Shelach Lecha 5771
Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas
A good friend once told me that the best way of being a tourist in a new place is by getting lost. He’s right. The first day I moved to New York City, I put on my headphones, filled my water bottle and headed south on Broadway. As I walked, I was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of cars, people, and buildings. With music moving in my head, I cast my eyes upward at the canyon formed by the walls of so many tall buildings. Soon enough, I got lost.
Almost by definition, being lost means you are a tourist. The difference between being a native and a visitor is that natives are of a place, they know where to go, when to go, and who to talk to. The place where they live shapes them. This lesson is one that I find relevant in this week’s Torah portion, Shelach Lecha. Moses sends twelve spies to the Land latur et ha-aretz (Numbers 13:16), to literally tour the land, to scout it out. The questions the Israelites ask sound a bit touristy: “What kind of country is it? Are the people nice? Are the towns big? How’s the food?” And my favorite: “Don’t forget to bring me back something.” (Numbers 13:18-20.) These questions are not the kind of questions a native of the Land would ask. They are the questions of outsiders – tourists.
When I finally got home after my hours long walk around New York, I felt transformed. I didn’t feel lost anymore because I learned which streets go in which direction, what the average price of a bagel and coffee is, and other invaluable things that oriented me to becoming a “New Yorker” (As if I could ever really be one.) I started a process of moving beyond being a tourist to being a native, being of a place.
So twelve tourists went to the Land, but only ten tourists returned. For the ten who came home and reported back to Moses, they explained that the Land has great food, but is filled with ferocious people; a great place to visit, perhaps, but not live. For the two who came back different, Joshua and Caleb, something about the Land transformed them. They felt an immediate connection. After forty days of getting lost, they found their home in the Land promised by the Holy One. Caleb explains to the people, “we will elevate ourselves and take the inheritance of it, for chol-yachol nuchal lah, literally for our entire capacity is for it [meaning this place.] (Numbers 13:30) Our capacity for life is tied to this place, this land. We are not outsiders, tourists, but insiders, inheritors. The key to understanding the difference between being a tourist and a native is the sense of immediate elevation a place brings to you. If the Land shapes you, makes you deeper, raises your personal expectations, it’s yours, you are home.
This week our VBS community sends its own fifty scouts to Israel with Rabbi Hoffman. We wish them only the safest and most meaningful journey. But this is no journey of tourists. While they move about the country, taste its foods and see its sites, I know that something deeper is at play. If you let the Land elevate you, you become elevated. If you let the history of our people shape you, you become shaped. If you take note of every moment, you will remember them forever. Because whenever you go to Israel, our Land, you can elevate yourself from being a tourist to being a native. You are home.
Rabbi Hoffman will be sharing the stories of our community’s travels while he is in Israel. Stay tuned to this blog to hear of the amazing transformations our members feel when the report back to us how wonderful a place Israel truly is.
To those who are traveling this Sunday, we say B’tzetchem L’shalom. Go in peace. Oh, and bring us back something nice.
Shabbat Shalom.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Shabbat Shalom--June 3-4, 2011
Nasso-When Torah Must be Changed
Rabbi Paul Steinberg
The Torah doesn’t always offer us such wonderful models of the gender roles, nor does it offer many model relationships between men and women. Perhaps, however, today’s society doesn’t really, either. The Torah describes a patriarchal society where men “own” their wives. I just can’t relate to that. But I am also struggling to relate to the gender divisions of men and women today, particularly with men and women in their 20’s and 30’s.
Let’s start with today and work our way back to looking at the Torah.
When teenage boys watch movies today, they see a cadre of common male role models, including caricatures often played by Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Will Ferrel, and Jonah Hill. The reason teenage boys love watching them is because these grown men are actually just like them. The most important things to these guys are hanging with their buddies, beer, playing Halo on PlayStation, action flicks, and their subscription to Maxim Magazine. This Sandler-Rogen type is between 21-35 years old, they’re unmarried, and are still figuring out their careers. They may not be necessarily lazy or unintelligent, they’re just in no rush to grow up.
For girls, the type of women to watch for are... well, picture Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha from Sex and the City. These are upwardly mobile, urban professionals, and in the case of Sex and the City, they boast of a columnist, a Harvard law school graduated lawyer, a director of an art gallery, and an independent PR executive. This is likely to be the most educated and successful group of women ever portrayed! Like their male counterparts, this female demographic is also generally unmarried, but their “biological clocks” are ticking. While the men can wait until their 40’s to marry and have kids, women can’t.
In her book, Manning Up, Kay Mymowitz identifies this new 21st century demographic as “pre-adults.” She specifically calls the men “child-men.” The existence of pre-adults for Mymowitz is a result of economics. Although she believes there are differences between men and women, this emerging life stage is not about hormones or brain chemistry. She explains that this is a manifestation of what economists call the “knowledge economy” wherein people go to university more, they move from city to city more, and they marry later. The average age of marriage in 1950 for men was 22.8 and for women 20.3, compared with 28.4 for men and 26.5 for women today (American Jews tend to marry even later than the national average). Moreover, the job market has created new jobs that are attractive to women at least as much as men in areas including technology, public relations and marketing, and health and fitness.
Now, contrasting the complexity and challenge of the foregoing discussion on family, marriage, and career as it pertains to gender here in America in the 21st century, it is utterly inane and practically inconceivable to seriously consider and regard the selection from this week’s Torah portion, which discusses the woman accused of infidelity to her husband (Num. 5:11-31). The ritual of the sotah (literally “deviant woman”) describes a jealous husband who accuses his wife of adultery. He takes her to the local priest where she is stripped and forced to drink a bitter potion. Along with incantations and sacrifices, the priest declares that if she is guilty, a spell will enter her body, “causing the belly to distend and the thigh to sag” (Num. 5:22). If she is innocent, she will go free.
The Rabbis of the Mishnah extrapolate and detail this procedure, leading to a strange justification for women to study Torah: “Ben Azzai infers that it is a man’s duty to teach his daughter Torah so that if she must drink [the sotah waters because she is an accused adulterer] she should know that merit will keep her punishment on hold.” (Mishnah, Sotah 3:4). Of all of the reasons to teach my three daughters Torah, I must confess that concern over any of them becoming a sotah and enduring this rite is not among them.
