Live Long and Prosper

““In the merit of which virtues were you blessed with longevity?”

— BT Megilla 28a

Throughout the book of Deuteronomy - the biblical book in which we are currently immersed - we find mitzvot framed as ways to lengthen our lives or the quality of our lives. It reminds me of an old TV ad for yogurt featuring seniors with the wrinkled face of walnuts all eating yogurt as the secret to longevity. Health scams often attract people with the promises of youthful aging or stopping the clock - a skin cream that is the elixir of life, a vitamin or an exercise that is the key to getting older and getting better.

 The Talmud sage Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKana [not to be confused with Hakuna Matata] was once asked the question above by his disciples. They rightfully wanted to know from their master teacher what he did to live to such a ripe old age. This begins a larger Talmudic discussion where the sages spill their longevity secrets. Free of cost, I will be sharing many of them with you. Combine them with yogurt eating and you just may live forever!

Rabbi Nehunya: "In all my days, I never attained veneration at the expense of someone's degradation. Nor did my fellow's curse go up with me upon my bed. And I was always openhanded with money." When asked later, by others, he added: "In all my days I never accepted gifts. Nor was I ever inflexible by exacting a measure of retribution against those who wronged me. And I was always openhanded with my money." This rabbi was able to live with an inner security that came from giving: giving people goodwill, granting them forgiveness, and sharing his material wealth (a fact he stresses twice when asked).

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korha: "In all my days I never gazed at the likeness of a wicked man." This rabbi achieved old age by surrounding himself with good people who generated positive influences that kept him young at heart and in mind.

Rabbi Zeira: "In all my days I was never angry inside my house. Nor did I ever walk ahead of someone who was a greater Torah scholar than me. Nor did I ever walk four cubits without words of Torah nor without wearing tefillin. Nor did I ever sleep in a study hall, neither a deep sleep nor a brief nap. Nor did I ever rejoice when my fellow stumbled. Nor did I ever call my fellow by a derogatory nickname." This rabbi lived a long time because he abided in humility and sensitivity to others. He was also able to make the most of a meaningful moment by staying fully awake in his own life.

What fascinates me, in addition to the answers, is the sheer premise made by these ancient rabbis more than two thousand years ago. They believed that with great reflection and wisdom, they could hazard a guess about their longevity. Instead of berating themselves for all that they did wrong in the past and might repeat in the future, they were able to look back with pride at the lives of virtue that they crafted. They could identify behaviors and tendencies that made the quality of life deep and worthwhile.

You don't have to be old to do that. You do have to take some time to ask why God blessed you with the very particular life you lead. You do have to believe that you were created in the divine image at this specific point in time and history to make certain contributions. In what merit are you here right now? What have you done to deserve this life, in the most positive sense? 

This Shabbat - as we begin to cap the summer and welcome the High Holidays - perhaps we can each take some time to reflect as individuals and as families about our larger question of purpose the way that the sages did and to pat ourselves on the back for the good that we do.

 What acts of virtue or acts of restraint have you done to receive the gift of life today?

 Shabbat Shalom

Stealing Minds

“It is forbidden to steal anyone’s mind...””

— BT Hullin 94b

Yesterday's Washington Post had a shocking column about a Virginia school principal whose resume was full of lies about his educational background. He presented himself as having college degrees he never had from institutions he never attended. He obtained his teaching license fraudulently and falsified three university transcripts. Three days after this discovery, he resigned. It seems that he had been employed for 14 years before anyone made this discovery. Ironically, his last name is Toogood. Too bad. 

I scanned the next page of the Metro section to discover that a dermatologist practicing in Mclean, Virginia intentionally "misdiagnosed patients with skin cancer" to perform unnecessary surgeries. He employed unlicensed and unqualified medical assistants to suture and close wounds and conduct other procedures and billed for surgeries that he assigned to his nurses, sometimes billing at three different locations at the same time. Washingtonian magazine recently named him one of the region's top dermatologists. Oy. If this is the one of the best, what does the worst look like?

Reading on the same day how the public was duped is painful, but it raises, in many ways, a different question. How did each of these men get away with this fraudulent behavior for so long? Both of these professions - education and medicine - are regarded in Jewish tradition as sacred. They are mitzvot, commanded occupations, perhaps because they involve and assume a level of trust. Perhaps precisely because of that trust, no one bothered to do a proper background check or an investigation into business practices. We assume that there is a certain unspoken covenant we make with people who lead us and take care of us. Unfortunately that agreement is too often broken.

In Jewish law, there is a category of theft called genevat da'at, literally stealing knowledge, based on a biblical prohibition found in Leviticus 19:11. Some call it stealing the mind. It is a subtle robbery; you likely won't know it's happening until long after it has happened. It's not like getting pickpocketed. You may never know that something was stolen from you. Professor Hershey Friedman describes the term genevat da'at as "fooling someone and thereby causing him or her to have a mistaken assumption, belief, and/or impression. Thus the term is used in Jewish law to indicate deception, cheating, creating a false impression and acquiring undeserved goodwill." This is a prohibition of biblical order so if you weren't going to break any of the big ten, you might want to add this as an unexpected eleven on your Jewish dignity laundry list of commandments.

The example I often use of genevat da'at is buying someone a gift at Walmart and putting it in a Nordstrom box. You never said you bought it there. You let the packaging speak for you. It did not tell the truth. You get undeserved friendship points as a big spender when, in fact, Jewish law calls you a subtle liar. Because we take knowledge so seriously, we take deception seriously as well, the breakdown in knowledge that plays on false trust, ignorance or naiveté. Other examples of this include inviting someone to an event when you know they cannot attend so you get bonus credit with them (unless you are doing so specifically to show respect and honor) or any financial misrepresentation when you are selling or buying something.

You might claim that there is a universe of difference between faking a transcript and faking how much you paid for a gift because you took the clearance tag off and left on the "real" price. But in Jewish law, these are matters of scale and degree. The willingness to misrepresent yourself to look richer, stronger, smarter, more generous than you really are - may one day take you to someplace you really don't want to be: the land of deception, where integrity cannot live.

Alternatively, you can take the view of George Burns, "Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made."

Shabbat Shalom

To Stand or Sit

““But as for you, stand here with Me”

— Deuteronomy 5:27

There is an argument taking place among writers right now. Is it better ergonomically to write while sitting or to write while standing? Hemingway used to write while standing as did Nabakov. We've see an emergence of the writing desk and even the treadmill desk for those who can really multi-task. A. J. Jacobs devotes a section in his book Drop Dead Healthy to this question, saying "The desk is where most of the Crimes of Excessive Sedentary Behavior occur." Since he wrote this book to experiment with ways to achieve optimal health, he piled 3 cardboard boxes on top of each other on his desk and started to answer e-mails.

"It didn't go badly," he writes. "I shifted and rocked a lot. I kind of looked like an Orthodox Jew praying at the Western Wall, but with a MacBook instead of a Torah." His breakthrough came when he followed the advice of Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic and rigged a desk on his treadmill, what some have called deskercise and others have termed iPlodding. He wanted to write the whole book on this desk and even includes a picture of his invention. He claims it helps him focus.

Because our sedentary behavior cause aches and pains, scholars of old also took on this question. Is it better to sit or stand while learning Torah?

In the Talmud [BT Megilla 21a], the beautiful imperative above - to stand with Me - was understood as an ancient way we partnered with God. "The phrase 'with Me' indicates, as it were, even the Holy One, Blessed be He, was standing [at Mount Sinai]." We never think of God as standing with us at Sinai but as giving us something. The idea that God was not only giving us teachings but also standing beside us to support the way that we received them has great value in helping us understand the nature of transmission.

