Va Yak Hel : On Vocation

A friend who does me the great honor of reading my d’var torah each week recently did me the greater honor of asking me why I was ‘not a writer’. I told her I had an answer to that, and my answer dovetails with one of the themes of VaYakHel, which is now (heh) last week’s parsha.

A few weeks ago we got an entire parsha with tedious instructions about just how to go about constructing the tabernacle in the desert. This parsha is almost entirely a recapitulation of that one, except that where that one was God giving instructions, this one is the Israelites carrying out the instructions God gave.

This is the part I am interested in: “And let all among you who are skilled come and make all that the Lord has commanded.” (Exodus 35:10) “And everyone who excelled in ability and everyone whose spirit moved him came, bringing to the Lord his offering for the work of the tent of meeting and for all its service and for the sacral vestments.” (35:21). “Moses then called Bezalel and Oholiab, and every skilled person whom the Lord had endowed with skill, everyone who excelled in ability, to undertake the task and carry it out.” (Ex 36:2).

My Chumash notes: “The Hebrew translated as ‘skilled’ (hakham lev) literally means ‘wise-hearted.’ A Hasidic master comments, ‘Wisdom of the mind alone, without wisdom of the heart, is worthless’ (Aaron of Karlin).”

Against this background, I’d like to talk about the idea of vocation, about what I see as my vocation, and about why the fact that I haven’t yet come fully into my vocation does not mean that I don’t intend to someday.

I have always been a terrific writer. When I was a kid I knew I would grow up to be a writer (probably a novelist). When I was in college I knew I would grow up to be a writer (probably an academic, writing also popular books for the New York Review of Books audience, probably Malcolm Gladwell). After college, I knew I would grow up to be a writer, mostly of activist screeds. But somehow, I never did grow up to be a writer. First of all, I never did reach a point where I thought “I’m all grown up now, time to be a writer.” Second, I looked around at people who were writers, at the work they did to be writers, and it looked too damn hard to me. There was a lot of toiling for very little reward. Writers didn’t make very much money. Writers had to spend a lot of time selling themselves and selling their writing, and that wasn’t very attractive to me. If a writer got successful a writer had to go on book tours and there would be gross coffee at gross hotels in gross places. And even most successful writers do not find it a lucrative business. I doubted very much both my discipline and my ability to write best-selling anythings.

My husband thought I’d enjoy programming, so I ended up as a programmer instead.

( Programming is a terrific career. When programmers are in short supply, which is often, we are paid a lot of money and treated very well, because the companies that hire us know that we can leave them at any time. Last September I decided I wanted a different job so I sent out a couple of resumes. My job hunt lasted a week and a half. Now, it won’t always be the case that programmers will be in such short supply -- tech goes through cycles, like everything else. But overall, as skilled labor, I am paid well and I have a lot of flexibility and respect in my work. The combination of the good pay and the flexibility is one reason I became a programmer, because I knew if I wanted to work when I had kids I needed to make enough money and have a flexible enough job to support that. I recommend programming to anyone who is thinking of a career change and has not yet considered it, because you really don’t know if you’ll be good at it and like it unless you try it. If you read this and you are wondering about whether you should try programming please let me know and I would be happy to talk to you about it. )

Despite my career choice, I have never been able to escape from the calling to write. Fortunately the rise of the internet made it possible to indulge my need to write (and to write publicly) in a completely unencumbered and undisciplined way. For several years I had a political blog, mostly focused on changing what had apparently become U.S. policy to engage in torture. Then for a while I kept up a professional blog discussing topics of interest to programmers and the people who work with them. About a year ago I began occasionally guest-blogging on a Christian blog I had fallen in with. Several months ago I started this blog, hoping to write each week about the torah portion. Then last week I started The Mussarista, primarily to capture quotations and my responses for the work I do each week on strengthening particular character traits.