The Mishnah (Sotah 3:4) continues:
Rabbi Eliezer says: “If any man teaches his daughter Torah it is as though he taught her lewdness [tiflot].” Rabbi Yehoshua says: “A woman prefers one measure of lewdness to nine measures of chastity” [i.e., a wife would prefer more sex and less income over more income and less sex].
Interestingly, this Rabbinic stream of consciousness leads to the majority acceptance of Rabbi Eliezer’s position, namely that it is prohibited to teach girls Torah on the basis of illicit sexual indiscretion. “Torah” here was later interpreted as Talmud (specifically the Gemara), which continues to remain prohibited to girls for study in many Jewish circles.
As I study this source and I consider the issues Mymowitz raises about the real gender, family, and demographic concerns facing us in the 21st century, I cannot help but to think that the Rabbis were simply living in a different world. What the Rabbis express in Jewish law and what they believed to be the will of God concerning men and women is simply not what I believe or could accept. This may have been an acceptable line of thinking for our Rabbis then, but it’s wrong and unhelpful for us today.
Despite the dissonance between the contemporary study of family and gender and the concept of gender and relationships exemplified in the Torah and Mishnah, I still maintain that the study of Torah, especially study for its own sake, is among the highest spiritual practices available. I also maintain that no text is off limits, including this one about the sotah ritual. We must not be blind, however, to the fact that people authored our sacred texts from a particular time and place. Those who wrote these and other texts that are so obviously irrelevant today were undoubtedly wise. Much of what they taught is universally and eternally true, and… they also got a few things wrong.
Study of sacred texts is intended to be mind-opening, so that when we look at a text and sincerely question it, we see that the truth, which is universal and eternal, is held within those manifold questions that the texts raise. That is to say, the sotah text – no matter how alien it appears at first glance – is really asking deep questions about the relationship between husbands and wives: How do we express the pain of jealousy? How do we engage our spouses and community when we suspect them of adultery? What kind of strain does this put on a family or community and how do we collectively reconcile and resolve it? The sotah text also asks questions of the relationship between parents, children, and gender differences: Should parents have different academic or professional expectations for sons and daughters? How do parents themselves acquiesce to the cultural gender stereotypes for their own children? Should boys and girls be reared differently and to what ends?
The truth is that Mymowitz is asking some of these same questions regarding gender and family. She, like the ancient texts, is merely viewing these questions from her own time and place and with the cultural assumptions and tools accessible to her, namely the media and scientific method. She adds her own conceptions to the layers upon layers of scholars that have asked if there should be gender roles and if so what they should be for a healthy society. Mymowitz proves that answers to the same questions will change for each generation, just as it has with regard to women in the professional world. And frankly, sometimes, the answer to such questions simply must change; if the Torah is to remain relevant, there are times when a new Torah must heal the old Torah. In the end, however, Judaism espouses that the truth is ultimately in the asking, questioning assumptions, comparing and contrasting, analyzing, and asking again: “Turn it, turn it for everything is in it” (Mishnah, Avot 5:22).
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Paul Steinberg
The Torah doesn’t always offer us such wonderful models of the gender roles, nor does it offer many model relationships between men and women. Perhaps, however, today’s society doesn’t really, either. The Torah describes a patriarchal society where men “own” their wives. I just can’t relate to that. But I am also struggling to relate to the gender divisions of men and women today, particularly with men and women in their 20’s and 30’s.
Let’s start with today and work our way back to looking at the Torah.
When teenage boys watch movies today, they see a cadre of common male role models, including caricatures often played by Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Will Ferrel, and Jonah Hill. The reason teenage boys love watching them is because these grown men are actually just like them. The most important things to these guys are hanging with their buddies, beer, playing Halo on PlayStation, action flicks, and their subscription to Maxim Magazine. This Sandler-Rogen type is between 21-35 years old, they’re unmarried, and are still figuring out their careers. They may not be necessarily lazy or unintelligent, they’re just in no rush to grow up.
For girls, the type of women to watch for are... well, picture Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha from Sex and the City. These are upwardly mobile, urban professionals, and in the case of Sex and the City, they boast of a columnist, a Harvard law school graduated lawyer, a director of an art gallery, and an independent PR executive. This is likely to be the most educated and successful group of women ever portrayed! Like their male counterparts, this female demographic is also generally unmarried, but their “biological clocks” are ticking. While the men can wait until their 40’s to marry and have kids, women can’t.
In her book, Manning Up, Kay Mymowitz identifies this new 21st century demographic as “pre-adults.” She specifically calls the men “child-men.” The existence of pre-adults for Mymowitz is a result of economics. Although she believes there are differences between men and women, this emerging life stage is not about hormones or brain chemistry. She explains that this is a manifestation of what economists call the “knowledge economy” wherein people go to university more, they move from city to city more, and they marry later. The average age of marriage in 1950 for men was 22.8 and for women 20.3, compared with 28.4 for men and 26.5 for women today (American Jews tend to marry even later than the national average). Moreover, the job market has created new jobs that are attractive to women at least as much as men in areas including technology, public relations and marketing, and health and fitness.
Now, contrasting the complexity and challenge of the foregoing discussion on family, marriage, and career as it pertains to gender here in America in the 21st century, it is utterly inane and practically inconceivable to seriously consider and regard the selection from this week’s Torah portion, which discusses the woman accused of infidelity to her husband (Num. 5:11-31). The ritual of the sotah (literally “deviant woman”) describes a jealous husband who accuses his wife of adultery. He takes her to the local priest where she is stripped and forced to drink a bitter potion. Along with incantations and sacrifices, the priest declares that if she is guilty, a spell will enter her body, “causing the belly to distend and the thigh to sag” (Num. 5:22). If she is innocent, she will go free.
The Rabbis of the Mishnah extrapolate and detail this procedure, leading to a strange justification for women to study Torah: “Ben Azzai infers that it is a man’s duty to teach his daughter Torah so that if she must drink [the sotah waters because she is an accused adulterer] she should know that merit will keep her punishment on hold.” (Mishnah, Sotah 3:4). Of all of the reasons to teach my three daughters Torah, I must confess that concern over any of them becoming a sotah and enduring this rite is not among them.
The Mishnah (Sotah 3:4) continues:
Rabbi Eliezer says: “If any man teaches his daughter Torah it is as though he taught her lewdness [tiflot].” Rabbi Yehoshua says: “A woman prefers one measure of lewdness to nine measures of chastity” [i.e., a wife would prefer more sex and less income over more income and less sex].