The Talmud then extrapolates, as it so often does. If God stood with us at Sinai to teach us, then teachers must also stand by their students when teaching them: "From where is it derived that the teacher should not sit on a couch and teach his disciple while he is sitting on the ground? "But as for you, stand here with Me." To this, one sage added, "From the days of Moses until the time of Rabban Gamliel [grandson of Hillel], they would study Torah while standing." Standing was a way of honoring Torah and an act akin to receiving the Torah at Sinai again. It was also a way to honor the teacher/disciple relationship. If we want people to really learn, we go to where they are to teach them. Why did this practice change, the Talmud ponders? "When Rabban Gamliel died, weakness descended to the world, and they would study Torah while sitting." 

Sitting while teaching was a sign of weakness. The sages debated the point. In Deuteronomy, one verse says, "And I sat on the mount" while another says, "And I stood on the mount" (Deuteronomy 10:10). This is interpreted by the sage Rav to mean that "Moses would stand and learn Torah from God and sit and review what he learned." Rabbi Hanina said, "Moses was not sitting or standing but bowing." Rabbi Yohanan believed this means that Moses simply stayed in one place when he taught where Rava said, "Moses studied easy material while standing and difficult material while sitting."

We have constructed very set spaces for learning that may not optimize our study. Our imaginations are often locked into the classrooms of our childhoods: desks evenly spaced apart facing the teacher's desk in neat rows. Very little about real learning, the integration of knowledge and wisdom develop this way. The Talmud understood that when we learn we need movement.

The Talmudic passage also made me think of the expression "to stand with Israel." We mean that we are together in unity and support. But I thought of Rava's contribution to this debate. Moses studied easy material while standing and difficult material while sitting. It may be easier to stand with Israel than to sit with Israel, to consider the complex and nuanced ways we can support our homeland in crisis. Slogans, reverse racism, simple political bantering are ways that people tend to protest - to stand with Israel - but real, long-term solutions can never be reduced to a simple formula. They always involve loss, anguish, compromise, patience, diplomacy and resilience.

It's time to stand with Israel and to sit with Israel, too.

Shabbat Shalom

A Bridge to Nowhere

A bridge is a fascinating architectural construct

The writer Vera Nazarian in The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration shared an effective story about the mystery of Bridges: “Once upon a time there were two countries at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean. But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never agree on the details, so the two halves of the bridge they started to build never met. To this day the bridge extends far into the ocean from both sides, and simply ends half way, miles in the wrong direction form the meeting point. And the two countries are still at war.”

Let Silence Speak

““When I speak, I have reason to regret. But when I am silent, I have nothing to regret. Before I speak, I am master over my words; once the words leave my mouth, they rule over me.”

— Rabbi Judah the Pious

I don't know about you, but I am getting a little tired of all the words spilled over the war in Gaza: the talking heads, the inane Facebook posts, the political rhetoric, the empty words, the angry words, the uncharitable words. So few of these words add clarity. They don't even add confusion. They just add to the mountain of talk that dissipates quickly when you see one profound visual image of anguish on either side.

I thought of this frustration when I encountered the following passage in the daily cycle of Talmud study this week: "What is the meaning of this that is written: 'For You, silence is praise [Psalms 65:2]? The best remedy of all is silence. When Rabbi Dimi came [from Israel to Babylonia], he said: In the West [Israel], they say, 'If a word is worth one sela, silence is worth two'" [BT Megilla18a]. I know what you're thinking: how much is a sela worth? Is it worth it to be quiet? Well in the days of the Talmud we used the Roman monetary system, and a sela was called a Tyrian Tetradrachm. 1,500 selas make up one talent, and 3,000 selas make the equivalent of a Biblical shekel, according to my research. What this means is that your silence is not worth very much, but it is worth twice your words!

One later Talmud commentator interprets this to mean that coming up with an appropriate comment is worth one sela, but refraining from making an inappropriate comment is worth twice as much. Wit is always trumped by restraint. This makes sense. While we may regret not sharing a poignant observation or clever retort, that missed opportunity will always be easier to live with than the insult, hurt or backhanded compliment that we do say. Rabbi Judah the Pious [R. Yehuda Ha-Hasid], a medieval scholar, says above that you cannot regret the words you do not say and that just the act of letting words leave your mouth allows them to master you rather than the other way around. Mastering silence - or zipping the lip - requires a level of personal discipline that speaking does not.

Because we also pay a psychic price for words we regret, we can understand how silence also protects us, not only others. And the proverb from Ethics of the Fathers: "I have found nothing better for my body than silence" [1:17] confirms this. Silence is not only a wise choice in regard to others but a way that we protect, nourish and defend ourselves physically because the price of poor judgment in words can create stress: ulcers and muscle aches, headaches and heartaches.

In Ecclesiastes we read the famous line "a time to speak and a time to be silent" [3:7], but how do we know what time is the right time for speech and the right time for silence? Here are five questions that may help you decide:

• Will this hurt someone?
• Is it necessary?
• Is it helpful?
• Does it make a genuine contribution to the discussion at hand?
• How will I feel if the person I am speaking about hears this?

We are now in the nine day period leading up to Tisha B'av. We read the book of Lamentations. It starts not with a word but with a sigh. It is a time when people are often more cautious about physical danger. It is a good time to be more cautious about spiritual and emotional danger by watching out for gossip and lies, hurtful speech and criticism. Let your silence protect you as the better part of wisdom. Silence creates the sacred space to hear better. If the world remains unlittered by our words, there is more room for the words of others. Let silence speak.

Shabbat Shalom

You Are Not Alone

““Judaism has always looks upon the individual as if he were a little world; with the death of the individual, this little world comes to an end.””

— Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik

A number of Facebook posts this week requested that people in Israel attend Max Steinberg's funeral. As a lone solider  - a soldier who decides to serve in the IDF from another country and is thus without family - Max was one of 13 killed in the fighting this past weekend. Max's friends  - and even strangers - were understandably concerned that Max would not have a lot of people to send him off to his eternal resting place. 

Max's death and the death of anyone who gives his or her life in service to others raises the profound and niggling philosophical question of the rights of the individual in relationship to the community. What is my responsibility to others? What are the limitations of my responsibility? How do I achieve community?  The quote above, by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik in his article "The Community," stresses that each person must treat himself and be treated by others as no other. We will weave excerpts of his article into Max's story.

““Each individual possesses something unique, rare, which is unknown to others; each individual has a unique message to communicate, a special color to add to the communal spectrum.”

Max joined the army six months after visiting Israel with Birthright. His parents had never been to Israel. His network of family and friends there was not deep. His mother told NBC news what any mother would have: "I never thought I'd have to bury my child. It's not supposed to be that way." His mother wanted him to be buried near her in Los Angeles, but when she got to Israel, she understood why he needed to be buried there, to be near what was newly important to him.

“[A human being] is a single, lonely being, not belonging to any structured collectivity. He is also a thou-related being, who co-exists in companionship with someone else.”

Max's family learned something about us. Death is a gruesome teacher. But when we mourn the loss of one person, we do so as a group, a collective entity that recognizes and acknowledges that we are not whole without the presence of even one. You cannot be Jewish alone. You always exist in companionship with someone else, even at moments when you are painfully on your own.

