tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-204787932024-03-13T02:17:10.543-05:00Shlomo's Drash"It is a matter of Torah and I need to Learn" (Brachot 62a)
Shlomo's Drash is a modern liberal commentary on the Torah Portion of the week based on Talmud, Midrash and Tanach sources. It written as a personal view of a modern semi-observant Jew. No knowledge of Torah Talmud or Midrash is necessary, but you will gain some.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.comBlogger274125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-84511201276007235382012-12-09T19:32:00.001-06:002012-12-09T19:32:43.277-06:00Shlomo's Drash: Through The Darkness<a href="http://shlomosnewdrash.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/shlomos-drash-through-the-darkness/img_2798/" rel="attachment wp-att-687" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="IMG_2798" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-687" height="300" src="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/img_2798.png?w=198" width="198" /></a>As part of Hanukkah the first two parts of the story of Joseph come before and during the holiday. In the first, we are introduced to Joseph and the two times he is flung into darkness.<br />
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24 And they took him, and threw him into a pit; and the pit was empty, there was no water in it[Genesis 37]<br />
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20 (K) And Joseph’s master took him, and put him in the prison, a place where the king’s prisoners were confined; and he was there in the prison.[Genesis 39]</blockquote>
In the next week, during Hanukkah, light dawns for Joseph:<br />
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40 You shall be over my house, and according to your word shall all my people be ruled; only in the throne will I be greater than you.[Genesis 39]</blockquote>
Hanukkah is the darkest of the dark, it uses the symbol of light to dispel the dark. all the winter solstice holidays do in some way do the same. While Christmas is always close to the solstice, Hanukkah moves to the lunar calendar. The middle of the holiday is Rosh Hodesh, a new month signified by a new moon. Hanukkah always includes the longest night with no visible moon of the year, hence it is the darkest of the dark, but in the days after, also the beginning of seeing light, just as Joseph had.<br />
I've written before about the darkness of the time, most notably in my fable The <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Tzaddik-Klaas-Tale-Deceitful/dp/1468114743/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1355102656&sr=8-1" target="_blank" title="The Tzaddik of Klaas">Tzaddik of Klaas.</a> This year was especially dark, and I felt the despair that Joseph must have felt while lighting the first candle last night.<br />
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Oddly, it was the following that made me realize something.<br />
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<pre>UIView *myView = [[UIVew alloc] initWithFrame: CGRect(0,0,self.view.frame.size.width,self.view.frame.size.height] ; myView.background = [UIColor redColor]; [self addView: myView];</pre>
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Now unless you too are a iPhone developer, you probably have absolutely no idea what I just wrote. I didn't two months ago. It is code to turn your iPhone screen red. Back in September, I started a project, a microscope camera app for work. The idea was for the app to be a companion to a product my company is making for the microscope. I developed the app, but with limited knowledge of how to program an iPhone, I used the easiest way to get at the camera. The problem is, it meant I had to write code for every button myself. That snippet of code is similar, though not the same as a lot of the code Iv'e written since then. Unlike many developers who are able to use the storyboard, a drag and drop way of building the user interface in a mere day, I was stuck coding it out for a month.<br />
The code was grueling work. It was eleven hour days almost five times a week. I got to work in darkness and went home in darkness too many times to count. The work was exhausting and unsettling. Towards the end, I was in despair.<br />
The app is done and in the submission process. I started to work on my next one and decided to use a few things I've never used before. Researching these new things, I was amazed how easily I understood them. Many of them used the same code I used for the red iPhone above. It was a clear as a sunlit day -- I understood them perfectly.<br />
That shocked me, but it also was a feeling of enlightenment. I thought of Joseph and this time of year as I looked out to the street with all the people rushing about getting ready for the holidays. Joseph we are told started out as a real brat. Rabbinic tales in the Midrash make him out to be even worse than the braggart the biblical text does. Yet he changes so that Pharaoh would trust him with his kingdom. Maybe it was the darkness of the pit and the prison than changed him. Like I learned programming code, Joseph had to get through the despair to become cheerful enough to be of help to Potiphar and Joseph's jailer. That got him to be viceroy of Egypt.<br />
The solstice holidays have always been at their root about getting though that dark despair of the season. The early church fathers and the Rabbis of the Talmud had a similar problem: people would celebrate the pagan holidays of Kalenda/Saturnalia and of the resurrection of Mithras, because getting through the dark is a deep human need. There is a story in the Talmud [Avodah Zarah 8a] that Adam just after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the first to be afraid in this darkness, what to him was the end of the world. When things got lighter and he celebrated. Both the rabbis and church fathers had to find a way to frame the solstice in their own terms. The church took the resurrection of a sun god Mithras and changed into the birth of the Son of God, who would be resurrected. The rabbis took the anniversary of the rededication of the Temple by the first religious zealots in history who invited Romans into Israel and illegally sat on the throne of Israel,(the Rabbis hated the Maccabees for those reasons) into a holiday of a miracle of light at the time of greatest darkness in the temple. After the solstice or the re-emergence of the new moon, we know we will live through the cycle one again, and into a successful year, like Joseph and my programming knowledge, into the light of success.<br />
May your season, whatever you celebrate, be filled with light.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-36392442222727726972012-10-18T09:11:00.001-05:002012-10-18T09:11:59.753-05:00Noah 5773: The Tower of Babel and the App StoreThere is more to the world than the United States. That should be obvious, but events this week floored me into realizing it. What floors me more is that the very liberal, open-minded person that I thought I was could ever make that mistake.
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This week’s Torah portion has two known stories, and that second one dovetails into my current thoughts so well: God becomes dissatisfied with all flesh on the earth, and thus plans to destroy them, saving one family, that of Noah, and a handful of animals. In the wake of the destruction that follows, God promises not to try that stunt again, using a rainbow for a contract. Noah, with a bad case of Post-Traumatic Stress, gets drunk and stupid. After the unpleasantness of this incident, a few more generations are born. With only a rainbow as a contract, these later generations don't completely trust God. They decide to make a tower to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
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<b>5</b> And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. <b>6</b> And the LORD said: 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they purpose to do. <b>7</b> Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.' <b>8</b> So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.[Gen 11]</blockquote>
Something about these verses interests me. God plans to confound their language, and instead scatters them. The text never say, that the people working on the tower first had their language changed and then were scattered. Genesis 11:9 seems to fill in that missing piece:
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<b>9</b> Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.</blockquote>
I’m not sure they weren’t simultaneous acts. I’d go as far to say God confounded language by scattering people. We are limited by our perceptions, and even more by our physical senses. These limitations create a situation where we tend to think locally. What is outside our local sphere of perception is ignored, the lesson I learned this week.
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Among the other things I do, I’m a budding app developer. A friend of mine who is a public health educator had an idea for a counter for smartphone which would count the number of time one would wash their hands. I decide to explore the idea, and for the various festivities around the globe associated with Global Hand washing Day on October 15th, I’d give away the app as an educational item. I wrote the<a href="http://ow.ly/ezPB5" target="_blank" title="Handwash Couter in App Store"> Handwashing Counter</a> in about a month, and got it into the Apple App Store on October 11<sup>th</sup>. Unfortunately, as of this writing I haven’t heard from my friend, so I assume she never promoted the app.
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<a href="http://ow.ly/ezPB5" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-676" height="200" src="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/img_1896.png?w=300" title="IMG_1896" width="300" /></a>The marketing guru Seth Godin calls writing apps a sucker’s bet. The world is full of apps already. For you to be found in the top ten is not likely. If you aren’t in the top ten, you won’t make all that money you thought you would. I’m not making any money at this to be sure -- I’ve sold about 130 of my paid apps in the 8 months they have been in the App Store. I did not expect a lot from the hand washing app given my main promotional never happened. A week after introduction, there have been over 130 downloads of Handwash Counter, the most I have ever had for that period of time. There are now more downloads in a week than all the paid apps I have ever sold. But what got me was this: it was downloaded in 34 countries, yet only a quarter were in the U.S.
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It was a shock to me, one that has got me thinking. The market is not the United States, it’s everyone else too. I had been thinking about one place, I was thinking local, when what I should have been doing is thinking global. God’s trick of making me distant from others got me. I did an analytics check on this blog and the numbers are extremely different. Two thirds of my shlomosnewdrash hits are US based. This blog is a lot of English. The average entry is about 1200 words. The Handwashing Counter app has very little in comparison. With a few localization changes, the app works anywhere. I’m planning to improve that. I’m going to add more graphics to the app in its next version, because I can see the less words, the better.
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God split us up at Babel the story goes. Being too far away to talk or communicate meant variation came into the picture. In time that variation became different languages. But what happens when that barrier of distance starts to break down? A tweet I send right now is visible anywhere on the planet in a few seconds. We still have language barriers of course. The 18% of downloads by China and Russia require those users to know a Latin alphabet just to use the app. Yet 75% of my downloads was from outside the US. The Internet connects lot of people. With cell phones being the most common way in even developing countries to communicate, smartphones with web browsers are slowly becoming common in the most unlikely places. We are getting closer to all having a link to everyone else, if only we had a common language again.
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Thirty years ago, Steve Jobs took some ideas from Xerox, whose executives thought it was not a profitable avenue for their company, and built an icon-based computer. The Macintosh led to the icons found in every program and app we use today. The idea that ancient languages had, of using pictograms as visual language, returned. In doing so it became so much closer to a universal language again. Those icons, buttons and sliders that make up my apps are still easy ways for people to understand things. It is a simple language. That I can transmit that anywhere is quite miraculous.
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There is a bit of programming I do, actually mandated by Apple, known as delegates. Two parts of a program don’t talk to each other. In order to get them to talk, I have one program part, known as a class, have a requirement of what it thinks is communication, and the other class to do that part. If I want the communication both ways both classes need to have requirements and both need to make part of their code that requirement.
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Babel was the time when we stopped communicating and started talking. We forget we need to be part of each other and know what that part was. We stopped having delegates to each other. The program, the building of a great tower, collapsed. God could have spread us half an inch apart from one another, but if we lose our ability to connect, we lose our ability to communicate. Even with the same vocabulary and grammar we can be talking different languages. This week I have hope we can connect. A little app showed me there is hope we can all communicate.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-29547483718577864982012-10-10T09:38:00.000-05:002012-10-10T09:39:44.489-05:00Is Religion A Good Thing?Is religion a good thing? For the last few years, it has been a question that seems to loom over many of us. There definitely are sides. There are atheists and religious fundamentalist positions vying for their one Truth, and there are many of us stuck in the middle. In the last few years, fundamentalism has risen its ugly head, not just to dictate to their congregation but force their view as the law of the land.<br />
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This is not the first time. Such corruption is as old as the Bible. One story is of course the story of King Ahab, his wife Jezebel and the Prophet Elijah. In their quest for an institutional religion, the king and queen massacre prophets, and Elijah has a price on his head. On the run, he heads south and ends up in a cave on Mount Sinai. Like Moses before him, Elijah gets to be in the presence of HaShem on the mountain:
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And He said: 'Go forth, and stand upon the mount before HaShem.'
And, behold, HaShem passed by,
a great and strong wind rent the mountains,
and broke in pieces the rocks before HaShem;
but HaShem was not in the wind;
and after the wind an earthquake;
but HaShem was not in the earthquake;
and after the earthquake a fire;
but HaShem was not in the fire;
and after the fire a still small voice.
And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entrance of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said: 'What doest thou here, Elijah?'
