Reciprocity

“Many seek favors from a ruler; everyone is the friend of a person who gives gifts.”

— Proverbs 19:6

Get on line. Someone is giving out presents. The verse from Proverbs emphasizes gift-giving in the most superficial relationships. We ask for favors from people who are more powerful than we are. We wait for hand-outs from people who give gifts. We call these gift-givers friends, whether the gift is a physical object or a conferred status as a result of the friendship. But it's hardly a real friendship. 

French sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote one of the early and influential books on gift-giving in 1924 and claims that gift economies are marked by three related obligations: the obligation to give, to accept and to reciprocate. These obligations which drive the gift-giving cycle are typical in small, tight-knit groups like families and communities. Those intrigued by this topic might appreciate Lewis Hyde's more recent book, The Gift. In our verse from Proverbs, receiving alone will not create a bond. There has to be reciprocity for both sides to feel valued and equal partners.

Amanda Owen has a saying: "Receive everything." Owen wrote two books on the subject, The Power of Receiving and Born to Receive after observing how many clients in her counseling practice were giving a great deal but receiving much less in their relationships. She herself was victim of the same problem - a dilemma for which she blames herself: ". . . I also created relationships in which I gave much more than I got back and that left me feeling exhausted, resentful, and distressed. . . . The more I thought about receiving, the more I wondered why we are taught to denigrate 50 percent of every transaction." Our society praises giving but denigrates receiving because it seems selfish. But without healthy reciprocity we don't learn how to receive praise, gifts and favors with grace and maturity. 

When we are always giving and block ways for people to give back, we also minimize the capacity of others to give back. "Create a pathway for those you help to give back," she advised. Owen claims that this not only makes others feel like equals but also minimizes the stress we feel when giving-taking relationships are uneven: "Once you get used to people giving to you as much as you give to them and receive all of the benefits of a less stressful life, you will not consider putting yourself last."

This approach explains a remarkable Talmudic passage that appears in this past week's study cycle. A husband, in ancient Jewish law, has the right to nullify his wife's vows if she commits to something that would negatively impact him, herself or their marriage. He cannot, however, prevent her from doing an action that she perceives as suffering. A Talmudic sage then determines what suffering in this context means through an unusual interpretation of a biblical verse. "Rabbi Meir would say, what is the meaning of '...the living should take this to heart' (Ecclesiastes 7:2)? This means that one who eulogizes others when they die will in turn be eulogized when he himself dies; one who weeps for others will be wept for when he himself passes away; and one who buries others will himself be buried upon his passing," [BT Nedarim 83b].

The entire verse from Ecclesiastes is one we may recognize from the title of an Edith Wharton novel. "It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of mirth, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart." Visiting mourners puts life in perspective and helps us appreciate what we have. The Talmudic reading is that a man cannot prevent his wife from visiting mourners because it may cause her anxiety. She will fear that if she does not console mourners, no one will be there for her when she needs consolation. Being part of a community is recognizing that reciprocity matters. You can't expect the benefits of the community if you don't invest in it yourself.

A friend who volunteers in a Jewish home for seniors said that she goes weekly because one day she may be in the same position and wants to know that there will be people who will visit her. Initially, I thought this was odd, maybe even a selfish rather than selfless reason for volunteering. But then I came to understand that this friend deeply believes in the power of community and was - without guarantees - paying her moral down-payment on the future. 

As we approach the High Holiday season, it's a good time to think about volunteering for the new year and investing in a community that is invested in us.

Shabbat Shalom

Stand Tall

“Blessed are You, our God, Ruler of the universe, who has straightened the bent over.”

— Morning Blessings

We rarely get good news in the papers these days so when there is news to celebrate, it is often eclipsed by tragedy or tucked into a remote corner. This week we take note of a big piece of good news that’s worth a moment of reflection and appreciation. According to The New York Times, “...it has been one full year since polio was detected anywhere in Africa, a significant milestone in global health..."

Doctors and health experts are celebrating what they consider a fragile success. When the global polio eradication campaign began in 1988, 350,000 children worldwide had polio. Last year that number dropped to 359. We are on the brink of eradicating all polio across the globe - something unimaginable is just on our horizon. This kind of accomplishment, only capable with the intervention of modern medicine, is worth a blessing. And I think I’ve found the perfect one, culled from our daily morning blessings: “Blessed are You, our God, Ruler of the universe, who has straightened the bent over.”

Polio is an infectious disease that usually causes a weakening of the muscles in the legs but can also spread to the head, neck and elsewhere. It is an ancient illness and can and still does have a crippling effect when not treated. Although Dr. Jonas Salk revolutionized the polio equation in the 1950s with his vaccine,  the World Health Organization still declared it a public health emergency as late as 2014 because pockets of the poorest populations in Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria and Afghanistan and other countries had still not overcome its reach. Now that Africa has been polio-free for a year, medical experts hope that additional pressures will be put on other countries to make polio a disease of the past.

Because of the crippling nature of the disease, a blessing on polio’s eradication might focus on the fact that God helps those bent over stand tall. The Talmud offers us a string of morning blessings that still appear in traditional prayerbooks today that travel with us through the process of waking up, from the moment we open our eyes and through the acts of getting out of bed, washing and dressing. Performed slowly, this choreography of rising can frame the entire day with a posture of gratitude, figuratively and literally. To me, one of the most touching of these blessings is “zokef kefufim,” - to straighten the bent over, in which the very Hebrew letters seem to mimic in its design the word’s meaning - especially the first letter of each word.

In Torah Yoga, Diane Bloomfield writes about the power of body and spirit in alignment regarding the spine: “Because your spine is your infinite spirit clothed in nerves, bones and muscles, every time you straighten and strengthen your spine, you are revealing more of your underlying infinite spirit.” As we age, Bloomfield writes, the spine often compresses without conscious work to keep it straight and aligned and the ease with which children bend down and straighten is compromised as we get older. Making this blessing is a way that we heighten our awareness of the spine as the defining anchor of our skeletal structure and spiritualize the experience of standing straight.

We find an inherent contradiction in the book of Ecclesiastes: “What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is missing cannot be recovered” (1:15). It seems as if that which is crooked will forever stay that way until we read later in the same book: “Consider what God has done: who can straighten what He has made crooked?” (7:3). Within human realms, it is near impossible to straighten that which is bent over, but when we invite God to partner with us, it seems there is nothing beyond our capacity to heal, as we read in Psalms, “The Lord upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down” (145:14).

We are fortunate that this blessing helps us capture and sanctify this moment in time when divine intervention and medical innovation have brought us to a historic accomplishment. But the blessing should not be reserved for medical cases alone. All of us have the power to lift up the fallen, to act in God’s image and pick up those who are bowed low in suffering. We may not all be physicians, but we all have the ability to heal. In honor of this milestone, let today be a day that you use your friendship and love to bring the gift of healing to someone in need.

Shabbat Shalom

Do You Know Who I Am?

“Rava said: ‘It is permitted for a person to make himself known in a place where people do not know him.’”

BT Nedarim 62a

I learned from the website Subzin about lines that appear in movies that this line “Do you know who I am?” has appeared in 1093 movie phrases in 1016 movies, most popularly – and not surprisingly – in “The Godfather.”

1 After a long time, in the third year, the word of the LORD came to Elijah: "Go and present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the land." 

2 So Elijah went to present himself to Ahab. Now the famine was severe in Samaria, 

3 and Ahab had summoned Obadiah, who was in charge of his palace. (Obadiah was a devout believer in the LORD.

4 While Jezebel was killing off the LORD's prophets, Obadiah had taken a hundred prophets and hidden them in two caves, fifty in each, and had supplied them with food and water.) 

5 Ahab had said to Obadiah, "Go through the land to all the springs and valleys. Maybe we can find some grass to keep the horses and mules alive so we will not have to kill any of our animals." 

6 So they divided the land they were to cover, Ahab going in one direction and Obadiah in another. 

7 As Obadiah was walking along, Elijah met him. Obadiah recognized him, bowed down to the ground, and said, "Is it really you, my lord Elijah?" 