“The originality and creativity in man are rooted in his loneliness-experience, not in his social awareness. The singleness of man is responsible for his singularity; the latter, for his creativity. Social man is superficial: he imitates, he emulates. Lonely man is profound: he creates, he is original.”

Max's friends who posted their concern, need not have. Trust in our people. We show up. We are there because Max may have been a lone soldier but he was never a soldier alone. There was nothing to worry about - other than everything else to worry about - because 30,000 people were there to pay their respects to Max and to thank him for his service to his country and his people. 

“Halacha [Jewish law] says to man: Don’t let your neighbor drift along the lanes of loneliness; don’t permit him to become remote and alienated from you...”

Josh Flaster, who leads a group that supports lone soldiers in Israel described Max this way: "Max was a small guy with a big heart...He put himself at risk throughout his service to look after other soldiers who might have been in danger. He wasn't eight feet tall but he acted like he was."

“Lonely man is a courageous man; he is a protester; he fears nobody; whereas social man is a compromiser, a peacemaker...”

We attend funerals of soldiers who are strangers because they protected us even though we are strangers. We are a world full of strangers who often exist solely because of the kindness of strangers. 

“...when lonely man joins the community, he adds a new dimension to community awareness. He contributes something which no one else could have contributed. He enriches the community existentially; he is irreplaceable”

Max, I don't know you. And now I never will. But I know one thing about you. You are irreplaceable.

Shabbat Shalom

Be Our Guardian

“Guardian of this holy nation, guard the remnant of the holy people, and let not the holy nation perish…”

Excerpt from Tachanun

Life-threatening danger to our people surfaces multiple, often conflicting issues - from the practical to the existential. As sirens blast across Israel and the news is dominated by pictures of rubble and rockets piercing Israeli skies, we cannot help but ask ourselves: How long will this last? How can we resolve this conflict on a more permanent basis? Is there hope?

At such times, I find myself thinking often of one of my favorite daily prayers: Tachanun. The word literally refers to a type of prayer: supplication, which demands self-contraction, humility and beseeching God. The Talmud reads a verse in Daniel as the basis for such prayers: “I turned my face to the Lord, God, devoting myself to prayer and supplication [tachanunim] in fasting, sackcloth and ashes” [9:3]. Many different sages had personal supplications, usually a pastiche of different biblical verses designed to petition God for mercy. This prayer - because of its solemn nature - is often the first to be abandoned in synagogue at times of joy, like the afternoon before a holiday or for the entire Hebrew month of Nissan. But when we don’t say it, we miss out on a moment to think about grace and its role in our lives.

The prayer Ashkenazic Jews recite today was probably an amalgamation of such personal prayers and verses constructed in the 14th century. There is a short version of the prayer that is read daily at the morning and afternoon services and a substantially longer one on Mondays and Thursdays, market days when the Torah was traditionally read in public, days that the Talmud marks are an “et ratzon” - a time of God’s openness to hearing our innermost prayers.

One of the foundations of the prayer is a string of words and sentences that appear in the sixth chapter of Psalms, a time when David was ill and suffering and reflected on his pain. “My whole being,” David wrote, “is struck with terror - and You, God, how long?” The odd construct of this sentence clues us into David’s anguish. When terror takes over, we cannot imagine our own resilience. We need the situation to end. We ask God how long this will endure because we can endure it no longer. In this chapter, we confront David’s deepest vulnerabilities: “I am worn out with my sighing, every night I cause my bed to float with my tears. I melt my couch. My eye is dimmed with anger; it has aged because of my tormentors.” 

Tachanun also has a fascinating choreography, and is often called “nefilat apayim” - or the bowing of the face because when a Torah scroll is present in the room, we say a passage of the prayer with our foreheads leaning down on our less dominant arm. “Be gracious to us, God, be gracious to us for we are saturated with humiliation. In anger, remember to have compassion.” When we feel one emotion, we ask for another. Help us forgive.

We move from standing, to a bowing of the head, to sitting erect to standing again. Our body adopts a dance of sadness that moves to a place of strength so that our bodies are telling us not to sign on the couch forever. Take charge. “Strangers say: there is no hope or expectation for us.” We say this line as we are already sitting up straight. Someone else may say this of us but we cannot say this of ourselves. Perhaps one way we respond to a situation that is out of our control is to say this prayer with greater intention and meaning.

Many years ago, I called the reception desk of a busy company, asking for a woman whose first name was Hope. The receptionist replied, “There is no Hope here.” Hearing it startled me, and I responded quietly, “There is always hope.”

Hope is the name of our Israeli national anthem and the abiding song of Jewish history. It’s time to bring hope back.

Shabbat Shalom

Ugly Torah

“Matters of Torah are likened to three liquids: water, wine and milk. Why?”

BT Ta’anit 7a

This week we have been bombarded with images of ugliness and pain. Where it says in the Talmud that matters of Torah are likened to three liquids: water, wine and milk, this week we have to add tears to that list. Those sensitive to the Torah’s teachings about love and peace cannot help but weep at the bloodshed and violence in our beloved homeland. And yet, this particular teaching will strangely elevate ugliness.

The Talmud sage Rabbi Oshya asked why these three liquids have been compared to Torah and explained that since “these three liquids can be retained in only the ugliest of vessels, so too are matters of Torah retained only by one who is humble.”

The Talmud then illustrates this with a story that seems cruel but telling. The daughter of a Roman emperor said to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananya, “Woe to glorious wisdom – like yours – which is contained in an ugly vessel.” She, a princess surrounded by finery, was dumbstruck by the dissonance between the intellectual and spiritual expansiveness of this scholar and his appearance, which defied any Roman aesthetic she knew.

Rabbi Yehoshua did not defend his looks or comment on her rudeness. Instead, with expected wisdom, he asked her a simple question: “Does your father keep his wine in clay vessels?” She replied with an obvious yes since this was the norm. “You who are so important, should put it in vessels of gold and silver.” Just as these are expensive liquids, should their containers be of equal expense to showcase the status they bring.

The emperor’s daughter repeated the conversation to her father who proceeded to have the wine transferred. No expense was to be spared in the fulfilling his daughter’s request. It made sense to a person of influence and wealth to treat his wine with honor and dignity. Alas, the transferred wine all turned sour. The acid in the wine had a corrosive effect on the metal and impacted the taste. Clay is porous and contained none of the poisonous contaminants often found in ancient metal vessels. The experiment failed. The king was angry. “Who told you to do this?”

The emperor summoned Rabbi Yehoshua. We are not sure why a sage would have been discussing these matters with a princess, but now he was to be held accountable for the spoilage. When the emperor questioned him, Rabbi Yehoshua explained that the best material is preserved in the most humble of vessels because it retains its specialness this way. The emperor thought about his and questioned this assumption based on his own experience. “But there handsome people who are learned!” Many wise people are blessed with good lucks. But Rabbi Yehoshua was not buying it. They would be even more wise if they were not as beautiful, he retorted.

“Had they been ugly, they would have been even more learned!”

We often mistake beauty for intelligence, but that is not the prevailing issue here. While it’s true that Ethics of the Fathers says not to look at the holding vessel but what ‘s inside it, this admonition is for the one who looks.  Rabbi Yehoshua suggested that human beauty can be a distraction to its “owner” and minimize wisdom because beauty and humility rarely come in the same package.