[I Kings 19]</blockquote>
Many many years ago a guy named Isaiah, inspired by God was angry about a corrupt priesthood. Isaiah cries out in the name of God:
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To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? saith HaShem; I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. When ye come to appear before Me, who hath required this at your hand, to trample My courts? Bring no more vain oblations; it is an offering of abomination unto Me; new moon and sabbath, the holding of convocations-- I cannot endure iniquity along with the solemn assembly.
Your new moons and your appointed seasons My soul hates; they are a burden unto Me; I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear; your hands are full of blood.
Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes, cease to do evil; Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith HaShem; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.</blockquote>
The sacred ritual had become mere rules, devoid of their meaning, static and unmovable. While there were times they listened under Jeremiah, the priesthood and the kings remained corrupt. The priesthood died at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar's army, but in the exile that followed, God was with the people. Jesus and his disciples was angry about a corrupt priesthood (actually political appointments from Rome). While they counted <i>Cohanim</i> among their numbers, The Rabbis of the Talmud also bristled at the travesty that the Temple had become. The Talmud [Gittin 56a-b] makes some rather remarkable statements in the story of bar Kamza and the destruction of the Temple. First, ignoring hospitality even to one’s enemies, leaving them embarrassed, destroyed the temple: The second was fundamentalism destroyed the temple.
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Rabbi Yohanan said, “The discretion of Rabbi Zechariah ben Abkulas destroyed our House, burned ourTemple, and exiled us from our Land.”</blockquote>
The fundamentalist rejects diversity by believing only the static perception of someone else is the whole and entire truth. By this view one can not believe or even tolerate anything outside their truth, nor does their truth change and evolve. They do not acknowledge that there may be other truths for other people. The truth is not just the truth for them but must be the law of the land. It must be enforced by Earthquakes, fire and wind. To the fundamentalist, the Infinite One which each of us humans can only understand in limited terms can only be described in one way, not as many as the number of people on the Earth or stars in the sky.
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The story in Gittin continues with Rabbi Yohanan b. Zakkai faking his own death to be carried out of Jerusalem, meeting with the Roman general Vespasian and essentially trading the old religion of Jerusalem for an academy at Yavneh and rabbinic Judaism, changing everything to hear the still small voice away from the corrupt institution. In the loss of everything, The Still Small Voice accompanied Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism wherever they ended up after the destruction of the Temple and Priesthood.
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HaMakom is the omnipresent. The Divine is in all things, and it takes those who honor and respect that fact to keep and grow the holiness in the world. I am and know of many people who I will refer to as <i>Benei Shechinah</i>, literally children of the Divine Presence, people who believe in a greater power that can manifest itself in the world around us. We believe in God, but may not believe what God is exactly the same way, nor do we completely agree on how to serve God, or even if service is what we are supposed to be doing. What we can agree on is that the Divine calls to each of us in different ways. Those of us who agree enough alike to the questions “What is God” or “What does God want of us?” may form a community, both small and big, to grow together in their answers to those questions, or in finding new questions about those answers.
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The <i>Benei Shechinah</i> are increasingly uncomfortable and questioning of what their greater communities, their religions, are doing in the name of God. Religions more often seem to take fundamentalist positions, or just acting corruptly and going against some the most important agreed on answers to the questions of service to God: caring for other human beings. Religion has become as Isaiah rails, and Jesus famously quotes:
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Thus says HaShem of hosts, the G-d of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place.
Don’t trust in lying words, saying: 'The temple of HaShem, the temple of HaShem, the temple of HaShem, are these.'
But if you thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if you thoroughly execute justice between a man and his neighbor;
If you oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt;
Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.
Here, you trust in lying words, that cannot profit.
Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and offer unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye have not known,
Then come and stand before Me in this house, whereupon My name is called, and say: 'We are delivered', that ye may do all these abominations?
Is this house, whereupon My name is called, become a den of thieves in your eyes? Hey, I, even I, have seen it, says HaShem.[Isaiah 7]</blockquote>
Organizations, interested mostly in their own survival, both in socially and financially have never been good at this. They get bogged down in rules, cannot hear the still small voice in the Thunder and Fire and Earthquakes of their rules and enforcement. They consistently give false witness, worshipping the false Idols, the Baal of Money, and marketing false prophets for profit.
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I look to the biblical prophets, and the history of religion in the times after the prophets. Micah, Jeremiah, Isaiah all look to the institutions of the land, the kings and priesthood and condemn them for corruption and for not doing what is the most important things: care for other people, especially those people who are strangers widows and orphans, those who cannot care for themselves without help. Yet time after time, the greater institution fails in this. Survival of the fittest is not holy, Atlas shrugging is the act of a pagan god, though institutions fall into the trap repeatedly. The prophetic books end with the destruction of the Temple, and exile to another land. Yet God goes with the people. Many of the thinkers of the first Century Israel were just as fed up with the corruption of the Second Temple practices, for very much the same reasons. The Temple became a profit center for the rich and powerful, not a prophet center. In Christianity, Jesus and his disciples had lots of problems with this system. So too in Jewish thought did the Rabbinic Mןnd. While the Tannaim of Talmud did preserve a lot of tradition of Temple Practices, they had no problem letting it crumble and be replaced by Rabbinic Judaism -- which has survived longer than Temple Judaism ever did.
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Rabbinic Judaism, where prayer and study replaces sacrifice, has its origins in Biblical times. The centralization of all sacrifices in the Temple and destroying the high places, the Bamot, had an unintended effect. People couldn't afford the the time or money to come to Jerusalem frequently -- so they started studying and praying instead. The institution was replaced by the community. By the time of the destruction of the Temple, this was a common practice, coming together in small prayer communities instead of the mass institution and spectacle of the Temple sacrifice. Our smaller prayer communities, the synagogue, church or prayer circle, emerged from these original communities.
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Some grew into larger organizations. There are advantages to larger organizations. There can be a consistency of message over many smaller communities. There can also be a bigger force of message and action when many people band together. Yet there is an even bigger chance of depersonalizing the<i> Benei Shechinah’s </i> diverse, personal witnessing of the Holy One. There is an even bigger, and fallacious idea that the survival of the organization, of the religion, is paramount to the the survival of the small communities and the individuals within them. Biblical precedent is clear here: the first and second Temples were destroyed, and with them the priesthood and sacrifice system. Judaism survived both, and in the ashes of the Second Temple, Christianity arose as well. The Shechinah will abandon the religion and it capricious rules made by humans, but The Shechinah does not abandon any of her children.
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We are once again in a time where we see so many counter examples of “love thy neighbor.” People often treating the widow, orphan and stranger with cruelty instead of kindness in the name of religion and the Baal of economic necessity. There are many who are obsessed with what they would call Sodomy, that brutal force is necessary to suppress it, instead of believing what both Isaiah 7 and Genesis Rabbah make clear: the sin of Sodom was to treat the stranger, and indeed everyone, with evil intentions, not homosexuality. Sodomites were rapists, and would rape anyone, any way on sight, not care to the needs of the stranger or the weak. It is not the sin of those referred to in one small verse in Leviticus 18:22. The sin of Sodom, found dozens of times in the Bible, is the core sin of many fundamentalists today. Their religion stands on oppressing the weak. Their religions stands on oppressing women and denying the status of human being to GLBT people within and outside their community.
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Yet, this is the voice of some institutions and religions -- there are others who have different views. Even more so the still small voice in the small communities of God, the Kehillat HaShem, who may even associate with a institution, work towards the goals of seeing the Divine in all things and all people, then act on that with a respect and goodness. It is not the big organization that will bring about the will of God and Tikkun Olam. It is the small community, as it was in days of old.
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The Talmud [Sanhedrin 38 a] Gives the greatness of God being compared to to a king who mints his own coins:
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Our Rabbis taught: [The creation of the first man alone] was to show forth the greatness of the Supreme King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. For if a man mints many coins from one mould, they are all alike, but the Holy One, blessed be He, fashioned all men in the mold of the first man, and not one resembles the other</blockquote>
On each coin is an image of the king and all are the same. But God mints coins in his own image, and yet no two are the same. We are God’s currency each witnessing and completing Creation differently. We are all unique and holy, but when we get together as a group holiness increases. As the Perkei Avot [3:3]tells us that for three to eat and talk of Torah, The Holy One Joins them at their table. Community is important and does makes us stronger, and creates a synthesis -- a presence of God -- that one person alone cannot manage.
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Religion is a dressing of organization over our servitude to God. There is no word for religion in ancient Hebrew, -- it is an alien term to scripture, never mentioned. Religion is neither bad or good -- but its institutions, in their desire for self-preservation may lose their way, and often end up corrupt and evil. As thought they are prophets, It is up to individuals and the smaller communities who might be under the umbrella of a religion to stand up and make there voice and action known, for like the Temples before it, the institution will fall, but the Divine Presence will accompany her children wherever they journey.
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As Elijah found out on Mount Sinai, the thunder and fire of religious institutions is not where God resides, but in the still small voice within the practitioner. To listen to the still small voice is not enough, we need to get together with others. Let us share our still small voices in community and heed them in doing <i>gemilut hasidim</i>, good works, in our selves, in our community, for the poor, the oppressed, and for our world.
