Text Study – The Embodied Torah of Study

Divre Harav/Words from the Rabbi – May, 2013

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The third of the three Biblical Pilgrimage festivals, coming approximately at the beginning of the summer, is Shavuot (“Weeks”), named after the practice of counting the days and weeks from Pesah to Shavuot. Although it is a harvest festival in the Torah, this aspect of the festival has been eclipsed by its post-Biblical connection to the revelation of Torah at Mount Sinai. Today, Shavuot is the holiday on which we read the Ten Declarations/Commandments and celebrate receiving the Torah.

Torah is, of course, the foundational text of Judaism. Traditional Judaism is structured around the practices of Torah, also know as mitzvah.

The literal, Biblical meaning of mitzvah is commandment, an obligation that God has imposed upon you. The implication of this is spelled out clearly in the Bible – God rewards those individuals and communities who follow the mitzvot, and punishes those who are disobedient. If this theology works for you as a motivation to engage in serious Jewish life and practice, you can stop reading here (and I’ll see you on Shavuot!). If you, however, like most Jews, do not believe that God cares whether you observe mitzvot, don’t believe that God rewards and punishes, keep reading – I’m going to give you an alternative meaning of mitzvah, inspired by a talk given by my colleague Rabbi Brad Artson.

The hasidic tradition noticed that the root of the word mitzvah in Aramaic means, “to connect” and understood mitzvah to mean “a connection.” Mitzvah is our means of making connections. When we are in a relationship, we do things for the other person not because we are seeking reward or afraid of punishment, but because the things we do express our desire to be in that relationship. The acts of mitzvah are acts which express our intimate relationship with God and/or with Torah and/or with the Jewish people and/or with the broad and eternal concept of Judaism. Most Jews at certain points in their life, find incredible and deep meaning in mitzvah – it may be within funeral ritual, it may be at a Passover Seder, it may be at a child’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah celebration, or it may be at a synagogue service. It is an experience of finding a connection to eternity through the texts and rituals that have sustained the Jewish relationship with the Divine for millennia. As in any relationship, the more you do, the deeper the relationship becomes, and the more joy you find in the relationship. Shavuot is the holiday on which we read the “love letter” and marriage contract of the Divine-Human relationship. See you at Mount Sinai!

The full talk by Rabbi Artson, Contemporary Meaning of Mitzvot, can be found online at ZiegerTorah.org.

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I do a variety of things in addition to writing sermons and bulletin articles, answering questions by phone or email, going to Board and Committee meetings, teaching religious school classes, leading study groups, and visiting members of the congregation. Here are some of my activities of the past month:

  • Partially planning and leading a 9th grade religious school trip to New York. We visited three different synagogues for services, two Jewish museums, a number of kosher restaurants, a walking tour and a museum of the Lower East Side, a Broadway Show, and more.
  • I gave an Introduction to Judaism talk and tour of the Synagogue to students of Westwood Middle School of Grand Rapids.

Summertime … Summer Reading List

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Bookshelf

Note:  I have not read most of the books on this list.  They have been recommended by colleagues (the annotation came from the recommendation or from book reviews).  Please comment on this post – suggest other worthwhile summer reads, or let us know what you think of any of the books on this list.

Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief by Stephen Dubner.

The free world: A Novel, by Bezmozgis, David.  A novel tracing refusenik family who gets an exit visa and finds themselves in Rome waiting to get a visa to America or Canada.  The story has a sense of reality, as told by someone who knows the experience from the inside.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem – James Carroll.  The History of Jerusalem.

The God Who Hates Lies:  Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition, David Hartman.  The struggle between commitment to Jewish religious tradition and personal morality.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot.  It’s about race, and gender, and poverty and science, education and love.  The story of the HeLa cells, taken from her cancerous tumor and used for medical research, becoming a multi-billion dollars industry – without the knowledge or consent of family, and without any renumeration.

Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?:  Gender and Covenant in Judaism, Shaye Cohen. The connection between Brith Milah and Jewish Identity considering Jewish and Christian sources on the question.

You Never Call! You Never Write!:  A History of the Jewish Mother, Joyce Antler. It has some fun sections as well as serious scholarship about the stereotype of the Jewish Mother.

Palaces of Time:  Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe, Elisheva Carlebach. Would you believe that a book about Jewish calendars and almanacs of the 15th to 18th centuries can be a gold mine of information about Jewish values and beliefs and their interaction with the external Christian society?

Sacred Treasure, The Cairo Genizah:  The Amazing Discovery of Forgotten Jewish History in and Egyptian Synagogue Attic, Mark Glickman, and Sacred Trash:  The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, Adina Hoffman, Peter Cole. The compelling story about the discovery of the Cairo Genizah, and the subsequent fate of its collection and the people who have studied them.

I’m God, You’re Not: Observations in Organized Religion and Other Disguises of the Ego, Lawrence Kushner. A wonderful collection of essays.

Hope Will Find You: My Search for the Wisdom to Stop Waiting and Start Living, Naomi Levy.  Quite moving and inspiring.

Hush, Eishes Chayil.  Eishes Chayil is of course a pen name.  Hish is a book about the sexual abuse that goes on in the Orthodox community. Fiction, based on the facts that no one talks about.