Sister Wendy Beckett, an English nun in an order of silence who temporarily renounces her retreats to host art programs on the BBC, was interviewed by Bill Moyers about her incredible gift for art analysis. With buck-toothed charm, she confessed that not being beautiful herself has given her more capacity to appreciate beauty. She spoke matter-of-factly, not asking for pity or false encouragement but with a sadness for the rest of us that we fall too often for the illusion of beauty. “Grace is deceptive. Beauty is illusory” [Proverbs 31:30].

Things are not always as they seem. Perhaps something of beauty will come out of all of today’s ugliness. To be human is to believe that today’s anguish – however existentially exhausting and painfully repetitive – will one day be transformed. Beauty is illusory. But maybe ugliness is illusory too.

Shabbat Shalom

The Difference a Day Makes

“Teach us to count our days well, that we may obtain a wise heart.”

Psalms 90:12

Sometimes when life gets rough or news is suddenly good or a special event takes place, you think to yourself: “What a difference a day makes!” And it does. In one day you can go from being single to being married. In one day you can go from being married to losing a spouse you cherish. In one day you can get a diagnosis, and in one day you can have surgery to remove a growth. One day you become a parent and life changes forever. One day, you stand on stage and get a diploma and suddenly you are a doctor, lawyer or accountant. It is not that you knew less the day before. It is that one day was picked to confer a different status upon you.

Any transition that takes only a few hours but changes a life, reminds us of the preciousness of counting days and making each day extraordinary when we can. The well-known verse from psalms above, however, points not to the extraordinary days of our lives that appear in photo albums but to the span of time that does not stand out for anything unusual. Days and days pass in monotony. Number those days well, and you have made a life. According to Psalms, you will obtain a wise heart.

We find this perspective in the unusual way that days are counted in Genesis 25:7 and 47:9. In the first verse, when Abraham approached his death, and the text records “the days of his years.” In the second, Jacob shared the hardships of the “days of his years” with Pharaoh when the two finally met. Long swaths of time are broken into the days of the years in these ancient passages as a reminder that years are an accumulation of days. They can blend into each other with sameness and tedium or stand out from the years as times of productivity, joy and distinctiveness.

Mason Currey, in his new book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, offers over 100 portraits of the every day rituals of famous novelists, composers and artists in brief spurts of a few paragraphs each. A few sleep all day and work all night. Some can’t begin work with a strong drink and a smoke; others need complete silence and a morning coffee. Maya Angelou writes in a hotel room to separate work from life. Truman Capote called himself a horizontal author because he loved to work in bed. Most woke early to catch the morning light and the first burst of creative energy and generally wrote 3-4 hours.

Some belittle the revelation of an artist’s rituals because it does not make a difference to us what someone else does to inspire the muse. Yet, we do want to know. Perhaps if, like Stephen King, we sit down every day and reach our 2,000 word quota, we will write the next airport bestseller. Maybe if we can discover a good daily ritual we can maximize our productivity.

William James believed that the best way to make meaning is to create daily routines that we stick to religiously: “The more details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.” Without a plan, he says that the indecision of how we should spend time, wastes previous time.

We are now in the period of the nine days, a season in the Jewish calendar where we grieve over the ancient destruction of Jerusalem and the Temples. We count these nine days as part of the 21 day period of our past violently lost. But what about day 10 and 11 and 32 and 1,045? When we count days, we are essentially saying that each day matters, and we have an opportunity to redeem time every morning. A day makes all the difference in the world.

Sanctifying time day after day brings us to another writer, William Faulkner, who once said: “I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.”

Shabbat Shalom

Good Neighbors

“Distance yourself from a bad neighbor.”

Ethics of the Fathers 1:7

A police officer approached two men hanging out in a public space in the middle of the night. He approached the first guy: “What are you doing here?

“Nothing.”

He turned his attention the other fellow: “And what are you doing here?”

“I’m helping him.”

We tend to do what the people around us do. It’s human nature. The sages of old recognized this and had a saying: “Woe to the wicked. Woe to his neighbor. How wonderful is the righteous person. How lucky for his neighbor” [BT Yoma 56b]. The decision of where to situate ourselves physically in a community is not random or coincidental. We make social choices everyday. Alice Roosevelt Longworth did. She famously said, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

Alice probably has a lot of company.

In his TED talk, “The Hidden Influence of Social Networks,” Dr. Nicholas Christakis talks about the tendency of like-minded people to cluster with each other and influence each other in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. With James Fowler, he studied the mathematical, social, biological and psychological rules and patterns in networks and offered some stunning examples of the impact of our homogeneous clustering: “…if your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher…if your friend’s friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher…if your friend’s friend’s friend  - someone you probably don’t even know – is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. And it’s only when you get to your friend’s friend’s friend’s friend that there’s no longer a relationship between that person’s body size and your own body size.”

Who would have thought that moving might help with weight loss?

In analyzing the reasons for this striking phenomenon Christakis suggests three possibilities: 1) obesity spreads from one person to the other in a causal fashion, 2) homophily – we gravitate to others who are like ourselves, and 3) confounding – we are not causing each other’s weight gain but share a common exposure to a factor that influences us both. We both happen to live walking distance to a bakery.

The Bible devotes many verses to the importance of picking the people you’re with and choosing well because we all operate “under the influence.” We are also told the importance of being good neighbors to attract good neighbors. Proverbs offers a few suggestions:

“Seldom step foot in your neighbor’s house – too much of you, and they will hate you,” [25:17].

“If a person loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse,” [27:14].

“A person who lacks judgment ridicules his neighbor, but a person of understanding holds his tongue” [11:12].

Give space. Be quiet at off-hours and zip the lip.

We live in the proximity of others. Our communities usually determine the norms, values and boundaries of our lives. Our social contract with others may never be articulated, but it’s virtually always present: in the decisions we make, in the social capital we invest, in the way we think, behave, vote and spend our leisure time. No wonder we are told to love our neighbor as ourselves. If we pick the neighborhood carefully, this won’t be very difficult.

Do you live in a neighborhood that helps you be a better person? Do something today that shows you’re a good neighbor.

Shabbat Shalom

Early Risers

“Wake up like a lion…”

Shulkhan Arukh, Code of Jewish Law

Laws of Rising in the Morning 1:1

When I taught young adults, one of my favorite quotes was, “Those who hoot with the owls at night, cannot soar with the eagles in the morning.” My children have heard this countless times when they’ve stayed up late then looked ghastly in the morning, trying to compose themselves for a day of school or work. What I love about the image is not the choice of animals but the choice of verbs. Do you want to muddle through the day or do you want to soar? Stay up late enough and you may have no choice in the matter. Feet drag. The brain feels foggy. And time seems to pass slower than ever until you can meet your bed again. The old Henny Youngman wisdom comes back: “If you’re going to so something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.”

In Rabbi Joseph Karo’s 16th century code of law, it is not the owl or the eagle who begins his book but the lion. The legal fragment above continues: “Wake up like a lion to stand in the morning to serve one’s Creator since he wakes up the dawn.” I’ve always struggled to understand who the “he” is modifying. Is it the lion who wakes up the jungle each day with a mighty roar, instilling fear in the other animals that generates adrenaline, or is it God who wakes up the morning? The contemplation of God inspires us to grab hold of the day and make it ours.

An early 20th century commentary, that of Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, observes here the affect of the owl. A person in the winter lies in bed and thinks about the warm and toasty feeling of being under the blanket or the lethargy of the summer and then feels immobile. Why get up? He suggests that just as one has to rise for work commitments, the mandate is to get up early for one’s ultimate work. This plays on the verb “la-avod” in Hebrew, which means both to work and to worship.