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It takes the individual to truly believe, not the organization. It is good to have a community who share experiences and ways of experiencing and bringing Ribbono Shel Olam more into the world in their own ways, like helping the widow orphan and stranger in their midst. Like Elijah, we may have the whole world, government, and priesthood after our head. But we do not listen to their thunder, fire and wind, because God is not there. We together listen instead to The Still Small Voice, for there is where הקדוש ברוך הוא The Holy One Blessed be sHe, really is.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-6057658803356119812012-10-08T09:31:00.000-05:002012-10-08T09:31:36.822-05:00Sukkot 5773: Is the Simple Life Complex? Since I was about five years old, I've been involved in building a sukkah. My family did not have our own in our own yard, but we did put together every year a sukkah in the parking lot of our synagogue. Every year my dad led the congregational effort, and came up with a new design each time. In Rochester, New York Sukkot was not just when the leaves fell but the sun would hide behind clouds until sometime in late spring. Often there were a few snowflakes in the air, though it was never an accumulation. Building that sukkah every year is one of my fondest childhood memories. <br /><br />That memory surfaces every year as I now build sukkahs along with my congregation. there is a holiness about making a sukkah that I don't find in many rituals, it is also one which I do the most in joy, no matter what the ever unpredictable Autumn weather brings.<br /><br />Only five days prior to Sukkot we read about a sukkah in the Yom Kippur Mincha Haftarah. Jonah makes one to see what happens to Nineveh. The roof leaks light and heat of the sun burns him. Only the gourd gives him comfort, which promptly dies the next day. IN other biblical stories, At the town of Sukkot Jacob builds a house for himself and builds sukkot for his cattle, naming the town. <br /><br />We also have the סכת שלמך the shelter of peace from the liturgy. In English we might call this a booth or a hut. Hebrew’s verbal counterpart to Sukkah(סכה) is Sachach(סכך) a word meant to overshadow, screen or cover. Our sukkot screen or shadow us. The Talmud of Sukkot begins the tractate by stating that if there is more sun than shade coming though the sukkah’s roof, it is not a valid Sukkah. Yet it is not a complete covering and must be made of plant material. <br /><br /> While I was sitting in the sun on Brannake Beach on the Island of Kauai, a local family put up a portable tent in about fifteen minutes. I had some interesting conversations with them, but I was rather interested in their point of view as locals about being out in the sun and being on the beach. The point of the tent was to keep the blazing sun out while able to see everything in this beautiful place. It may not have been a sukkah, but it was doing the same thing -- keeping the sun out, but let them see the sea turtles swimming by, the crashing wakes against the rocks, the surfers riding a wave towards the shore. <br /><br />The sukkah has a simple purpose. It’s supposed to be a simple booth. But when we put together the sukkah this year at my congregation, it took hours, not the fifteen minutes of the well-engineered popup tent. The complexity of the task is in fact amazing. It may be a simple hut but takes a good chunk of Talmud to describe its building. <br /><br />My life is complex. Lately, I’ve begun to simplify things. I’m thinking about life in an idealized sukkah, the simple shelter, kind of way. I started to think about simple around the time of another Harvest festival, Shavuot, when I was told to pack up my office for the remodel of the offices at work. I realized I had a lot of stuff to pack. My office was crowded with stuff. For most of the summer, I was in a temporary location, either in another part of the building or in my own office, sharing it with others who offices were being remodeled. <br />There was a lot of stuff I shoved into boxes. As I unpacked however, something extraordinary happened. I started to not put things back, but throw them away or donate them. I realized in my office and in my home how much stuff I had accumulated. <br /><br />Some people are good at accumulating things -- they have problems throwing them away. I’m not not talking about hoarders here, just people who have a hard time getting rid of something. They reason the stuff might be of use later. I’m one of those. In what I do there times that is a very good strategy. But many times it is not. <br /><br />Complexity in my life often come from collecting things and not letting go of it. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that is true of. Some of my things, as I mentioned in my <a href="http://wp.me/p1xLVG-a7">Yizkor Drash</a>, are hooks to memory, and cannot be thrown out because I want to remember my mom through some of her stuff. There is my artworks and sculptures, there to remind me that I can accomplish things. And there is my book collection, a reference library on several topics I’m involved in: Programming, Web design, Jewish studies, Educational Psychology, Business, Science, and Regulatory Affairs. That’s just the stuff I have reason to have in my office. There is also stuff I’m not quite sure why it is there. I just ignore it like it is invisible. That would be the problem stuff. <br /><br />This week, I stand in a sukkah. Everything is so simple. There is a table and I eat. I shake a lulav and etrog. So much like the way I’d like my office to be -- simple. In my dreams, I sit down in my office and I work on one thing until it is done. How nice it wold be but that is far from the truth. Looking out of that tent on the beach in Kauai, and looking out of the sukkah, I realize life isn’t simple. Outside the shade of simplicity that is the sukkah is a complex life -- it can’t be avoided. Like the sun coming trough the windows of my office, I will have infinite interruptions and complexities in my day and I will get nowhere in any of the simple tasks of my day. <br /><br />But complexity can be mitigated. The high holidays, besides ridding of what most would call sin, also gives us time to remove the needless complexities of our lives. The evaluation of our sins is the sealed judgement of Yom Kippur. The evaluation of the complexities is Sukkot, in living in the simplest kind of structure. Similiarly, I can throw out the needless junk in my office. All of it leads to a new beginning, the beginning of the Torah cycle and of the story of Creation. <br /><br />We come out of Sukkot ready to create a new world for ourselves, one we hope is better, and in some sense simpler than the last one. <br /><br />May your new world be a good one. Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-15279556740181350152012-09-28T06:32:00.004-05:002012-09-28T06:32:50.011-05:00Post Yom Kippur 5773: Return Again<p>I believe in Signs from God. That I just got one certainly colors my view. That it was the same sign as I got seventeen years ago just rattles me. While I’ve <a href="http://shlomosnewdrash.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/parshat-vayera-5768-graduation-and-seeing-things/">written about this</a> before, there is a bit of my old history that you need to understand what happened this Yom Kippur.</p>
<p>Just after my Bar Mitzvah, after great Haftara reading, I was asked to do the afternoon Torah reading for Yom Kippur. In more traditional liturgy, this is Leviticus 18, the odd inclusion in the service which lists prohibited sexual conduct and other prohibitions like turning your child into a burnt sacrifice. In retrospect, it was not very smart of our rabbi to give me a NC-17 rated reading like that. It soured me, not for any one line*, but the entirety of the piece. It shattered my Hebrew school image of Judaism, and in the emptiness left I went elsewhere of a spirituality that worked for me. For many years, into my adulthood, I was involved in Taoism and Zen, not Judaism. </p>
<p>Everything changed on a summer study abroad program to Rome for graduate school when I had a dream. In the dream, a Hasidic rabbi and I were alone in a room freshly plastered, yet without doors. The Rabbi told me to fresco on the walls some passages in Hebrew, though he did not tell me what. Though I did not know how to read Hebrew at the time, I began to write perfectly, and even knew what I was writing: the Shema. As I got through the fresco of the third wall, somewhere in the middle of <em>Haya Im Shmoah</em>, the room begun to spin, and the letters spun upwards towards Heaven like a upside-down tornado.</p>
<p>I had never had a dream like it. It began a search for a place I would belong as a Jew. A year later, almost in the same place as the first, I had a second dream which told me a lot of where I would go. That place turned out to be a Jewish Renewal Congregation on Chicago’s South Side, Makom Shalom. </p>
After my return, I wondered where the dream came from. Was it all original material? It took me a few years but I had an idea of its source. In the Yom Kippur liturgy is the stories of the ten Talmudic martyrs. One of these was the story of Hanina b. Teradyon: </p>
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<blockquote>
His death was terrible. Wrapped in the scroll, he was placed on a pyre of green brush; fire was set to it, and wet wool was placed on his chest to prolong the agonies of death....His heartbroken disciples then asked: "Master, what seest thou?" He answered: "I see the parchment burning while the letters of the Law soar upward."(Avodah Zarah 17b et seq.).</blockquote>
<p>By the time I learned that fact I was entrenched in the masters of Jewish studies program at Spertus, and could read that passage not only in english, but the original Aramaic. Shlomo’s Drash was born in the period, and for quite a while I was writing regualrly. </p>
<p>While I was faltering for a while before my mom’s death, as I wrote last time, her death killed Shlomo’s Drash, and in my anger towards God for taking her away, just about killed my motivation for anything Jewish.
Then came this Yom Kippur, when God made absolutely sure I got the point. It started on Rosh Hashanah when a friend of mine was looking for people to do readings for the part of the Yom Kippur service she was leading.Without ever looking at the reading I agreed. </p>
<p>I looked at it Yom Kippur morning as I was getting dressed for services, and burst out crying. It was a poetic interpretation of the martyrdom of Rabbi Hanina b. Teradyon. </p>
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<blockquote>
...He who will see this desecrated Torah
avenged
will make good, somehow, my dying
I see the parchment burn
but the Letters are soaring to their source
You may burn a Torah
But Torah will not be consumed
You may kill Jews
but the Jews will survive
and serve witness
to the Genesis-- patterns of creation
and the Isaiah -- prophecies of hope.
[ Danny Siegel pg 902 Kol Ha Neshama Mahzor]
</blockquote>
<p>When I got to services, I asked the friend who assigned the reading, if I had told her the story of the dream in Rome. She had no idea what I was talking about. Not to leave that to coincidence, while I wandering about, waiting for the doors to the sanctuary to open, there was a new display in this synagogue we were renting for services. It was a Holocaust torah, one of many the Nazis collected and stored when busy destroying everything else Jewish. It has been damaged to the point it could not be repaired, and so was on loan as a display piece. On the display was the words of Hanina b. Teradyon. </p>
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<p>Maybe some will take this a coincidence. Maybe some will say it was my subconscious. playing tricks on me. I’m still of the belief that it was all too strange to be any of that but a sign from God. Like it did the last time, I was to return. As I got my seat and put on my talit for services to begin, I thought of the song that was popular at my renewal synagogue way back when:</p>
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<blockquote>
Return again
Return again
Return to the land of your soul. </blockquote>
Of course that was when services started with the choir singing, yes, <i>Return again</i>. </p>
<p>The song makes sense. The word <i>teshuvah</i> means not only repentance, but return. Nothing like a blatant message from God. So, unlike Jonah’s vain attempt at fleeing, I’m back, returning once again. </p>
<p>Don’t think I have much choice, unless I want more signs. </p>
<p>*Though Lev 18:22 would dog me for my entire adult life, cause some of the most serious swings in my life-path, and in ways I never would have imagined. But that's another story and another Drash all together. </p>Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-20834763827933480762012-09-25T06:37:00.000-05:002012-09-25T06:37:42.340-05:00Shlomo’s Drash Yizkor 5773I went to visit mom in the cemetery Sunday. After driving there, my wife and I sat with her at her bronze grave marker for about a hour talking to her and then talking about her. Most of our talk centered around about how unfair it was for her to die, how unjust God is for taking her away from us. We talked about many other things as well. About an hour later, the cool but sunny day became cloudy and colder, and we decided to leave.Before I left I knew I would have some writing to do again.<br />
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Here I am in the days of Awe, the ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, with Yom Kippur looming ahead. Like last year, I dread it because of Yizkor. For those unfamiliar with the traditions and the liturgy of Yom Kippur, a holiday whose whole point is getting in our last shot at repentance before our fate is sealed for another year. Yizkor is the memorial service, a time in the middle of all this to remember loved ones who have died. The juxtaposition of these two has bothered me for the last year and a half. On one hand we have the Netana Tokef declaring our doom and how it is decided by God. Leonard Cohen’s adaptation, Who by Fire gives some of the spirit of the Netana Tokef and a lot of Yom Kippur, a solemn, hard core fast holiday. While we are trying to keep ourselves alive for another year, we are remembering and honoring the dead.<br />
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I remember Yom Kippur of my youth, when Yizkor was a welcome break in the service. There is a tradition to not tempt fate by those whose loved ones are still alive. They leave the sanctuary so not to hear or say words about the dead. Like most young families, our family would leave for the time of the Yizkor part of the liturgy. As we grew older first my dad, then my mom stayed to remember their parents. Last year, and now this year I stay for my mom.<br />
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Both the English and the Hebrew of Yizkor has a core word: memory. We remember someone we lost. While I said it was a welcome break, over a decade ago I began to stay for Yizkor, not for my parents but for those who had no one to say yizkor for them. I wonder now if I did tempt God to take away my mom because of that. Yet I think what I did was a righteous act. How horrible would it be to not be remembered but to be completely erased. Whether they died in the Holocaust or were abandoned somehow by their families, the dead needed to be remembered. They could not be completely erased, So I stayed.<br />
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It’s different now of course, there is someone who I am remembering.<br />
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In 5772, I watched her memory erased. In places and spaces where she spent a lot of time, she was erased. Visual cues to her existence were in these places. The space contained her spirit, memories of her were sparked by these objects around these spaces. As they were erased and replaced, I find those places that were once warm, cold and ugly. There are others besides me who bear the pain of her loss. It is not for me to decide how they bear it, or if by erasing her space and spirit it is so much easier to deal with the pain, not seeing reminders of her make it easier not to miss her as much. It might be an easy way to stop the pain, though far from a cheap solution, for erasers also lose something when they erase.<br />
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It has me thinking of memory, how we have it and how we use it. I’m glad I took so many pictures on the trips I took with my mom. The ones of her are reminders to me and I can be transported back to times where we adventured together in Israel and Jordan, the Galapagos Islands, Alaska, and Africa. They are so precious they are stored not in one place but several, so I never lose them and no one can take them from me.Kiker Rock at Dawn, Galapagos Islands.<br />
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Memory can be hard because we remember what we have lost. For two reasons I have not been writing this blog for the last year. One is I’ve been mad at God for taking her from us. It’s been a matter of spite and a lack of spirit to write. There is a second reason: my biggest fan, the one who wrote me almost every week to say she’s proud of me and that she learned something new in what I wrote is gone. Remembering that and seeing the e-mail or comment absent from her is a horrible feeling. I too temporarily erased a memory that was too painful to bear — erasing memory is also my sin, and a very selfish one at that.<br />
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Yet it is one that I can change, I will have to listen to the silence, the lack of a comment or e-mail from my mom. That will always hurt. I will miss one of the two people who tell me regularly they are proud of me. I still will hear from my wife the thoughts on what I wrote, either over dinner or in a comment somewhere. That is a big comfort and a bigger blessing.<br />
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During these Days of Awe a few things happened that I realized writing is a part of me — it is part of the work I have to do. It is part of developing who I am and it is something that inspires others, as it did my mom. There are other comments on my blog besides my mom, and I have to remember that too.<br />
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Elsewhere we are told to blot out the Memory of Amalek, it is indeed a mtizvah. During Yom Kippur to blot out the memory of a loved one seems to be a sin. If so, the placement of Yizkor is not counter to the point of Yom Kippur — it is the point. To erase memory is a sin, and it hurts the eraser as much as the erased. We inherit who we are from our parents and loved ones, not just genetically but emotionally and spiritually. If our parents hurt us, we can take that and rise above it. If our parents taught us good like my mom, who was compassion and caring personified, we need to take that inheritance and spread it through the world.<br />
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I never heard my mom’s will — for whatever reason I was excluded from the reading, never told when it was. I have my inheritance anyway. The rabbis said that prophecy and wisdom can be transmitted like a candle. It lights another light, but does not diminish the first – so unlike an eraser. So too with the good in a soul, and that is what I got as an inheritance. It is a huge burden, one I’m not sure I’m capable of holding up, for to be my mother’s son is to risk being erased myself. But I will try.