8 "Yes," he replied. "Go tell your master, 'Elijah is here.' " 

9 "What have I done wrong," asked Obadiah, "that you are handing your servant over to Ahab to be put to death? 

10 As surely as the LORD your God lives, there is not a nation or kingdom where my master has not sent someone to look for you. And whenever a nation or kingdom claimed you were not there, he made them swear they could not find you. 

11But now you tell me to go to my master and say, 'Elijah is here.' 

12 I don't know where the Spirit of the LORD may carry you when I leave you. If I go and tell Ahab and he doesn't find you, he will kill me. Yet I your servant have worshiped the LORD since my youth. 

13 Haven't you heard, my lord, what I did while Jezebel was killing the prophets of the LORD? I hid a hundred of the LORD's prophets in two caves, fifty in each, and supplied them with food and water. 

14 And now you tell me to go to my master and say, 'Elijah is here.' He will kill me!" 

15 Elijah said, "As the LORD Almighty lives, whom I serve, I will surely present myself to Ahab today."

16 So Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him, and Ahab went to meet Elijah. 

17When he saw Elijah, he said to him, "Is that you, you troubler of Israel?" 

18 "I have not made trouble for Israel," Elijah replied. "But you and your father's family have. You have abandoned the LORD's commands and have followed the Baals. 

19 Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel. And bring the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel's table." 

20 So Ahab sent word throughout all Israel and assembled the prophets on Mount Carmel. 

21 Elijah went before the people and said, "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." But the people said nothing.

This unusual practice  is traced to an interpretation of a verse in Kings, “But, I, your servant have feared the Lord from my youth” (I Kings 18:12). Ovadiah, the prophet, identified himself to Elijah so that the well-known prophet would know with whom he was speaking.

The Rosh believes that this is permitted because a community would not want to make the mistake of not properly honoring a Torah scholar but others disagree and say this is permitted in few situations.

The Place

This week was exhausting existentially in our homeland. Ideology and fundamentalism became tools of violence in a land so desperate for peace. These were not external threats, but internal zealotry born of an arrogance and certitude that should make us pause, wonder, feel immense shame and anger and then take a painful look inside.

One of the names of God in Hebrew is Makom; God is a place, the ultimate place, so to speak. Makom is an odd way to refer to a Divine Being, but there is something about it that signals both grandeur and solace. When it comes to spiritual shelter, what matters is location, location, location. Many biblical verses refer to God as a refuge or place we hide to escape from our troubles when we feel ill at ease or afraid.

Stamped on many psalms is not the idea that God is a place as in a scenic vista or a magnificent sweep of landscape but a place we can go to when there is nowhere else to go. "Deliver me, O Lord, from my enemies. I take refuge in You" (Psalms 143:9). Continuing the theme of protection, we read, "For You have been a refuge to me, a tower of strength against the enemy (61:3). God not only shields us. God is a tower when we are feeling small and powerless. "You are my hiding place. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with songs of deliverance" (32:7). Not only do we hide in God, when we do so, we are surrounded by the loving cradle of song to sooth us. Sometimes we need to hide and do not know how. Then, too, the psalmist calls out to God, "Hide me in the shadow of your wings" (17:8).

Elsewhere, in the book of Isaiah, we have God as place using visual cues in nature: "Each will be like a refuge from the wing and a shelter from the storm. Like streams of water in a dry country, like a huge rock in a parched land" (32:2). God offers a place for us to hide when we are at our lowest and most fragile, and we suddenly grasp sight of a rich oasis. The problem is that we cannot always hide nor should we.

Turning to a more modern view of place, we study the living words of Israeli poet Tuvya Ruebner, who was awarded the Israel Prize for his poetry in 2008. Ruebner came to what was then Palestine from Czechoslovakia in 1941 during the British Mandate. He came alone. His family eventually perished in the Holocaust, but Ruebner's different path saved him. He became a member of Kibbutz Merhavia and a schoolteacher.

His poem, "When I arrived the place was," appears here in an English translation by Oded Manor.

When I arrived the place was
Filled with dust. No signature 
Of grass. Not
A single blade. A few grey trees
Stood here, there, shrouded
In sackcloth and dust. In my dream I saw
The rivers of my youth, the nights of my forests. Nowadays
Everything is green. In my dream I see
Filled with dust.

Sometimes we dream of a place that is lush and verdant but the reality turns out not to match the welcoming vision. Hardly anything is growing. Everything is covered in a film of dust that mars the deep green of nature. That happens to places when we have great expectations that are not met, when our disappointments become a storm cloud of reality.

When we speak of God as "Makom," we don't mean just any place. We mean a place of safety, of joy, of triumph, of home. Our homeland, too, has to feel like that makom, that place of vibrancy and shelter for all who live there if we take the mandate to live in God's image seriously. Because if it is not a makom - a safe and loving space - for all who live there now then it will cease to be that one day for any who live there. Let the repair and the healing begin.

Shabbat Shalom

Is Doubt Good for You?

“A person does not put himself in a position of uncertainty.
”

— BT Nedarim 61b

This past week in the daily Talmud study cycle, we find a statement related to vows that gets to the heart of personal dissonance. More than a statement, it's an argument. Rabbi Meir believed that, " A person puts himself in a position of uncertainty," knowing that with every commitment comes a degree of risk that we understand. We invite some degree of uncertainty into our lives. We cannot always reside in unwavering certainty; to move forward and advance in virtually all arenas in life, we need to anticipate that risk will live near us and with us. Rabbi Yosei takes a more conservative position designed to maximize self-protection: "A person does not put himself in a position of uncertainty." No one willingly likes to lose control, thinks Rabbi Yossi, and puts himself or herself into a situation of doubt and ambivalence.

According to medieval interpreters of this passage of Talmud, the context of this debate is specifically targeted to a person who takes a vow - makes a commitment - and cannot remember exactly what he vowed. Alternatively, he may not have made his intention abundantly clear when making the commitment in the first place. In this case, we take his word literally because we have nothing more to go on other than what he said rather than what he may have meant. Rabbi Yossi is of the opinion that people do put themselves in positions of uncertainty, meaning that when reflecting on a vow, the person who made it wants to avoid the most narrow understanding of his or her words.                         

In essence, the debate is about whether or not people opt for ambiguity as a desideratum or whether the fear of doubt is so great that human beings will go out of their way to avoid ambivalence. In fact, we have a rabbinic expression that cements Rabbi Yossi's understanding of human nature: "There is no happiness like the resolution of doubt." Living with uncertainty has many psychic costs. Relieving oneself of uncertainty is a source of comfort and, ultimately, of joy.

But sometimes we opt for certainty for all the wrong reasons. Jonathan Haidt, professor of ethics at NYU, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, contends that it's almost in our DNA to gravitate to groups that smother individuality and prize conformity. Living in relatively homogeneous clusters is a way that we validate our own decisions and choices. In many instances, we think we are making decisions, but in reality we are swept up in group think or group behaviors that are highly predictable. It makes life simpler, like that classic line from The Onion, "Stereotyping makes life easy."

In Haidt's words, "...when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say." Haidt challenges a fundamental assumption many of us make: human beings are mostly wired and driven by reason. "If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you." 

Haidt's solution to inviting greater subtlety and ambiguity into our lives? "...if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system." This, he believes, explains why it is so important to have "intellectual and ideological diversity" within groups.  It is this diversity that will ultimately produce good public policy.

Personally, I think the comedian Gilda Radner summed up what we're aiming for perfectly. "I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity." As we get closer to our season of Jewish introspection, now is a good time to welcome and honor different understandings of the world that just might - if we're lucky - shake up our own.

Shabbat Shalom

To Plant or Not to Plant

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot…”

— Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

There is a time to plant and a time not to plant. Right now in the Jewish calendar year, we are not supposed to plant. During the nine days leading up to and including the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, we diminish activities of happiness and risk; this includes gardening for pleasure. The sixteenth-century code of Jewish law, the Shulkhan Arukh, writes: “As we enter the month of Av, we diminish joy...from the first of the month until the fast, we reduce business dealings, housing construction for the purpose of happiness [like a house a man might build for his son, the groom]...and refrain from planting for pleasure...” [O.H. 551:1-1].