Interestingly, this Rabbinic stream of consciousness leads to the majority acceptance of Rabbi Eliezer’s position, namely that it is prohibited to teach girls Torah on the basis of illicit sexual indiscretion. “Torah” here was later interpreted as Talmud (specifically the Gemara), which continues to remain prohibited to girls for study in many Jewish circles.
As I study this source and I consider the issues Mymowitz raises about the real gender, family, and demographic concerns facing us in the 21st century, I cannot help but to think that the Rabbis were simply living in a different world. What the Rabbis express in Jewish law and what they believed to be the will of God concerning men and women is simply not what I believe or could accept. This may have been an acceptable line of thinking for our Rabbis then, but it’s wrong and unhelpful for us today.
Despite the dissonance between the contemporary study of family and gender and the concept of gender and relationships exemplified in the Torah and Mishnah, I still maintain that the study of Torah, especially study for its own sake, is among the highest spiritual practices available. I also maintain that no text is off limits, including this one about the sotah ritual. We must not be blind, however, to the fact that people authored our sacred texts from a particular time and place. Those who wrote these and other texts that are so obviously irrelevant today were undoubtedly wise. Much of what they taught is universally and eternally true, and… they also got a few things wrong.
Study of sacred texts is intended to be mind-opening, so that when we look at a text and sincerely question it, we see that the truth, which is universal and eternal, is held within those manifold questions that the texts raise. That is to say, the sotah text – no matter how alien it appears at first glance – is really asking deep questions about the relationship between husbands and wives: How do we express the pain of jealousy? How do we engage our spouses and community when we suspect them of adultery? What kind of strain does this put on a family or community and how do we collectively reconcile and resolve it? The sotah text also asks questions of the relationship between parents, children, and gender differences: Should parents have different academic or professional expectations for sons and daughters? How do parents themselves acquiesce to the cultural gender stereotypes for their own children? Should boys and girls be reared differently and to what ends?
The truth is that Mymowitz is asking some of these same questions regarding gender and family. She, like the ancient texts, is merely viewing these questions from her own time and place and with the cultural assumptions and tools accessible to her, namely the media and scientific method. She adds her own conceptions to the layers upon layers of scholars that have asked if there should be gender roles and if so what they should be for a healthy society. Mymowitz proves that answers to the same questions will change for each generation, just as it has with regard to women in the professional world. And frankly, sometimes, the answer to such questions simply must change; if the Torah is to remain relevant, there are times when a new Torah must heal the old Torah. In the end, however, Judaism espouses that the truth is ultimately in the asking, questioning assumptions, comparing and contrasting, analyzing, and asking again: “Turn it, turn it for everything is in it” (Mishnah, Avot 5:22).
Shabbat Shalom
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Shabbat Shalom--May 27-28, 2011
B'midbar--The Tenth Jew
Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
I stand at the threshold of the synagogue, waiting for the tenth Jew, so I can recite the Kaddish for my mother. We wait together — nine of us — looking for the tenth, so we can chant and respond to the reader. If we fail to find a tenth, we will have to disband, return to our home, unprayed. We wait for the tenth person, as our people has waited for the messianic Redeemer.
How dependent we are on each other: my “Amen” leading on the reader’s benediction, the sanctification of God’s name waiting for “the yehay shmay rabbah” of the minyan.
Without a minyan, we are silenced. The Sh’ma and its attendant benedictions, the prescribed portions of the Torah and prophets, the priestly benedictions, and the seven benedictions over the newly wed, are all left abandoned by the absence of the tenth person. We need a minyan to elevate the insulated self.
I need you. Without you, we each return to our privatized lives, our dreams unsung, our petitions muted.
Why “ten” to make up a minyan? Why was “ten” the critical number chosen by the tradition as the nucleus of the community? Surely the sages were wise enough to choose a smaller number to satisfy the quorum. They could have chosen “five” for a minyan, after the number of the five books of the Torah. Or, they could have chosen “seven” after the seven days of Creation.
But the sages chose “ten” as the minimum number for the minyan because of the episode recorded in the fourth book of the Bible (Numbers 14:27). Here is told a story of twelve scouts chosen to spy out the land of Israel, to judge whether this wandering people escaped from bondage, stranded in the desert, had the heart and the faith and the courage to enter the promised land and to create there a place of its own, where they could realize the yearnings of liberty they dreamt of in the dungeons of Pharoah.
But ten of the twelve scouts return from spying the land and came with melancholy heart, defeated in spirit and small in their own eyes like grasshoppers. And so they appeared in the eyes of the others. Their defeatism imperiled the hopes of Israel.
Moses turned to the ten and addressed them as “a wicked edah.” “Edah” is the Hebrew term for “community” or “congregation,” and it is used to apply to the people for the first time in the Bible.
What lesson can we learn from this unflattering appellation, “wicked congregation” ? Perhaps to teach us that a congregation is not made up only of fully righteous, saintly, angelic persons, perfect flawless beings. But a congregation is a community that knows its members can become better, softer, wiser, kinder. Together, a congregation can experience the embrace of belonging, the transcendence of belief, and the moral behavior that is refined through belonging.
We need each other. We depend on each other. Without the tenth person, the soaring song of prayer turns into a whimpering whisper; the Sh’ma is stifled, the Kaddish is orphaned.
I need you to enlarge the image of myself. I need you to transmit ethical wisdom to my family, to my friends, to myself. I need you because in your absence, I die a little. With you, I can open my lips and raise my voice on earth so that it may reach the heavens. With you, I live differently.
You are the tenth link in the grand chain of Jewish being … and so am I.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
I stand at the threshold of the synagogue, waiting for the tenth Jew, so I can recite the Kaddish for my mother. We wait together — nine of us — looking for the tenth, so we can chant and respond to the reader. If we fail to find a tenth, we will have to disband, return to our home, unprayed. We wait for the tenth person, as our people has waited for the messianic Redeemer.
How dependent we are on each other: my “Amen” leading on the reader’s benediction, the sanctification of God’s name waiting for “the yehay shmay rabbah” of the minyan.
Without a minyan, we are silenced. The Sh’ma and its attendant benedictions, the prescribed portions of the Torah and prophets, the priestly benedictions, and the seven benedictions over the newly wed, are all left abandoned by the absence of the tenth person. We need a minyan to elevate the insulated self.
I need you. Without you, we each return to our privatized lives, our dreams unsung, our petitions muted.