Because I will remember.
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Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-77475357100877333302012-04-06T08:09:00.000-05:002012-04-06T08:09:49.992-05:00Passover 5772: Why I am Still a Slave<p>Tonight begins Passover, this year overlapping Shabbat. The last week has given me time to think, and the pain in my bones muscles and stomach have helped me ponder something I really hadn’t thought much about before: I still am not free.</p>
<p>The story of the Seder is about our escape from Egypt, in Hebrew מצרים <i>mitzrayim</i>, meaning the narrow place. In geography, the habitable parts of Egypt are narrow. Egypt is dependent on the river Nile. Too far beyond its banks, and there is nothing. Even on a satellite map today it is so very visible how linked the Nile is to Egypt. It may have many more square miles of land but a small narrow green strip is where life is. The rest is desert. Without the water of the Nile there is no life.</p>
<p>All of Egypt is in slavery to that river, even to this day. They really cannot wander, or even conceive of it. There is only the narrow place. One can travel north and south on the Nile, but to travel east or west in inconceivable to most.</p>
<p>Yet a band of wandering Arameans did come from the east into Egypt. So did the Ishmaelites that sold one of those wandering Arameans, Joseph, into slavery, only for him rise to the heights of power, based on a dream and planning for the inconceivable time the life giving river would remain dry for a while. His family easily moved in and then began to overpopulate the place, leading to fear of these new eastern people. Racism, slavery and infanticide were to follow against these strangers in the land of Egypt. Not until the time of Moses did this change.</p>
<p>Pharaoh had dealings with all these people from the East, probably even the civilizations of the Tigris Euphrates valleys as well. But I wonder if a hardened heart of pharaoh was something besides stubbornness. It was impossible for him on one level to break his assumption one can travel east or west. Even Pharaoh’s gods didn’t travel in those directions – rarely is a temple found far from the Nile Valley. Pharaoh had evidence that there was east-west travel, but it just seemed impossible. For slaves to travel there was therefore impossible. The plagues not only were showing the wonders of God, but also trying to get Pharaoh to break out of his mindset, that people could live out there. The first few plagues intentionally attack this notion: the life giving Nile becomes Death.</p>
<p>I have preconceived notions where I only think along my own metaphorical Nile. Sometime they surprise me and anger me that it is still there. I find myself still a slave. At some time those notions may have been good for me, protected me, gave me what I needed to survive. Yet I wonder what they are doing now. I cannot move forward, and get to my place of freedom, away from the narrow spaces, and I hurt others being chained to them. I get angry and cry when I find myself so chained to them that I cannot move.</p>
<p>Many of them are chains to my continued growth, my own slavery to an internal Pharaoh. Mine keeps me from success in relationships and in success professionally. As I was reminded in of all places at my favorite morning coffee stop this morning in a friendly conversation between a barista and a customer, there are other chains to the Narrow Places that are far more dangerous. I hear in others lately, like that barista and customer, how easily racist, misogynist, and hate filled statements flow off the tongue. Such people are still enslaved to notions that will keep them slaves forever. Narrow places for them are good in their eyes: the wide-open wilderness is too scary to contemplate away from the comfort of the narrow place.</p>
<p>I have a tradition to read a country song written by Garth Brooks and Stephanie Davis. Sung at the President Obama’s Inauguration celebrations, <i>We Shall be Free</i> envisions a time when we break away from all the narrow places. I so hope for such a day, but the narrow places seem to head us toward the plague of darkness instead of the light of freedom.</p>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KQ0DXLm5pd4?fs=1" width="459"></iframe>Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-18332733485347124872012-03-16T12:41:00.000-05:002012-03-16T12:41:05.071-05:00Vayakhel- Pekudei 5772: Is Craft a Holy Thing?This week’s double portion we have the building of the Mishkan, starting with Moses telling the people the last instruction told to him on Sinai: to be sure to observe the Sabbath. Then, like God first instruction, Moses asks for donations to the building of the Mishkan. Then he give directions for the components starting with the tent and working his way to the Ark, even though God started with the Ark. After Moses’ appeal the donations are overflowing from both men and women, and the men and women who are “wise of heart” began the work of constructing from these raw materials. Betzalel leads the project, and he and his crews get all the components made. Two years into their journey, Moses puts together the components for the first time, with the results that the cloud was over the tent and the glory of God filled the tent.
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I haven’t been writing lately. I was otherwise occupied. <a href="http://www.shlomosdrash.blogspot.com/2011/09/bmidbar-5771-change-and-changing.html">Last year </a> I wrote I still had my teenage dream to be a software artist. I put Shlomo's Drash in Haitus trying to figure out how to do exactly that. I wrote in that <a href="http://www.shlomosdrash.blogspot.com/2011/09/bmidbar-5771-change-and-changing.html">B’midbar drash</a> about change. I’ve learned that change requires building, but I still wonder where this building comes from.
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For several weeks, we have had the plans to the Mishkan. These two parshiot are the action. There is a lot of difference between thought and action, as much of Exodus shows us. Moses gets the Mishkan’s specifications solely and the people end up building a golden calf. In contrast, Betzalel coordinates and builds the Mishkan and everyone either wants to donate or help build. I have really spent decades planning and doing nothing. Maybe that was not idol worship, but it certainly was idle worship. So I decided to actually do something. On the suggestion of a classmate of mine, I put some software together, an app for the iPhone and got it into the App Store.
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Like the Mishkan, the app, Rashi Decoder, is to help people get closer to God. Unlike the Mishkan, it is a marvel of high tech consumer electronics, written on the most sophisticated platform existing: iOS5. But it started with planning, and then building the individual parts, and finally putting together and testing. If the Mishkan was put together right, God would dwell there. If my app worked it would do as advertised.
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<a href="http://www.itunes.com/apps/RashiDecoder" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZ5N4MLKaiKPYO2kqsMQPkCAgJ3d8qvD7UksSGXLfap6a5ccyXAtiY0i6nlBADbANBeER-FOIPvzseYfibWAHki9dVZofI0woDcdflXRqju5DHCjm2_S0JlQKc-JWyBvPjFx5vg/s200/ss_iPhone_pg1_Heb.png" width="138" /></a>The app is actually rather simple in purpose: a calculator-like program to convert Rashi script to block Hebrew. It started with a complaint from a fellow student of mine that he was having problems reading commentaries given the odd 16th century Italian script that commentaries are often written in. Like Betzal’s craftsmen and women I built this program, component by component. Unlike Betzalel, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing – I learned as I wrote each component. I didn’t think there was a voice from God helping. All the references books and videos often didn’t help much. I had to play with the code to get it to work. I had to make four different sets of buttons until I found one I liked the look of.
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I’m one person, not an army of craftsmen and crafts women. I had two groups I needed to please, not God. My app needed to pass the Apple vetting process to make it into the App Store. Once posted in the App Store, it has to please and delight customers, so more people will buy it. It is the only app of its kind in the app store, not to mention the code the colors and fonts and the programing style is unique to me. This app getting sold is a very creative act. It seems like the building of the Mishkan was more a manufactured process – an exact specification like the specs for the circuit boards in my iPhone, than the artistic, creative flourishes of my programming and app interface.
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The wise of heart as mentioned at the beginning of the portion might mean those who are creative and skilled at their craft. But no two craftsmen are alike. My programming is not like any other artist or app developer. How could all those separate elements come together so flawlessly that Moses pops the tent together? How can my creative work be as much of a wonder as that?
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Rashi points out something about Betzalel, the man responsible for getting every specification of the Mishkan exactly right. Exodus 38:22 states that Betzalel did everything that God commanded Moses. Rashi notes that the text does not say that Betzalel was commanded by Moses but what was commanded of Moses. While God in Terumah gives one order to put the Mishkan’s components together when talking to Moses, Moses transposes them at the beginning of Vayakhel. Betzalel put them together in the order God said, not what Moses said. <br />
To have Hochmat Ha Lev, wisdom of the heart, means that you are aware that your personally creative act is also an act of God. Even if you have strict specifications, if you give yourself over to that creative act, it will be a work of God. The Temple had three versions. Betzalel’s and Moses’ Mishkan version 1.0 in Exodus is very different than King Solomon’s and Hiram’s version 2.0 in I Kings or Ezekiel’s vision of version 3.0 in the time to come. The three Temples still all fit the requirements – all are holy. <br />
There is parable in Mishnah Sanhedrin about a king who mints a coin with his face on it. Every coin has his face on it. The wonder is that the king of all kings mints a coin in the image of the first man, who is in the image of God. Those coins have a different image every time, but it is still an image of the God. Sanhedrin is trying to point out that we are all are in the image of God. I think this just does not apply to humans being made in God’s image, but all of our work when done with wisdom of the heart, when done congruent to the source of all, will be holy. Our own style may be there, but it will shine through as divine influence. <br />
That holiness is in my apps. It is also in my paintings and in this D’var Torah blog. I cannot ignore it and be wise of heart. So once again, I’m back to write these weekly.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-63657542369983586992012-03-15T15:47:00.000-05:002012-03-15T15:58:59.560-05:00Rashi Decoder for iPad and iPhone<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizucCWew8IFQPgwdzBsib4rkz_7GmGnWQ37VBLqgx8T19vDjhk6qbhEzfOKdQOpieiSnfRWe8uxPthgNaz5gVibhPdYIg1wsER7NFop2cOIkyp086V0uVJE9hLDFD-N3VGfqpH0w/s1600/icon+ipad+72x72.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizucCWew8IFQPgwdzBsib4rkz_7GmGnWQ37VBLqgx8T19vDjhk6qbhEzfOKdQOpieiSnfRWe8uxPthgNaz5gVibhPdYIg1wsER7NFop2cOIkyp086V0uVJE9hLDFD-N3VGfqpH0w/s1600/icon+ipad+72x72.png" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZ5N4MLKaiKPYO2kqsMQPkCAgJ3d8qvD7UksSGXLfap6a5ccyXAtiY0i6nlBADbANBeER-FOIPvzseYfibWAHki9dVZofI0woDcdflXRqju5DHCjm2_S0JlQKc-JWyBvPjFx5vg/s1600/ss_iPhone_pg1_Heb.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZ5N4MLKaiKPYO2kqsMQPkCAgJ3d8qvD7UksSGXLfap6a5ccyXAtiY0i6nlBADbANBeER-FOIPvzseYfibWAHki9dVZofI0woDcdflXRqju5DHCjm2_S0JlQKc-JWyBvPjFx5vg/s200/ss_iPhone_pg1_Heb.png" width="138" /></a> Have problems reading Rashi script? Rashi decoder is a calculator style app to change Rashi style fonts into block Hebrew for those who know Hebrew but not the flowing fine print of the commentators.