Actually, a couple of years ago I had an actual signed contract to write a book, about computer science. I wrote a proposal for the book one night I had insomnia, sent it off, and three weeks later got a contract in the mail. ( I should note that this is not as insane as it seems, because the publisher, although ‘real’ and highly respected in my field, did not issue advances on its books. So getting a contract turned out to be easy, but if you could not actually deliver on the book, the publisher did not lose anything, and in fact got to keep the idea. ) Ideas are cheap, though -- I’m good at ideas. Follow-through is something else altogether. I started trying to write the book, but I had a one-year-old, and then out of the blue I got a job, and after four absolutely miserable months of making very little progress but feeling a lot of despair, I gave up the book. I spun it well: it’s not the right project for me, and it’s not the right time, I said. Both were true. I was happy to let the idea go -- as I said, they come cheap to me. But I was sorry to let the book go, because after all, writing books is what I was born to do. How could I have a chance to get published like that and let it slip through my fingers? Could I finish nothing? Was I not, after all, meant to be a Writer ? For me, the best part about getting a book contract was getting the book contract. The rest of it was awful.

Still, having gotten one contract, I blithely assume I can get another when the time and topic are right. But I am also unwilling to “Become a Writer” until the time and topic are right, because I’ve seen that I can’t deliver when they are not.

What does this all have to do with this week’s parsha?

This week’s parsha is all about men and women who have been called to do the work of building the tabernacle. They are talented in different ways, and they use their talents in the service of God. “And everyone who excelled in ability and everyone whose spirit moved him came,” we read. Jews don’t talk much about vocation, these days, but Christians do.

Here is Frederick Buechner, a Christian writer I love to read, on Vocation:

Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, “to call,” and means the work a person is called to by God.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.

By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work god usually calls you to do is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads , the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Does anyone believe these days that they have callings? Or, if they feel they have callings, do they believe that they have actually been called? Am I trying to say that I believe I have been called, by God, to write my little blog entries about my little thoughts? Am I that much of a narcissist, am I that delusional, and do I need to adjust my meds?

Here’s what I do know.

I have always been compelled to write. But I have never felt that what I wrote mattered, in particular. The words that came out of me were of little consequence. They were just words, they came out of me because I seemed to have an excess of them. Sometimes I vomit words or shit them out. I’m good at words. I’ve used them to be cruel, and I’ve used them to get what I wanted, and I’ve used them to get back at people who hurt me. At work I’ve used them to write documentation, and pitch ideas, and get things done. But all those words have been so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. And somewhere in me I knew that was true, I knew that all those words, clever as they were, touched nothing real. I had nothing of consequence to write about, and hence, little interest in ‘being a writer’, either as a profession or as a hobby.

I had nothing to say.

I don’t know how to describe what’s changed. I can say “God has entered my life, and in my relationship with God I have been changed, and changed for the better. And that -- that! -- is something to write about.” But some of the people I most want to understand this will not understand it if I say that. So I’ll try a different way to explain what it’s like, why I feel as though I understand, finally, what this talent of words I have is for.

So think of “the world’s deep hunger.” No, think of your own hunger. Maybe you have none. Maybe you have no longing. Maybe you are not looking for anything. You’re only reading my blog because you know me and you’d read anything I wrote, even a phone book. There is nothing you want so deeply and so profoundly and that sometimes seems just within reach, you see it just from the corner of your eye, but then it’s gone. You are not plagued by fear and uncertainty. You feel centered and strong and you know how to behave and you find yourself able to behave how you know you should behave. So maybe you’re not hungry. That’s cool.

But maybe you are. Maybe you don’t even want to admit it, but you are.

I’m hungry. I’ve always been hungry. It’s in our nature to be hungry in the way I’m talking about. To hunger and thirst for something that we can’t even describe.

I’m hungry, and I have found food. I have found food in the Torah, and I have found food in the spiritual writing of Jews, and Christians, and Buddhists, and others. Most of all, I have found food in a living relationship with God. If you are hungry and you don’t really want to admit it, you read “God” and off you go again, you’re outta here. That woo-woo shit is not for you. You are sensible and grounded in the reality-based community. Just think of it as food, then. Something that keeps the gnawing feeling at bay. Jews like to look at Christians like they are crazy because they eat and drink their god, but really, the feeling of spiritual yearning is precisely a hunger and a thirst, and there’s something very satisfying about the concreteness of the Christian ritual to meet that need with bread and wine. (Still not a Christian, don’t worry, friends and family! Just giving credit where due.)

This food I’ve found, it’s not a chili dog from the 7-11. It was not invented in a laboratory last year, either. Humans have been cultivating the stuff for a long time, this food. The tree of Judaism, in particular, has been cultivated continuously for thousands of years. It’s been burnt to the ground many times, and green shoots come from the stump, again and again. It doesn’t make my life easier, it doesn’t soothe all my doubts or make me unafraid of death or give me a certainty that I am right or a feeling of safety and protection or a nice easy simple story where I always know what to do next and I don’t have to make tough decisions and everything is going to go my way. People who haven’t tasted it think it must do one or the other of those things, that it must have a nice easy point to it. They think it’s not complicated, the food. They think I must be eating cheese-wiz.

