Monday, August 30, 2010

Ki Tavo: Act Wisely, Don't follow other Gods, and you will not be cursed with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (plus some thoughts on contracts and EULAs)

Ki Tavo describes a participatory drama that Moses instructs the Israelites to engage in after they’ve crossed over into Israel. They are to stand half on one mountain, Mt. Gezerim, and half on another, Mt. Ebal, and commit yet again to a covenant with God. The first half recites all the great blessings that they’ll have if they follow God, and the second half gives the curses.

Only first the Levites say some stuff which looks like curses but are actually more like laws, for example (my favorite): (Deut 27:19) "Cursed be he who subverts the rights of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. — And all the people shall say, Amen."

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Ki Teitzei : On The Diversity of Commandments

The commandments given in Ki Tetsei ( Devarim/Deut 21:10-25:19) illustrate everything that is most incomprehensible and frustrating to me about Halacha (Jewish Law). Some of the commandments -- and the fences and explanations and illustrations that the Rabbis have built around them over thousands of years -- are masterpieces of ethical lawmaking. A famous example is 22:8: “When you build a new house you shall make a parapet for your roof.” We are required by God to be careful, for ourselves, and for others. Our building, which has a flat, black roof, doesn’t in fact have a parapet all around; you can walk right off the back to fall four floors to your death on the back patio. Maybe if you’re lucky the overgrown forsythia will break your fall. When we need to put on a new roof, I’d like to put a parapet up back there. I dread some child or drunk person going up for a lark and going over the edge. So that’s sensible.

And then there is 22:11, “but don’t weave two types of fabric together”. This sounds like nothing so much as my three-year-old complaining about a tiny, tiny piece of green stuff on her pasta. There’s nothing ethically wrong with mixing fabrics. It’s just irrelevant, and what is it doing there in the same parsha as 24:17 “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless,” which is so beautiful as to make one cry? It’s infuriating. And finally, there are the commandments that are actively obnoxious: 23:2 is an injunction against allowing men with ‘crushed testicles’ to convert to Judaism, and 25:11 says that if two men are fighting and the wife of one of them helps her husband in the fight by running up and grabbing his adversary’s genitals, the wife’s hand should be cut off, I presume because she has possibly prevented the adversary from becoming a convert? (I jest. I know that’s not why, because the law probably only ever applied if the adversary was already Jewish! No Jewish woman is going to get her hand chopped off over hurting gentile testicles! )

So there’s the situation. We traditionally identify 613 different commandments in the Torah, and they exhibit a diversity of subject matter, apparent intention, palatability to modern people, and importance or triviality that is truly boggling. Like each commandment evolved on a different island, in very different microclimates, and then were all gathered together and thrown into a big dusty storage room somewhere in the Victoria and Albert museum.

Actually, that’s probably pretty much exactly what happened.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Shofetim: What is justice, and how do we pursue it?

Shofetim has two very famous verses. They are both concerned with justice.

Deut 16:20 “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”

And 19:21 “Nor must you show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”

I have two not-particularly-related things to say about these verses, and if I were disciplined and professional and all that, I'd pick just one. But I'm going to say them both. First: Yes, you must show pity, and no, we don't take an eye for an eye. The rabbis made sure of that. Second: To pursue justice is to accept the burden of free will. This is the essence of being commanded. This is what it's all about. So those are my two big ideas, here's how I get to them:

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Re'eh -- On gods whom you have not experienced

Sorry, devoted readers (hi Mom!), I was offline for a whole week in Vermont, and so I missed posting Re’eh on (late) time.

In Re’eh, we get admonitions to follow only Adonai, our God, and not to follow any other Gods, “whom you have not experienced.” We also get some of the classic Deuteronomic admonitions to only worship and sacrifice to God at His Temple in Jerusalem, and not to sacrifice at ‘high places’ all around the land of Israel, as had been done in the past. These admonitions reflect a priestly concern during the time of King Josiah to consolidate worship at the temple, and to root out practices like sacrificing at stone pillars that bring Israelites, so the priests worried, perilously close to idolatry. (No matter that all the earliest ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob among others, are specifically recorded to have erected stone monuments at sacred places all over Canaan, and sacrificed to their God at those places. Such is no longer to be countenanced, in this Temple phase of Israelite religion.)