Rashi Script is a 16th century Hebrew typeface. Like its Latin equivalent italic, the typeface was used to print small font sizes in removable lead type without chipping the type. Based on rounded Sephardic handwriting, it also gave a different look to commentaries and glosses placed around Tanach and Talmud on a printed page. The 11th century commentator Rashi was the first and most popular of the Hebrew Biblical commentators. Rashi's and the other commentator's work stands out on a page of Tanach or Talmud due to this unique looking font. Modern scholars, in tribute to the volume of Rashi’s commentary material in the glosses have named this font for him.
<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rashi-decoder/id505136878" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7HuSYp-Texj7Fh8o55nddFz-DDOkW91AdGOO1Blb47L4q6Xknmk8di90xVZ5JukwfPP9ysUUHJ00ob40aBkDabE0CaPEDPN47EFAmaS1OG2xeZjL2is2Ac7wE43xgm-y6EqF_4w/s1600/App_Store_Badge_EN_0609_100px.png" /></a>Since this script does look different than block Hebrew, Rashi script decoder is a utility to quickly transcribe a word or short phrase into block Hebrew. Type in a word or short phrase and its block Hebrew writing shows in the display.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-23281347619785578172011-10-02T12:58:00.000-05:002011-10-02T13:02:44.784-05:00Rosh Hashana 5772: A Mourner at Rosh HashanaI stood in the darkened anteroom corner of this synagogue my congregation rented looking out into the night while the choir rehearses. There were things I should not be doing tonight, on Erev Rosh Hashanah before services. One I’m sure is I shouldn't be writing, tapping out a Shlomo’s Drash blog post on my iPhone, but writing is my heartfelt prayer, and God knows I haven't prayed a lot with kavvanah in these last few months. Granted I’ve been going to services, and I said the prayers, but I didn't pray the way I prayed, praying fervently and with intension. The way I prayed what most would consider prayers when my mom was illl. When I said Kaddish for her the first time at her grave, I stopped praying -- tying to say the kaddish even moths after her death is so hollow. Flowing prose onto screen and paper seems to be the most fervent prayer I've managed.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/p1010296.jpg"><img alt="" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-338" height="225" src="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/p1010296.jpg?w=300" title="OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" width="300" /></a>Since February, my mom had beendead -- suddenly, without real reason. Now my family celebrates The High Holidays so differently. There is no family dinner that mom took two days off of work to cook, using the same pots she has for years. Due to differing timing of services, Sweetie and I cannot even eat at a family meal like I have for so many years. Timing doesn't work out --<br />
For my family, there is a chain restaurant to replace the family meal at home. For us, dinner with friends.<br />
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The liturgy has a kind of centerpiece of this season. The Netana Tokef reminds us this is the season where we are judged on Rosh Hashanah and inscribed in the book. On Yom Kippur it is sealed. Who is to live this year, and who is to die. With my<br />
Moms death, this brings up many questions, including the big one: Why did she die now? Why was such a compassionate, good woman inscribed and sealed in the Book of Death? What did she do to deserve that? There are people in this word who are hate filled and spread their hate to all who listen, why should they live and my mom, one of the most giving, caring people I have ever known, have to die?<br />
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I have no answers, I can only explore. I, along with many others have never liked the Netana Tokef theology. I have in other of these commentaries changed the Book of Life to the Book of Fully Living. It is not just enough to live, but to make the most of your circumstances to live fully -- to make your world and the world around you a better, happier more complete place. To learn and grow,to engage with God, to perform deeds of kindness -- that is fully living. As the liturgy reminds us every morning, as quoted from the Perkei Avot, the word stands on those three things: on Torah, Avodah, and Gemilut hasidim.<br />
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Pondering that, it is time for services, and I walk into the evening service. I hurt, and by the end of the service I hurt so much, I am numb. It makes no sense, I cannot pray at all. Halfway through the Amidah, a page before Modim Ananchnu Lach, I just sit down. It just becomes too difficult -- I feel nothing, I feel no connection. Later, I say the words of the Mourners Kaddish like a zombie -- there is nothing of my soul in me -- it too seems dead. Prayer has left me, and I fell no connection, I feel there is no one to serve. God and I are no longer talking to each other. Sweetie drives me home and I collapse into bed.<br />
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The next morning, the numbness is gone but the hurt remains. While dressing that morning, I think about how wonderful it would have been for Sweetie to spend more time with my mom, to go shopping and with her, for them to go to their favorite restaurant and share their favorite pizza.<br />
When I get to the synagogue , and services start, I still cannot pray. I cannot even look at the words in the prayerbook -- although it is bulky, I usually can hold it with no problem. Today, I cannot even hold it. I go through much of the prayers by memory. My mind wanders to the trees outside, behind the window framing the Ark and the Torahs within it. I remember similar windows a long time go, and in my mind I am forty years in the past, in Rochester New York, standing between my mom and my dad, fidgeting at Rosh Hashanah services on my metal bridge chair. The synagogue I remember was rather dark, with a very large 3 steeple-like roof meant to be a tent held up by poles behind the Aaron Chodesh. The steeple behind the Ark was a diamond of glass, and bees or hornets would always be flying into it. I spent many a service looking up into that window out into the grey featureless sky beyond. My mom would point to an English paragraph in the Machzor with a look that told me I should read it. Following my mom’s instructions, I always did.<br />
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We stand up for Barchu, and I’m brought back to the present -- though there is a connection to my memory. In Rochester, that conservative prayer book never spoke to me, the english translation was a religion that I did not understand or accept -- the words about Ribbono Shel Olam, HaMelech are so empty and meaningless. There is no connection to something greater for me. In the present, everything I do is so half-hearted, so seemingly meaningless. Eventually we get to the Netana Tokef and we sing in Hebrew the concluding lines “but charity, prayer and repentance cancel the stern decree” as it would be translated in that conservative prayerbook. For the first time today I feel something. I want to scream across the room “BULLSHIT!!!!!!!”. I don’t, though. Instead I cry, tears streaming down my face. Then I hear the rabbi repeat the English for what we just sang in Hebrew., yet with a change: The English uses “comforts us” instead of cancels. Once again we are in the silent Amidah, and once again I cannot pray, I sit down without completing it, bewildered at what I am feeling. Like my mom told me to do decades ago, I look down at the text and begin to read a Reconstructionist response to Netana Tokef, and by extension, to much of the theme of Rosh Hashana. I’ve heard it in other forms before. There is stuff we are able to control, but there is a lot that we are powerless about. To acknowledge that we are powerless and admit that we need to trust God for those things is what ths is about. We do not choose the day of our death -- God does. Nothing we do changes that. But we can make the world a better place in the meantime, and know that it is so for our efforts.<br />
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That for me still isn't enough comfort. A kind deed, a small act of Gemilut Hasidim strengthens me enough to get home. I drive a fellow congregant to the train so he doesn't have to stand in the rain waiting for a bus. A thought occurs to me, one I don't like and have a hard time accepting.<br />
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What if one person lives life so fully, that it shadows others from doing so? Was my mom so good to all of us, that we could not grow into being as good as she was? Was her death removing her from the picture so we could truly live? Even with all the challenges that are before me personally, all the places I have to rise to the occasion, I have a he'd time believing this. I have not succeeded in many of them, and the future does not look bright for my success. I still don't know what to believe.<br />
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I have no answers, Rosh Hashanah leaves me with none. All I am left with is the dread of Yom Kippur, when Yizkor raises it's ugly head for the first time. Will I connect with God sometime in this holiday? I don’t know, but I fear the gates are closed to me.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-81482347698336440342011-09-16T06:45:00.004-05:002011-09-16T06:58:14.266-05:00Ki Tavo 5771: The Evil of Tea?This week we read the ceremony of the first fruits and instruction for the ceremony at Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim of the Blessings and Curses. As part of the first fruit ceremony we read:<br /><blockquote>12 When thou hast made an end of tithing all the tithe of thine increase in the third year, which is the year of tithing, and hast given it unto the Levite, to the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow, that they may eat within thy gates, and be satisfied, 13 then thou shalt say before the LORD thy God: 'I have put away the hallowed things out of my house, and also have given them unto the Levite, and unto the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow, according to all Thy commandment which Thou hast commanded me; I have not transgressed any of Thy commandments, neither have I forgotten them. [Deuteronomy 26]</blockquote><br />We also read in the curses:<br /><blockquote>18 Cursed be he that makes the blind to go astray in the way. And all the people shall say: Amen. {S} 19 Cursed be he that perverts the justice due to the stranger, fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say: Amen.[Deuteronomy 28]</blockquote><br />We keep seeing the same phrase: the stranger, fatherless and widow. In each case we are to deal with justice to them -- feed them. This phrase and the obligation to take care of those less fortunate than us show up not just here but in 19 places I could find explicitly:<br /><br /><blockquote>Ex 22:21-25<br />Deut 10:18, 14:29, 16:11, 24:17, 24:19-21, 26:12-3, 27:19,<br />Is 9:16, 10:2,<br />Jer. 5:28, 7:6, 22:3,<br />Ezek 22:7, 7:10,<br />Mal 3:5,<br />Ps 10:18, 82:3, 94:6, </blockquote><br />All say the same thing, and all state that God will take care of the stranger, fatherless and the widow in a very angry way -- with revenge:<br /><blockquote>22 The LORD will smite thee with consumption, and with fever, and with inflammation, and with fiery heat, and with drought, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish. 23 And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron. 24 The LORD will make the rain of thy land powder and dust; from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed. [Deuteronomy. 26]</blockquote><br />Most modern liberal folk have a hard time with this angry quid pro quo punishment stuff. I admittedly do too. The news for the last few weeks has me wondering. I have heard Politicians and fundamentalist religious leaders blame earthquakes, hurricanes and other catastrophes on passing gay marriage and not cutting the budget for public program that help so many. Yet earthquake and flood aren’t the curse we read about.<br /><br />It is drought and famine accompanied by fiery heat.<br /><br />I didn't think much about this until I watched a storm track of Tropical storm Lee, which seemed to go out of its way to avoid Texas and Oklahoma, and deny relief for the drought those beleaguered states are facing. A state with as many problems as Texas makes me wonder. It is a state, though by far not the only one, who oppresses the fatherless, the single mom, and the stranger in their midst. Many in that state, on religious grounds want to ban abortions and would never allow Gay marriages in their state. For this, they call themselves “righteous.” Their leaders believe in life for the fetus, yet Texas is the worst state in the nation for prenatal care. There is only two places in the entire Tanach mentioning a prohibition of homosexuality, and to my knowledge only one in Tanach which hints at abortion being bad. Indeed the Talmud interprets the laws for abortion much differently than this lot of “righteous” people, believing the life of the mother to be far more valuable than the life of the fetus. <br />If God says something twice, say "a man should not lay down with a male as he does with a woman"[Lev 18:22] it may be important, even though that says nothing about signing a contract of lifetime commitment under God. If you believe that two time is important, if God says something nineteen times, wouldn’t be a good idea to listen? The latter prophets and the book of Kings are statements that oppressing the needy is not a new thing. They also attest to God’s anger in doing so, for oppressing the poor is oppressing the image of God.<br />I still have a very hard time believing in a quid pro quo God, even on a macro level. Yet I watch the evil around us, and the evil that wants to lead us, and I wonder if such wonders as a massive drought are a sign or retribution from God. While I might hear something about climate change, I don't hear people stating that the catastrophes that plague us this year are because we oppress the poor. Yet I wonder. <br />The curses are set up to turn those who oppress into the oppressed. It is to turn a whole land, both the innocent and the guilty to a horrible fate. I really don’t know if this is God’s doing. Whatever the cause there are now more poor people in the world, and each needs help. I know what our role is -- and that is to help the stranger, widow and orphan.