A Talmudic principle underscores this sentiment: “The vigilant are early in the performance of mitzvot.” What are you waiting for when it comes to goodness? Tractate Rosh Hashana 32b uses the term “vatikin” to describe such individuals, a term that implies both piety and early rising possibly from the Greek for straight or trustworthy. People who rise early to pray, study and commit themselves to kindness show great enthusiasm for life and what it can unfold when you seize on the day’s energy.

Naturally, the slow to move become the object of chastisement in the Bible, particularly in the book of Proverbs, because if you’re lazy, you won’t be able to take care of your needs or those of others in the most basic way.

 “Laziness brings on deep sleep, and the slothful person goes hungry” [19:5].

“The sloth will not plow because of the cold and then will beg during the harvest because he has nothing” [20:4].

“The desire of the lazy man kills him for his hands refuse to work” [21:25].

The momentary desire for inertia is overwhelmed by the long-term need to support oneself. But perhaps the best quote from Proverbs on the topic is about lions. “The lazy man says, ‘There is a lion in the road, a fierce lion roaming in the streets.’ As a door turns on its hinges, so does the sloth turn on his bed” [26:13-14]. A lazy man sees a fierce lion approaching but then turns over and goes back to sleep.

We know what the lion had for breakfast.

Shabbat Shalom

The Book of Empathy

"I've been told all about what you have done…”

Boaz to Ruth

empathy: noun 1.the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. 2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self. Origin: 1900-05;  < Greek empátheia  affection, equivalent to em- em-2  + path-  (base of páschein  to suffer) + -eia -ia; present meaning translates German Einfühlung [definition.com].

To be empathic in this definition can be either an intellectual identification with someone else or an emotional mirroring. It is the capacity to go beyond the self to hear and relate to the needs or pain of another. And it’s hard, particularly when it involves getting beyond your own hurt, getting over yourself and your bruises to see how you have bruised. Empathy represents a mature level of adult emotional development that few really achieve.

On the intellectual level of empathy, we turn to a passage in the Talmud. There was a legal argument of some consequence between two great sages. One was obligated to follow the other, and the submissive sage was concerned that he was breaking a very important law. Rabbi Akiva saw this scholar's distress and offered him an alternative way to look at the situation, to which the sage replied: “Akiva, you have consoled me; you have consoled me” [BT Rosh Hashana 25a]. Commentaries parse this, saying that he was consoled for two separate problems. But repeating an expression of solace is like emotional highlighting, a way that we acknowledge the depth of how someone has touched us. You have truly and deeply consoled me when I thought that I was inconsolable.

Then there is the emotional aspect of empathy. This takes us to the heart of the book of Ruth, chapter two: “So Boaz said to Ruth, ‘My daughter, listen to me. Don't go and glean in another field and don't go away from here. Stay here with my servant girls. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the girls. I have told the men not to touch you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.’ At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She exclaimed, ‘Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me--a foreigner?’ Boaz replied, ‘I've been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband--how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.’  ‘May I continue to find favor in your eyes, my lord,’ she said. ‘You have given me comfort and have spoken kindly to your servant--though I do not have the standing of one of your servant girls."’”

Ruth is so unused to an empathic ear that she seems almost embarrassed by Boaz' compliment. He is able to articulate her sacrifices when she never does, giving her a profound level of self-worth that was foreign to her.

Christian theologian Henri Nouwen in Out of Solitude writes, “The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

Maybe Shavuot is not only a time for Torah study but for a time for reflecting on friendship and celebrating it. It’s a time when we can reach beyond ourselves to acknowledge the suffering and the kindness of others, and sometimes giving voice to joy and pain beyond what a friend has communicated.

Celebrate friendship this Shavuot.

Our Hearts Weep

“Through the window peered Sisera’s mother. Behind the lattice, she sighed. Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why so late the clatter of his wheels?”

Judges 5:28

Those of us who are parents recognize in this verse in Judges the anxiety of not knowing where a child is: that momentary loss of eye contact in a busy place, that waiting for news, that expectant sound of a familiar car parking in the driveway or a key turning in the door. Until we hear it, we wrestle with a polarity of emotions: we expect the worst and then push aside the demons of worry that are ever-present. There must be a logical explanation for the delay. The biblical text masterfully captures this moment, not by telling but by showing. A mother sighs at the window, wondering when her son will come home.

This is no ordinary mother. It is the mother of a cruel enemy general who oppressed the Israelites for years, a general who died a coward. But the text pushes aside the politics to ponder the anguish of a mother in pain, one who intuits that her son will perhaps not be coming home. We have never met Sisera’s mother. She is introduced to us only to provide this spotlight. Her ladies-in-waiting try to reassure her that Sisera is merely enjoying the spoils of war: the women and the embroidered clothes, as if they were all mere objects. The text here offers a vulgar note of women making other women into chattle.  There is a reason Sisera has not yet made his way home, they contend. And she, too, dismisses any thought of a bad outcome with this reasoning: “she also assures herself,” the verse states. We are not convinced.

As readers who have already learned that Sisera is dead, we sense that when this mother approached the window in pain she somehow already knew.

As a community, we have all been waiting by that window for weeks, checking the news constantly and asking if there are any updates, any developments about our three kidnapped boys. We prayed for them, thought of them, cried for them. We told ourselves that the army would find them. It was just a matter of time.

The murder of three Israeli teenagers was just confirmed when journalists and pundits were talking about political and military responses within hours. The inevitable responses of harsh retribution or measured restraint were out in the public domain, as expected. They were predictable and predictably not effective.

But these were mere distractions. All most of us could really think about was what it must be like to be a parent of one of those boys at that hour and for every other hour after that. Our own sacred texts demand that we do this as a sign of compassion, pushing away the politics and prognoses that will inevitably follow a tragedy like this for one simple moment: the moment a parent who is waiting finds out the terrible news that he or she has lost a child.

We have all been in some psychic, mystical way the parents, brothers, sisters and friends of those boys: Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar. This bond of connection and concern runs deep, in tears, in friendship, in helplessness. We waited by the window with the families of these boys.

Yet, at the end of the day, our verse in Judges reminds us that we are not the parents.  Whatever closeness and pain we experience can never come close to that of the families who lost those children. Sisera’s mother does not stand with her friends at that window. She stands alone.

And this too, is an obvious but critical aspect of community. There is something intensely uncomfortable about strangers or acquaintances who are more distraught than the actual mourners. An I-Thou relationship is constituted through many private understandings. One of them is that we must know when to respect the privacy and singularity of mourning, especially in deaths that receive great public attention. We can never to presume to understand someone else’s most intimate pain. We have our own pain as a community and extended family that has lost three young lights. It translates and extends itself but also has a limit. We go on when those who sit on the floor in mourning cannot imagine they ever will.

Compassion extends us. Respect limits us. Our humanity makes us reach out. Our humility makes us stand back. We mourn with these parents, and we also know that there is an abyss that we will never understand. Even as we all stood with these parents, they stood at a window alone and will be alone still.

Shabbat Shalom

The Name Game

“A good name is better than fine perfume…”

Ecclesiastes 7:1

A good name is easy to compare to perfume because perfume leaves its residue in the form of a smell. Many people wear a signature perfume that identifies them even before they walk into a room. Sometimes it’s a great smell, and sometimes it’s overbearing. Remember the old commercial; everyone in the office smelled the boss coming before he entered the room because of his terrible cologne, so they immediately started working to give the appearance of busy-ness. Your reputation - your name - is a lot like perfume. It announces your presence, introducing you, accompanying you and even leaving a little after-effect for impact. And just like perfume, you hope that the impact is positive and maybe even beautiful.