This conclusion is a little surprising since Jeremiah, our prophet of doom and the “narrator” - if you will - of Tisha B’Av writes this in chapter 29 about Jews in exile.

“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.’   

 The very same author who gave us the pathos of Lamentations, also advised us to conduct ourselves with dignity and practicality in exile. Marry, build homes, plant gardens and pray for your host country. In many ways, this attitude has served as a recipe for Jewish success in exile. We mourn our losses and do not believe that life in the Diaspora is our ultimate collective goal as a people yet while we are on foreign soil, it’s best not to cry. It’s best to plant.

And yet, even with this admonition, there are times when our pain is too acute for the pleasure of the garden and the sense of enduring presence that it offers. These nine days are that time.

You may wonder, if you’re not a gardener, how planting gives one pleasure. In fact, you may feel quite the opposite: that digging and plowing and sowing is a source of unnecessary physical exertion and, therefore, permitted and encouraged during this season of Jewish anguish. Freud, however, tells us that flowers “are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.” Plants are a source of calm; the feast of the eyes is a balm for the restless soul. Cicero believed, not so much in the aesthetic of gardens as the practical sense of security one might enjoy knowing that one’s food needs can be met at home. “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

There is a spiritual side to planting and seeing the fruit of one’s labors quite literally that may also provide joy. Since so many human attempts at change and continuity fail, watching a seed ripen into a plant and then a fruit or vegetable provides a distinctive kind of happiness and sense of self-sufficiency and pride - all wrapped up in one exquisite tomato.

It is this joy that we avoid at times like this. The writer and food activist Michael Pollan, adds another dimension into our understanding of the seduction of gardening: “A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.” Gardening sometimes provides us with the pleasure of believing that we have control of nature, even if it’s only a small patch, of forces that are so often intimidating and beyond human control. This, Pollen, hints, is only an illusion. We may think we control nature because our small corner of it is neatly manicured, but we are wrong in the ultimate sense.

These nine days, we reduce our happiness and minimize our risk and relinquish control to the Ultimate Gardner who gave us the very first garden to work and to watch.

Shabbat Shalom

Frailty, Thy Name is Woman

When Hamlet denounced his mother for her quick re-marriage, he made a sweeping statement about 50% of the population: “Frailty thy name is woman.” He considered his mother weak-willed and spineless, but for Hamlet this is apparently a condition of all women.  That women were regarded as pitiable and vulnerable was also an important literary conceit for the biblical prophet Jeremiah, prophet of doom and exile. For him frailty is more about compassion than about fickleness.

It was Jeremiah who saw the destruction of the first Temple and shared his torments in the anguished and lyrical five chapters of The Book of Lamentations. If it is hard to imagine such a task, picture someone the afternoon of 9/11, trying to describe the wreckage before him as an act of witness to those who would never see it. Today, our beautiful Jerusalem is once again filled with people and embellished in splendor. As the Sages once said, “Ten measures of beauty were given to the world. Nine were given to Jerusalem.” But we no longer have a centralized place to pray as a community, a place to unburden ourselves and seek atonement or share our deepest spiritual yearnings and longings. What we do have is a first-hand recollection. Each year, we honor Jeremiah’s memory and the way that he tried to personalize this event and its scars.

Throughout the book, Jeremiah uses images of frail and disconsolate women to help readers after his death imagine what it was like to see Jerusalem and its holy Temple in ruins. With the coming approach of Tisha B’Av - the ninth day of Av – when we recite this dirge as a community, we will do a close reading of the first chapter of Lamentations to see how Jeremiah evokes pathos through the image of a fallen woman.

How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations! She who was queen among the provinces has now become a slave. Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are upon her cheeks. Among all her lovers there is none to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her; they have become her enemies. After affliction and harsh labor, Judah has gone into exile. She dwells among the nations; she finds no resting place. All who pursue her have overtaken her in the midst of her distress [1:1-3].

Jerusalem is a widow lying in empty streets that were once full, mourning the full life that was once hers. Jerusalem is a queen whose crown has toppled and whose authority has been overturned. Jerusalem is not only a powerless royal; she is now a slave to others who once held her in high regard. Her royalty is gone. Jerusalem is humiliated. She has no friends. She has no rest. Like a woman facing her tormentors, she runs without direction, led into narrow straights that prevent escape.

The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to her appointed feasts. All her gateways are desolate, her priests groan, her maidens grieve, and she is in bitter anguish. Her foes have become her masters; her enemies are at ease. The Lord has brought her grief because of her many sins. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe [1:4-5]

Even the streets of Jerusalem grieve. They, too, were once full of spiritual pilgrims, ascending to Jerusalem to gain atonement, to offer thanksgiving, to celebrate the holidays in the presence of community. Now there is no one at her once bustling gates. There is no cause for celebration or feasting. The Temple’s employees – its priests – have nothing to do but sigh. Jerusalem is both a young maiden mourning for a future she will never have and a mother whose children have been violently snatched from her. She will wait in desperation for her children to return from exile. In the ashes of her destroyed city, she realizes they may never return.

All the splendor has departed from the Daughter of Zion. Her princes are like deer that find no pasture; in weakness they have fled before the pursuer. In the days of her affliction and wandering Jerusalem remembers all the treasures that were hers in days of old…Jerusalem has sinned greatly and so has become unclean. All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans and turns away. Her filthiness clung to her skirts; she did not consider her future. Her fall was astounding; there was none to comfort her [1: 6-9].

Like an old, wrinkled woman in front of a mirror, Zion sees that her splendor is gone – that her enemies made a grab for her treasures and left her in rags. But she has brought much of this upon herself. Like a woman who stains her garments with her own blood, she sits undignified in her filth, not thinking about the consequences of her actions until she can no longer run away from them.

This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit. My children are destitute because the enemy has prevailed. Zion stretches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her. The Lord has decreed for Jacob that his neighbors become his foes; Jerusalem has become an unclean thing among them [1:16-17].

Enemies mock her. They, too, see her filth and comment on her loss of pride in the world. In pain, she realizes that she has no one. She raises her hands for help and solace, but no one lifts her up. She is left simply to weep alone. Frailty, thy name is woman.

Shabbat Shalom

The Gift

“A gift is not complete until the item goes from the possession of the one who gives it into the possession of the one who receives the gift...”
”

— BT Nedarim 43a

Remember O. Henry's short story The Gift of the Magi ? It's a wonderful tale about the significance behind the gifts we give. Are they a trifle we give little thought to or are they a genuine sacrifice in which we take deep pleasure? Della scrimps and saves and then cuts and sells her long and beautiful hair to buy Jim a watch-fob for Christmas, while Jim sells his gold watch to buy Della combs for her beautiful long hair. They end up with expensive gifts that they each rendered useless in the immediate present. But they were, no doubt, buoyed by the love behind the sacrifices each made.

"...in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi." 

Gifts are an important way we show love, appreciation and interest in others. When someone pays particularly careful attention to our needs and this is reflected in a gift, we feel an emotional lift that may resurface every time we look at the gift or use it. The giver also experiences pleasure in seeking out the "perfect" gift and in the often altruistic motives behind the transaction. 

When we spend time picking out a present, we consider the needs and wants of someone else and journey outside the self. This alone can prove to be an existential relief and escape from too much self-absorption. There's the excitement we feel as we anticipate what the other person will think when he or she opens the wrapping and the satisfaction if we have done our job well. A thoughtful gift can cement and reinforce a relationship or connection between two people. In this way, the receiver gets when he gives.

These are all of the up-sides of giving. There are, however, many down-sides; gift-giving can become an emotional minefield. For the giver, there may be a lot of financial pressure when the gift one wants to buy or is expected to purchase is beyond one's means or the stress created at not getting the right gift. Sometimes a gift seems too generous and can create discomfort for the receiver. There may be "giver resentment" when the receiver does not express what we deem appropriate gratitude. The receiver may feel resentful or insulted when getting a gift that he or she feels is too skimpy or thoughtless. "I always wanted a sweater with one sleeve." "Thanks for the toaster. There's nothing I like better than a small appliance for our anniversary." "I really appreciate the gift card. It's so personal. Thanks for the errand" (Jim Gaffigan fans unite). 