The food doesn’t do any of those things -- or at least it doesn’t do any of those things all the time, reliably. It’s not simple like that. It’s not cheese-wiz, it’s camembert. You have to taste it.

I can’t explain it very well, of course. Who could?

But --- and here’s the thing -- I know I have been blessed with a talent for words, and therefore I know that while I can’t explain it very well I can explain it better than most. And when I am explaining it, I find myself full of a “deep gladness”.

So, why am I not a writer? Well, I am. Why have I not made it my profession? Because it never seemed worthwhile for me to devote my life to it. Sure, there was some deep gladness in it, sometimes. But there was no deep hunger in the world for what I wrote. Perhaps there isn’t any deep hunger for what I write now, either. I haven’t given up my day job, and I don’t intend to anytime soon. I have in any case only begun to acquire wisdom of the heart, hakham lev. There has only now seemed to be a point behind my cleverness, something useful I could say.

I do not think it means that my purpose and goal in life is to write a bunch of powerful-sounding stuff that ‘converts’ people to Judaism in particular or to God in general. I just want to talk about the camembert. And to the extent that some people may find that they would like to taste the camembert themselves, I want to point a way. I’m gesturing at something outside the frame, smiling, with my mouth full.

I’m working on joining Bezalel and Oholiab, trying to get wise-hearted enough to help build a dwelling place for God, a tabernacle of words, the words themselves just the tents, the ark, the cherubim, surrounding a cloud and a pillar of fire so powerful and mysterious and strange that words can never tell.


P.S. I’ve been writing this blog for a few months now and have not made any effort to publicize it. I’m not interested in becoming a ‘blogger’ (which is sort of like becoming a writer only generally involves AdWords rather than book tours). But the discipline of writing is hard, and I need encouragement to maintain it. If you like what you read here, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to my feed, either via a feed-reader, if you have one of those, or via email. ( See the links at the top right.) And if you know someone else who might like it, tell them about it. When I know I have readers I am encouraged to keep writing, even those weeks when I can’t think of anything good to say, like in May, where I believe we’ll get a lot of rules about lepers. Thanks!

Must we talk about The Golden Calf?

There’s some sort of awful stomach plague going around the city; all the preschools are emptied out, and the doctors’ offices are swamped. My daughter has been laid low for five days now. I called the doctor this morning, finally, and asked for intel on how long this thing is going to last, and if I ought to bring her in. “One to two weeks,” said the nurse, “and no, as you suspected, there’s nothing we can do for her here. Just keep her hydrated.”

In our family, I’m the grownup who deals with the pukes, because, much as I hate to puke, I’ve always been a puker myself, and my husband thinks that vomiting is akin to dying. So for five days I’ve been holed up in my apartment, sharing my bed with a pitifully ill child, cleaning up explosive diarrhea and mucous-y vomit and offering up a rotating menu of apple juice, ginger ale, seltzer, ice cream, and childrens’ chewable ibuprofen. Oh, and working. I’m a software developer, and I can work from home, and we have a big deadline, so I sit here in bed with my sick daughter and fix bugs, and I am exhausted.

Illness is strange; it takes you out of time. Like death and birth, only not quite so baldly. My daughter and I have been lost in our own world this week, trapped in a still point, as in a glass bubble. Outside, the world goes on. It is 60 degrees out. Here in the bedroom, it is no time. We’re just waiting for time to start up again, for our routines to resume. It’s tiring and miserable but it’s also very intimate. And I’m proud of how well I’m managing to care for my poor sick little girl. I’m glad of how I’m able to be in this bubble of waiting with her -- sorry I cannot make her well, but grateful for the strength to sit with her in her illness.

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My daughter is finally better. She is once again imperious and impish, laughing and telling stories to herself. I’ve had a migraine for a day and a half, my reward for struggling through her illness with her. This morning I drugged it to death and then went to shul with my son. At shul we did not read the golden calf portion of Ki Tissa -- we’re on a triennial cycle and this year we read all about, I think, the census. Under my breath I read the part about the golden calf to my son. We left not long after. I was glad to have gone to shul; it had been a long time since I’d been to shul on a Saturday morning, I don’t know why exactly. I have just fallen out of the habit.