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-13279598105407946332011-09-08T10:07:00.000-05:002011-09-08T10:08:16.149-05:00D'varim 5771: Pt.2 Resistance and the Yetzer HaraIn this week’s portion, Moses gives the people a review of the book Numbers. In this Cliff's Notes version he recounts their leaving Sinai, and the story of the spies. He goes into describe their adventure once getting there and the opposition encountered the Amorite kings of Sihon and Og and their armies, who the Israelites completely rout - men women and little ones all die. Moses then recounts the settling of the land by some of the tribes on the east side of the Jordan, ending with encouragement for their new leader Joshua.<br /><br />What I read today was bloody -- a practically scorched earth policy. It seems so horrible -- a Genocide on a small scale. Is that what is going on? What is going on here?<br /><br />Like Moses giving his history this week, I need to look at some personal history. On June 24 1979, I read Shlach Lecha, the original story of the spies that Moses summarizes this week, for my bar mitzvah portion. Oddly I was a lot like the Israelites -- I feared a lot. By the time I got to college I still did. In my sophomore and junior years of college I met and was in the very outer social circles of one of the most beautiful women I have ever met. Between her always dating someone else and with my fear, I was intimidated of even talking to her. My senior year she left for a year abroad in France, and I of course graduated. I never expected to see her again.<br /><br />In May 2008, I put a pintelach in the Kotel asking to find my mate. In August 2008 I signed up for Facebook. On December 28 2008, I got a happy birthday message from that woman from college-- Sweetie. This time Fear did not grip me. Even going on vacation was not going to stop me, and I kept up communication. We met in late January 2009, flew back and forth between Seattle and Chicago from then until August 2009, and when we moved in together. In December, on my birthday I proposed to her. Next week, two years from moving in together, we will be married.<br /><br />Looking back on the last quarter century of my life, I would answer that: Sihon v’Og zeh yetzer ha ra. Sihon and Og are the Yetzer ha ra, the evil inclination.<br /><br />We often think of the evil inclination terms of some little voice on our shoulder telling us to do evil things. For example in terms of lust, as found in the Story of Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Meir, who even as sages were unable to control sexual urges when Ha Satan tries to tempt them with really beautiful women sitting in trees. We also find another case of greed leading to injustice in the Haftarah this week in a rather strong rebuke from the prophet to the government, one which sounds all too contemporary:<br /><blockquote>Your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes, and follows after rewards; they judge not the orphans neither does the cause of the widow reach them. [Isaiah 1:23]</blockquote><br />It is easy to succumb to such voices, as we have seen many times in public figures. Yet the yetzer hara is more than just doing evil to others. There is a phrase repeated several times (1:21, 1:29, 3:2) in this portion lo yira -- do not fear. Yet it is clear that in the wilderness hearing the report of the spies the people did fear. They even went into battle fearing their adversary and ended up with their butts handed to them. Sun Tzu’s art of war makes an important point:<br /><blockquote>If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.</blockquote><br />Why does Moses start his farewell speech with this much edited and very personal take on the book of numbers? Why does he spend so much time rebuking everyone, only to conclude this portion with two incredibly big victories that happened only weeks earlier in Torah time?<br /><br />I believe Moses was telling the story of the wilderness to make a point: know the enemy and know yourself. . The people, we have heard many times before are "stiff-necked." but what does that mean? I believe it means they gave into their own yetzer hara too easily. Moses was starting his speech with a very important point: there is a yetzer hara, an internal enemy. Give in to it and you can live in fear and failure. Alternatively, don’t be afraid knowing God is with you, and beat fear and resistance in the ground, and find yourself at your fullest potential -- the way God wants it.<br /><br />There were many things standing in the way of bringing us here to this auf ruf -- the 1800 miles between here and Seattle, coming from very different backgrounds, and not least of all, two stubborn-headed independent individuals under the same roof. Each could have derailed us with a word from our Yetzer Ha ra. The fact that they didn’t is a miracle, and I get to marry the woman of my dreams.<br /><br />We must know the internal enemy, often it is the most dangerous and destructive. IN anything that brings out our fullest potential and God given talent such is true. Knowing the enemy is the first part of strategy. As Steven Pressfield wrote in The War of Art:<br /><blockquote>To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius</blockquote><br />Sihon and Og is that enemy for the people. The people cannot get to the Promised Land without going through them -- and Sihon and Og both want nothing but to stop them. Any remnant left will go back and stop them. I don't want to think of this on terms of political terms, for that too is a form of resistance to what I am going to ask. I want to think of this in terms of our inner selves, our potential for tikkun olam, for changing the world for good, put into each of us. I beat my fears of dating and am getting married next week. I have many fears of success to yet to beat. How can we all find the Sihon and Og in us so we can all get to our promised lands?<br /><br /><strong>Questions:</strong><br /><ul><br /> <li>Are Sihon and Og metaphorically the Yetzer hara of resistance?</li><br /> <li>What is the nature of the Yetzer hara?</li><br /> <li>How do we overcome it?</li><br /> <li>Is it ever completely overcome?</li><br /> <li>What is the role of lo yira and God in overcoming resistance?</li><br /></ul>Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-24033549282140214422011-09-08T10:04:00.002-05:002011-09-08T10:07:29.091-05:00Parshat D'varim 5771: Tisha B’Av and Marriage.<span style="font-style:italic;">This is my Auf Ruf D'var Torah at Emanuel Congregation and Congregation Or Chadash Erev Shabbat August 5 2011</span><br /><br /><br />Marriage...Marriage is what brings us here together today.<br /><br />If there is any movie that my whole family likes it's <em>The Princess Bride</em>, where that quote comes from. At its core was a story of true love between a princess and a pirate. True love brings us together today too.<br /><br />This week in Torah we begin Deuteronomy, where we find Moses beginning his farewell speech, since he will not cross the Jordan with the people into the Promised Land. Moses starts by reviewing the book of Numbers from the time of leaving Sinai, through the episode of the spies to the defeat of Kings Sihon and Og along with their Kingdoms.<br /><br />This is also the Shabbat before The 9th of Av, Tisha B'Av in Hebrew, part of the cycle where we commemorate the destruction of the temple. This portion and its associated Haftarah are read always on the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av.<br />`<br />For me personally this is full circle. Thirty two years ago, I read Shelach Lecha, the portion of the spies as my Bar Mitzvah portion. I was the first in my family’s generation to be called to the Torah. Here I am the last to be married. Like the Israelites I read about in that portion, I was terrified, so terrified I did not even give a D'var Torah. D’varim this week reviews that episode of the ten out of twelve spies giving bad reports about the land.<br /><br />There is a Midrash [taanit 29a, numbers rabbah xvi:20] that tells the evening the spies gave their report was the 9th of Av. During the night of the 9th, we read in this week's portion<br /><blockquote>27 You murmured in your tents, and said: 'Because the LORD hated us, He has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us.[Deut. 2]</blockquote><br />God, in anger for this needless whining, apparently decreed: "They cry over nothing! I’ll give them something to cry about!" So the 9th of Av is the worst day in the Jewish Calendar. Both Temples were destroyed on the Ninth of Av, and the Spanish expulsion of the Jews started on the 9th of Av. The number of events related to the 9th of Av are innumerable.<br /><br />Usually the Hebrew calendars and secular calendars do not match in dates. In a curious coincidence this year, August and Av match in their dates. The 9th of Av is on August 9th, and the 6th of Av is august 6th. August 6th and 9th 1945 is if course a date known to most of us: The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now since the Hebrew calendar did not match the secular one in 1945, there is another connection to the Manhattan project: The test firing of the first Atomic bomb at Trinty site on the 6th of Av 5705, or in the secular calendar July 16,1945.<br /><br />When planning our wedding, we found out about this, and some other issues about the 6th and 9th of Av. While I knew about Treblinka's ovens and gas chambers getting fired up for the first time on the 9th of Av, I did not know about the 6th of Av 5702, July 23, 1942. The Gila River relocation camp, the fifth of the Japanese Internment Camps was opened on a barren patch of stolen Native American territory. 13,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated from their homes in California to Arizona to what FDR himself called a concentration camp.<br /><br />While it has no connection to the month of Av, as a computer scientist, one of my heroes is of course Alan Turing, a man I had pause to think about a lot lately. One of the most brilliant men of the 20th century, he arguably did more to advance computer science than anyone else. He also was responsible for a lot of what was necessary to break German codes, and helped the Allies to defeat the Nazis. Yet less than a decade after the war he was arrested and convicted by the British government he so heroically assisted in wartime of the crime of merely being gay. In June of 1954, he took his own life with a poisoned apple. Turing’s story was really my first exposure to what the GLBT community has dealt with throughout history. I’m too aware today, there are still those who hurt and oppress those who are part of the GLBT community.<br /><br />I think about all these horrible things and cry. It's hard to think about all of that and not cry. To know how much racism and hate continues, that it appears to become more and more institutionalized once again like it did in the 30's and 40's makes me cry. That was, according to the Midrash God’s idea, but it should not just make Jews cry. It should make everyone with a heart and soul cry. Indeed that might be the real motivation behind the 9th of Av: to prove you really do have a heart and soul, you have to cry. Until you cry you cannot truly repent as we approach the season of repentance. Not like I haven’t been crying this year. Without all this historical tragedy, Sunny and I have been crying for the last seven months since the loss of my mom in a totally senseless illness and death. I’ve been crying a lot in the last two weeks. I miss her so much as Sunny and I do what planning and preparation we need to do for next weeks wedding -- much of it she would have done with us or done herself. Grief I buried seven months ago is at the surface now.<br /><br />Yet, It gets better, and you know why?<br /><br />Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today. True Love brings us together today. Because that's the good part of any story, of any fairy tale. This is the second Auf Ruf in two weeks. Ours is nothing special compared to the one last week right here. There are now civil unions here in Illinois. There is the marriage for anyone who chooses to in New York. Last week’s celebration here is one I hope we as a community repeat many Shabbats with many people. Unfortunately we only have half the battle fought, I do look forward to the day when I can say anyone in these congregations can be Married.<br /><br />Through all that crying I see Treblinka and Auschwitz, Camp Grenada and Gila River, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the latest bullying incident and the insane homophobic statements of politicians and pundits. All go back to what Moses was doing with this week’s cliff notes version of the book of Numbers. To make a short statement objectifies us; it places us in a box. It’s easy to kill or hate something in a box when all you see is the box. For all you know there really isn't anything in the box - it is a mere idea, and you really aren’t hurting anything significant.<br /><br />The world and the media tells us that we are to fit into a box. Marry someone of the opposite gender, have 2.5 kids and a house in the suburbs, some cars and a widescreen TV. Have a job and be loyal to your company. Have friends that also are in the box. If people do not fit in the box, make them uncomfortable or hurt them until they do.<br /><br />Funny thing is, such a box a lie -- worse, it is a superficial crust. None of us really fit into that box. Many of us here cringe about even going near that box. Yet we often find ourselves in boxes. Everyone is put into boxes, willingly or unwillingly, and sometimes we find the boxes named not very complimentary names. These generalizations celebrate walls and boundaries. In doing so, generalities give birth to divisions between people. Taxonomies might be good for classifying insects, but what of people?