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.
I am reminded of a piece of paper that I found recently in a kitchen drawer, labeled “Dinnertime Rules.” I’d drawn it up for my son’s edification maybe four years ago. He was amused by them. “That had to be a rule?” If today I drew up a new set, some of the rules would be the same, and some of them would be different. Four years ago I did not need to tell him he was not allowed to read at the dinner table, and I did not have to tell him not to tussle with his sister. Now, I don’t have to tell him that he’s not allowed to say “beurk!” to the food. I still have to tell him to use his napkin, though. And some things don’t have to be rules because we’ve changed the environment: it turns out to be impossible for our kids to drink with straws without blowing bubbles and otherwise making a mess, so we just don’t have straws in the house anymore.
So I really think we have to look at the collection of mitzvot in the torah as having arisen in part through just this kind of ad-hoc rulemaking. A situation comes up, somebody rules on it, and the rule then becomes a precedent, and some of the precedents end up being collected in the Torah, where, unfortunately, they can ossify.
And actually I think that my view might be also the majority rabbinical view, in practice if not in theory. (In theory, all the laws are the Word of God.) As I’ve said before, traditional Judaism is not fundamentalist or literalist or ‘bible-believing’ in the sense that ‘bible-believing’ Protestant sects are, or say they are.
So the Rabbis have expanded or contracted the meaning and domain of the rules based on their best understanding of the principles behind the rules. If we must build a parapet, we should also build a fence around our pools, for example, and require seatbelts in our cars. But I’m hoping that in thousands of years (and I don’t know) they’ve narrowed the meaning of ‘crushed testicles’ quite a bit and loosened up about mixing fabrics.
Still, however the Rabbis have organized the collection, the collection is still basically a source of reverence and devotion and truth for Jews who try to be mindful of all these mitzvot, and do them. However much they’ve narrowed some and expanded others, and reinterpreted all along the way, the basic structure is still in place, with its injunctions against shellfish, its tedious detailing of temple sacrifices, its don’t mix two kinds of cloth, its bride-prices and crushed testicles and slaves with their ear-piercings, right there with justice and mercy and loving our neighbor. It’s frustrating, having to take all the crazy stuff along with all the sensible stuff. It’s equally frustrating to have to choose what we don’t have to take anymore. Which of these laws were for then, for those people living at that time and place, and which of them are for now and for always? The Torah (both written and oral) is a record of how one people were guided by the voice of God to engage with those very same questions. They had olden days back then just as we have them now. They were not more stupid or more credulous than we are.
So to be a Jew is to first be mindful of all these mitzvot, whatever we think of how sensible they are. Of course, there’s ethical monotheism, secular humanism, secular humanist judaism. We try and try to find a way not to throw out the baby of ethical mitzvot along with the bathwater of nonsensical or obnoxious mitzvot. We complain about mindless rituals and archaic practices the original meaning of which has been forgotten. I mean, really, WE NO LONGER REMEMBER THE NAME OF OUR GOD. Why should we remember the burnt offerings we made in that name? Build a parapet for your roof, keep honest measures, be good to the weak, the hungry, the orphaned, the stranger, and the slave. But eat pork, cheeseburgers, and shrimp. Go shopping and run errands on Shabbat. Wear mixed cloth and dress as the opposite sex and love who you love. Why doesn’t that work, exactly?
Maybe for some people, it does. We derive our ethical rules and we drop the unreasonable stuff, drop god even, and god’s unpronounceable name, and off we go, perfectly and unerringly living our values, never a struggle or a conflict in sight.
Not for me, though. I struggle so much to be good, to do good, to be a person of strong character, to be ethical, to care, to treat others with kindness and empathy, to look out for the sick and the old and the homeless and the poor and the orphaned and the immigrant. I am so wrapped up in myself, most of the time, and I do things so often that are what the Buddha called ‘unskillful’. I can see they’re not good to do, for me or for others or for the world.