So I was thinking about the golden calf. The story is, Moses goes up onto Mt. Sinai, looking for all the world like he’s climbing up into the crater of an active volcano, and he stays up there for forty days and forty nights. That’s a pretty long time to be up on a mountain, alone. It’s a pretty long time for a recently enslaved rag-tag band of refugees to cool their heels in a tent city down below. People get bored and anxious. They want something to happen. Nothing is happening. They are at a show, and the opening act has been on, and left, and the main act never comes. Occasionally a roadie rushes across the stage, murmuring into their headset. The beer is getting warm, and the people who used to stand around smoking in this kind of venue are thinking longingly of the alley outside. It’s too loud to talk, even, because the club managers have turned up the really awful music to encourage some kind of desultory dancing activity to make up for the failure of the main act to arrive. You start envisioning them, the band, out in their tour bus or ensconced in some gritty yet decadently comfortable green room in the bowels of the club. You bet they’re allowed to smoke in the green room, and on the bus. They are sprawled in their leather pants, snorting coke and making out with groupies. They’re in no hurry. Why should they rush? The fans will wait. Where the hell else are the fans going to go? Back home? And miss the main act? You’re angry out there in the noisy dark, waiting. Who do those people think they are, anyway? What’s so special about them, that they can make us wait like this, for no visible reason?

Well, dammit, someone says finally, let’s make our own fucking music! We don’t need no stinking ‘main act’. The idea spreads, and the general disgruntlement turns to something else -- to revolt. We’ve got people down here in the audience who know how to play that fancy drum set, and look, here’s an electric guitarist, and this fine lady used to sing a cappella. There’s resentment and nastiness, to be sure, in the swelling demands of the audience, but also excitement, and solidarity, and a heady anticipation. The mob of fans could turn violent, but they are not violent, yet. They are unified around this single idea: that out of the ordinary audience members they will form their own band, that they will stop waiting for the main act, which, like Godot, has failed to arrive. They will take matters into their own hands.

The club manager comes out onto the stage, hands raised, conciliatory. He is so very sorry for the delay, he say, but we must trust that the main act will come out soon. He admits he does not understand the hold-up himself. But he’s booked this act dozens of times and they have always come through. He trusts them. If everyone can just calm down --

No one is going to calm down. Some men down at the front, stinking of bud light, make as if to storm the stage. There’s a lot of fancy equipment there, and the club manager does not want it destroyed. Nor, for that matter, does he want his own face smashed in. What can he do but give in, what can he do but attempt to contain the rising energy, to dissipate it safely? Let’s have some love songs, he says. Let all those who can sing come up on the stage, and a drummer, and a guitarist, and a bass player. Can anyone play a fiddle? he asks. What about saxaphone? Let’s hear some music, while we wait, some gentle songs, something light.

It’s not a terrible idea, really. Some light songs, to calm down the crowd, to pass the time, to channel all that energy. Light songs, like a newborn calf, all wet tongue and velvet nose, struggling to its feet for the first time, staggering a bit, drunk on having been born. Some adorable gamboling, under the spring sun, in the grasses. Harmless, innocent, powerless, and benign. What harm could possibly come of such song, of such imagery? What band will be offended at hearing its audience pass the time with such frivolous music? What God could imagine a newborn calf, leggy and still damp, to be any kind of threat? It’s this or a descent into absolute chaos, thinks the manager of the club. A nice innocent calf, thinks Aaron -- surely God won’t get too exercised about that. Not when the alternative is mayhem.

And so the music starts, smooth and calming, like the stuff they play in the dentist’s office. And so the calf, innocent and powerless, is cast. Everything is under control.

But all that energy hasn’t been dissipated. People are still pissed off, underneath the major key and in the face of the sweetest little velvet nosed calf you ever did see. They are still waiting, dammit. It’s not like any decisions have been made, it’s not like the beer has gotten cold again or the people who want to smoke have had their cigarettes yet and the bathrooms are pretty nasty and they’re all sick of standing, and they still can’t decide if they should stick around waiting (50 bucks, complains someone! To wait in the dark, on this sticky floor! ) or just leave. All those people in the desert, they’re still there in the desert, who knows where, this godforsaken place, who knows why we’re even here or whether we’re just going to die out here or where this Moses guy is taking us or if he’s even coming back, the maniac, he’s probably just dead up there, and the vultures picking his bones.