In this week's Talmud study cycle, we come across the above statement, which seems odd at first glance. Of course, a gift is not a gift until it goes from the hands of the giver and into the hands of the receiver. And yet, the Talmud alerts us to the fact that this process of transmission may not always go smoothly. We may have every intention to give a gift and then life gets in the way. The receiver may be unable - for any number of reasons - to take ownership of the gift. There may be practical obstacles like time or distance or cost. And then there may be the emotional issues just mentioned. The giver may not be able to give freely and generously - like the person who gives you something and has to remind you repeatedly how much it costs or how hard it is to part with. And the receiver, for emotional reasons, may not be able to accept a gift with a full heart because he or she comes from a family or culture where gift giving is either more or less important than it is to the giver, like the aunt who hasn't forgiven you in twenty years because you didn't send a thank you note for a wedding present - even if it was a set of his and her matching pot holders. Sometimes, in making fun of an inappropriate or unwanted gift, we diminish the thought or person behind it.

There are so many hidden wants and insecurities around gift-giving that the Talmud, in its very simple language - stresses the importance of communication around a gift transaction on both sides. Think of the most special gift you ever got and the most special gift you ever gave. Focus, for a moment, not on the item but on the context and on all the other emotional factors that we may forget about when thick in the dance of giving and receiving. How can you become a more thoughtful giver and a more generous receiver?

Shabbat Shalom

Under the Sea

“Then God said: ‘Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear,’ and it was so. God called the dry land earth and the gathering of the water He called seas. And God saw that it was good.”

— Genesis 1: 9-10

Early on in Genesis, God separated water and dry land creating what we know today to be earth and sea. God saw that it was good. Many of us will spend time this summer at the beach and make a similar declaration. It is good. It is more than good. Listening to water lap endlessly along the shore in calm and meditative movements that turn in high tide to the thunder of breaking waves cannot but help instill in us a sense of magic and mystery. Many of the forces at work in the ocean's patterns remind us physically of language we use in religion to capture the world spiritually: the highs and lows, the ebb and flows, the silence and majesty of water.

The Hebrew Bible contains many, many images of the sea for precisely this reason. God's presence is felt in its presence. We find the sea mentioned all over the book of Psalms: "The sea is His, for it was He who made it. And his hands formed the dry land" (95:5). Again the text reiterates the division of the world from Genesis. The sea, given its broad expanse and continuous, repetitive motion can only belong to God. "Who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them?" Psalm 146:6 asks, "who keeps faith forever." Just as we cannot imagine the sea ever stopping its movement, can we never imagine God being absent from the world. 

Because God is Master over nature, God can control what happens to the sea: "He caused the storm to be still, so that the waves of the sea were hushed" (Psalms 107:29). We immediately think of Jonah and the storm that tossed his ship and the way the sea stilled when Jonah was thrown overboard. Storms often give the appearance of God's wrath just as a calm sea creates a sense of God's deep pleasure.

The sea also becomes a biblical metaphor for the depths of knowledge that human beings will never fully access because of our limitations. In Jeremiah, God asks, "Do you not tremble in my presence? For I have placed the sand as a boundary for the sea, an eternal decree so it cannot be crossed over. Though the waves toss, yet they cannot prevail; though they roar, yet they cannot cross over it" (5:22). There are places that we dare not cross. We cannot. And yet a common biblical image of a leader's maturation is the crossing or parting of waters: Moses, Joshua, Elijah, Elisha. We as a people cross over the sea - the Reed Sea and the Jordon to actualize our future.

Late in the book of Job, Job inquires about his own fate and suffering. God tells him that he will never understand the universe's great enigmas, questioning Job's desire to know God's secrets: "Have you entered the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?" (38:16). These are places you will never go or have intimate knowledge of. Keep the mystery. Keep the distance. It will create a sense of awe and holiness.

The mystery of the sea, unfathomable as it is, also helps humans bury their mistakes. We have the ritual of throwing our iniquities into the water and casting them far away from us, into the deep recesses that Job could never probe. Some have the custom of saying this verse from the book of Micah when they perform "tashlikh" - the symbolic casting of sins into the sea - on Yom Kippur: "He will again have compassion on us; He will tread our iniquities under foot. Yes, you will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea" (7:19).

The sea has been purposed and re-purposed for many different spiritual messages. When you are at the beach and have a moment to think beyond colorful towels, umbrellas and sunscreen, what moves you about the ocean? Does it connect you to anything transcendent?

At the very least, we might arrive at God's conclusion: It is good. It is very good.

Shabbat Shalom.

A Banner Year?

“The Israelites shall encamp troop by troop, each man with his division and each under this flag.”

— Numbers 1:52

I must confess my ignorance. I never knew that a Confederate flag flew over the capitol building of South Carolina until the governor this week asked for it to be permanently removed. Having never been to South Carolina or visited its central government buildings, I couldn't believe that a state would permit such a thing when it has long been a symbol of white supremacy and a not-so subtle nod to a return to pre-Civil War segregation and slavery. I heard multiple comparisons to the flying of a Nazi flag after losing World War II but this comparison, though natural, seems somewhat fatuous and narrow. Symbols must always be contextualized and loose comparisons lead to sloppy thinking. 

Perhaps we focused so much on the Confederate flag this week because the much larger conversations on racism, serial killings and the easy accessibility of guns in this country are not resulting in enough change. The tragic shootings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church stirred a lot of bad feelings about the Confederate flag and what it symbolizes to those who see it as an image of oppression and those who see in it an image of sentimental Southern patriotism. But the flag literally masks the more painful subjects that need banner attention right now.

In ancient Israelite history, when we marched through the wilderness on the way to our homeland, we were instructed to encamp in an orderly fashion: surrounding the Tabernacle, each person by tribe, each tribe in a particular location, each division with its own flag. The instructions above are reiterated only a few verses later: "The Israelites shall camp each with his flag, under the banners of their ancestral house; they shall camp around the Tent of the Meeting at a distance" (2:2).

The flags they were instructed to display had to represent in some way, their ancestral homes, much the way that we might imagine a family crest would be replete with letters and symbols that represent a family's business and personal interests, geographic location and religion. A modern scholar associates the word for flag in Hebrew  - a degel - with the Akkadian dagalu which mean "to look" or a variation of it which means "sight." To serve its purpose correctly, a flag had to be visible. Without visibility, the flag was useless. In the ancient Near East, military units of a sizable number would group together with their families as an economic and legal unit that needed to be represented symbolically. 

A midrash on Numbers 2:7 posits that every tribe had a flag that corresponded in color to the stone it represented on the colorful breastplate of the High Priest, the kohen gadol. With this color alignment, you knew where you were located spiritually and physically in relation to a larger community. Flags are important ways that we demarcate space and stamp individuality on a location that may remain neutral without any mark. Noteworthy is that the first man on the moon placed a flag as if to suggest triumph and ownership of a space formerly uncharted.

We have flags of our towns, of our universities, of our states, of countries. A flag can be a highly moving symbol of belonging. Think of Francis Scott Key in 1814 seeing the stars and stripes of a flag that still waved high despite war that inspired him to write the American national anthem. Think of Israeli Olympic award medalists who wrapped themselves in Israeli flags as if to be totally embraced by a national symbol. Or consider the somber moments when the coffin of an American or Israeli soldier is laid to rest covered in a flag. The Veterans Association of America will provide a burial flag free of charge to honor the memory of a veteran that is then given to the next of kin. 

The history of the flag of Israel is itself fascinating. While the government settled on a rather striking and plain image that carries with it religious symbols like the Star of David and recalls the stripes of the tallit, a prayer shawl, the contest to design the flag suggested signs and colors associated with the number of work hours in a socialist day. Who we are or who we aspire to be often comes out in the flags we design.

Roman Mars did a fascinating TED talk on why we never notice city flags and how to design better flags, in case you were thinking of crafting something as a family. If you have an extra 20 minutes this week, listen and learn from an expert who has given this much thought.