It’s easy to be flippant about the ulterior motives of the authors and collectors of the Torah, this oddest of collections: Well, this guy was making a power grab. This was an old ‘just so’ story about how a place came to be named what it was named. These are records of wars; these are myths that came from Babylonia; everyone tells this story of a great Flood; lots of nations had legal codes with language just like this one. What’s so special about all this, that I should read it still and think about it still and struggle still with its words, infuriating, evocative, repetitive, inexplicable, dull, ridiculous, contradictory words?

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Eikev

So, Eikev.

Today I went to have lunch with some Christians I’d never met in person. I knew them from a blog I’ve been following for a little more than a year, Not the Religious Type, and I heard about the blog from a member of the church the blogger is pastor of, Greater Boston Vineyard. I met the member of the church because I happened to be there for an event that had rented the church, and my daughter, then two, did not want to be in the event. So I’d taken her out of it, and was sitting in a community room where some people were cleaning up from a church event, watching her hang on the stairwell like a little monkey, and she went up to the church member in question and sat down with her and started a conversation.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Va-ethannan: What do you get the parsha that has everything?

If you want one parsha that hits practically every theme of Jewish tradition, you can do worse than go for Va-ethannan.

You’ve got Moses, begging The Lord to enter the Promised Land, and reporting back that “The Lord said to me ‘Enough! Never speak to me of this matter again!’” (Deuteronomy 3:26).

You get God promising that observing the laws will be “proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples...” (4:6) and there you have it, the tradition of exceptional Jewish intelligence.

You get plenty of warnings to “Never Forget” ; for example: “But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live.” (4:9)

You get your Ten Commandments (one version of them, anyway...), you get your stone tablets, you get your Lord who “spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of his words but perceived no shape -- nothing but a voice.” (4:12)

You get your advance warning of and explanation for the Diaspora:
When you have begotten children and children’s children and are long established in the land, should you act wickedly ... I call heaven and earth this day to witness against you that you shall soon perish from the land ... The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a scant few of you shall be left ... There you will serve man-made gods of wood and stone, that cannot see or eat or smell. ( 4:25-28)
Well, sort of. It probably wasn’t really advance warning; scholars figure Deuteronomy was written mostly after there’d already been some scattering.

Did I mention the Ten Commandments? Cue the thunderclouds.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Devarim

Yes, late again. Maybe I should make it a policy to be one week behind. Then I wouldn’t be late all the time.

Devarim is the first parsha in the Book of Deuteronomy. The entire parsha is an extended recap of Exodus and Numbers, like that hour-long special they showed before the Lost series finale. Much of it is told in first person by Moses. It’s an extended monologue: “And then God said this, and we did that, and I said this, and you did that, and ...” “And I said to you at that time, saying, 'I cannot carry you alone.’” (1:9) “ How can I bear your trouble, your burden, and your strife all by myself?” (1:12) And then you pissed God off, and He punished you like so, and I pissed God off, and he punished me, and these are all the people we displaced, and so as to justify our exterminating them I’ll mention how those peoples were in the land because they’d come in and exterminated the people who lived there before them, who had done the same to the people who lived before them. And here we are, back in the bloodbath.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Matot and Masai

A day late and a dollar short yet again, folks. Matot and Masai were last week’s double-header parsha game, ending last night, when the rest of my family did Havdalah and I lay in a tranquilized stupor in my tempurpedic bed. Two parshas, I guess, for those pesky calendrical reasons I can’t wrap my head around; in other news, did you know Hanukkah is like, the week of Thanksgiving this year? It’s a-crazy, man. A-CRAZY.

A couple of weeks ago I complained about Balak to a Rabbi teacher of mine and he said something like “maybe you should skip the next couple of parshas for your blog, because they’re pretty tough to swallow...” But no, I am de-VO-ted to my parsha project, swallowing be damned. Anyway, I ought to know what’s in those scrolls I go to shul each week to hear read out loud in a language I don’t speak. I ought to know what I’m revering as Torah when I revere the Torah. Wait, I’m getting perilously close to having an Alanis Morrisette song stuck in my head, though given what’s been stuck in my head the last few weeks, an Alanis Morrisette song is a distinct improvement, which goes to show how very badly my brain has broken.