What the hell are we going to do next?

That kind of fear and anxiety is not dissipated with any old Kumbaya my Lord or any cavorting little baby animals. That kind of fear can turn to chaos, or to the Tea Party, or Hezbollah, or to Fascism. A good leader could turn it to good, maybe, to a strong kind of good leading with a rare kind of love. If you can turn that energy inside out, into a high and loving and miraculous sort of courage -- well, that’s something to be seen. That’s “I have a dream” material, is what that is. But if what you are is a middle manager and a functionary then what you do is paper over it with sentimentality, hoping to buy some time, and when that wears off the sentimentality gets ripped away, like old wall paper, and what’s underneath is pretty dark. That calf is going to the slaughter, after all. Those love songs end in despair, as likely as not. Lovers murder one another, the throat of the calf is slit. All that black energy just gets blacker, and someone’s shirt gets ripped off, and someone gets a bloody nose, and the drums get louder and the singers start howling. It’s a wind whipping through the people, whipping up their fear and their anger and their anxiety, ripping all that innocence and love to shreds.

And by the time the main act comes on stage, their instruments have been smashed to bits. There are puddles of beer, and the air is thick with smoke, and a red-headed girl is passed out on an amp.

By the time Moses comes down from the mountain, that golden calf is all bloodied. The severed head of a real calf is hooked on one of its horns. Several dogs are eating up entrails that are stuck in its tail. The Israelites are all naked, streaked in blood, drunk, hollow-eyed. A baby is whimpering for its mother, who is pinned under some men. Mounds of steaming excrement are piled close to the tents.

Whose fault is this, exactly? Who should we blame? The people, who were left without guidance, after years of hard slavery? Left in the desert, to die -- for all they knew. Abandoned by their leader, the man who had the ear of God, or so he said. It had seemed like he did, it was plausible enough, when Moses was there with them, when he did great things, when all those signs and wonders had happened, when they were led out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. But human memory is short. The Israelites were an anxious lot, and the place they were in -- well, it was an anxious place. The energy of mobs is a fearsome thing.

Should we blame Aaron? Aaron the functionary? Aaron knew about the correct ways to sacrifice things, about the forms and rituals of worship. He did not know how to inspire a people. It was not Aaron who had led them out of Egypt. It was just Aaron, left down below, facing an angry mob, without any guidance from either God or his brother. Left to babysit, no phone number to call in case of emergency. For all Aaron knew, his brother had died up there, and he was stuck with somehow leading these people to somewhere they could settle and call home. The waiting was awful. Perhaps he could stall people, maintain some semblance of order in the camp, while waiting a little bit longer. Give them an innocent project to focus their energies on, something he could leverage later, if he needed to, to assert his own authority to lead. If in the end Moses never came back after all. It was a decent enough plan, for an average-ish managerial type.

Should we blame Moses? Moses went up on the mountain and didn’t come back down for 40 days and 40 nights. Didn’t he worry, any of that time, about what was going on down below? He’d been the only source of stability for those people -- their rock. He was the one who spoke of God to them. He was a wise enough leader -- humble, judicious, and clever. And for over a month, he gave no thought to those down below? Didn’t ask for a furlough to visit his people? Didn’t worry they’d think he was dead? Well, maybe he did think of it, but so what? He was going to ask God, who was dictating to him, and fast, too -- ask God to slow down, to give him a break to go down to his people? Ask God to let him check on his flock, God!? Who surely would know if there were anything wrong down there, at the base of the mountain. Surely God would let him know if he was needed. If God kept him up there, taking dictation, then that must be the right thing to do.

So we’re left with just one party to blame. One character in this story who was in a position to know what was happening, and had the power to stop it. Someone, Someone, who shall remain Nameless.

Are we willing to step forward and blame Hashem for what happened? Are we willing to accuse God? Are we willing, when God gets angry and God’s anger blazes forth, and God says to Moses “I will destroy this stiffnecked people, I will wipe them off the face of the earth and I will give you a new people, a new people who shall be my people, with whom I will make my covenant” -- are we willing to argue with God? Who would be willing to do that?