We are about to read the story of Ruth, a book filled with names that invite interpretation. Some believe Ruth’s name is related to the word for friendship, a grammatical stretch but true to her character. She was totally committed to her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s people, God, homeland and future. She had the opportunity to stay and rebuild her life at home but wanted instead the spiritual adventure of a lifetime. Her devotion ends in the true redemption of her life and the life of the people she adopts through the legacy of leadership that follows.

There is Naomi who does not want to be called “sweet” because her life was deeply embittered by loss. When the women of Bethlehem come to the city gate to greet her and ask, “Is this Naomi?” she quickly disabuses them of that notion. I have suffered so much loss that I cannot be called by the same name. I am no longer that person. As she says this, it is a chastisement to these women who dismiss her with their question. God has punished me enough, she reminds them. I do not need you to punish me further. Perhaps if you call me a different name, you will treat me differently. You will find compassion that you do not have now.

Orpah’s name in the midrash means “neck” because in leaving Naomi, she turned her neck from the life she had. There is ploni-almoni, a name associated with anonymity because this redeemer failed to redeem Ruth and was not considered worthy. And then there are Naomi’s sons: machlon and hilyon, loosely translated as “sickness and destruction.” Lovely. Glad I wasn’t at that baby-naming.

Scholars believe that these names were transposed on the text to reflect the feelings that readers should have upon reading this story. Maimonides helps fill in the gap by suggesting that Naomi’s sons were leaders of the generation who, during a time of famine and political unrest, turned away from those in need. They moved to Moab to seek their fortunes and evade the cries of petitioners. We appreciate their predicament. It is hard to have and be surrounded by have-nots. But that is where the work of leadership must take place. Those are the times when instead of moving away, we need leaders to lean in.

Ethics of the Fathers identifies four crowns, three of which appear in the book of Ruth: “Rabbi Shimon would say: ‘There are three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of kingship. But the crown of a good name transcends them all’” [4:13]. The book of Ruth contains the crown of kingship in presenting the ancestry of King David. It contains the crown of Torah because, in addition to its special narrative qualities, it demonstrates the Jewish values of charity and the importance of the levirate marriage in protecting women and the family name. And it contains the crown of a good name because Naomi returned to her state of sweetness by the book’s end and Ruth showed us the power of transformation through friendship.

If your name is your perfume, what fragrance do you bring into the lives of others and what beautiful smells are associated with your reputation?

Shabbat Shalom

Ruth and the Ego Check

We just read the story of Ruth, a book filled with names that invite our interpretation. Some believe Ruth’s name is related to the word for friendship, a grammatical stretch but true to her character. There is Naomi who does not want to be called “sweet” because her life was deeply embittered by loss, and Orpah whose name in the midrash is “neck” because in leaving Naomi, she turned her neck from the life she had. There is ploni-almoni, a name associated with anonymity and then there are Naomi’s sons: machlon and hilyon, loosely translated as “sickness and destruction.” Lovely. Glad I wasn’t at that baby-naming.

Scholars believe that these names were transposed on the text to reflect the feelings that readers should have upon reading this story. Maimonides helps fill in the gap by suggesting that Naomi’s sons were leaders of the generation who, during a time of famine and political unrest, turned away from those in need. They moved to Moab to seek their fortunes and evade the cries of petitioners. We appreciate their predicament. It is hard to have and be surrounded by have-nots. But that is where the work of leadership must take place. Those are the times when instead of moving away, we need leaders to lean in.

Judaism has always coupled power with responsibility, even if there is a large price to pay. The Talmud says that “authority buries the one who owns it.” Some commentaries believe that this is to be taken literally. People with power have shorter lives.  Others read it as a quality of life issue. You will take on the problems of others and the burden of fixing them. If you are the head of an organization or the president of a board, pay attention to this health warning. It should say on the side of the stationary: “This leadership position could and will be hazardous to your life.”

What our health warning also needs to say is that not taking on leadership may be hazardous to the lives of others. We need good leadership. We need visionaries who can chart a course for us and great managers who can get us there operationally because without them we’re lost.

The problem is how to use authority wisely and keep humble when you have power. And here we turn to the Talmud again: “He was naked when he entered [into power], and he will be naked when he leaves it. If only his exit would be like his entrance – without sin and iniquity.” Few people enter the world with any power. Not even kings are born wearing ermine capes. And when they exit this world and their position of power, they will once again be naked but this time sin and iniquity will have to be removed. Power changes people.

Because power changes people, those with power have to keep their egos in check. When one Talmudic sage, for example, went from his home to the court to judge a legal case he would say to himself: “Of his own will, he goes to die.” In other words, I know that this is a difficult job and that I imperil my life when I do it.

Another sage did the same thing but when a crowd of people followed him, he added a few verses from Job to his self-whispers: “Though his excellency ascends to the heavens, and his head reaches the clouds, yet he shall perish forever like his own dung; they who have seen him will say: where is he?” (Job 20:6-7). When you achieve power, be wary of your downfall. With your ascent comes a possible moral descent. You may have your head in the clouds, but you are really like the basest of human waste. You are dung.

The Talmud then relates the story of Rabbi Zutra who was carried on the shoulders of his admirers on the Sabbath and on holidays. He, too, would recite something to keep him aware of authority’s perils. “For power is not forever, and does the crown endure for all generations?” (Proverbs 27:24). He reminded himself that  power is only temporal and short-lived. Each of these sages was highly conscious of power and the way it can manipulate – and possibly bury - those who have it. Each identified a saying to keep the ego in check.

Shabbat Shalom

Every Day Counts

“Today my days and years are exactly filled to teach you that the Holy One, Blessed Be He, sits and fills the years of the righteous from day to day, and from month to month, as it is stated, ‘The number of your days I will fulfill’ [Exodus 23:26].”

BT Rosh Hashana 11a

‘Tis the season of graduations and that unique saturation of trite, feel-good advice known as the commencement address. Seize the day. The world is your oyster. Now is your time.

This year, we’ve spiced up the season because perfectly good commencement speakers were “fired” because of student protest or fired themselves first to avoid the fray. Condoleeza Rice was ousted as was chief of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, Robert Birgeneau, former chancellor of Berkeley and Attorney General Eric Holder. This led Timothy Egan in The New York Times to conclude of the graduation bullies: “They’re afraid of hearing something that might spoil a view of the world they’ve already figured out.” And while we are on The New York Times, let’s not forget Jill Abramson’s graduation address this year at Wake Forest University, only days after she was let go as the paper’s executive editor. She said to the 2014 graduating class: “What’s next for me? I don’t know. So I’m in exactly the same boat as many of you.”

At least she was honest. She – along with many in her audience – are unsure of what is next. The messages of overweening confidence don’t always resonate with young people insecure about their choices or the still sober job market. Carpe Diem doesn’t always hit a cord. So for all you graduates out there, I offer the present of a passage of Talmud. It didn’t cost me anything, but it’s still priceless, and I mean well, even if the message still borders on cliche.

The Talmudic observation above is complex and related to time. The words are imaginatively put in the mouth of Moses who died at 120. The verse recording his death in Deuteronomy has Moses addressing the people, his own commencement speech, if you will. “And he said to them, ‘I am one hundred and twenty years old today’” (31:2). Quite an announcement. The Talmud parses out the phrase and wonders why Moses included the word today and decides that it is for the sake of precision. Moses lived out every one of those years to the day, leading to the conclusion that God fulfills the days, months and years of the righteous exactly: “The number of your days, I will fulfill.”