I keep thinking of the words of Rabbi Chaim Luzzato (The Ramchal) in the introduction to his Mussar masterpiece, called in English 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.This, to me, is the crux of the problem with stripping ethics from the ritual and tradition that surrounds it. Or, as Paul said, (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.” Reason and knowledge and ethics alone are not enough. It is difficult to change ourselves, it is terribly hard to direct ourselves away from ourselves. Every day we act in ways big and small that are not what we want to do. Or rather, not what the better part of ourselves wants to do.
For years it’s been a huge question for me, one I circle back to all the time in my journals, in my mind. How do we become other than what we are? What makes us change? And more specifically, what makes us change to become better people than we are? There’s no shortage of systems, gurus, books, tapes, and varieties of yoga all offering us the tools to change ourselves. There’s no shortage of religions. But change seems so painful, and slow, and small.
My friends at Cambridge Vineyard talk a lot about empowering impossibly great lives. For them, Jesus offers that promise, and delivers. Jesus doesn’t really talk to me, but my God, the one with the unpronounceable name, does. And in the year and a half that I’ve been listening to my God, the year that I’ve been talking back, I know that I have become a better person. That I am an impossibly better person than I was before. And though I think that change is driven by God, it has not happened in a vacuum. It happens in context, the context of my Jewishness, the context of Judaism, of my peoples’ ongoing relationship with God.
There’s a field of neuroscience called neurotheology. I read one book about it, How God Changes Your Brain.
At the end of the book the author offers perfectly secular ritual techniques to help you get some of the benefits of God without actually needing God. Ritual words, music, and movement help, but they don’t have to be religious. Meditation and mindfulness are useful, and they too don’t have to be religious. But religion has been around a lot longer than neurotheology, so I’m going to guess that whatever stuff a neurotheologist comes up with to hack your brain into getting the goods from God and religion without actual God or religion involved is not going to work as well, or be as rich, or just as fracking beautiful and mysterious and many-layered and multifaceted as actual God and actual religious practice. Spiritual practices are technologies to connect with God. Or to get the goods. Experimenting is good, but we shouldn’t be too quick to throw out what has come out of thousands of years of tradition, which is really just a way of saying the collective experiments of generations. So I struggle with this mixed bag of commandments we’ve got, and not just the commandments but a mixed bag of practices and rituals spiraling out from the commandments. I struggle with figuring out which are important for me, at this time, to connect me with God. Because I see that it is my connection with God that has enabled me to live, far more than I’ve managed on my own in the past, according to what I would always have said were my values. ( G.K. Chesterton says something similar about Christianity in Orthodoxy
: “This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.” ) I think my favorite How to Be Jewish book is Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice
. It’s an introduction to the teachings of Reb Zalmon Schacter-Shalomi, the founder and spiritual leader of Jewish Renewal. Reb Zalman was a college outreach rabbi for Chabad when he decided that the insights of Hasidism needed to be brought to a much wider community of Jews. Lots of Jews find Renewal too woo-woo, touchy-feely, and new age for them. I guess my shul is sort of renewal, though we don’t identify with any denomonation at all. What I like about Reb Zalman is that he talks about God, unapologetically, and about having a relationship with God. We modern Jews are mostly pretty uncomfortable with God -- that’s why we are all agnostic or secularist or assimilated or intermarried or whatever. Not Zalman. Well, not the Hasids, either, but Hasidism is a lot to swallow, and it looks so horribly itchy and uncomfortable to be a Hasid in the summer. Anyway, I read in Jewish with Feeling
that traditionally the mitzvot are divided into three types: mishpatim, the ethical mitzvot; edot, the mitzvot of witnessing or remembrance; and chukim, ritual commandments, those which defy logic. Reb Zalman writes that each of the three types of mitzvot are different ways of being in relationship with God, of sanctifying our lives. The mishpatim are logically easy to assent to, but often very difficult to actually perform; it is the work of the other two types of mitzvot to strengthen us through a connection with God such that we are able to be transformed. Keeping Shabbat and keeping Passover, nailing a mezuzah to one’s door -- these are mitzvot of witnessing. They remind us that we were slaves in Egypt, that God rested and commands us too to rest, that we are to remember God when we enter or leave our houses. Reb Zalman talks about circumcision as perhaps the epitome of the chukkim -- a powerful and terrifying ritual that so many Jews submit their infant sons to, appalled, even, at themselves, desperate to find a way out of it, sure it is horrible, and most of the time going on to do it anyway. It was that way for us, and when our son was born we were by no means believers in God. But I knew my son would be circumcised and I knew I’d want a bris. My mother thought that a bris was barbaric. No, I said, it’s the act that’s barbaric; only the ritual meaning could possibly redeem such a thing. Still, we called up, the day before, the Rabbi who’d married us, terrified to go through with it and terrified not to. Everyone feels like this, assured the Rabbi. Go ahead and do it. It’ll be fine.