Moses was, and he did:

Moses pleaded before the Lord, his God, and said: "Why, O Lord, should Your anger be kindled against Your people whom You have brought up from the land of Egypt with great power and with a strong hand? Why should the Egyptians say: 'He brought them out with evil intent to kill them in the mountains and to annihilate them from upon the face of the earth'? Retreat from the heat of Your anger and reconsider the evil intended for Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your very Self, and to whom You said: 'I will multiply your seed like the stars of the heavens, and all this land which I said that I would give to your seed, they shall keep it as their possession forever.' " The Lord then reconsidered the evil He had said He would do to His people. -- Exodus Chapter 32:11 - 14.

The people of the Torah are always arguing with God, and sometimes they win, as Moses did here. “Look,” they say, “you made a promise, you swore an oath, you said you’d guide us, and we screwed up but you’re an honorable God, you should stand by your word.” They remind God of the importance of a good reputation. They ask for more chances and for mercy. Again and again they call God to account. Again and again they turn away God’s wrath, or change God’s mind, or kindle God’s mercy. What sort of God is this, who deigns to argue with humans? Who is swayed not only by sacrifice, but by intellect? Is it any wonder we Jews like to argue, when you look at the models we’re given? Any one of us might be called upon to argue with God!

God did not make the golden calf. But in the end, God had to take responsibility for the world that God made, for the people God saved, for the 40 days and nights they waited down there in the desert, for the calf that they made. There was nothing special about those people, they were no better than anyone else. But God had an idea. God wanted to try an experiment. Could God make an entire people holy? Make a holy society? Not just individuals gifted in holiness, but everyone? Could God make a people to be a light unto the nations, to be a nation of priests? God didn’t know. God figured on giving it a try. God keeps getting mad at the people God’s chosen; they’re not holy at all, they’re just people. Then one or another of the just people will call God to account: You made us, they’ll say, and you bound yourself to us. This is your experiment we’re in, and tell the truth -- it’s not much fun being your lab rats. So give us a break and don’t let us be annihilated. You can’t publish a paper if your data are swallowed up by the earth.

I don’t know, the Golden Calf is supposed to be this big old betrayal. From here it looks sort of inevitable, the way things went down. There’s a Dr. Who episode in which The Doctor, very serious, tells a ragtag bunch of humans that they must be, right now, the very best of the human race. They must be better than they are. Of course they try, and they fail, and The Doctor forgives them. You must do better next time, says The Doctor, for the sake of your children. So throughout our generations forever, we try to do better. And we fail, and God forgives us, and we try, try again.

The Breastplate of Decision: some thoughts on Tetzaveh: Exodus 27:20-30:10

I’ve been working a lot the last couple of weeks, and my daughter is sick. Also, I wrote a lot of stuff about pageantry and priests for what is now last week’s parsha, and then I decided that it wasn’t any good and it didn’t hang together very well even with the joke about John Ashcroft and his Crisco anointing. So I kind of ditched it and then I had nothing.

Then I thought I would talk about how I used to read Tarot cards, and about the Breastpiece of Decision.

Tetzaveh, in case you are too lazy to read the wikipedia entry on it, covers the priestly dress code. ( And some other stuff, including that priests are anointed with high-quality olive oil, and why John Ashcroft chose Crisco instead of olive oil when there’s no shortage of olive oil in this country is quite a mystery to me -- did he want to be tacky and gross? There, see, I fit the John Ashcroft joke in after all.) Included in the uniform of the high priest is an item called the “Breastpiece of Decision”. There’s a note about this in my Chumash. ( I use Etz Hayim, the Chumash put out by the Conservative movement. It was bequeathed to me by my uncle, of blessed memory, as we sat together in the hospital on the day it arrived, sent from home by a friend. “You can have this,” he said. “Thank you,” I said. “I don’t think anyone will be fighting me for it.”). Anyway, page 508, note 30, regarding Exodus 28:30 “Inside the breastpiece of decision you shall place the Urim and Thummim, so that they are over Aaron’s heart when he comes before the Lord. Thus Aaron shall carry the instrument of decision for the Israelites over his heart before the Lord at all times.”

The editorial note about this enigmatic statement says “It is clear from the association with the ‘breastpiece of decision’ and ‘the instrument of decision’ that these two items [ the Urim and Thummim ] constituted a device for determining the will of God in specific matters that were beyond human ability to decide. Although the function of this device is clear, nowhere in the Torah is there a description of it or of the technique employed in its use... It remained in the exclusive possession of the priest and was used only on behalf of the leader of the people in matters of vital national importance.”

