fallen behind. 

Why was this role assigned to the tribe of Dan?  Midrash proposes that while the Danites’ religious faith was weak [since their territory would later become a haven for idol worshippers], their love for their fellow Israelites was very powerful.  God recognized this admirable trait and gave them a job that played to their strength. 

There is an important lesson here for all of us.  Every community needs leaders, to generate vision, determine direction, and blaze the trail for those who follow.  But we also need “gatherers”—those who care for the stragglers and see that we all make it to the Promised Land.  The leaders tend to get the glory but the gatherers are no less essential. 

Furthermore, these roles are mutable.  Sometimes those inclined to lead must instead shepherd from the back, while those accustomed to bringing up the rear must step forward.  We are all called to be both leaders and gatherers at various times and circumstances.  May we recognize the worth of each of these callings. 

Getting by Giving (Portion Naso)

Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

I have often seen this bumper sticker—and every time I do, it saddens me.  The notion that we can achieve contentment by accruing a bunch of stuff is perhaps the most damning and destructive lie at the heart of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism.  As Ecclesiastes realized three thousand years ago, amassing anything—wealth, fame, power and even knowledge—is, in the end, pure vanity.  The Rabbis put it succinctly: “Who is happy?  Those who rejoice in their own portion.”  Or in Sheryl Crow’s insightful take on this wisdom: “It’s not getting what you want—it’s wanting what you’ve got.”

In this week’s portion, Naso—the longest in the Torah—we find another version of this lesson.  Numbers 5:8-9 teaches: “Any gift among the sacred donations that the Israelites offer shall be the priest’s.  And each shall retain his sacred donations: what a man gives to the priest shall be his.”  By the standard reading, “his” is a reference to the priest, who receives the gift.  But the Talmud (Brachot 63a) offers an alternative interpretation, in which “his” refers to the donor.  In other words, as the commentary in Etz Hayyim notes, it is only when we give something away that the gift, and the good deed that it represents, becomes permanently ours.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner captures the essence of this paradox in his path-breaking book, Honey from the Rock.  He writes of our central human challenge: “To learn that it is good for you when other people love other people besides you.  That I get more when others give to others.  That if I hoard it, I lose it.  That if I give it away, I get it back.”

In other words, the things that matter most—love, kindness, wisdom—do not follow the rules of the “dismal science” of economics.  Paradoxically, it is only when we share what we have that we can gain and grow.

Or, to amend that bumper sticker: Whoever dies with the fewest toys wins.

Shavuot: Making Room for Silence

If we want to hear God’s voice, we must learn to keep silent.

This coming Saturday night we will celebrate Shavuot, which our Rabbis called z’man matan Torahteynu—the time of the giving of the Torah.  The festival marks the high point of Jewish history, the moment when we stood together to hear God’s word at Mount Sinai.

A time of high drama, to be sure.  And yet, the Talmud suggests that revelation did not end there.  The Rabbis insist that God still speaks to us: “Each and every day the Divine Voice issues forth from Sinai” (Avot 6:2)

So if the Holy One continues to reveal the Sacred Word to us, what was so special about the events commemorated by Shavuot?   A passage from the Midrash notes that the difference was the utter silence which preceded God’s Ten Utterances:

R. Abbahu said in the name of R. Yohannan: When the Holy One gave the Torah, no bird chirped, no fowl flew, no ox bellowed, not one of the angels said, “Holy, holy, holy!”  The sea did not roar, creatures did not speak—the whole world was hushed into breathless silence; it was then that the voice went forth: “I am the Eternal your God.”

In other words, as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes, “The reason Sinai is so special and the reason why we are unable to hear Torah all the time is because the noise, static, and muzak of this world drown out the sound of God’s voice.  Only at the time of the “giving of the Torah” did God “silence the roar.” At Sinai we could hear what had been there (and continues to be here) all along. 

Often, as we imagine the giving of the Torah, we think of the pyrotechnics: thunder and lightning and fire.  But the key ingredient for hearing God is, in fact, silence.  Elijah learns this when the Holy One pays him a visit in a cave where he is hiding on Mt. Carmel. 

As it is written, “God passed by and a mighty wind split the mountains—but God was not in the wind; and after the wind, an earthquake—but God was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire—but God was not in the fire.  And after the fire, a still, small voice.”

In our high-tech culture, so noisy and full of distractions, Shavuot reminds us that Holiness does not dwell amidst the sound and the fury; it reveals itself subtly in the calm that follows, when the noise dies down.  The still, small voice continues to speak to us, everywhere and always.  But most of the time, we do not hear it because our world is too loud and we are moving too quickly.

Perhaps that is why the watchword of our faith is Shema—Listen!  This is our Jewish mission: to be still, to listen to one another, to our own better angels, and to hear in them the whispering voice of the Holy One.  The Psalmist declares, “Be still and know that I am God.”  The corollary to his teaching is both obvious and difficult: until we learn to embrace the silence, God remains out of reach.

So, this week, try to make some time for silence.  Still the noise, within and without, even if just for a moment or two.  And then listen for the voice of conscience and spirit—the sound of God speaking to you.

Setting Free the Captives (Idaho Statesman piece for May 2012)

Faith communities tend to make requests of God that She either cannot or will not deliver.  Sometimes we petition for what simply cannot be; more frequently, we pray that God will do things that She, in Her great wisdom, delegates to humanity.   Since we are God’s partners in the work of repairing our broken world, much of this sacred burden falls on us.

Such is the case with a blessing that Jews traditionally recite upon waking.  Every morning we proclaim, “Praised are You, Eternal One. . . who frees the captives.”  Yet God does not free captives.  God leaves this calling to humankind.  The point of the blessing is to remind us of our God-given obligation to bring liberation.  Alas, we in America are failing dismally in this task.

Adam Gopnik offers a powerful indictment of our national epidemic of incarceration in his January New Yorker essay, “The Caging of America.”  He notes that our prison population is at a level almost unprecedented in human history.  With over six million people currently locked up, we have surpassed the numbers cast into the Gulag at the depths of Stalin’s tyranny.  Racism plays a significant role here; there are now more African-American men living under the auspices of the criminal justice system than there were slaves prior to the Civil War.  This scandal exacts a terrible cost in both moral and fiscal terms.  Over the past twenty years, the money that states spend on jails has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.  As Gopnik concludes: “The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.”

Surely faith communities, who are charged by God to “free the captive”, should insist that America—and Idaho—can do better than this.  We who believe that every human being is created in the Divine image should not abide the cruelty, racism and corruption at the foundation of our penal system.  We should sound a clarion call for reform.  Such reform might start by abolishing the contracting out of our prisons as for-profit business to for-profit companies.  As Adam Gopnik points out: “It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.”  So, too, should we be doing more to combat the racism and poverty that render the system so inequitable.  Justice should be colorblind—which, for now, it surely is not.  Meanwhile, synagogues, churches, mosques and other houses of worship have largely failed in our God-given mission to provide people with hope—and people condemned to live in hopelessness will always turn to crime in disproportionate numbers. 

Last but not least, we should insist on the decriminalization of marijuana and the reform of our nation’s drug laws.  The so-called “War on Drugs” is an utter failure and the collateral damage that it has inflicted on our entire nation is colossal.  The compassionate response to drug use is rehabilitation rather than incarceration.  We need prisons to protect society from violent criminals; locking up addicts serves no one, and is a sign of barbarism.  

God does not free prisoners—but we can.   Before we continue praise or petition the Holy One for liberating captives, it is long past time that we do our human part.