Why “ten” to make up a minyan? Why was “ten” the critical number chosen by the tradition as the nucleus of the community? Surely the sages were wise enough to choose a smaller number to satisfy the quorum. They could have chosen “five” for a minyan, after the number of the five books of the Torah. Or, they could have chosen “seven” after the seven days of Creation.
But the sages chose “ten” as the minimum number for the minyan because of the episode recorded in the fourth book of the Bible (Numbers 14:27). Here is told a story of twelve scouts chosen to spy out the land of Israel, to judge whether this wandering people escaped from bondage, stranded in the desert, had the heart and the faith and the courage to enter the promised land and to create there a place of its own, where they could realize the yearnings of liberty they dreamt of in the dungeons of Pharoah.
But ten of the twelve scouts return from spying the land and came with melancholy heart, defeated in spirit and small in their own eyes like grasshoppers. And so they appeared in the eyes of the others. Their defeatism imperiled the hopes of Israel.
Moses turned to the ten and addressed them as “a wicked edah.” “Edah” is the Hebrew term for “community” or “congregation,” and it is used to apply to the people for the first time in the Bible.
What lesson can we learn from this unflattering appellation, “wicked congregation” ? Perhaps to teach us that a congregation is not made up only of fully righteous, saintly, angelic persons, perfect flawless beings. But a congregation is a community that knows its members can become better, softer, wiser, kinder. Together, a congregation can experience the embrace of belonging, the transcendence of belief, and the moral behavior that is refined through belonging.
We need each other. We depend on each other. Without the tenth person, the soaring song of prayer turns into a whimpering whisper; the Sh’ma is stifled, the Kaddish is orphaned.
I need you to enlarge the image of myself. I need you to transmit ethical wisdom to my family, to my friends, to myself. I need you because in your absence, I die a little. With you, I can open my lips and raise my voice on earth so that it may reach the heavens. With you, I live differently.
You are the tenth link in the grand chain of Jewish being … and so am I.
Shabbat Shalom
Friday, May 20, 2011
Shabbat Shalom--May 20-21, 2011
B’chukotai
Cantor Herschel Fox
In this very challenging portion of the week, God makes a very powerful and controversial statement:
“If you walk in My statutes, and keep My commandments and do them, then I will give your rains in their season and the land shall yield her produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit…”
The question naturally arises: And what if we don’t keep God’s commandments? God issues a prophetic warning with the “Tochacha,” a series of “penalties and horrors” (as J.H. Hertz calls them) that would befall the sinful people. These are arranged in a series of groups of increasing severity: sickness and defeat, famine, wild beasts, siege, and exile.
When I was young and studied B’chukotai, truthfully I felt that this was unfair. However, as I got older, I agreed with a Torah commentator who wrote, “Understand that God does not punish for punishment’s sake; He wants to get our attention so that we will introspect, recognize our errors and correct our ways. God does not wish to destroy us, and will never annul His covenant with us.
This is the Almighty’s guarantee to the Jewish people: “I will not grow so disgusted with them nor so tired of them that I would destroy them and break my covenant with them, since I am the Lord their God” (Deut. 26:44-45). He wants to prevent us from becoming so assimilated that we disappear as a nation.
In my opinion, had the Jews not had Torah principles as a blueprint for their lives we would not have existed in exile for nearly 2,000 years till 1948 – the creation of Israel as a sovereign nation.
Interestingly, in the sixth verse of B’chukotai, one of the great promises God makes is “V’natati shalom ba’aretz” —“And I will give peace in the land.” As a people, the Jewish people have constantly searched, dreamed and wanted peace.
Rabbi Zelig Pliskin — reflecting on the great commentator Rashi’s quote, “If there is no peace, there is nothing” — wrote the following:
“There are many people who would really feel satisfied with what they themselves already have. However, because they see that others have more, they feel envious of those people. They actually feel pain when they see that someone else has what they do not.
“When a person feels sincere love for someone else, he is not envious of that person. It does not bother him if that person has more than him. Therefore, the only way for people to really experience a total blessing with what the Almighty has given them is for there to be true peace amongst people. This is the peace in which people feel love for one another and are happy for their good fortunes.
“The only way you will be able to enjoy what you have is to master the attitude of feeling good for the good fortune of others. Envy prevents you from living life to its fullest. The more joy you feel for others, the better your own quality of life.”
I wish you “Shabbat Shalom” — A Shabbat of peace.
Cantor Herschel Fox
In this very challenging portion of the week, God makes a very powerful and controversial statement:
“If you walk in My statutes, and keep My commandments and do them, then I will give your rains in their season and the land shall yield her produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit…”
The question naturally arises: And what if we don’t keep God’s commandments? God issues a prophetic warning with the “Tochacha,” a series of “penalties and horrors” (as J.H. Hertz calls them) that would befall the sinful people. These are arranged in a series of groups of increasing severity: sickness and defeat, famine, wild beasts, siege, and exile.
When I was young and studied B’chukotai, truthfully I felt that this was unfair. However, as I got older, I agreed with a Torah commentator who wrote, “Understand that God does not punish for punishment’s sake; He wants to get our attention so that we will introspect, recognize our errors and correct our ways. God does not wish to destroy us, and will never annul His covenant with us.
This is the Almighty’s guarantee to the Jewish people: “I will not grow so disgusted with them nor so tired of them that I would destroy them and break my covenant with them, since I am the Lord their God” (Deut. 26:44-45). He wants to prevent us from becoming so assimilated that we disappear as a nation.
In my opinion, had the Jews not had Torah principles as a blueprint for their lives we would not have existed in exile for nearly 2,000 years till 1948 – the creation of Israel as a sovereign nation.
Interestingly, in the sixth verse of B’chukotai, one of the great promises God makes is “V’natati shalom ba’aretz” —“And I will give peace in the land.” As a people, the Jewish people have constantly searched, dreamed and wanted peace.
Rabbi Zelig Pliskin — reflecting on the great commentator Rashi’s quote, “If there is no peace, there is nothing” — wrote the following:
“There are many people who would really feel satisfied with what they themselves already have. However, because they see that others have more, they feel envious of those people. They actually feel pain when they see that someone else has what they do not.
“When a person feels sincere love for someone else, he is not envious of that person. It does not bother him if that person has more than him. Therefore, the only way for people to really experience a total blessing with what the Almighty has given them is for there to be true peace amongst people. This is the peace in which people feel love for one another and are happy for their good fortunes.