This reminds me of something I read in the autobiography of the 14th Dalai Lama. There was in his court a man whose occupation was to channel a spirit to provide guidance to the Dalai Lama in matters of national importance. The spirit would possess the man in a special ceremony, offer guidance, and then depart. It was in fact at the urging of this spirit that the Dalai Lama went into exile when he did, and the route that he and his entourage took over the mountains to India has also been specified, apparently, by this spirit.

Of course the Torah is against divination. My tarot cards are not sanctioned by Halacha. The sacrifices prescribed in the torah were always careful about entrails, because entrails were associated with divination and sorcery, and sorcery was no good. Sorcery was practiced by people who had not been properly anointed. They were not sanctioned by God, those people, with their predictions. The instruments of decision were all on the up-and-up: tools for use in matters of state, by the specially trained and the specially clothed.

It intrigues me, this difference. Of course like all cultures Jewish culture is chockfull of magic and superstition. Well, not your nice post-everything Jewish culture, very focused on the tikkun olam and the social justice and the yiddishkeit and oh, on radical theologies that basically boil down to different approaches to getting us modern Jews to stomach God. We’re not superstitious, us non-dualist god-in-your-body-ist mindfulness ground-of-being-ist Jews. We’re practical, deep-breathing, focusing-on-the-moment kinds of Jews. We accept our inability to predict the future, it doesn’t occur to us to ask either God or Tarot cards to help us decide anything. We don’t hike over mountains because a spirit said the Chinese were coming. We ask our LinkedIn networks, or perhaps we ask twitter. The lazyweb is our breastpiece of decision, or perhaps the coin flipping app on our phones.

Divination was proscribed because it was dangerous to presume we knew what came next, dangerous to usurp one of God’s powers as our own. Who needs to proscribe such things these days, when clearly the future is an indeterminate mess?

Anyway, I used to read my tarot cards all the time, whenever I had a decision to make, or felt at a loss of some sort, or simply when I wanted to know what would come next. I never thought there was either a spiritual power or a force behind the reading. You draw some cards, they give you themes, and then you have to make a story from the themes. You make the story up as you go. It helps you decide things, or perhaps it just helps you make things happen. The story you make up sinks into you. It becomes a part of you. Your subconscious mind fixes on it, devotes processing cycles to it, grows dendrites for it. You give it reality in your brain, and your brain works to make it reality in life. That’s all very neuropsychiatric: that stuff really does happen. When we make things real in our minds, then our minds devote more effort to making things real. So the cards are powerful for entirely materialist reasons.

A spirit who sends you over mountains, though, that’s something else.

How do we make decisions when we do not have enough information to make decisions? Donald Rumsfeld did have a point, we do live in a world of unknown unknowns. Nevertheless, we must leap. And most of the time, we must not leap with weak knees and doubt on our faces. We must leap strongly, like surefooted goats in the mountains. And yet, how?

It is not easy to leap strongly based on the recommendations of the lazyweb. It is not easy to trust in decisions arrived at via twitter. We can read all the medical literature, and still shoot the moon for that heart/bone marrow transplant. We can look at the data and question ourselves every night when we swallow our meds. Sometimes it wouldn’t be so bad to have a breastpiece of decision, would it? “We shall do this, say the Thummim and Urim. This is God’s will.” We would leap into the unknown, go into exile, swallow our meds, take the new job -- surefooted and confident that whatever came next, we had God at our sides.

Here is G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy:

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

There is something in that quote that feels real and true to me, and then I think of George W. Bush, deciding with his gut, going full speed ahead straight for the iceberg. But it was worse than that, really, for Bush invented the iceberg and then slammed full speed ahead into 30 million people. Given that, it’s not fair to blame Bush on Mr. Chesterton.

What Mr. Chesterton says, what he means, is that what God provides is a direction to go in, a relationship that guides you there, a confidence that there really is something right and true and good in the world, that we humans can, albeit poorly, access it, that at the very bottom of reality there is sense and goodness and order, and that we, mere mortals, have been offered a chance to participate in that. That whatever we do, wherever we go wrong, the offer stands firm. The center holds. We leap strong, breathe deep, suck the marrow out of life. It’s a beautiful vision. Can you feel it? Can you imagine what that is like, that center actually holding? The confidence and peace in it. That’s God, that center. Grab hold any way you can.