It's not a bad idea to spend time this Shabbat thinking of what your family flag might look like or if you are part of a group like a workplace, school or camp, what symbols would mean the most to you that need to be included as a mark of identity in the small space that a flag takes up. One thing is clear: ancient Israelite flags were there to provide direction through high visibility to those who required shelter. They were never a source of offense or anguish. They accomplished the exact opposite - telling you where you belong rather than telling others where they do not belong.

Shabbat Shalom

Anger Management

“Anger rests in the bosoms of fools”

— Ecclesiastes 7:9

We use the expression “anger management” confidently, as if our most intemperate feelings were easy to manage, as if anger is something we can easily control. Yet people usually describe anger as something that feels beyond control, like a storm that sweeps us up in its toxic wake and drops us off in a foreign country. People often describe anger transporting them to new and unfriendly territory, a place that’s hard to find a way out of when you’re stuck there temporarily.

Anger becomes a subject of rabbinic contemplation in a page of Talmud studied in this week’s daily cycle this week [BT Nedarim 22a-b]. The Sages two thousand years ago brought together biblical verses on anger and interpreted their meaning and relevance to human interactions. Rabbi Samuel ben Nahmani specifically tells us what foreign country we’re in when we’re angry: hell. He said, “One who loses his temper is exposed to all the torments of Gehenna [purgatory].” If you can imagine hell as a place where you are your worst possible self, your anger becomes your passport into that unpleasant, threatening place. Therefore, Rabbi Nahmani concludes, “remove anger from your heart.” Move out of that country quickly.

Rabba adds to this discussion: “When a person loses his temper, even the Divine Presence becomes unimportant to him.” There is an underlying arrogance to anger, namely that I think my opinion or behavior is correct and yours is clearly not – that is what gives me license to release my inner venom on you. When I do that and spill out that anger on another person and make myself superior in the process, I remove the godliness of the other. God demanded that we act in God’s likeness. This means that all of our relationships should be colored by transcendence, not arrogance.

Rabbi Jeremiah said, “He [an angry person] forgets his learning and becomes more and more foolish, as it is written, “Anger rests in the bosoms of fools,” [Ecclesiastes 7:9] and it is written, “The fool is laid open to folly [Proverbs 13:26]” Rabbi Nahman ben Isaac said, ‘It is certain that his sins outnumber his merits, as it is written “A furious man abounds in transgressions” [Proverbs 29:22]. Because anger is a vehement and immersive emotion, it has the power to erase whatever was occupying the mind and heart beforehand: learning, commonsense, goodness, kindness. It all goes. We make foolish decisions in a state of anger.

The pastor and motivational speaker and writer Joel Olsteen discusses the myriad opportunities we have daily for anger and its many minions: offense, insult and stress, to name just a few. When you “indulge these negative emotions,” Olsteen says you give something outside yourself “power over your happiness.” Olsteen, like our Sages of old, emphasizes the way that anger takes over our psychic landscape and entraps us, making us into people we don’t want to be. We give anger power over us.

But when we describe anger as an animated almost extraterrestrial force, we also – perhaps unwittingly – attribute powers to it that it cannot have. We give it permission to live within us and dominate us as if we were victims.  All we did was offer this force entry into our souls and then it hijacked us without asking.

Aristotle is attributed with this perspective on anger: “Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.” This is not the view of the Sages of the Talmud. The Talmud wants us to acknowledge the power and destructiveness of anger while still owning the anger. We are not its victims but its ultimate master, each and every one of us. Managing anger is an aspect of human free will. If we regard it as anything more then we deny our ability to tame and calm it.

Think of a time when you were really angry.

Why?

How did it make you feel?

Did you control it or did it control you?

Shabbat Shalom

Curiosity Conversations

For 35 years, the movie producer Brian Grazer - who produced films like Apollo 13, Splash and A Beautiful Mind - has conducted what he calls curiosity conversations. Originally, he sought out people in the entertainment industry for one-hour conversations simply to learn the business from people who were different from him. Then he realized that in order to really grow, learn and enhance his understanding of the world, he needed to speak to people outside his industry. He wants to disrupt his point of view and get completely out of the world he lives in.

To that end, Grazer has spoken to Jonas Salk, Isaac Asimov, CIA directors, and the world’s richest person, simply to understand what life is like in someone else’s very different shoes. He often spent more than a year trying to arrange such meetings and then eventually hired someone called his cultural attaché whose only job was to set up these meetings. In A Curious Mind, he writes: “My strongest sense of curiosity is what I call emotional curiosity: I want to understand what makes people tick: I want to see if I can connect a person’s attitude and personality with their work, with their challenges and accomplishments.” 

There is something profoundly spiritual in Grazer’s quest - the desire to know the other. We all know people who haven’t the slightest curiosity about the other; other people are just a platform for getting back to oneself in a complete narcissistic sweep. If you’re frustrated by this dynamic, practice a few curiosity questions on strangers and relatives - moving the spotlight from you to the other:

Why did you...?

What interests you about...?

How did you come to...?

 In Hebrew, the word for curiosity - that natural inquisitiveness that mines, explores and discovers - is “sakranut.” We have some wonderful examples of curiosity conversations in the Hebrew Bible and in rabbinic literature. Moses turned during his work day as a shepherd to see a wondrous site: a burning bush whose flames did not consume it. He couldn’t stop looking. And when God saw Moses seeing, God realized that this was the leader he was looking for - a person who paused to wonder. Moses, in effect, had a curiosity conversation with God.

In the Talmud, we read a few wonderful stories of curiosity.

Rabbah b. Bar Hana stated: Once we were traveling on board a ship and saw a fish whose back was covered with sand out of which grew grass. Thinking it was dry land we went up and baked, and cooked, upon its back. When, however, its back was heated it turned, and had not the ship been nearby we should have been drowned...

Rabbah b. Bar Hana further stated: ‘I saw a frog the size of the Fort of Hagronia. (What is the size of the Fort of Hagronia? - Sixty houses.) There came a snake and swallowed the frog. Then came a raven and swallowed the snake, and perched on a tree. Imagine how strong was the tree. R. Papa b. Samuel said: Had I not been there I would not have believed it” [BT Bava Batra 73a-b].

Scholars whose heads were usually in books turned to the natural world in what Rabbi A. J. Heschel called, ‘radical amazement.”

Perhaps one of the great lyrical reflections on curiosity comes from a psalm of David in his marvel at the cosmos. “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” (Psalms 8).

Whether you are amazed by the complexity of another person or the intricacies of nature, the summer is a great time to amplify your curiosity. The pace is slower. We spend more time outdoors, exposed to the wonders of nature, and we often spend more time relaxing with friends. Try a curiosity conversation this Shabbat with people you know well: your kids, your parents, your closest friends. A few curiosity questions later, a new and improved person may very well emerge before you. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.”

Shabbat Shalom

Get Motivated

“It is permitted for a person to motivate himself...
”

— BT Nedarim 8a

In our new cycle of talmudic tractates, we encounter a volume on oaths and a fascinating question: can a person take an oath to fulfill a mitzva? I swear I am going to keep Shabbat, for example. The specific example the Talmud brings is taking an oath to study Torah. Can a person swear to get up early and study a chapter or text of choice. It seems the answer is yes: "It is permitted for a person to motivate himself."

This answer is shocking because taking an oath was regarded as a very serious matter in Jewish law. We know the solemnity and severity of oath-taking from the start of Yom Kippur prayers where we use a lot of legal jargon to ask that any oaths that we have taken be totally and utterly nullified so that we are not held spiritually captive by commitments we've made that we cannot keep. A mental debt is owed unless we can vitiate the oath altogether. Swearing that something is what it can never be or swearing that something is what it is is a serious misdemeanor in God's books. If I said that a circle is a square, for example, or that a circle is a circle, these are both foolish oaths that have no meaning. Swearing falsely is a transgression from the Ten Commandments since God's name was usually used in ancient oaths as another means of enforcing ourselves to do what we have committed to do.

The question is why you need to take an oath to motivate yourself. The likely reason is that you know you either don't like a particular mitzva or you care about it so much or it is so necessary that you want to take every precaution and measure to ensure its fulfillment. If you have a special deed in front of you that is hard for you to keep, the Talmud asks, should you take an oath to force you into its performance? The answer is debated but appears to be generally affirmative. Help yourself do that which is good for yourself or others. If an oath helps, then go for it.