So: Matot and Masai.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Pinchas

Oh, DOODY! I did not manage to post an entry on Pinchas. I did read Pinchas, and I did make some notes on it, but I was a little slower than usual last week because of a bizarre out-of-nowhere debilitating episode of depression.

Anyway, Pinchas is really not that interesting. God gives Pinchas some kind of special covenant for having killed that guy having sex with that Midianite or Moabite woman (not clear which). There’s a census plus some lottery for distributing land (maybe I recall wrongly though, there seems to be a census and land lottery every other freaking parsha ). The only interesting bit about that is that someone’s daughters show up and complain to Moses that they shouldn’t be permanently disinherited because their dead father left no sons. Moses asks God about that, and God agrees, so the inheritance laws set down in the Torah actually count daughters as inheritors, although only if all the sons are dead. Ladies, get ready for fratricide! Or something. Sorry, I’m a bit weird today, having some funky-ass responses to some meds.

The rest of Pinchas is verse after boring verse about appropriate offerings to be made to God in the form of sheeps, goats, bulls, grain, oil, aromatic spices, and whatever else people have on hand that is precious and can be burnt. Not quite as dull as the endless descriptions of how to build the tabernacle that we got back in Exodus (er, I think) but still. If I’d managed to write an actual d’var last week it would have been something about sacrifice, and the temple, and how Orthodox prayer books still include page after page of descriptions about what sacrifices we ought to be making at particular prayer services which we replace instead with prayer since we don’t have the temple anymore, and even non-Orthodox versions of the Amidah usually say something about rebuilding the temple speedily in our day, and really? We’re looking forward to temple sacrifice again? As a good thing?

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Balak, Part Two: The Parable in Balaam's Mouth

Poor Balak. He’s just trying to save the land he loves, playing his very last card, hoping for some magic to pull him out of the hot seat. Reality is barreling down on him like a stampede of oxen, as he says. His world is changing, and there is nothing he can do to stop it. Like Treebeard said: “The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” The Israelites are coming, and God, it appears, is on their side.

Three times he asks Balaam to curse the Israelites; three times Balaam blesses them instead, with the Word that God places in his mouth.

Balak, Part One, the synopsis

Balak is a king, and the people Israel come in a swarm to camp out near his land. He fears the ravening masses. They are wanderers. As far as Balak is concerned, these people are the barbarian hordes, come to topple Rome, come to destroy all he has built up, lay waste to his peoples’ land, his beloved home, the cities and temples of his world. And rape, and slaughter, and pillage, and destroy.

Balak feels helpless to stop it, so he calls on Balaam, a prophet. Balaam is a prophet of the One God, it appears, even though he is not an Israelite. Balak sends some men to convince Balaam to come and curse the Israelites for Balak, so that he can save his people and his land. Balaam says “I can only do what God tells me to do. Let me dream and ask God and give you my answer in the morning.” And God tells Balaam not to go with the men that Balak sent, and so he does not.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Chukkat, part two, the d'var

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai said, of the ritual of the red cow, two different things. To non-Jews, he said it was an exorcism. To Jews, he said “It makes no sense, it has no point, but God commands it, so we do it.” (from Midrash Tanhuma).

I read in my Chumash, also, that King Solomon himself labored to understand this ritual, and could not.

I don’t get that. The Torah is full of bizarre rituals, rituals that seem like magic. At the same time the Torah itself, and the Rabbis who followed, are careful to note that the rituals are NOT magic. Their effectiveness stems from God, not from any other forces called into service by the specific actions. It is commanded by God that this is what you do, and so you must do it exactly as God commands. But the fact that you do it precisely is not what makes it work. You do it precisely only because God commands you to do so. That is why the rituals are not magic. But why should the ritual of the brown cow be more mysterious than the others?

Chukkat, part one, the synopsis

Chukkat, a synopsis: (Numbers 19 - 21)

God tells the priests burn up a red heifer and mix it with water. This potion will purify people made unclean by contact with death. Many paragraphs explaining how to do this. Involves hyssop.

