Text Study – The Embodied Torah of Study

Psalm 44

Posted by

1

… God knows the secrets of the heart. (44:22)

The image of God knowing all of my secrets, knowing everything I have done wrong down to the last sordid embarrassing detail, is not comforting. Instead, I understand this verse in the light of a story told about the Hasidic Rebbe, Rabbi Moshe Leib.

R’ Moshe Leib used to tell his hassidim that he learned what it means to love a fellow Jew from two Russian peasants. Once he came to an inn, where two thoroughly drunk Russian peasants were sitting at a table, draining the last drops from a bottle of strong Ukrainian vodka.

One of them yelled to his friend in a slurred drunken drawl, “Igor! Do you love me?”

Igor, somewhat surprised by the question answered, “Of course, Ivan, of course I love you!”

“No, no”, insisted Ivan, “Do you really love me, really?!”

Now feeling a bit cornered, Igor assured him, “What do you think? I don’t love you? Of course I love you. You’re my best friend Ivan!”

“Oh yes, yes?” countered Ivan. “if you really loved me … then why don’t you know what hurts me and the pain I have in my heart?”

Reb Moshe Leib is speaking about a kind of knowing that implies a close, caring connection between two people. This is the kind of knowing that I prefer to read into the verse from Psalms – that God knowing all of my secrets means that God knows what hurts me. When I am hurting, I am never hurting alone. God shares my pain; God suffers with me. Pain that is shared does not hurt as much as pain suffered alone.

When I am in terrible emotional pain, I sometimes use a practice that I learned in interfaith dialogue with Christians, who know a lot about a theology of a suffering God. Jews know suffering; Christians know a God who knows suffering.

My Christian friends taught me how to offer up my pain to God. Essentially, the practice is to share the pain and its causes with God; to talk to God about the hurt, what I did to cause it, and what I can do to relieve it. The practice is to lift the burden of the pain through honest prayer and share it with the Holy Blessed One. It may not remove the pain entirely, but putting it into words and offering it up can be, at least for me, a kind of healing ritual.

Psalm 43

Posted by

3

Send forth Your light and Your truth; they will lead me; they will bring me to Your holy mountain, to Your dwelling-place. (43:3)

The least pleasant conversations on religion that I have had are those with people who are certain beyond a shadow of doubt that they have seen the light and know the Truth. If I may slightly mangle the lyrics from a song in “The Music Man,” — that’s Truth, “with a capital T” and that stands for “Trouble.”

The Psalmist wants certainty. Don’t we all sometimes want to know for certain whether we are making the right decision? We can ask all he wants, but he can’t and shouldn’t have it. Certainty – Truth – is one of God’s names in Jewish tradition. Truth belongs to God. I think we can come close to truth; I think we can search for truth; but I don’t think we were ever meant to capture truth.

For one thing, people who think they have the truth are insufferable. How can they not be, when they’re right and everyone who disagrees with them is wrong!? It’s impossible to have a conversation with someone who is convinced that he or she has a lock on the truth. There is no shared learning, there is only the conversational equivalent of the attempt to open up my head, pour in information (the truth), shake, and bake for an hour at 350° until my head feels like it’s about to explode.

Will the truth lead you to the holy mountain? Only if the holy mountain is Everest. If you stay up on that mountain too long your lungs will starve for oxygen and you’ll freeze to death. Rather, it is the search for truth (not truth itself) that leads you to the holy mountain. As long as the search never ends, you can stay on the holy mountain indefinitely. This holy mountain is Zion, not Everest. At the top of the mountain was a place of searching for God’s name, a place where we tried to care for the elusive presence of God.

Back to the Psalmist: If truth is like the light of the sun, we can see it and feel it, but we can never capture it, contain it, and keep it. Keep searching for enlightenment, search all of your life, and you will behold the light of truth.

Psalm 42

Posted by

0

Like a hind crying for water, my soul cries for You, O God; my soul thirsts for God, the living God; O when will I come to appear before God! (42:2-3)

The human desire to form a relationship with a creator is natural, although the new generation of atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, see it as a delusion. We are constantly trying to make sense of the complicated world in which we live by using the scientific method of identifying cause and effect. Every object was created through some process, and if we trace the creation of the object back far enough, we can discover how the object functions. We identify the rules by which the object was created and continues to operate in the world. We might even identify the original purpose of the object, and its original creator or designer.

