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.

I’m pretty tired right now, and I don’t have the energy to give a recap of a recap. Read the parsha yourself if you don’t know what’s in it: Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22.

Okay, actually, I’m super-duper tired right now. I can barely keep my eyes open. The only two things that strike me in this parsha strike me, I think, because I can relate them back to two middot I practice as part of my Mussar work. But explaining about that requires me to explain about Mussar.

Mussar means Ethics. It’s the Jewish study of and practice of ethics. It offers, in practical terms, answers to the questions: How do I become a better person? How do I purify my soul of all the accumulated schmutz it has stuck to it because of this polluted although beautiful world we inhabit? Mussar is self-help, but not for self-satisfaction, but for the glory of God. Here's a quote from Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, aka The Ramchal, from the turn of the 18th century, in his book The Path Of the Just:

I have written this work not to teach people what they do not know, but rather to remind them of what they already know and clearly understand. For within most of my words you will find general rules that most people know with certainty. However, to the degree that these rules are well-known and their truth self-evident, they are routinely overlooked, or people forget about them altogether.

Therefore the benefit to be obtained from this work cannot be derived from a single reading; for it is possible that after just one reading, the reader will find that he has learned little that he did not know before. Rather, its benefit is a function of continuous review. In this manner, one is reminded of those things which, by nature, people are prone to forget, and he will take to heart the duty that he tends to overlook.

Christians will notice that this sounds a lot like Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, 7:15 “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Paul believed the solution to this problem was to trust in Jesus. The Ramchal, and many great Rabbis and teachers since, had a different solution, since obviously Jesus was out. Their solution was systematic study of the traits of godliness, called Middot, and systematic practice to increase them. Today you can study Mussar through books like Alan Morinis’s Everyday Holiness, the book that introduced me to Mussar, and through online programs and institutes, The Mussar Institute and Mussar Leadership, in online communities like madrega.com, and perhaps at your local synagogue or in your own town. I study Mussar with Rabbi David Jaffe who runs The Kirva Institute For Torah and Spiritual Practice.

One of the core Mussar practices is to choose 13 soul traits, or middot, to work on. Each week you work on a different one, so that in the course of the year you’ve hit each trait 4 times. During the week you study texts about that trait, you examine yourself and your behavior in light of that trait, and you actively practice that trait. The week I do generosity, for example, I try not to turn down requests for help or money, in fact, I actively look for opportunities to give. When I first started the practice it actually took effort for me to do this, but over the last several months it’s become easier and more natural. It is no longer such a struggle. What I want to do, I do, at least some of the time. At least more of the time than I used to.

Wow, I am really too tired to be doing this right now. Not an auspicious start to my practice of this week’s middah, which is zerizut: enthusiasm, alacrity.

Savlannut

Anyway, one of my middot is Savlannut, which can be translated as patience or forbearance or bearing burdens. Traditionally Moses is seen as the examplar of savlanut: he bears the burden of leading the entire Hebrew people for 40 years in the desert while they grumble and argue and rebel and complain and sleep around and disbelieve and worship other gods and get tired and want better food and miss Egypt and don’t like their allotments and are afraid to go to war as God commands or else go to war when God forbids it. That is one hell of a burden. Moses had to keep God from smiting his people and his people from going against God’s will, with nary a thank you in sight. Not only did no one thank him, the one time he screws up, gets angry, lashes out, by beating that dumb rock with a stick instead of just commanding it to give water, he gets horribly punished by God, who says that Moses will not after all be able to enter the promised land. Moses had a bum deal, no doubt about it. As told in Exodus, he tried like hell to get out of taking on the position in the first place. But eventually he had to bear that burden, and bear it he did, year after year after year.

In one of the Kirva Institute courses I attended, we studied Savlanut as exhibited by Moses. In the Torah verses we studied, Moses did not complain directly to the Hebrews about what a pain they were; he complained only to God. This is in Bamidbar - Numbers - Chapter 11: 10-15:

Moses heard the people weeping with their families,each one at the entrance to his tent. The Lord became very angry, and Moses considered it evil. Moses said to the Lord, "Why have You treated Your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in Your eyes that You place the burden of this entire people upon me? Did I conceive this entire people? Did I give birth to them, that You say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom as the nurse carries the suckling,' to the Land You promised their forefathers? [...] Alone I cannot carry this entire people for it is too hard for me.         If this is the way You treat me, please kill me if I have found favor in Your eyes, so that I not see my misfortune."

In our study group we discussed the significance of Moses complaining to God only and not to the Hebrews themselves. Complaining to God is an appropriate outlet for Moses; both because God can bear all complaints, all burdens, and because God may also be able to offer help. Complaining to the Hebrews themselves would not be appropriate: Moses’ job as leader is precisely to bear the complaints of his followers. In any case, God does come through with some help: he tells Moses to appoint some middle managers to filter the complaints and disputes, solve the easy ones, and only bring the hard stuff to Moses himself. Delegate, delegate, delegate!