Miriam dies. The people complain to Moses that they’re thirsty. No water in the desert, why’d you bring us here, will this wandering never end. Moses throws himself down on his face. God, could you help? Also, please, please make the whining stop. God says, “ Take your staff, stand at that boulder, speak to the boulder and water will come.” Moses goes to the boulder, says “Look how much God loves you even though you are all ungrateful wretches.” and hits the rock, twice, with his staff. Water springs forth, and everyone drinks it. God says “Moses, I didn’t tell you to hit the rock. Because of this neither you nor Aaron will reach the promised land.” (Moses does not point out to God that this punishment violates the clear meaning of ‘promise’, and what does Aaron have to do with it anyway?)

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Korach

It is appropriate that I start with Korach. Last year, when I first began looking for God, I went to synagogue once and had a really lovely experience, and then I went again, and there was Korach.

This parsha reports, in the usual strange and muddled way, on a rebellion led by Korach, a Levite, against Moses and Aaron, during the time the Israelites wandered in the desert after leaving Egypt. Korach says that the entire nation is holy and who are Moses and Aaron to say that some israelites are more holy than others. Some other chieftans, Dathan and Abiram, chime in complaining to Moses for not having come through on his promises to bring them to a land of milk and honey.

Friday, June 4, 2010

What Happens When I Have Insomnia

So my daughter woke us up last night with what was, apparently, a bad acid trip. She screamed about bugs and how they were crawling all over her and we had to get them off her. She's three, so we're pretty sure it was just three-year-old brain farts rather than actual acid trip. (Seemed perfectly fine in the morning. Me, I'm tired! )Anyway, then I was awake, getting ideas. One of my ideas was that I'd like to write a d'var torah each week for a year and post them all on a blog.

I am not a Rabbi. I am a pretty ill-educated Jew. My d'vrei torah are unlikely to be at all illuminating to anyone except me. Also, I start a lot of projects that I don't have the time or inclination to finish. Oh, and I don't read Hebrew. You are better off getting your official Judaism from the wrapping on a box of Streit's Matzo than from me, that's for sure. I am busy and conflicted and I don't even think I've read the whole Torah before. And most of the people in my life are really not interested in religion at all, so it's not like anyone's going to be impressed or supportive of this particular weirdo project of mine.

Still, plenty of people devote a lot of energy to editing Lostpedia entries, and other people to memorizing baseball statistics or studying subway maps from around the world. Some people, and I say this without judgment, make time in their schedules for The Real Housewives of New York City. Reading and writing about the Hebrew bible has been a popular activity for a few thousand years. It may not be the word of god, good moral teaching, good literature; it may not make any sense; it may not be what it sometimes claims to be. But one thing it is: hella popular, historically speaking. So this is my halting attempt to join the conversation, and see what all the talk is about.


Two basic notes to start out with. I don't assume that anyone reading this knows anything about Judaism or has read the Bible in either its Jewish or Christian incarnations. So I'll try to explain myself when I use funny words I probably just learned (sorta) yesterday.

Parsha: Jewish tradition divides the Torah (aka The Pentateuch, aka the Five Books of Moses, aka the first five books listed in any bible, Christian or Hebrew, that you pick up) into different portions for a yearly reading plan. Each portion is called a parsha, which is short for something else I don't remember, look it up if you care. Actually there are 54 of them, because the Jewish calendar is both solar and lunar and super-confusing, so some years there are leap months added in. Or something. But I didn't find that out until I'd already settled on 52 parshas as a blog name. And everyone can figure out that 52 of something is either a card game or something split up weekly.

D'var Torah: A D'var Torah is a teaching about that week's parsha. (D'vrei is the plural). Maybe what I will do will turn out to be something other than D'vrei Torah, or already has some other more appropriate name that I don't know about. Maybe it'll be more like riffing on torah, or fanfic on torah or navel-gazing with torah as an excuse. Maybe lots of Jews will find it completely offensive and ridiculous that I thought for even a second that whatever I'm doing might be d'var torah, and call me horrible names in anonymous comments. I freely admit I'm not qualified to do teachings on anything. More like Learnings. Could devolve into rantings, evolve into poetry, go out with a whimper, end in a self-published book. We'll see...