I've always been interested in what motivates people to make a change they knew they should have made long ago or what inspires people to take on a new challenge. Motivation in general is a fascinating prompt. When in seminars I've asked people to think about the time in their lives when they've had weak motivation and peak motivation, the peak times almost always emerge from self-driven desires and the weak motivation is almost always due to external pressures that thin out quickly. There was the man who decided to run a marathon for charity and never felt more motivated in his life to train and cross that finish line. There was the graduate student who had a punishing professor who procrastinated on every paper because he just didn't care. He felt worn-down by the class culture.

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in Primal Leadership write: "Motivation on the job too often is taken for granted; we assume people care about what they do. But the truth is more nuanced: Wherever people gravitate within their work role indicates where their real pleasure lies - and that pleasure is itself motivating." We can offer rewards and awards but, they conclude, "...no external motivators can get people to perform their absolute best." Only you can be the best driver of your best self.

Daniel Pink in Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us explains why external motivation rarely works or cannot be sustained long-term. He offers seven "deadly flaws" related to carrot and stick motivators:

• They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
• They can diminish performance.
• They can crush creativity.
• They can crowd out good behavior.
• They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behaviors.
• They can become addictive.
• They can foster short-term thinking.

If we are too driven by external motivation, we may crush inner motivation and creativity. We may behave badly around or to other people in our competitive zeal to get something done better or more efficiently than someone else. This is something to think about in an age of entitlement when we are always passing out gold stickers and rewards.

It also helps us return to today's talmudic debate. Perhaps the argument against allowing people to take an oath to do a mitzva that they are obligated to do anyway is to encourage them to find internal drive to do it. It may be permitted simply because we care most about outcomes or believe that sometimes people who habituate themselves to perform mitzvot will eventually come to do them out of love, what we call "mitokh shelo lishma ba lishma." What we do not for its own sake, we will come to do for its own sake.

For what mitzva might a little external motivation help?

What mitzva do you have a lot of inner drive to fulfill?

Shabbat Shalom

The Upside of Stress?

“Be still and know that I am God…”

Psalms 46:10

Stress can be beneficial to your health. I know what you’re thinking. Impossible. It’s not the Jewish way. Oy vey is the Jewish way.

Then came along Dr. Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford, with her new book The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You and How to Get Good at It. Good at it? In the words of one of my children about ice-skating: “That’s a talent I don’t want to have.” No one wants to be good at stress. We just want to get rid of it quickly, like shaking off the rain when we come indoors or swatting pesky flies to get them to leave us alone.

The religious response to stress is to put one’s trust in God because that faith with minimize our own sense of looming crisis. If we just let go and let God, goes the expression, all will be OK. It’s not that we don’t have biblical figures who communicate the intensity of their anguish. Job is a prime example. “My inward parts are in turmoil and never still; days of affliction come to meet me” (30:27). It sounds like Job needs a really good gastroenterologist. Job here does not invite disaster. It finds him. It causes him acute pain. Job does not minimize stress - the tension, pressure and emotional strain- of his situation. He articulates it artfully.

This kind of articulation in the Bible is often followed immediately by a statement of God’s role in one’s life – as in the verse above from Psalms. Be still. If God is with you then you can quiet those shaking inner parts. The famous 23rd psalm reminds us that the Lord is our shepherd so that we will not want. When we know we are being led by forces of good and handled with care, we can release some of the pressures – the way that good company allows us to be at ease. We read in Psalms that God is “our stronghold in times of trouble” (9:9) as a way of suggesting that we can put down some of our own armor.

Many people have shared with me the way that this idea of being held by God helps them manage their own “catastrophizing” in the spirit of Isaiah’s words: “Fear not for I am with you; don’t be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (41:10). A more obscure biblical book, Habakuk, records the actual catastrophe and the reliance on God to minimize it: “Though the fig will not blossom and no fruit be on the vines, the olive tree fails and the field has no yield, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (3:17-18).

This type of faith – to find joy even though one’s surroundings offer little or nothing – is very hard to achieve. Let’s imagine for a moment, a contemporary equivalent. “Though I cannot find a job, there is nothing in my fridge, I’ve gained ten pounds, my girlfriend dumped me and I lost my cellphone, I will still take joy in God.” Stated that way, we can appreciate that even though so much of daily life is not working, there is still reason for hope and happiness by rising above crisis and touching eternity.

McGonigal’s approach to stress is not spiritual in this way. She says part of the problem is that we use the term stress to describe everything from a traffic jam to a death in the  family, thus making it an ineffective catch-all for any time we feel any tension. She finds that talking about the negative impacts of stress on one’s health just created more shame and stigma around stress. After researching stress, she concluded that the way that we think about stress impacts our capacity to manage it. View it positively as a way to learn and grow and develop resilience and you have recovered what she calls “the biology of courage.”

Stressed? You may be a click away from relief. Listen to McGonigal’s TED talk “How to Make Stress Your Friend” at http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend?language=en. Stress may never be your friend, but it doesn’t have to be a persistent enemy either.

I used to say “Don’t be stressed be blessed.” After the book, my new line is “Be blessed because you’re stressed.”

Shabbat Shalom

Climb Every Mountain

“...They entered the wilderness of Sinai and encamped in the wilderness. Israel encamped there in front of the mountain.”

— Exodus 19:2

We are a few days away from Shavuot, marking the re-giving of the Torah and our reliving of this holy event. We tend to focus on words - the sacred words we received and have passed on for generations. And yet, in any close reading of the biblical texts of Sinai, words were actually less significant to the ancient Israelites than the setting itself: the mountain surrounded by desert, the smoke, thunder and thick clouds. The special effects shaped the day.

Reading the above verse casually, one might think that the choice of location for the giving of the Ten Commandments was basically a function of the scenery. The ancient Israelites came into a wilderness, picked a nice spot in front of mountain and set up camp there. The Rashbam, Rabbi Samuel ben Meir, medieval commentator and grandson of the exegete Rashi, reminds us that this was no accident but the very spot indicated much earlier in Exodus. Moses asked God what to say when the people would question his judgment in Egypt: "I will be with you; that shall be your sign that I was who sent you. And when you have freed the people from Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain" (3:12). They did not merely land at a special place; this place was predetermined while the Israelites were still slaves in Egypt.

 In other words: location, location, location.

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen famously wrote: "What are men to rocks and mountains?" The way you create awe and reverence is to deliver your most dramatic remarks in the most dramatic of places. The combination will result in unforgettable impact.

While we as a people have not climbed every mountain, mountains certainly make dramatic appearances in the Hebrew Bible. Moses stayed on top of a mountain for forty days and nights preparing himself to bring the Ten Commandments to his people. The giving of the Ten Commandments takes place on a mountain, an event we celebrate and relive every year at Shavuot. The curses and blessings of Deuteronomy were given on two mountain tops. Jotham in Judges 9 challenges the people's choice of ruler on top of a mountain ,and Elijah invites the idol worshipping priests on top of a mountain to contest their powers.

Of the mountains mentioned, here are a few of the most famous in the Bible: Horeb, Seir, Gilboa, Hermon, Moriah, Hor, Pisgah, Ebal, Ephraim, Carmel, Gerizim, Sedom, and Tabor. From Mount Zion to the Mount of Olives and then the Judean Mountains, these high protrusions into the sky suggest power and domination, aspiration and mystical heights while producing in those who admire them an acute sense of humility and the fragility of human life. Because mountains offer a sense of touching eternity, a 16th century code of Jewish law recommends that people not pray on mountain tops lest they become swept up in the sense of their own dominance. Prayer is always best accomplished through a sense of our smallness. 

Because Sinai was supposed to be imprinted into the conscious DNA of the Jewish people, the event had to be as memorable as possible. Words alone cannot create that. Background counts. Noise counts. Preparation counts. Fear counts. Love counts. Anticipation counts. All of these elements contributed to the imprint. Today, we mistakenly think that study alone will help us return to Sinai, but it was not words alone that characterized the original event. It was words in conjunction with nature, and not just any aspect of nature but its most dramatic elements. "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity" wrote john Muir in Our National Parks.