Studying that text, among others, really helped me to grab onto forbearance (says Amy, immediately before speaking rather too sharply to a 7-year-old wanting paper towels to play with in the bathtub), because it offered a concrete way to respond to the burdens of others. You take your impatience, your anger, your frustration, your weariness, your burdens, and you lay them at God’s feet. You give all that ugliness to God instead of sending it back out into the world or back at the people who are driving you crazy. If this sounds wrong because you think that we should only give God our good stuff, not our bad stuff, then you will find yourself able to give very little to God, because most of us have a lot more bad stuff than good stuff in our lives. If we are not able to give that to God, then where exactly are we supposed to put it? Should I give my impatience and my frustration to my kids? Will they bear it any better than I can? Should I give it to my husband? Will he? Who can bear all those burdens, all that strife? Who can carry even one hearts-full of toil and trouble? Is it Santa, the candyman, the Hulk, Batman, Spiderman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist?

If we are not to add to our own or others’ burdens, we must give our burdens to God, who can bear them a million million times over, and still have room for one more complaint about how great the spring onions were in Egypt. When I have something to bear (a cross, for example :-) I offer it to God. Of course I also try to offer God the good stuff. I offer it all, the good the bad and the ugly. I burn my burdens on an altar to God and they are purified. God returns only Love. And then, instead of burdening others with my anger, my complaints, my trouble, my impatience, I can give them love instead.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice I suck at it, of course. Once in a while I’ll breathe in through the blood rushing through my head, wanting to scream at a kid who’s dumped my coffee onto the bed, and I’ll picture myself just draining all that blood out, like a sacrificial animal, like a goat, all that blood onto an altar to God. Here, I say to God, please have this. And God does accept such sacrifice, and the blood is gone, the anger has passed.

Once in a blue moon. Once in a long while. Once in a leap month or a mercury retrograde or a lunar eclipse. Better than never, though. Infinitely better. Who knows what havoc a single instant of untamed anger may wreak in the world?  But God is a sort of sink for bad stuff: you can just keep on offering it.

( Ira Stone of Mussar Leadership, develops his entire theology around savlannut and the terrifying responsibility of bearing hte burden of others in his book A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar )

 So, that’s savlanut, and Moses is its exemplar, but here we are in Devarim and as Moses is recounting the story of the 40 years, he recalls that he complained directly to the people, not to God: “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)

I’m not sure what to make of this. I suppose the main thing to say about it was that the character of Moses we think we know now, the role that Moses plays in Jewish myth is more consistent than the Moses who appears in 4 of the 5 Torah scrolls. That Moses is not always the same Moses, because those scrolls were not written by one person, but many, over a long time, and because in any case even one person doesn’t always maintain perfect characterization in, say, a long novel, and many people over lots of time even less so, and people themselves don’t behave always consistently anyway, and also have terrible memories. So here Moses remembers himself as less virtuous than he actually was. He remembers complaining to the Hebrews themselves, even though he only complained to G0d. Or perhaps he only says that he remembers it that way, because he does not want to set himself up as such a saint? It’s such a minor discrepancy, you wouldn’t even notice unless you’d been thinking about those other verses, in Numbers, because from them you had learned a little bit about how to behave when you would like to scream and throw something preferably with a nice smashing sound.

Yet the Jewish tradition of Biblical interpretation is built on just such discrepancies. Why say this here, and that there? Why say this twice, and that only once? Why mention both hands and fingers? Why? The answer, in that context, is never “no good reason” or “happened that way” or “transcription error” or “poetic license”. There is always a reason, if you look deep enough, and yes, if you are creative enough.

If I’m working within that tradition, and everything has a reason, I’d go for the “doesn’t want to set himself up as a saint” explanation. It’s many years later, the people listening probably don’t care if Moses bitched to their parents 30 years ago, as their parents bitched to Moses. Even the older ones are probably over it all by now. But it would be humiliating to hear how your parents bitched to Moses, how you yourself bitched to Moses, and Moses just turned the other cheek. How is anyone supposed to live up to that? ( There’s a discussion here about Jesus, turning the other cheek, how to become the perfect image of God on earth, living up to God’s expectations, and perhaps something about spiritual humility.) Moses was so humble and so forbearing he wouldn’t even boast about his humility and forbearance. He goes out of his way to show that he’s not any better than the rest of them, complaining-wise. As well he might, because he’s about to die and appoint a perfectly ordinary man, Joshua, not a prophet or a saint, to lead the Israelites. If Joshua is not to seem a pale reflection, then Moses must bring himself back down to earth.