We are into only in graduation season. We are also counting the days from Passover to Shavuot. We count them by days and weeks, noting each one and blessing the Omer count as a way to remind ourselves that every day matters, that every day requires our blessing, that were each day really significant, not an hour or minute would be wasted. In that sense, it’s not so much that God gives the righteous the gift of squeezing the most out of time, but that perhaps this is what constitutes genuine righteousness: the ability to use time well, to regard it as sacred, and never to believe that an act of grace or compassion towards another human being is a waste of time. We are put on this earth to serve.

In the spirit of fulfilling the demands of each day precisely and with meaning, I leave you with the words of French novelist Marc Levy in If Only It Were True:

If you want to know the value of one year, just ask a student who failed a course.

If you want to know the value of one month, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.

If you want to know the value of one hour, ask the lovers waiting to meet.

If you want to know the value of one minute, ask the person who just missed the bus.

If you want to know the value of one second, ask the person who just escaped death in a car accident.

And if you want to know the value of one hundredth of a second, ask the athlete who won a silver medal in the Olympics.

Congratulations to all of our graduates (we have three this year). May you live until 120, and may you make every minute matter.

Shabbat Shalom

Naming Opportunities

“If someone gives charity saying, ‘I give this sela [ancient monetary amount] to charity in order that my children may live or that I may merit life in the world to come,’ he is still considered a fully-fledged righteous person.”

BT Rosh Hashana 4a

It is sometimes hard to give full credit to someone who gives charity on condition or as a naming opportunity, particularly if the name is his or her own and not that of a relative or friend. And yet, this passage of the Talmud has no qualms about the practice. If someone gives charity on the condition that something good will happen to him or his children, it is regarded as an act of righteousness regardless of the terms. This individual is considered a “tzadik gamur’ – a fully-fledged righteous person.

This is difficult to compute with a competing statement about humility that appears in Ethics of the Fathers: “Be not like servants who serve the Master to receive a reward” (1:3). The Koren Steinsaltz brings two Talmud commentators who offer an alternative reading of this statement because of their discomfort with the notion that such a person is a tzadikand read it instead as tzedaka. It does not matter how you give, the money is considered a complete act of charity, thus placing the emphasis on the gift and not on the person. Some emphasize that what makes this person righteous is not what he hopes to gain but the way in which he gives. If he or she gives generously, even for the sake of some reward, then this individual is considered special and worthy. In charity it is the how and not the why that is of ultimate importance.

This passage gets to the heart of a difficult conundrum in charity. Is it about the process or the outcome? In the statement above, the outcome is critical, but we know that a lot of charities today are process rather than outcome driven. They have campaign goals and a culture of cultivation, courting donors [and spending a lot of time and money doing so] instead of stating very specific needs and how they achieve them. For example, “our campaign is one million dollars, and we are 50% to goal” as opposed to “we need to feed 150 seniors in a daily meal program at the cost of…” All of the events and lunches and meetings often distance people from the very problems they seek to solve with their charitable dollars.

Yet, in a medieval compendium of Jewish law, the Sefer Ha-Hinukh, the emphasis is on the one who gives and how the charitable transaction creates a deeper level of compassion and generosity in the giver, almost in absence of the receiver. Thus, the process is paramount. How are you transformed as a result of giving more expansively?

But perhaps there is something deeper in the charitable equation or negotiation above. After all, what is at issue here is not a name on a wall but the welfare of one’s children or the future of the giver in the next life. In other words, the stakes here are not about status but about leveraging charity to achieve health and religious satisfaction, ultimately two spiritual goals. The profound desire to invest in one’s future is paralleled by the investment that the giver makes in others. If I make someone else’s life better, will it make my life better? The answer in this passage of Talmud is a resounding yes. My existential understanding of the world is that if I build spiritual capacity by addressing the needs of others, I may expand, in some way, the compassion I need to live in this world.

This sentiment is echoed in another legal text that understands charity as a spiritual insurance policy. “A person should meditate on the fact that, at every moment, he asks God for his livelihood. And just as he requests that the Holy One, blessed be He, hear his cry, so too should he hear the cry of the poor. He should meditate on the fact that the wheel of fortune turns constantly, and ultimately he, his children or his grandchildren may need to receive charity” (Laws of Charity, Kitzur Shulkhan Arukh 34:1).

The wheel of fortune turns constantly, and we may never know when we will have to be on the receiving end of charity. It’s good to be the hand that gives. It helps us appreciate that if we ever need to be the hand that receives, someone else will put out a hand with love and grace.

Shabbat Shalom

Trigger Happy/Sad

“Behold the Lord stood by a wall of wrongs, and in His hand were the wrongs.”

Amos 7:7

I learned a new concept this week: the preemptive trigger. It has been spreading on college campuses and has been reported in the Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and The New Yorker. I am always the last to know.

A preemptive trigger is a verbal or written alert offered by professors in advance of presenting or discussing material that may be racially, ethnically or sexually offensive in the classroom. Issues of privilege or oppression also need to be flagged. Originating in online feminist forums, it seems to be an academic offshoot of political correctness. Students who encounter material that may trigger traumatic feelings, particularly if they are revisiting a personally painful subject, need time to prepare emotionally. If the classroom is to be a place of authentic learning, it needs to be a safe space.

This is a presumptuous statement about the nature of education. The assumption that learning takes place in emotionally comfortable environments undercuts what many educators believe is at the heart of education: making people uncomfortable enough to question themselves and their universe. Some educators believe that the preemptive trigger fails students precisely because we rarely get warnings when an insult or offense is thrown our way. Journalist Jessica Valenti contends that there are so many possible ways to hurt people that it is impossible to catalogue them. And even if you could: “There is no trigger warning for living your life.”

What does Jewish law say about the preemptive trigger?

The closest legal parallel I could find is the rabbinic explanation of a verse in Leviticus: “A person must not oppress his fellow. He should fear the Lord” [25:17]. This chapter contains both the transgression of oppressing someone with money and oppressing someone with words. A mishna records the comparison [Bava Metzia 58b-59a]:

Just as it is wrong to aggrieve someone in business, is it also prohibited to aggrieve someone with words. One should not ask how much an item costs if he has no intention to purchase it. If a person once led a sinful life, one should not remind him what he used to do. If he was the grandchild of gentiles, one should not say to him, “Remember what your ancestors did,” as it is written, 'Do not oppress the stranger...' [Exodus 22:20]."

The ensuing Talmudic discussion goes into detail. Asking the cost of an item without intention to buy it is not a problem in today’s capitalist environment where people are accustomed to inquiring about prices before purchase but was important to bear in mind when taking up the time of a craftsperson who made the wares or a peddler who must continue traveling. One may make the argument today that if one takes up a salesperson’s time knowing that he or she was going to purchase the item online anyway, it may traverse an acceptable boundary of the Jewish value of sensitivity to another’s feelings or another’s time.

Reminding people about their past is another matter. If a person speaks freely about his or her previous lifestyle, then perhaps it would not be oppressive to mention it. But you never know. As a result, we are not allowed to reference a person’s conversion in front of him, unless he wants to bring it up. It may simply be too painful: the isolation, the difficulty of the spiritual journey, the alienation from family members. The Talmud goes so far as to say that if a person had someone hanged in his family, a fishmonger should not ask him if he can hang the fish he selected as it may cause him pain. Talk about cataloging previous hurts, that’s real attention to detail. If that is not a preemptive trigger, what is?