Subversive Sequels in the Bible, Judy Klitsner. 2009 National Jewish Book Award winner. Close reading of the Biblical stories – for example, it shows how the story of the Hebrew midwives builds upon, and is based upon, the Tower of Babel story in Genesis.

The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson. Interesting, probably thoughtful, definitely quite funny, and it evokes a lot of questions and conflicting feelings.

Sustaining Relationships

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A bit of Torah, which I learned from Cantor Lorel Zar-Kessler this past week and shared in my d’var Torah this morning.  It is based on the following passage:

“When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not be freed as male slaves are. If she proves to be displeasing to her master, who designated her for himself, he must let her be redeemed; he shall not have the right to sell her to outsiders, since he broke faith with her. And if he designated her for his son, he shall deal with her as is the practice with free maidens. If he marries another, he must not withhold from this one her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights. If he fails her in these three ways, she shall go free, without payment.”(Exodus 21.7–11 JPS)

שְׁאֵרָהּ כְּסוּתָהּ וְעֹנָתָהּ

Three things are obligated to to the woman sold into servitude:  Food, clothing, and ona, which might mean ointment, but which has been understood by most commentaries as (sexual) pleasure.

We can read each of these three things as metaphorical instructions for what we need to do within our marital or other relationships to sustain them.  Consider the three questions below.  I’ve suggested answers for each of them, but you might find your own ways to express the concepts of food, clothing, and pleasure in your relationships.

In our relationships, what do we give/receive that is nourishing?  We give:

  • Simple attention.
  • Loyalty. The assurance that the other is a priority in our life.
  • Support and encouraging the other’s growth as a human being with unique talents.

… how do we give protection, how do we need to be protected? We provide the clothing of physical and emotional support:

  • We can be a provider in a financial sense.
  • We give support when our partner fails, we give a hug, an encouraging word.
  • We can also honor accomplishments, affirm a sense of self-worth.

… what makes the relationship pleasurable and fun?

  • How do we laugh together?
  • How do we create moments in which we enjoy each others company?

A Critique of Artscroll Press

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I am often critical of the theology of Artscroll publications, and suggest that those who use anything produced by Artscroll need to understand that the theology behind their books is deeply embedded in their translations of text and commentary.

A great example of what I am talking about is found here:
http://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2010/10/where-in-world-is-robinson-crusoe-on.html

I encourage you to read the article. The author, Fred MacDowell, describes how a mid 20th century Torah commentator, Rabbi Zalman Sorotzkin, made reference to Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe as an example of a person living in utter loneliness. The author even reproduces the page from the original Hebrew text, where one can very clearly read the paragraph mentioning Robinson Crusoe.

We also see a scan of the text of the Artscroll “translation,” which without comment or footnote omits that paragraph.

The author gives a number of guesses as to why Artscroll has emended the text of Rabbi Sorotzkin’s commentary:

  • It doesn’t seem natural or proper that an authentic Lithuanian rosh yeshiva of the previous generation, the pride of the great Telzer yeshiva, would have even read Robinson Crusoe much less included a reference to it in his Torah commentary.
  • Even if it was not written by himself, but based on oral talks, it doesn’t seem right that he should have referenced Robinson Crusoe in an oral talk on the Torah.
  • While not explicitly doing so, he almost seems to recommend reading it.
  • It appears strangely close to the much-maligned Torah U-Madda approach. [RK – The approach of the Modern Orthodox]
  • This is farfetched, but it is interesting that one of Orthodoxy’s favorite arch-heretics, the hebraist Eliezer Ben Yehuda, many times cited his having read כור עוני, Yitzhak Romesh’s Hebrew translation of Robinson Crusoe, which was secretly shown to Ben Yehuda by his half-maskil rebbe, R. Joseph Blucker (?). See, for example, his autobiographical החלום ושברו. Reading the fine prose of this book helped kindle a love for the Hebrew language within him.

So once more I caution you – Artscroll publications might seem to make Torah, the Siddur, the Talmud,  and other Hebrew works accessible to the non-Hebrew reader; but be aware that the original text and the version of the text that you are learning might not be the same.  If Artscroll believes that Rashi, Ramban, Rambam, the Siddur, the Talmud, the Torah, or a commentary on any of the above departs from their very narrow theology, they will take the very ‘modern’ approach of emending the text!

Happy Mother’s Day

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A bit of Torah in honor of mothers (Kiddushin 31b):

“When Rabbi Joseph heard his mother’s footsteps, he would say: ‘I will arise before the approaching Shekhinah.’

Shekhinah is a reference to the presence of God, coming from Exodus 25:8, “Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”

Honoring one’s father and mother, the fifth of the ten pronouncements, forms a bridge between the mitzvot between human beings and God and the mitzvot between human beings. The placement of this command reminds us that our parents are potentially our earliest link to God. Similarly, the statement of Rabbi Joseph honors his mother as the one who gave him life and links him to the presence of God.

Let us be thankful to our mothers, those who gave us biological life and/or those who raised us. They gave us life and hopefully taught us something about how to use our life to bring light and goodness into the world.

Thank you to my colleague Rabbi Rob Scheinberg for sharing the source.