“The only way you will be able to enjoy what you have is to master the attitude of feeling good for the good fortune of others. Envy prevents you from living life to its fullest. The more joy you feel for others, the better your own quality of life.”
I wish you “Shabbat Shalom” — A Shabbat of peace.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Shabbat Shalom -- May 6-7, 2011
EMOR
Rabbi Ed Feinstein
The great Rabbi of sixteenth century Prague, Rabbi Yehuda Loew, received word of a coming a blood libel, an attack on his community. So he prayed for divine help. In a dream, he saw ten Hebrew words in alphabetical order: Create a Golem of Clay, Destroy Those Tearing Israel’s Heart.
After seven days of fasting and praying, he took his son-in-law and his disciple at midnight and went to the banks of the river, Moldau. Out of river clay, he fashioned a man, and under the creature’s tongue, he placed a slip of paper inscribed with the secret, unutterable name of God. On the creature’s forehead, Rabbi Yehuda wrote, Emet -Truth. They circled the creature seven times, reciting sacred incantations. The creature came alive. Rabbi Yehuda commanded, “Stand,” and the creature stood. They dressed him in servant’s clothes and brought him home. As three they had come; as four they returned. Thus was the Golem born.
The Golem lived in the Rabbi’s house. Strong as ten men, invulnerable, able to turn himself invisible, he repeatedly saved the community from those who threatened the Jews. But the Rabbi worried that someone would misuse the Golem’s powers. Despite his warnings, members of the household sent the Golem on trivial errands. Once they sent him to the river to bring water. But they did not know how to stop him. Soon all were in danger of perishing in a flood. Only the Rabbi’s timely arrival saved them from drowning.
Fearing a calamity, the Rabbi brought the Golem to the synagogue attic, and commanded him to lie among the old tallisim and prayerbooks. The Rabbi removed the slip of paper from the Golem’s mouth, and erased the first letter on his forehead, changing Eme-, Truth, to Met- Dead. And the Golem turned back into lifeless clay.
The Golem is said to rest to this day in the attic of Prague’s ancient synagogue.
In fact, he lives. He lives among us here in America.
Jewish discourse is awash in harsh anger especially when it comes to the future of the Jewish state. There are those who say that the left forsakes their Jewish heritage to accommodate the will of an unreliable partner. They label the left as traitors to the Jewish people and Israel. There are those who say that the right forsakes their Jewish values like compassion for the sake of an old narrative of victimhood. They label the right as traitors to sacred morality.
We can be a self-righteous and angry people. For sixty-five years, we have suffered a severe case of post-traumatic stress. But now, a half-century late, our rage is finally coming out. Like the Golem, rage is a gift of God intended to protect us. Rage gives us strength to defeat an enemy. But like the Golem, rage has no discretion. It attacks everything. It doesn’t know how to stop. Without an external foe, our rage is displaced -- directed internally; not against them, but against our own. It stands behind a banner of Emet-Truth. It speaks in the Name of God. And it will surely drown us.
The Lord said to Moses: “Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them: None [of you] shall defile himself for any [dead] person among his people.” (Leviticus 21:1-2) This week’s Torah portion begins with this puzzling instruction: We would expect the opposite. When there is a death in the community, the Rabbi is among the first we call for help. Why were priests not permitted to attend to the dead? The Ishbitzer Rebbe answered: In the presence of death, one is filled with rage and bitterness. The priest is Oved Hashem, the servant of God, the embodiment of God’s love and care. One so charged cannot carry out his calling with a heart full of anger. Rage and bitterness disqualify him. Only one free of anger may lead and teach the Jewish people.
In the imagination of the Talmud, God prays each morning. And what, the Talmud asks, does God pray? “May it be My will that My love may suppress My anger, and that My love may prevail over My [other] attributes, so that I may deal lovingly with My children.” So may it be for us.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Ed Feinstein
The great Rabbi of sixteenth century Prague, Rabbi Yehuda Loew, received word of a coming a blood libel, an attack on his community. So he prayed for divine help. In a dream, he saw ten Hebrew words in alphabetical order: Create a Golem of Clay, Destroy Those Tearing Israel’s Heart.
After seven days of fasting and praying, he took his son-in-law and his disciple at midnight and went to the banks of the river, Moldau. Out of river clay, he fashioned a man, and under the creature’s tongue, he placed a slip of paper inscribed with the secret, unutterable name of God. On the creature’s forehead, Rabbi Yehuda wrote, Emet -Truth. They circled the creature seven times, reciting sacred incantations. The creature came alive. Rabbi Yehuda commanded, “Stand,” and the creature stood. They dressed him in servant’s clothes and brought him home. As three they had come; as four they returned. Thus was the Golem born.
The Golem lived in the Rabbi’s house. Strong as ten men, invulnerable, able to turn himself invisible, he repeatedly saved the community from those who threatened the Jews. But the Rabbi worried that someone would misuse the Golem’s powers. Despite his warnings, members of the household sent the Golem on trivial errands. Once they sent him to the river to bring water. But they did not know how to stop him. Soon all were in danger of perishing in a flood. Only the Rabbi’s timely arrival saved them from drowning.
Fearing a calamity, the Rabbi brought the Golem to the synagogue attic, and commanded him to lie among the old tallisim and prayerbooks. The Rabbi removed the slip of paper from the Golem’s mouth, and erased the first letter on his forehead, changing Eme-, Truth, to Met- Dead. And the Golem turned back into lifeless clay.
The Golem is said to rest to this day in the attic of Prague’s ancient synagogue.
In fact, he lives. He lives among us here in America.
Jewish discourse is awash in harsh anger especially when it comes to the future of the Jewish state. There are those who say that the left forsakes their Jewish heritage to accommodate the will of an unreliable partner. They label the left as traitors to the Jewish people and Israel. There are those who say that the right forsakes their Jewish values like compassion for the sake of an old narrative of victimhood. They label the right as traitors to sacred morality.
We can be a self-righteous and angry people. For sixty-five years, we have suffered a severe case of post-traumatic stress. But now, a half-century late, our rage is finally coming out. Like the Golem, rage is a gift of God intended to protect us. Rage gives us strength to defeat an enemy. But like the Golem, rage has no discretion. It attacks everything. It doesn’t know how to stop. Without an external foe, our rage is displaced -- directed internally; not against them, but against our own. It stands behind a banner of Emet-Truth. It speaks in the Name of God. And it will surely drown us.