The sage Rabbi Hisda tags on an inspiring message on this passage of Talmud that may be an intriguing explanation of why the verse that asks us to be sensitive about what oppresses others mentions the fear of God: “All the gates have been locked, except the gates through which pass the cries of the oppressed, for it is written ‘Behold the Lord stood by a wall of wrongs, and in His hand were the wrongs’ [Amos 7:7].” It is not only that God knows our real intentions when we hurt others but pretend that we meant nothing by it. It is that God stands by the wall where the oppressed cry and holds on to each of those bruises and holds us accountable to them. We may forget the hurt we create, but God does not.

We are accountable for our words. We cannot afford to take people back to a place of woundedness because God is standing there with an admonition. We are human. We are all wounded. Remind someone of his or her pain, and you will simply surface more pain in the world. Grace and our silence are the only compassionate response.

Shabbat Shalom

The Book Thief

“One who is always generous and always lends, his children will be blessed.”

Psalms 37:26

I was recently speaking with a friend who bemoaned the state of book lending. Perfectly wonderful people who would never think of taking a dime from you without returning it, can have a book of yours on the shelf for years without the thought of returning it. I have even purchased the same book twice to lend it out, without thinking it would ever make its way home. Someone I know warned never to lend him a book because the whole world was his library. You’d never see it again. What, this friend asked, could possibly explain this strange phenomenon?

Before we tackle this question, let’s turn for a moment to a few excerpts from a letter that Maimonides’ Hebrew translator, Judah ibn Tibbon, wrote to his son Samuel in twelfth century Spain: “I have assisted you by providing you with an extensive library for your use and have thus relieved you of the necessity of borrowing books. Most students must wander about to seek books, often without finding them. But you, thanks be to God, lend and borrow not.” It seems that book borrowing is a time worn practice that was taxing to the student. Ibn Tibbon relieved his son of this by – in his words – “journeying to the ends of the earth” to procure teachers and texts to grow his son intellectually.

But Samuel was a disappointment to his father. He did not immerse himself in learning. Of his books, his father chastises, he took no care “to know them or even their titles.” Samuel wouldn’t even have recognized his books in the hands of another. This scholarly family was not producing an heir in Samuel, thought his father. “You are still young, and improvement is possible, if heaven but grant you a helping gift of desire and resolution, for ability is of no avail without inclination…” Have no fear. Samuel turned into a fine translator, philosopher and physician.

The point is that his father understood that having books and being able to lend them rather than borrow them is an exalted position to be in when it comes to the development of the heart and mind. The verse above in Psalms describes the need of generous people to be generous, which is only fed by giving and not getting back. Generosity is a sign that children will be blessed because of the spillover effect that it engenders in the giver, which changes the life of the receiver.

If people don’t return books it may be because the borrower understands that the lender wants to share sometimes more than the borrow wants to borrow. After all, why do lenders keep lending, even to recidivists? When we are moved by something we read, we want to share the delight and adventure and provocation of it. It both validates and enlarges our own reading. What could be better than a borrower telling a lender, “I love the book you gave me. It gave me pleasure. It helped me understand something about myself. It changed my life!” Borrowers should be wary, however, of taking advantage of the lender’s delight in sharing by not returning, thus preventing the lender from lending the book out again and magnifying the pleasure.

Do me a favor, will you? When you finish reading this, return that book that you’ve had for ages or suffer the fate in this little poem by Canadian author Lucy Maude Montgomery, best known for Ann of Green Gables:

“Steal not this book for fear of shame

For on it is the owner’s name

And when you die the Lord will say

Where is the book you stole away?

And when you say you do not know

The Lord will say go down below.”

Shabbat Shalom

Welcoming Distractions

Sometimes when you study Talmud, you find yourself laughing out-loud. OK. Maybe rarely, but it’s always surprising when it happens. Here is today’s laugh. Rabbi Avya the Elder asked Rabbi Huna a complicated question about the slaughtering of an animal on a festival. Are you laughing yet? Rabbi Huna did not want to answer the question so he used the oldest trick in the book. He told Rabbi Avya that a raven was flying by to distract him – “Look. A raven flies.” - hoping that when they looked up at the sky, his colleague would forget his question. Laugh here.

Did Rabbi Huna think his colleague was stupid? Rabbi Huna’s son witnessed this interaction and was deeply puzzled; after all, Rabbi Huna said that Rabbi Avya was a great man. If he was such a great man and a great scholar, why didn’t Rabbi Huna answer his question instead of resorting to a juvenile distraction? Rabbi Huna responded with a sense of despair: “What should I have done for him? Today I am like this [best described by the verse that states]: ‘Let me lean against stout trunks; let me crouch among apple trees’ (Song of Songs 2:5), and he asked me about something that requires reasoning.”

Rabbi Huna was a scholar of distinction who was deeply engaged in matters of the community. People were leaning on him. He was the stout trunk in Song of Songs. Everyone needed him for guidance and legal advice. He wanted, instead, to be like one crouching or hiding among apple trees, far from sight. He was so tired from answering questions that he did not have the mental state to tolerate another, even or perhaps especially, from someone learned who would require a thoughtful response.

Rabbi Huna did not lie. Rashi states that a raven really did pass by at that moment, perhaps startling the group study. Rabbi Huna leveraged this diversion because he either did not want to give Rabbi Avya an answer right away or because he could not think of one. The more honest approach would have simply been to say he had run out of mental steam. Some commentaries believe that Rabbi Huna was being dismissive of this scholar because he thought the question did not make sense. But this would not explain Rabbi Huna’s convoluted answer.

Being a public figure can be very hard at times, particularly if you are running low on energy or creativity; when all of your ideas are spent and you have very little room left for negotiating politics or engaging in difficult intellectual gymnastics, you may get to a point where you say “Enough.” It is hard to replace lost energy or to feel inspired when you are this burnt out. Maybe when Rabbi Huna saw the raven, he was trying to distract himself. The image of a bird free in flight for a stout and rooted tree trunk would have been an appealing relief.

Ravens live for a long time, often for decades. They mate for life and are very territorial in pairs. We know the raven from Edgar Allen Poe stories as a symbol of doom and a foreshadow of trouble on the horizon. In the ancient world, however, ravens were often revered because of their intelligence and ingenuity. Rabbi Huna could have been, in some way, suggesting that Rabbi Avya was like the raven. He was smart, swift and flying high while Rabbi Huna felt too weighed down and burdened to respond. This may even have been a play on words because Avya in Hebrew suggests a birdlike quality, referencing the air or sky.

Jackie Kennedy explained her role as first lady much as the raven functioned in this story: “I think the best thing I can do is to be a distraction. A husband lives and breathes his work all day long. If he comes home to more table thumping, how can the poor man ever relax?” She knew that a president’s work is rarely done and that home had to be an oasis that would distract her husband from the burdens of leadership. And a lovely distraction she was.

While we may not agree with Rabbi Huna’s trick, we can certainly appreciate where it comes from and what it was trying to mask. We appreciate his vulnerability and the confession of his inadequacy. And he teaches us something at the same time. Rather than take us far away from our goals, helpful distractions can provide small diversions that help us relax and re-focus.

Distractions don’t always have to be viewed negatively. They can provide us with a temporary mental space and pause to re-focus. Name one of your positive distractions. Be a raven and fly away with it, but don’t forget to come back.

Shabbat Shalom