Hence, he reports that he complained. He says he gave his bad to the people instead of to God. Just a regular Joe, says Moses.

If I had to make sense of it, that’s how I’d do it, anyway. Sometimes I think I have to make sense of it all, and sometimes I think it doesn’t matter much whether sense comes or not. Here is a logic beyond logic. Here is deeper magic from before the dawn of time, says Aslan, rising from a broken stone table. One of the Lost Stations was called The Lamppost, in honor, I’ll bet, of Narnia. Sometimes I think the myths I swim in are too confused. Swimming in a mess of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, all mixed in with psychiatry and neurology and evolutionary psychobiology and headaches and nausea and meds. I graph my meds and moods and energy and side effects on an hourly level right now, these days, trying to work it all out. My mind is drifting through this flotsam and jetsam of human religiosity. I feel a little unmoored today. Do I really want to tell you this? It’s a distraction, my mental state. It has nothing to do with Devarim. So let’s move along, to the other middah I noticed, reading through this parsha, Emunah.

Emunah

Emunah is faith. It’s another one of my thirteen middot. It’s not about belief. It’s about trust, and about trustworthiness, and about keeping faith, about being faithful. Emunah exists in the relationship between God and people. The Amidah praises God “who keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust”. So faith is not a thing we have, it’s something we do, and God does. We can keep faith, even when we do not believe. We can keep faith when we do not even have faith, because keeping and having are two different things.

Ah, so here’s my mental state again. When I’m sick, I don’t believe in anything: not in myself, not in God, not in anyone, not in living. Even the kind of faith I keep during those times is not the kind of faith that looks like faith. It’s not something I feel. So if I’m neither believing in God or in health or in joy, nor feeling God or health or joy, then what is it that I am calling faith?

What I am calling faith is the relationship between me and God. God has blessed me with my husband, and my brother, and my parents, and my friends, and my other family, and a great doctor, and to live in a time where there are at least some medicines that help some ways. God led me to join the synagogue before I got sick, so that I would have that extra help. So God is keeping faith with me in my illness. And so I keep faith with God too. It’s reciprocal, this faith-keeping. Duh, it would be, it’s a covenant.

Oh, right, devarim. Here’s the line that made me think of this, Moses complaining about how utterly faithless the Hebrews are:

“But regarding this matter, you do not believe the Lord, your God, Who goes before you on the way, to search out a place for you, in which to encamp, in fire at night, to enable you to see on the way you should go, and in a cloud by day.” (32-33)

It’s true, they’re faithless. Signs and wonders all over the place, and still they don’t do what God would like them to do. Still they do not hold up their end of the bargain. They whine and complain and rebel. Ooh, I can quote Jesus again. Mark 8:12: He sighed deeply and said, "Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it." (New International Version). You can see why Jesus wouldn’t have bothered with signs; more often than not, we ignore them, disbelieve them, refuse them, or find them inadequate. In the context of the Gospels, Jesus gave plenty of signs, and some people had faith in him, and some did not. ( I make no truth claims about the Gospels, I just mention that the pattern there is the same, unsurprisingly.) God in a pillar of cloud was not enough to convince the Hebrews to keep faith. We have eyes to see, but see not, etcetera. My dad is a big believer in UFOs. Look at the evidence! he says. There’s plenty of it! But our minds see the evidence they want to see. To see differently, to see with an open eye, as Balaam did, that’s tough. How do we judge evidence when evidence shows that we are so very bad at both seeing and weighing evidence? That, kids, is a question Kurt Goedel answered decades ago, and the answer was this: we are fundamentally limited. There are truths we can know but cannot prove. Well, really I’m completely misappropriating his work, as he was talking about math and logic, not God. There is some relationship though. “Imagine a perfect circle,” I say to my husband. He can do it, even though he knows that such does not exist in this world. He cannot prove that he imagines it. He cannot prove it has some reality outside his mind. And yet the sense of reality of that perfect circle cannot be shaken. It matters, that circle. Oh, Plato, we are still in your shadow.

I try to keep faith with God, because I cannot shake Reality. We keep faith together, God and me, outside of the system of evidence and logic. The evidence might be there for UFOs and not for God, but God keeps faith with me, and UFOs do not. It’s like we are outside the perfect circle, in the infinity that is left after we’ve defined a tiny, careful, consistent closed world. Nothing interesting goes on inside the circle. God is not the circle but the space around the circle. I’m pretty sure this is a bunch of cheap half-assed pseudo-theological rambling. Trashy pop theology. Only not very pop.

But why do I keep faith with God now, and not before? Why do some people keep faith with God, and then stop? Why couldn’t the Israelites, with all their signs and wonders, keep faith? To keep faith is mysterious and wonderful.

Now I have some meds and a nap to take.