This Shabbat, the day that leans into Shavuot, we begin reading the book of Numbers - our account of the wilderness years. Between the middle of Exodus and the beginning of Numbers, we realize that to celebrate Shavuot properly, our task is not only to study inside but also to stand outside in awe of the natural universe and to marvel at how nature draws us to God and to embrace higher personal aspirations. 

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Shavuot.

Art Attack

“You shall not make a graven image...
”

— Exodus 20:4

This week the conceptual artist Chris Burden died at 69. This may not be news to you, but in many ways, he revolutionized art as we know it by being among the first to use his body as a piece of art.  Burden was shot, dropped, kicked down stairs, starved and electrocuted himself for the sake of his art. In his obituary in The New York Times, Burden's contribution is described this way: "Where traditional artists had long depicted images on canvas, he became the canvas - and a highly distressed canvas at that."

Perhaps it was Burden who served as the inspiration for the strangest novel I read this year - or possibly ever, The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson. It depicts a family - a couple and two children - who live as works of art, posing and staging bizarre and often dangerous performances in malls and supermarkets to unsuspecting onlookers. They test the limits of performance and of the meaning of family if every moment offers the possibility of being an object of curiosity. Needless to say, this lifestyle was a bit of a strain on the children. "'Great art is difficult,'" Caleb [the Fang son] said. After a few moments, he said, 'But I don't understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.'" 

Since we are soon to read the Ten Commandments on Shavuot, I thought I would focus on the second commandment, the prohibition of idol worship that has largely shaped Judaism's complex relationship with visual art:

"You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand [generations] of those who love me and keep my commandments," [Exodus 20:3-6].

Most of the Ten Commandments are pithy and straightforward. Not killing and not bearing false witness seem to require little explanation. Yet our second commandment is lengthy and cumbersome. We are mandated not only to refrain from the worship of an image but the very creation of one. This led writer Cynthia Ozick to the conclusion that this commandment alone put the kibosh on Jewish art: "Where is the Jewish Michelangelo, the Jewish Rembrandt, the Jewish Rodin? He has never come into being. Why?" She ponders why Jews have been influential in so many fields but not in the arena of the visual arts. She boils it down to the second commandment.

This is a gross oversimplification of the commandment and of the history of the relationship between Jews and art. Several chapters after the commandments were revealed at Sinai were Jews told to create a portable sanctuary in the wilderness led by chief artisan Bezalel. This building was to be a spiritual and aesthetically pleasing centerpiece for the ancient Israelite journey home. Aesthetics and their interplay with worship are again important in the building of the First and Second Temples. The problem identified in the biblical text is not making any art but in limiting God to a visual image or even worse, believing that a human being can craft a divine being. That crosses the line into transgressive behavior.

Some scholars believe that it wasn't the second commandment that obstructed Jewish involvement in the plastic arts but a long history of persecution and exile. In other words, it was not theological but practical. Without a country and an autonomous governing structure, it is hard to patronize the arts and help them flourish. The uprooted nature of Jewish life in the Diaspora may have gotten in the way of investing in the beauty of one's surroundings. It's the difference between putting up art in a rental home where you may not be allowed to make any marks on a wall or decorating a permanent home.

Those interested in the subject may want to read Vivian Mann's book, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, Richard Cohen's book Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe or Kalman Bland's book, The Artless Jew among many others. These scholars, from different vantage points, flesh out the conversation on what our real rather than perceived notions are about art and the Jews.

It's hard to say how personal performance art is regarded in light of the second commandment. What happens when you become the graven image you are not supposed to worship? If conceptual art of this kind is made to encourage adoration or fixation, it may be a problem. If it is designed to disturb or provoke, it may be fine from a Jewish legal standpoint but lead to the question that became the title of a Tolstoy book of non-fiction: What is art?

Shabbat Shalom

Police State

“You shall appoint judges and police officers at all your gates that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice.”

— Deutoronomy 16:18

The number of incidents involving police violence and then subsequent public protest in the past many months has been heartbreaking. In New York and Baltimore, Ferguson and North Charleston tensions are high. Only last week the violence traveled to Israel as thousands of Ethiopian Israelis protested unfair treatment by police following the video-taping of a police officer caught on security camera beating a uniformed Ethiopian-Israeli soldier in the city of Holon for no apparent reason. In a New York Times column this past week, Guy Ben Porat, an associate professor at Ben-Gurion University who has spent years researching how Israeli police manage different sectors of society, concluded that many Ethiopian-Israelis, especially males, see themselves the victims of over-policing and racial profiling.

There is the response of justice: who committed what crime, and what is the fairest way to adjudicate the problem? There is the response of pain: what are the underlying racial tensions and assumptions about authority that live underneath the brutality on both sides that must be named? And then there is the response of the spirit: how do we go about healing the immense fracture of trust that has taken place to shift perceptions, to change in visible ways the treatment of victims on both sides and to quell the anarchy that is rocking pockets of the world?

If you look at the verse above from Deuteronomy 16:18 you find a commitment - even before we entered the land of Israel - to prepare a judiciary and to create a body of officials to enforce the laws. The German nineteenth century commentator, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, emphasizes two aspects of this commandment: the commitment to have judges and police all over and that this be the appointment of the entire nation. Everyone must be committed to the system for it to take effect. In his words, "...here it is a question of making it a duty for the nation to appoint judges for the first time throughout the whole land...The representatives of the whole united nation are to appoint judges and executive officers throughout the land and in making these appointments be guided solely by the purpose that justice and true justice only becomes achieved through these appointments." We all have to commit and accept authority or else there will be a breakdown in governance. 

Interestingly, the next verse states: 'You shall not judge unfairly; you shall show no partiality..." One modern commentator writes that this entire passage is directed not at judges but at every member of a community who must not only ensure that an objective governance structure is in place but that we not judge our judges and officials unfairly, making negative assumptions about those in power who have given their lives to public service.

Last week's riots in Baltimore - which resulted in looting and the destruction of many homes and stores, dozens of cars and public buildings - also could have damaged something much more fundamental: that the belief in authority and the belief in humanity can coincide - even if they do so in a healthy tension. Nothing was healthy about what happened, and we have every reason to believe that unless a real diagnosis is made and named, this problem of police brutality and the resultant anarchy will persist.

In the verse above, we are commanded to place judges in every gate - gates that the Lord, our God gave us. In other words, at every point where people can enter and exit, the vulnerable spaces, we must strengthen a commitment to law and bolster a sense of order. But what happens when it is no longer the places that are vulnerable, but the people who man those places? Good people will not enter public service when they have to fear continuously for their lives. What happens to the collective psyche of people who feel vulnerable not because of their acts but because of their color? 

God gave us those gates. We don't own them. God merely trusted us as stewards of those gates, and we have broken the partnership by not being trustworthy stewards and protecting and enshrining justice. It's time to clean up.

Shabbat Shalom

When the Earth Shakes

“The earth is utterly broken; the earth is split apart, the earth is violently shaken.”

— Isaiah 24:19

Every day, the radio and newspapers dish out more despair. The mounting death toll in Nepal is shattering; the crushing reality of people trapped under collapsed buildings and towns shaken to their foundations cannot be ignored and can have serious theological repercussions. Where is God in all this rubble? 

Natural disasters were not uncommon in the ancient world. Sacred texts often captured the wonder and fear that storms, hurricanes and earthquakes created. Isaiah's earth was violently shaken. Isaiah observed that, "the earth will be shaken out of its place, at the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of His fierce anger" (13:13). Job understandably regarded earthquakes as God's anger: "He who removes mountains, and they know it not, when he overturns them in anger, who shakes the earth out of its place and its pillars tremble" (9:5-6). This same view is shared in psalms: "Then the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations of the mountains trembled and quaked because He was angry"(18:7). 

We find ourselves slightly off-balance when reading these verses, as if we are ourselves reeling and rocking slightly. The world's pain is our pain. In the ancient world, weather was never just weather. Rain felt like God's tears. The earth quaking felt like God's wrath. 