The Lord said to Moses: “Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them: None [of you] shall defile himself for any [dead] person among his people.” (Leviticus 21:1-2) This week’s Torah portion begins with this puzzling instruction: We would expect the opposite. When there is a death in the community, the Rabbi is among the first we call for help. Why were priests not permitted to attend to the dead? The Ishbitzer Rebbe answered: In the presence of death, one is filled with rage and bitterness. The priest is Oved Hashem, the servant of God, the embodiment of God’s love and care. One so charged cannot carry out his calling with a heart full of anger. Rage and bitterness disqualify him. Only one free of anger may lead and teach the Jewish people.
In the imagination of the Talmud, God prays each morning. And what, the Talmud asks, does God pray? “May it be My will that My love may suppress My anger, and that My love may prevail over My [other] attributes, so that I may deal lovingly with My children.” So may it be for us.
Shabbat Shalom
Friday, April 22, 2011
Shabbat Hol HaMoed Pesah 5771--April 23-24, 2011
BIBILICAL LIBERTY
Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas
Freedom! Every Passover for thousands of years Jews have gathered around dining room tables, in synagogue ballrooms, in ghetto basements, and in frontline bunkers to celebrate our liberation from Egypt. From what I remember, the Passover seder integrates the international Jewish community – it is practiced by more Jews than any other mitzvah. But what is this liberty that we speak of? When we raise our wine glasses and toast to freedom, what exactly are we praising God for?
There are two great narratives of liberty that have engaged in a kind of philosophical wrestling match with each other over the course of our people’s long history and our nation’s shorter one. The first, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin understands it, is called, “negative liberty.” Simply put, negative liberty is freedom from interference. As Berlin writes, “The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, and from enslavement by others.” The second idea of liberty is called “positive liberty.” It is the freedom to grow and prosper, find fulfillment, and a flourishing life. On the face of it, freedom from interference and freedom to prosper might not seem so far apart. But when given over to communal structures and how we decide to shape our community, negative liberty and positive liberty lead us in very different directions.
Negative liberty gives energy to the idea that each one of us carries certain natural rights that must not be impugned by others. Negative liberty originates inside each one of us. Thoughts cannot be compelled, character cannot be minted. Even if we are enslaved to others' political will, it is the liberty of the mind that is freedom’s beginning. Biblically, we find root of this idea in the Exodus story. After 400 years of oppression, the Israelite slaves first freed their minds and looked to wider horizons of human living. Then they were able to finally see the disconnect between the way they lived as slaves and the way they could live as free people. The groaning was heard by God, who took note of this primal call for freedom and reached out the God’s mighty hand to begin the Exodus.
Beyond the machinations of the mind, it is in our acts of will in which negative liberty accrues true force and celebration. “Remember this day, on which you went free from Egypt, the house of bondage, how the LORD freed you from it with a mighty hand...You go free on this day, in the month of Aviv.” (Exodus 13:5) In the opening moments of liberation, the Israelites understood freedom in its rawest form – as freedom from oppression. After the Exodus, negative liberty normalizes in as value in biblical law. For example, debtors cannot be stripped of the shirts off their backs, and each one of us has an inalienable right to food and clothing.
Given its head, however, negative liberty can affirm too strongly the idea of rugged individualism. “Don’t tread on me” can easily become “don’t bother me.” An understanding of this sort of libertarianism leads us precisely to the type of virtue the rabbis understand as the virtue of Sodom, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.” (Avot 5:10). Like the character of Noah, if we affirm liberty only as freedom from interference, our disposition situates ourselves alone in a world flooded with “others” of whom we have no real concern.
On the other side of the spectrum is positive liberty. The freedom to prosper entails a different sort of communal expectation than simply a freedom from interference. Positive liberty looks to wider goals or ideals than negative liberty. Positive liberty pursues ends like human fulfillment, societal welfare, and moral perfection. If each of us has the right to prosper freely, then each of us must create a society that allows for everyone to pursue those rights. As the rabbis say, each one of us has, “a share in the world to come.” In the Torah, human flourishing overrides even the most strident of individuals including the injunction against covetous behavior (Exodus 20:12) the requirement of safe harbor for guests (Genesis 19), the exceptions to conscription into the army (Deuteronomy 24:5), and denial of permanent ownership over property or others (Leviticus Ch. 25). Micah, understands positive liberty in the broadest of terms: “He has told, you O human, what is good, And what the LORD requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness and to walk modestly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
But positive liberty given its teeth can also lead to disaster. If the conventions used to secure the human good for all are strengthened qua convention, then the resultant society limits freedom instead of promoting it. The most dastardly examples of positive liberty are found in political systems that find their power in the enslavement to a single idea of the human good where the good for the many trumps any notion of individual choice. As Jews, we are rightly chary of those who wish to choose for us our fate.
Both negative and positive liberty animates our Torah and our sense of Judaism. Moreover, these notions of freedom stand at the heart of the choices set before us as Americans. In the coming weeks and months, our nation will embark on a policy discussion that will shape the texture and timbre of our society. How do we understand our freedom as individuals? On one side of the debate the central question is how can the government have the right to proscribe my liberties for the sake of another’s? On the other side, the central question is how could it not? It is these questions that will rub one type of liberty against the other on the threshing-floor of the House and Senate, across tables in lunchrooms and boardrooms, and on porches and in family rooms across the country.
I believe, however, the question is not of kind, but of degree. Our sacred texts speak of both, because we need both. Positive liberty cannot alienate negative rights and negative liberty is fascicle without positive rights. The rabbis understood the interplay between these ideas of cherut, freedom, as engraved into the very tablets that stand at the center of our religion as a covenanted people: “The Tablets of the Law are the work of God, engraved upon the stones. (Exodus. 32:16) Read not charut [engraved] but cherut, [freedom]. To which one rabbi believes it means freedom from oppression, and another takes it to mean freedom to live. At which all the rabbis agreed that freedom at the very least means freedom from suffering. As we move into the final days of Passover we realize with all too much clarity that the answers to the most important questions, like, “What does it mean to be free?,” yield complex answers. Yet, as we all know, there is no end to the questions set before us on Passover. It is in the questions that we find the meaning and direction that will shape our lives and our children’s lives in the years to come.