And it was. This is a long post, and maybe I’ve strayed a long, long way from Ki Teitzei. It is easy to dismiss certain mitzvot as irrational, barbaric, and unneccesary. It’s easy to nod sagely at the wisdom and goodness of others, “yes, yes, of course, I ought to be like that, I ought to do that. That’s obvious, who needs to be told that anyway?” But my experience, and I think the experience of many who have found transformation in Judaism or in another religious tradition, has been that radical transformation, radical connection, a radical sense of the goodness of God and of our own capacity for goodness -- that those don’t come from smiling and nodding and they don’t come from only doing the things that make sense. I don’t keep all the mitzvot, by any means. God has not told me to keep kosher, for example, though in our household we eat so very little meat to begin with that it wouldn’t be a big stretch, except that I cannot imagine giving up jamon iberico and scallops and the occasional cheeseburger. But I try to be mindful of the mitzvot, even if I do not do them. I consider them, not only with my mind, but with my heart. The water of lustration, for example -- the ritual of the red heifer -- a bogglingly illogical ritual that, when I thought about it, made perfect sense in response to the spiritual contamination that is death. I’ve tried to keep shabbat without lighting candles, and it simply doesn’t work as well -- shabbat needs to be welcomed with candles and wine and the breaking of bread, and it needs to be sent on its way with more candles, and spices, and wine, at Havdalah. I could have decided, instead, that Tuesday would be our day of rest, and that we would welcome it with incense and chocolate bon bons and drums, and see it off by playing scrabble in the dark, with flashlights. Those would be rituals commanded by no one, shared by no one, neither more or less strange than the ones I practice now. But somehow, there’d be a vacuum. No one else, neither God nor person, would be involved. There wouldn’t be as much power there.
And I’m not in this religion thing for the fun of it. I’m in it for the goods. I want to be changed. I’m scared of that, too, scared to grab hold of that live electrical wire. But I do it, because, like Frankenstein’s monster, all that electricity changes me. Makes me more alive than alive. I sound a lot like a Christian here, I know. I could be speaking of new life in Jesus, of being born again. For Jews, I don’t know, it’s a little different maybe. Not turning to something new, but remembering who we were before we were born. Returning, which is the meaning of teshuvah, which is what is usually translated as repentence. We do not become new people, we Jews. We return to who we always were, we wipe the dust and grime off our souls. The soul you have given me is pure, we pray every morning. We do not need to be born again, we just need to return.
So I make my way through the sensible, the strange, the offensive, and the bizarre. I try to be mindful of all these mitzvot even when I do not do them. I do what I do and I listen, and I experiment, and I struggle. This is the journey I am on. I mark my discoveries with pillars of stone. “Surely God was in this place, and I did not know it.” (Someday many years later uptight priests will make my descendents tear the pillars down. “Do not worship in high places, do not build pillars of stone...” they’ll say, and some of what I discover will be lost. But there are still Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, wandering through a sacred landscape in a sacred scroll, turning and seeing their visitors are angels, after all. Mirthful; struck dumb with awe; afraid; triumphant, coming upon God unexpectedly and marking the way. There’s following them, our ancient and mythical forebears, and also the priests and their psalms, and also the rabbis and their fences. And the mystics, the hasidim, and the scholars, and the women, lighting candles on Friday evening, as the sun sets, all over the world, throughout our generations forever.
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