<br /><br />Abraham Joshua Heschel writes in <em>Who is Man</em>?<br /><blockquote>Generalization, by means of which theories evolve, fails in trying to understand man. For in dealing with a particular man, I do not come upon a generality, but upon individuality, a person. It is precisely the exclusive application of generalities to human situations that accounts for many of our failures... my existence as an event is an original, not a copy. No two human beings are alike. A major mode of being human is uniqueness. (Heschel, 37)</blockquote><br />We are told in Mishnah Sanhedrin we are all unique and all in Gods image. We are all unique, and we can communicate that uniqueness, our bit of holiness by telling stories, by including others in the narratives of our lives. It is harder to be heartless to someone you know their story, and that you tell yours. That is what Moses is doing in D’varim -- telling his story from his perspective.<br /><br />We all have stories. I know a story of Shlomo and a princess. Shlomo met the most beautiful princess he ever saw but he had been cursed by an evil witch to be quaking in fear around princesses. He wished he could be close to the princess but she had other suitors, and she rarely noticed him. So the princess went away to a far off land and he thought he would never see her again. Shlomo spent many years learning to break the curse, and in time, he did. One cold wintery day he gets a message from the princess. He responds, and then she responds back. He learns she is in another faraway land, a land of seas and cloud and rain -- and really good coffee. They travel to each other several times until they decide to be together. And in one very hot, wet summer, they get married. I don’t yet know if they live happily ever after, but I for one am excited to find out with my princess, my true love.<br /><br />Marriage, marriage is what brings us together today. May He who blessed our ancestors bless us with marriage and true love that will bring us together for many more Shabbats like this one and last week’s, with many more people and their stories, with civil unions now and weddings for whoever wants one soon.<br /><br />Shabbat Shalom.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-11443075598864813802011-09-08T10:02:00.001-05:002011-09-08T10:03:59.194-05:00Shelach 5771: Sink or SwimLast week I was at the bat mitzvah of our our Rabbi's daughter. In her D'var Torah, the Bat Mitzvah asked a very good question relating to last weeks portion "Who tells you when you are ready?" The answers to that question apply not only to last week's portion, but to this week's which is my Bar Mitzvah portion from so many years ago. <br /><br />This week Moses at God's command sends twelve spies, one from each tribe into the land to find out what it is like. Ten of the spies report back with good tiding, then deliver the bad news that the inhabitants appear unconquerable. On the other hand Caleb of the tribe of Judah and Joshua of Ephraim disagree and believe that if the people have confidence and they believe that God can help them in their quest, they cannot be defeated. This causes a riot, and Moses, Aaron, Joshua and Caleb are threatened with being stoned to death. God intervenes and after first wanting to kill everybody, decides to just let every adult who left Egypt die out through forty years of wandering in the desert. At this, some of the people, grumble and complain. Some who were at first cowards enter the land to conquer it, only to be completely defeated. We then have some sacrificial rules, and the short story of a man executed for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, followed by the commandment to wear fringes on the corners of our garments. <br /><br />But the question the Bat Mitzvah asked was sadly not answered by many. Many who tried did not even hear the question correctly. Many thought she said "When do you think you are ready?" But that was not the question, though they implicitly answered the actual question with "I am." and went off to tell when they thought they were ready for something. I have a different answer. I believe who tell us when we are ready is two fold: it is God and our own actions when placed in that situation by God. It has nothing to do with our personal opinion about being ready. <br /><br />The people when told the bad report by the ten spies, say something interesting about being ready: <br /><br /><blockquote>And they said one to another, Let us choose a chief, and let us return to Egypt.[Numbers 14] </blockquote><br /><br />Last week they described Egypt as: <br /><br /><blockquote>We remember the fish, which we ate in Egypt for nothing; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic;[Numbers 11] </blockquote><br /><br />Next week we read:<br /><blockquote>12 And Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab; which said, We will not come up; 13 Is it a small thing that you have brought us out of a land that flows with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, that you also make yourself a prince over us?[Numbers 16]</blockquote><br /><br />All of this points to Egypt as somewhere comfortable, somewhere safe. It was, of course nothing like that in reality. These were the same people a few years earlier crying out to God to save them from captivity, from the people who wholesale murdered their children. They fell into a comfort zone of the knowable versus the unknown. We never feel we are ready for the unknown. It takes faith like Joshua's and objectivity like Caleb's to even look at it fairly, and that is only two out of ten voices. There are the ten voices of Doubt uncertainty and fear that keep us still. The story of the spies was a test, and a test the people failed. God said "you are ready" and the people said they were far from ready. So God waited till they were ready. It is in the Haftarah we read how ready they were forty years later:<br /><br /><blockquote> And they said to Joshua, Truly the Lord has delivered to our hands all the land; for all the inhabitants of the country faint because of us. [Joshua 2]</blockquote><br /><br />What really changed was belief. The people forty years earlier did not believe the same as those forty years later. They took the long journey and had to erode the comfort zone. I've done this. The bar Mitzvah boy from three decades ago was too scared of public speaking to give a D'var. Time has changed me, and I speak in front of hundreds easily today. <br /><br />It is not alwys a good idea to charge into things though. If you go do something not totally believing you are ready, or that God is with you, you might get handed your corpse in a hand basket. The people do try to go up in to the land after God tells him they will not, and they fail miserably. It requires both our own confidence and God to go up into the land, to succeed in anything. <br /><br />I said nothing about this question, and we left just after Kaddish and Aleinu. Neither Sweetie or I felt much like celebrating at the oneg afterwards. Four and a half months into mourning my mom, neither of us felt like partying. Seeing the Rabbi and her daughter and a reminder of a good mother daughter relationship didn't help much. But on the way home in the car, I had a thought: I am facing dozens of crises right now, mostly due to my mom's death. She would have taken care of many of these issues, from filing my tax return to paying for our honeymoon to keeping the family business on a the same path it has been for many years to being the best friend and counsel of both myself and Sweetie, her death changed everything. There is a lot of things my whole family needs to do, and are now challenged to realize they are ready for them. <br /><br />God said to the people implicitly by sending the spies out: "You are ready." The spies then needed to come back and give all the strategic data to take the land, instead they cower underfoot from the same people terrified of them only forty years later. What they did was rely on themselves and their fears to say "we are not ready." They went and cried and whined so much, Midrash tells us that God uttered a rather infamous line "your'e crying for nothing! I'll give you some to cry about!" the day they cried was the 9th of Av and we have bee crying ever since. <br /><br />We have a choice, like I have a choice now. We can spend our lives in paralysis saying "we are not ready" living in a illusion of a comfort zone, or take up the challenge and do what is necessary. "We are ready" we need to tell ourselves, "otherwise God would not put us here." I worry a lot about our future without my mom as a support. Yet, I see one way this changes things. We now need to be ready or we can fail and fall into a chaotic wilderness. God set this up, and while I'm still not very happy about being in this situation, there is only two things I can do. One is know that God is with me in the next few difficult months and years. And the second is go ahead and succeed, go ahed and get to my personal Promised Land.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-58934422251697428512011-09-08T10:01:00.002-05:002011-09-08T10:02:08.590-05:00Behaalotecha 5771: Healing and Petitionary PrayerLast weekend we had a discussion about Petitionary prayer in my Shabbat morning minyan. I said nothing in the discussion, though I had a lot to say. I was too busy trying not to cry. Here's why.<br /><br />This week we read at the end of the potion, about Miriam and Aaron slandering Moses. Miriam takes the brunt of the punishment from God.<br /><blockquote>10 And when the cloud was removed from over the Tent, behold, Miriam was leprous, as white as snow; and Aaron looked upon Miriam; and, behold, she was leprous. 11 And Aaron said unto Moses: 'Oh my lord, lay not, I pray thee, sin upon us, for that we have done foolishly, and for that we have sinned. 12 Let her not, I pray, be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consumed when he comes out of his mother's womb.' 13 And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying: 'Heal her now, O God, I beseech Thee.'[Numbers 12 ]</blockquote><br />Moses' prayer, in Hebrew אל, נא רפא נא לה <em>El na rafa na la</em> is simple and to the point, "please God, please heal her" is all it says. I first learned it as an alternative <em>Mi Shebeirach</em>, the healing prayer at the first synagogue I attended in my return to Judaism. I've said it many times, many of those times last January.<br /><br />Starting when I got a phone call that my mom was taken by ambulance to the local hospital I kept saying it, over and over again. I said it out loud when I could, I said it silently when I couldn't, on the road, at home, in the hospital when I was awake or lying in bed at night. I said <em>El na rafa na la</em>when we found out she needed emergency surgery for a rare condition that should have killed her already. I said it during her recovery, and when she slipped into a coma. I said אל, נא רפא נא לה when she came out of that coma, and when she slipped back into another. I said it until a few hours before her death when we were told it was hopeless, and my sister, Sweetie and I began our vigil to be with her at her last breath.<br /><br />[caption id="attachment_311" align="alignright" width="225" caption="El Na rafa na la"]<a href="http://shlomosnewdrash.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/behaalotecha-5771-healing-and-petitionary-prayer/painting-title_003/" rel="attachment wp-att-311"><img class="size-medium wp-image-311" title="El Na rafa na la" src="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/painting-title_003.png?w=225" alt="El Na rafa na la" width="225" height="300" /></a>[/caption]<br /><br />With my mom's passing our lives have been turned upside down. Our family is shattered by this loss and still trying to put the pieces back together. Grief does different things to different people, and all too often grief blinds us to another's grief. I once described grief early in our mourning as drops on a pond with ripples spreading out to others. When there is one drop in the pond there is little problem in understanding the concentric circular waves. But many drops in the pond produces confusing, conflicting waves.<br /><br /><em>El na rafa na la</em> is a petitionary prayer. We ask for health and healing. I heard many things about petitionary prayer in our discussion. Much was condemning the frivolous petitionary prayer common in children praying for something for themselves, like anew doll or getting on the baseball team. It's selfish, most say, and not a good prayer. Yet I remember placing a small scrap of paper from my sketchbook into the Western wall and praying as hard as I could that would find my mate. I cried that day as Israeli jets flew over Jerusalem celebrating 60 years of independence. My mom shot a picture of me with tears still in my eyes from her side of the <em>mechitza</em>. A few months later, a freak snowstorm shut down the town Sweetie lived in at the time, and so she did something she rarely does -- go online. We started to chat, and that lead to everything else, including our upcoming wedding. Somehow that prayer in that little piece of paper is hard to ignore. It's hard to ignore that my mom did start to get better after all that prayer. She could have died that first night, but was with us for three more weeks, enough to let us say goodbye to her.<br /><br />Interestingly this prayer ends with the word <em>la</em> meaning <em>her</em>. It is not written<em>li</em> meaning <em>to me</em> . The Cohanic blessing is in the second person. That prayer, expresses all the good things God may do to you, not me. IN that case maybe petitionary prayer does not work when it is selfish, when it is about me. Petitionary prayer does not work when I gain, only if someone else does. So one thought that keeps going around in my mind. I wanted my mom at my wedding. I wanted to see her joy at the day of my joy, one that has taken too long to come. Did all my prayer amount for nothing because my healing prayer had a selfish end? Since I wanted her to be joyous on that day, was it selfish? I don't know and the questions still dig at me.