Shabbat Shalom
Chag Sameach
Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas
Freedom! Every Passover for thousands of years Jews have gathered around dining room tables, in synagogue ballrooms, in ghetto basements, and in frontline bunkers to celebrate our liberation from Egypt. From what I remember, the Passover seder integrates the international Jewish community – it is practiced by more Jews than any other mitzvah. But what is this liberty that we speak of? When we raise our wine glasses and toast to freedom, what exactly are we praising God for?
There are two great narratives of liberty that have engaged in a kind of philosophical wrestling match with each other over the course of our people’s long history and our nation’s shorter one. The first, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin understands it, is called, “negative liberty.” Simply put, negative liberty is freedom from interference. As Berlin writes, “The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, and from enslavement by others.” The second idea of liberty is called “positive liberty.” It is the freedom to grow and prosper, find fulfillment, and a flourishing life. On the face of it, freedom from interference and freedom to prosper might not seem so far apart. But when given over to communal structures and how we decide to shape our community, negative liberty and positive liberty lead us in very different directions.
Negative liberty gives energy to the idea that each one of us carries certain natural rights that must not be impugned by others. Negative liberty originates inside each one of us. Thoughts cannot be compelled, character cannot be minted. Even if we are enslaved to others' political will, it is the liberty of the mind that is freedom’s beginning. Biblically, we find root of this idea in the Exodus story. After 400 years of oppression, the Israelite slaves first freed their minds and looked to wider horizons of human living. Then they were able to finally see the disconnect between the way they lived as slaves and the way they could live as free people. The groaning was heard by God, who took note of this primal call for freedom and reached out the God’s mighty hand to begin the Exodus.
Beyond the machinations of the mind, it is in our acts of will in which negative liberty accrues true force and celebration. “Remember this day, on which you went free from Egypt, the house of bondage, how the LORD freed you from it with a mighty hand...You go free on this day, in the month of Aviv.” (Exodus 13:5) In the opening moments of liberation, the Israelites understood freedom in its rawest form – as freedom from oppression. After the Exodus, negative liberty normalizes in as value in biblical law. For example, debtors cannot be stripped of the shirts off their backs, and each one of us has an inalienable right to food and clothing.
Given its head, however, negative liberty can affirm too strongly the idea of rugged individualism. “Don’t tread on me” can easily become “don’t bother me.” An understanding of this sort of libertarianism leads us precisely to the type of virtue the rabbis understand as the virtue of Sodom, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.” (Avot 5:10). Like the character of Noah, if we affirm liberty only as freedom from interference, our disposition situates ourselves alone in a world flooded with “others” of whom we have no real concern.
On the other side of the spectrum is positive liberty. The freedom to prosper entails a different sort of communal expectation than simply a freedom from interference. Positive liberty looks to wider goals or ideals than negative liberty. Positive liberty pursues ends like human fulfillment, societal welfare, and moral perfection. If each of us has the right to prosper freely, then each of us must create a society that allows for everyone to pursue those rights. As the rabbis say, each one of us has, “a share in the world to come.” In the Torah, human flourishing overrides even the most strident of individuals including the injunction against covetous behavior (Exodus 20:12) the requirement of safe harbor for guests (Genesis 19), the exceptions to conscription into the army (Deuteronomy 24:5), and denial of permanent ownership over property or others (Leviticus Ch. 25). Micah, understands positive liberty in the broadest of terms: “He has told, you O human, what is good, And what the LORD requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness and to walk modestly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
But positive liberty given its teeth can also lead to disaster. If the conventions used to secure the human good for all are strengthened qua convention, then the resultant society limits freedom instead of promoting it. The most dastardly examples of positive liberty are found in political systems that find their power in the enslavement to a single idea of the human good where the good for the many trumps any notion of individual choice. As Jews, we are rightly chary of those who wish to choose for us our fate.
Both negative and positive liberty animates our Torah and our sense of Judaism. Moreover, these notions of freedom stand at the heart of the choices set before us as Americans. In the coming weeks and months, our nation will embark on a policy discussion that will shape the texture and timbre of our society. How do we understand our freedom as individuals? On one side of the debate the central question is how can the government have the right to proscribe my liberties for the sake of another’s? On the other side, the central question is how could it not? It is these questions that will rub one type of liberty against the other on the threshing-floor of the House and Senate, across tables in lunchrooms and boardrooms, and on porches and in family rooms across the country.
I believe, however, the question is not of kind, but of degree. Our sacred texts speak of both, because we need both. Positive liberty cannot alienate negative rights and negative liberty is fascicle without positive rights. The rabbis understood the interplay between these ideas of cherut, freedom, as engraved into the very tablets that stand at the center of our religion as a covenanted people: “The Tablets of the Law are the work of God, engraved upon the stones. (Exodus. 32:16) Read not charut [engraved] but cherut, [freedom]. To which one rabbi believes it means freedom from oppression, and another takes it to mean freedom to live. At which all the rabbis agreed that freedom at the very least means freedom from suffering. As we move into the final days of Passover we realize with all too much clarity that the answers to the most important questions, like, “What does it mean to be free?,” yield complex answers. Yet, as we all know, there is no end to the questions set before us on Passover. It is in the questions that we find the meaning and direction that will shape our lives and our children’s lives in the years to come.
Shabbat Shalom
Chag Sameach
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Shabbat Shalom--April 15-16, 2011
Acharei Mot
Cantor Phil Baron
This week’s parasha begins a section of the Torah (culminating in next week’s parasha K’doshim) commonly referred to as the “Holiness Code,” which sounds like something author Dan Brown would think up. The plot should cook with intrigue, mysterious French women, fast cars and secret societies.
But no, it’s actually far more profound, if not quite as exciting as “The Da Vinci Code.” This part of the Torah is a litany of do’s and don’ts regarding commanded and proscribed behaviors leading to holiness. But how do these behaviors actually make us holy?
And in fact, how do you define “holiness?” The Torah sets out to specifically teach us how to achieve a state of holiness by doing certain things and refraining from others. But this state is external. Heaven can see we’re doing right, and we may look nice and holy on the outside, but what is going on in our hearts?
I do my best thinking out on the patio in my back yard, so I grabbed a cup of tea, a stack of scholarly books and a commentary from the internet and set to work staring blankly into space. Suddenly I felt a wet nose at my ankle and looked down to see my daughter and son-in-law’s new puppy, followed moments later by my son-in-law Marc. He gave me a sunny smile and said hello. I stuffed the interenet print-out randomly into one of my books and asked Marc to help me answer the burning question: how do you define holiness?