What are we to make of all of this destruction at God's hand?           

This question is further enhanced elsewhere in the book of Psalms: "You have made the land to quake; You have torn it open: repair its breaches, for it totters. You have shown your people desperate times..." (60:2-3). God, if you destroy, You must also repair. If You force people into desperation, then you must create solace and comfort for them through the reconstruction effort. 

But this assumes that it is indeed God's anger at us that creates disasters. You will often hear clergy spouting such views, sadly assuming that they know the exact reason a terrible natural disaster occurred. If God is angry at anything, I would argue, it is at human apathy, at creating a manmade world that is not thoughtful of nature. It is as if God said to us, "You are my partners in creation, and your job was to steward your planet. You have disappointed me. You must keep us your side of this covenant."

 Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his forthcoming Nine Essential Things I've Learned about Life asks how we can find the willpower to face great challenges and answers:

I find God not in the test that life imposes on us but in the ability of ordinary people to rise to the challenge, to find within themselves qualities of soul, qualities of courage they did not know they had until the day they needed them. God does not send the problem, the illness, the accident, the hurricane, and God does not take them away...Rather, God sends us the strength and determination of which we did not believe ourselves capable, so that we can deal with, or live with, problems that no one can make go away.

Thinking of determination and strength, I happened to be with Ruth Messinger, head of the American Jewish World Service, when the tremors in Nepal were still taking lives. At the special event we attended, she was clearly preoccupied and quickly took a sheet out of her bag with information on Nepal: "There's going to be a huge Jewish response, Erica. You'll see." She said it confidently. There was no question that we as a people would come to the rescue in some way. She expressed her absolute faith in our people to go outside of ourselves and give until it hurts because someone else is hurting.

As we go into Shabbat - our day of rest - let us feel that we at least reached out to our human family across the globe and eased the pain and amplified the hope. To donate online, click onto ajws.org to their earthquake relief fund. Start helping so others may start healing.

Shabbat Shalom

Trust Twice

“Personally, I am brimming with the belief that God will not abandon His people and that our national existence in this Holy Land is secure.”

— Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstien

This week, as we ran the gamut of Jewish feeling from Holocaust Remembrance Day to Israel's Independence Day, a towering scholar in Israel passed away at 81. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein co-headed one of the finest academies of Jewish study in the world - Yeshivat Har Etzion - and he stood for a sophisticated type of commitment to tradition that was nuanced and complex. His lectures  - for those who could fully understand them - were filled with quotes from world literature, philosophy, rabbinic texts and Jewish modern and ancient thought. He was an elegant spokesman for religious Zionism and commitment to Israeli military service and the winner of the prestigious Israel Prize, the State's highest honor. In his memory, we will study one of his teachings.

In a stunning article called "Trust in God" in his book By His Light, Rav Aharon - as he was fondly called - offers us two notions of faith or "bitachon" in Hebrew. One level of trust "is expressed by the certainty that God stands at your side and will assist you." This is, in his words, an approach that is fundamentally optimistic - "saturated with faith and hopeful expectation for the future." This type of faith gives those on the battlefield the energy to soldier on, those trapped in the darkness of  a concentration camp the belief that redemption will come. Ani Ma'amin - I believe with a perfect faith... 

But this is not the only faith that can sustain an individual in crisis, since optimism may prove to be naïve or unfounded. When circumstances sour, the person with this type of faith alone will lose all trust in God and others. This second type of trust "does not attempt to scatter the clouds of misfortune, try to raise expectations, or strive to whitewash a dark future." It is a trust grounded in realism; "it expresses a steadfast commitment - even if the outcome will be bad..." This can be a challenge for modern human beings, nourished on empowerment and high self-esteem. It is spiritually demanding: "This approach does not claim that God will remain at our side; rather, it asks us to remain at His side." 

Rav Aharon marshals sources to demonstrate both kinds of trust and then relates it to sacrifices made to build our people and the State of Israel after the ashes. He writes that the first kind of trust is "endangered by our continuous accomplishments." He believes that religious Zionism as understood and taught by the State was successful at filling us with certain values: redemption, hope and expectation, "but neglected to teach the values of loving trust, of cleaving to God without hesitation under all circumstances. We did not fortify our children or ourselves concerning the possibility of crises..."

Even though so many in Israel made and continue to make personal sacrifices for our homeland, it was done "riding a wave of optimism, that all would work out because the process of redemption was unfolding." It is here that Rav Aharon inserted the quote above. He was not giving up, God forbid, on the importance of personal faith. It was a faith in the eternity of the people and land of Israel that he would never abandon. He was, instead, offering a more mature complementary approach to faith, "to trust during suffering" and to realize that this kind of deeper trust, when coupled with faith and love, may be the most trust that ultimately shaped and will shape our people.  

Above many a Torah ark is a verse from Psalms, "I have placed God before me always"(16:8) - what Rav Aharon called "God's constant overarching presence."  The word "always" implies not only when it serves our needs or confirms our beliefs, but even when life flies in the face of them. Rav Aharon taught generations of students to understand and deepen God's holy presence through rigorous study, through commitment to the army and through the modern State of Israel that we celebrated this week. He challenges us still to see and to say this verse as we ask ourselves: is God before me always?

May his memory be for a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom

Good Enough

“You shall do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord...
”

— Deuteronomy 6:18

This week I spoke with someone on the phone who asked me several questions about Sabbath observance. He told me he found it interesting but was raised as a Catholic and is now lapsed. "I don't really believe in any religion. I don't have a faith. I raise my kids with one principle." Naturally I was curious and asked him to share his singular distilled value. "It's simple: don't be a jerk." I couldn't help it. "John, if you don't mind my saying, that's quite a low bar."

His principle was not entirely unexpected. I frequently hear that there is no reason to keep strict adherence to any rigid set of laws. "I'm a good person. Isn't that enough?" Naturally the minute someone advertises his or her own goodness, I am instantly suspect.

Who defines goodness anyway? Often it's a mask for an arbitrary determination of moral stasis. Good is wherever I am and whatever I am doing. The Hebrew Bible has some choice words for this kind of ethical anarchy: "You shall not do according to all that we are doing here today, everyone doing whatever is right in his own eyes..." (Deuteronomy 12:8). The Book of Judges ends with a civil war and a description of what happens when there is no leadership: "In those days Israel had no king so everyone did as he saw fit." (Judges 21:25). When every person has his or her own prescription for goodness it often means that there is no reigning expectation of what constitutes that unique combination of compassion, kindness and justice that goodness is. It becomes descriptive of where you are rather than aspirational of where you might one day be if you work hard on it.

John's principle reminded me of something I first read decades ago that was fundamental to my own thoughts about traditional observance. In their seminal work, The Nine Questions People Ask about Judaism, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin also challenged those who think being good is good enough without necessarily defining goodness:

“When asked to define a good person, these people answer ‘someone who doesn’t hurt anybody.’ We are convinced that most people define a good person as one who does not hurt anyone. This definition is as wrong, however, as it is popular. A person whose conduct consists of not hurting anyone is not good; such a person is merely not bad. To be a good person is the active pursuit of good.”

— Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin. The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism

Simply not being a jerk is not asking enough of what humanity is capable of achieving with intention and moral energy. This week we've been given a little lift in this effort. David Brooks' new book The Road to Character is finally out. There he writes that "we live in a society that encourages us to think about how to have a great career but leaves many of us inarticulate about how to achieve an inner life." Life has often taught us to be overconfident about moral character and unprepared for what really matters. It would be better to say, "I don't know what goodness is" than to label ourselves as instantly good and then always suffer the deficiency.

Telushkin and Prager remind us: "You do not have to do something bad in order to do bad; you only have to do nothing. This is why Judaism consists of so many positive laws of goodness." We have to teach ourselves to refrain from gossip, to visit the sick, to attend to the poor, to mourn with those who are grieving, to sacrifice for charity.

Maybe you're good. If you assigned yourself that label, make sure you've earned it. There is plenty of literature by atheists who are trying in earnest to work out a shared moral code without God. But if that is not you, then ask yourself  - when it comes to a tough and enduring moral compass, are you really good enough?

Shabbat Shalom