By understanding the world, we think we can improve it. The desire to understand, to fix, to improve, is part of the same internal soul-inclination that directs so many of us to want to be in a relationship with God, or that directs some of us to loudly and angrily deny that such a relationship can ever exist.

My support of same sex relationships is based on the idea that the desire to be in relationship is a fundamental human need. We need parents and teachers to nurture us as children, we need siblings or friends to teach us about peer relationships, and for many, the desire to marry and possibly produce a new generation of children is our ultimate goal in forming relationships.

I affirm the possibility of reading Leviticus 18 either as a limited prohibition on same sex sexuality or as no longer halakhically applicable, based on a paper by Rabbis Elliot Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram Reisner; or as argued in a paper by Rabbi David Greenstein, or in a book by Rabbi Steven Greenberg. The powerful image of a soul thirsting for the presence of God is no less true with respect to a human relationship. To deny a gay or lesbian individual the opportunity to have intimate partnership is to sentence him or her to live without the fulfillment of a fundamental human need.

Psalm 41

Posted by

0

Adonai, God of Israel, is the source of Blessing from the eternal universe to the eternal universe. Amen and Amen. (41:14) End of Book One of Psalms.

The book of Psalms is divided into five parts, just like the Torah. Each part ends with a verse of praise (or in the case of the conclusion to Book Five, an entire Psalm of praise). The word ‘amen,’ signifying affirmation or agreement, is found in the statements of praise which end the first four books of Psalms.

The word olam denotes endlessness in both the dimension of space and the dimension of time. It’s hard to capture the sense of the word in English – universe captures only the physical dimension, and eternal captures only the temporal dimension. The opening word of the Hebrew, barukh, is also tricky to translate. I’m never sure what is meant by the phrase, “blessed is God.” Surely it cannot be meant in the sense of “May God by blessed,” for I cannot imagine that human beings can bless God. It must be meant to say that “God is the One from whom blessings flow.” The word barukh is similar in sound to the word b’reikha, which means “pool,” as in a pool of water. Thus, when I think of the phrase barukh ata Adonai (which except for the word ata, “you,” is the same as the opening words of verse 14), I associate it with an image of God being a spring of blessing which gushes fourth in the form of animating energy onto the world.

This article not only represents the conclusion of 1/5 of the books of Psalms, but also the final bulletin article for the first year of Psalm Reflections. If I am able to keep up the pace of one Psalm a week, I will finish all 150 Psalms in a little under three years. I intend to keep writing and posting over the summer. You can follow the reflections either at AhavasIsraelGR.org or directly from the blog site, EmbodiedTorah.WordPress.com.

Are you engaging in daily and/or weekly Jewish devotional learning or practices? If not, I encourage you to find something to connect you to your Judaism on a regular basis, to nurture your Jewish soul. Read Jewish books, learn Jewish texts, help out at a synagogue minyan or come to Shabbat services. Enjoy the summer, and make Ahavas Israel a part of it!

Psalm 39

Posted by

2

My mind was in a rage, my thoughts were all aflame; I spoke out! (39:4)

At a moment of terrible, raging, flaming, emotion, at precisely the time when we are least capable of speaking with wisdom, what do we do? We speak, we write and send an email, we write an angry text, we post a status or comment that we will later regret.

An angry, flaming, mind is pathologically unable to see the path of truth. A raging mind is only concerned with itself. The ego seeks to soothe its own pain, not caring about anyone or anything else. The unsettled mind can justify any action, no matter how much damage it may cause.

The solution seems easy. When the mind is angry, stop acting and be still. Retreat into silence. Calm the mind. Easier said than done, because the angry mind doesn’t know that it is muddled. In fact, the angry mind thinks that it is thinking crystal clear thoughts. It think that it is seeing the truth far more clearly than a quiet mind, because the rage makes it feel powerful, like a supercharged engine.

Giving voice to an angry mind is a reflexive habit, and the only way to break a habit is to practice. We need to practice quieting our mind when our mind is already pretty quiet, because this is easy. Then we need to practice quieting our mind when our mind is a little bit agitated, because this is a small challenge. Then we need to practice calming our mind when we are excited, because this is a greater challenge. Only then will we have cultivated the skill to recognize and put out the flames of a raging fire of emotion.