Marc is getting used to me throwing these deep questions at him. He quickly answered that any discussion about holiness should start with a discussion about goodness. Fine. Goodness was easy to describe. You needed to love your neighbor, he said, give tz’dakah, be kind to strangers, respectful to elders, and honest in your business dealings. Holiness, on the other hand, involved going to synagogue, praying, and other religious activities.
Nice answer, but this also felt too external. It occurred to me that, as in prayer, holiness was about intention. Maimonides taught that giving is elevated when done with a full heart. Any kindness can be achieved automatically, but is only holy when done with kavanah – with direction. Now I was getting somewhere. Marc said he saw my point (after all he had to respect his elder) as he scooped up the puppy and headed toward the door.
With a renewed sense of purpose I grabbed a book off the stack and opened to the random spot where I had stuck my papers. I gasped as I read the title on the page: “The Holy and the Good.” I had pulled Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ "To Heal a Fractured World" off my shelf, having no idea that he dealt with the subject! Clearly the rabbi and my son-in-law were in cahoots.
As I read the chapter in earnest I soon realized what the Holiness Code boils down to. Humankind needs the commandments, statutes and judgments found in Acharei Mot and its partner, parashat K’doshim. As Rabbi Sacks teaches, “there is nothing inevitable about human virtue. The life of the commandments is an ongoing exercise in character formation, a sustained seminar in Judaism’s ‘habits of the heart.’” Then I found something I resonated with. The rabbi writes that these habits do indeed become holy when we remember that we are made in the image of God, and that “life belongs to Him, not us.” In this is transcendence. As Rabbis Schulweis and Feinstein would say, we are intended to be co-creators with God.
So the Holiness code is a roadmap, leading us through action to that desired state of holiness. “Our prayers, texts and rituals hold before us a vision of how the world might be. The holy is where we enter the ideal; the good is how we make it real.”
But I would respectfully add to the equation Rabbi Sacks and my son-in-law put forward, for there is a step missing. How do we enter the ideal? Here I would return to Maimonides. The Holiness Code repeatedly commands us to do (or refrain from doing) things because “I am the Lord.” This is like a parent saying “because I said so.” The Rambam writes, “It is not right to serve God…out of fear.” However, “whoever serves God out of love…impelled by no external motive whatsoever…such a person does what is truly right.” Love, or “direction of the heart” is what takes the external commandments of Acharei Mot and elevates them to the holy.
So that is my definition of holiness: acts of goodness lovingly performed with the knowledge of our partnership with God. Hmm, not bad. I think I’ll run that by my son-in-law…
Shabbat Shalom
Cantor Phil Baron
This week’s parasha begins a section of the Torah (culminating in next week’s parasha K’doshim) commonly referred to as the “Holiness Code,” which sounds like something author Dan Brown would think up. The plot should cook with intrigue, mysterious French women, fast cars and secret societies.
But no, it’s actually far more profound, if not quite as exciting as “The Da Vinci Code.” This part of the Torah is a litany of do’s and don’ts regarding commanded and proscribed behaviors leading to holiness. But how do these behaviors actually make us holy?
And in fact, how do you define “holiness?” The Torah sets out to specifically teach us how to achieve a state of holiness by doing certain things and refraining from others. But this state is external. Heaven can see we’re doing right, and we may look nice and holy on the outside, but what is going on in our hearts?
I do my best thinking out on the patio in my back yard, so I grabbed a cup of tea, a stack of scholarly books and a commentary from the internet and set to work staring blankly into space. Suddenly I felt a wet nose at my ankle and looked down to see my daughter and son-in-law’s new puppy, followed moments later by my son-in-law Marc. He gave me a sunny smile and said hello. I stuffed the interenet print-out randomly into one of my books and asked Marc to help me answer the burning question: how do you define holiness?
Marc is getting used to me throwing these deep questions at him. He quickly answered that any discussion about holiness should start with a discussion about goodness. Fine. Goodness was easy to describe. You needed to love your neighbor, he said, give tz’dakah, be kind to strangers, respectful to elders, and honest in your business dealings. Holiness, on the other hand, involved going to synagogue, praying, and other religious activities.
Nice answer, but this also felt too external. It occurred to me that, as in prayer, holiness was about intention. Maimonides taught that giving is elevated when done with a full heart. Any kindness can be achieved automatically, but is only holy when done with kavanah – with direction. Now I was getting somewhere. Marc said he saw my point (after all he had to respect his elder) as he scooped up the puppy and headed toward the door.
With a renewed sense of purpose I grabbed a book off the stack and opened to the random spot where I had stuck my papers. I gasped as I read the title on the page: “The Holy and the Good.” I had pulled Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ "To Heal a Fractured World" off my shelf, having no idea that he dealt with the subject! Clearly the rabbi and my son-in-law were in cahoots.
As I read the chapter in earnest I soon realized what the Holiness Code boils down to. Humankind needs the commandments, statutes and judgments found in Acharei Mot and its partner, parashat K’doshim. As Rabbi Sacks teaches, “there is nothing inevitable about human virtue. The life of the commandments is an ongoing exercise in character formation, a sustained seminar in Judaism’s ‘habits of the heart.’” Then I found something I resonated with. The rabbi writes that these habits do indeed become holy when we remember that we are made in the image of God, and that “life belongs to Him, not us.” In this is transcendence. As Rabbis Schulweis and Feinstein would say, we are intended to be co-creators with God.
So the Holiness code is a roadmap, leading us through action to that desired state of holiness. “Our prayers, texts and rituals hold before us a vision of how the world might be. The holy is where we enter the ideal; the good is how we make it real.”
But I would respectfully add to the equation Rabbi Sacks and my son-in-law put forward, for there is a step missing. How do we enter the ideal? Here I would return to Maimonides. The Holiness Code repeatedly commands us to do (or refrain from doing) things because “I am the Lord.” This is like a parent saying “because I said so.” The Rambam writes, “It is not right to serve God…out of fear.” However, “whoever serves God out of love…impelled by no external motive whatsoever…such a person does what is truly right.” Love, or “direction of the heart” is what takes the external commandments of Acharei Mot and elevates them to the holy.
So that is my definition of holiness: acts of goodness lovingly performed with the knowledge of our partnership with God. Hmm, not bad. I think I’ll run that by my son-in-law…
Shabbat Shalom
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