<br /><br />I have many questions about what happened and the part prayer played. Prayer seemed to work then didn't. Should I have ever given up praying? Would she still be alive and another miracle would have occurred had I kept praying and not given up like everyone else? What if, as is likely that meant a very limited life for her? If prayer was just keeping her alive but in extreme pain, did I did the right thing by giving up? I did hear a voice while I was prying in those final hours say " stop. Let Go." I keep wondering about that voice and if I should have heeded it.<br /><br />I also wonder the power of communal versus personal petitionary prayer. when she came out of the first coma and begin to have some function to her body, she had yeshivas praying for her, the second time, I'm not so sure who was. One synagogue I attend called me to find out my mom's status, ostensibly to take her off the <em>mi sheiberiach</em> list the day we found out the bad news she was likely to die. Does volume count in petitionary prayer. Does it count in healing prayer?<br /><br />I keep thinking about how much I prayed those three weeks. I keep thinking how in the end it didn't matter, she didn't get better but died instead, and I'm left living in a shattered world. I prayed so hard and wasn't heard. She won’t be at the wedding, she won’t be there to support me, my bride-to-be, my sister or my father not just at the wedding but every day.<br /><br />Does petitionary prayer work? Who I have become in large part because of my mom says in a still small voice "yes." My grief continues to shout "NO!" in the end I still do not know. I just know I hurt so much because she is no longer here.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-71693214377145548462011-09-08T10:01:00.001-05:002011-09-08T10:01:34.333-05:00Naso 5771: Sotah, Fear and DancingThis week we have several interesting pats of the portion, but Sotah is the most curious of all. I keep trying to understand it, and end up still perplexed. In this last attempt, I studied this portion in my Hebrew class and came to another conclusion no one was very happy with, Liberal or Conservative: State mandated abortion.<br /><blockquote>...then shall the man bring his wife unto the priest, and shall bring her offering for her, the tenth part of an ephah of barley meal; he shall pour no oil upon it, nor put frankincense thereon; for it is a meal-offering of jealousy, a meal-offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to remembrance. 16 And the priest shall bring her near, and set her before the LORD. 17 And the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the water. 18 And the priest shall set the woman before the LORD, and let the hair of the woman's head go loose, and put the meal-offering of memorial in her hands, which is the meal-offering of jealousy; and the priest shall have in his hand the water of bitterness that causeth the curse. 19 And the priest shall cause her to swear, and shall say unto the woman: 'If no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness, being under thy husband, be thou free from this water of bitterness that causeth the curse; 20 but if thou hast gone aside, being under thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee besides thy husband-- 21 then the priest shall cause the woman to swear with the oath of cursing, and the priest shall say unto the woman--the LORD make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the LORD doth make thy thigh to fall away, and thy belly to swell; 22 and this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, and make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to fall away'; and the woman shall say: 'Amen, Amen.' 23</blockquote><br />I came to this startling and disturbing conclusion after we talked about what "belly to swell and thigh to fall away" meant. With several other citations we learned of in class, it seems it meant a miscarriage. I then noted some about the dust on the tabernacle floor -- it was likely that the dust contained ash from the sacrifices, but also a rather large amount of myrrh, which was used in the anointing oil for the vessels in the Mishkan and later temple, as read in Exodus 30. Exodus 30 was also very clear this stuff is toxic. In herbal medicine, myrrh has been known to induce labor -- no matter what stage of pregnancy a woman is in. Herbalists avoid myrrh around pregnant women for this reason. That Ahashveyrosh in chapter 2 of the book of Esther requires myrrh treatments for six months for all maidens before meeting him points to more than cleaning the skin but the insides as well. Acashveyrosh was guaranteeing any child born to one of the "contestants" was really his.<br /><br />I mentioned all this in class, and my idea of a state induced miscarriage and got it from all sides. Abortion is of course a touchy subject but what I was saying equally offended everyone. That a biblical passage was a commandment for preists to give a potion that would terminate a pregnancy in order to adjudicate a domestice dispute smashes both the pro-life and pro-choice positions rather squarely. The only one who did not object was my Orthodox professor, who from a biblical scholarship point of view could not find a fault in my argument.<br /><br />And while there is a whole Talmudic tractate on Sotah, I think there is one critical element to Sotah, this bitter waters rite, that is missing. There is no record it was ever used in the biblical text. Someone leading a D'var Torah I attended recently asked the question did ancient peoples who could have written the Biblical text, also know modern psychology. I would say today no, they did not, for they had no use for understanding the mechanism of behavior. But they were certainly interested in results, and results that modern psychology might be able to derive, ancient man could easily see and use in their lives.<br /><br />One of these is the concept of the ordeal and fear associated with it. Ordeals are painful or dangerous situations, sometimes used to judge a person. In some of those cases, as in Sotah, it is to gauge a woman's guilt or innocence for infidelity. Yet rites of passage into adulthood have often had ordeals as part of their ritual. To go through the ordeal as part of a rite of passage is to show one's bravery or perseverance. To fail is to show one is still a fearful child.<br /><br />Yet not everyone has the courage, or some might say the stupidity to go through an ordeal. Some just looking at the ordeal freak out. I had that experience this weekend, and failed miserably. Of course my ordeal was something rather laughingly benign, indeed most would look at me funny -- Dancing.<br /><br />Everyone has performance fears. Probably one of the most common is speaking in public. Some fear being in crowds. Sometimes reason can counter a phobia, but a lot of time it is not enough. I do not have any problems getting in front of a crowd, I'm happy speaking or lecturing in front of 10 or 10,0000. Some people would be a total panic. But I can understand them, since I believe my fear of dancing is very related to public speaking. Both are about being embarrassed in public. My brain and my nerves have a really bad habit of not communicating well. It takes a huge amount of practice for me to do even the simplest of coordinated things. I could not catch a ball until I was in college for example. This has irritated more than one kid when I was growing up. I was so incompetent in sports all I got on the playing field was either kids laughing at me or kids yelling at me. If anything more than attendance was considered for Physical Education classes when I was growing up, I would undoubtedly fail. I even failed driver's education. I was terrified to get behind the wheel of a car for the longest time.<br /><br />Oddly though, I got a job out of college which required a massive amount of travel. 83,000 miles on the odometer in one year got me out of my driving phobia. As busy as I-80 is, it is still a rather lonely road, with no one but the one or two cars around you and state troopers watching what you are doing. That's different from a crowded dance floor. Trip and everyone sees you. Dance badly and everyone knows.<br /><br />What's worse,as I found out in those P.E. Classes I failed so miserably, is that dances are not just partners dances but things like square dancing, which requires a lot of rather complex moves leading to disaster. I don't just mess myself up, but everyone else as well. That kind of embarrassment is more than I can take. I thought of that this weekend watching a northwestern kind of square dancing known as contra dancing. These people were good, but watching them scared me witless. It was not me dancing, but just watching brought on the panic.<br /><br />I can of course do what I did with driving. Get behind the wheel and do more intensive performance in a year than most people get in ten years of driving. If I do it gets into my "muscle memory" and it is no longer a problem. But just seeing people dancing brings on the fear, and that makes me realize why Sotah probably was never used. It was too fearful an ordeal -- not just for the woman but her jealous husband. If she was willing to go throughout with this, it might be his child he was killing. there is a lot of setup, a lot of what the Inquisition called "showing the instruments," bringing fear of the ordeal to do the same thing as the ordeal itself. If anyone even tried this, by mid ritual it probably stopped, for either husband or wife lost their nerve and confessed or recanted, depending on the situation.<br /><br />I think for most we would not go through ordeals unless they are forced on us. The ordeal of mourning is one we have no choice. The ordeals we have a choice in we are, for the most part, cowards and will avoid. I believe there was a fiction of a bitter waters rite, once that scared everyone enough to calm dawn and deal with domestic disputes in a lot more rational and civil way.<br /><br />But that said it is a good thing to conquer your fears. Excuse me while I practice this waltz.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-32797610168079984892011-09-08T10:00:00.001-05:002011-09-08T10:00:55.499-05:00B’midbar 5771: Change and changing.This week we begin the book of B’midbar, known in English as the book of Numbers. While the more accurate name for the book is <em>in the wilderness</em> as the Hebrew indicates, the English is a reference to the census which starts the book.<br /><blockquote>1. And the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they came out from the land of Egypt, saying, 2. Take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, by families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of names, every male by their polls; 3. From twenty years old and upward, all who are able to go forth to war in Israel; you and Aaron shall count them by their armies. [Numbers 1]</blockquote><br />It is not the only time we have a census in this book. There is also one towards the end of the journey, immediately after the Baal-Peor incident is closed, and the people are ready to enter the land of Israel. They are bookends to the journey between.<br /><blockquote>45. So were all those who were counted of the people of Israel, by the house of their fathers, from twenty years old and upward, all who were able to go forth to war in Israel; 46. All those who were counted were six hundred three thousand and five hundred and fifty. [Numbers 1]<br />51. These were the counted of the people of Israel, six hundred thousand and a thousand seven hundred and thirty. [Numbers 26]</blockquote><br />There is debate by biblical scholars what Elef, usually translated as thousand, means. There is a school of thought that it is actually some smaller unit of a company or detachment and the true number is less. Either way, there are 603,550 at the beginning of the trip and 601,730 at the end. The numbers themselves don’t matter as much as that they change. This journey is not a static one.<br />The people too change. The timid slave mentality of being provided for and believing they are weaker than anyone around changes into an effective, unstoppable juggernaut. The people on the east side of the Jordan are trembling in terror, as the spies bring back their report from Rahab of Jericho in the book of Joshua.<br />B’midbar is about change, and how the people change. It can be taken as a whole as an allegory of change, from a stupid idolatrous people to a people strong and worthy of worship of Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu. For one to worship Hashem, one really need to be empowered enough to believe they can. It requires a mindset like the Daughters of Zelophehad where even the rules as set down get questioned, not in rebellion like Korach, but synthesis, something no one completely submissive can do.<br />I think of this as I begin a new journey myself, Since the death of my mother, I’ve been in a wilderness too, wandering in this desert of emotion, where the water of life, joy, seems so rare. I’m two and a half months from my wedding as well. I’ve also lost my biggest client, and officially begin to take my professional life in a new direction.<br />It’s all scary, but the last two give me hope. I’m marrying the most wonderful woman in the world. I’ve know how beautiful she is for close to twenty-some years, when we first met in college. Her beauty is overshadowed by the person within though, and I am so blessed she will be my wife.<br />My professional life is yet to be set but the direction is clear. Almost thirty years ago, I ran across an ad for a new company called Electronic Arts. I remember the first time I saw their ad proclaiming CAN A COMPUTER MAKE YOU CRY?<br />The ad had a bunch of people who could be either rock stars or avant garde artists dressed in black. They were programmers. The copy was equally intriguing:<a href="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/we-see-farther.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-301" title="we see farther" src="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/we-see-farther.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a><br /><blockquote>These are wondrous machines we have created, and in them can be seen a bit of their makers. It is as if we had invested them with the image of our minds. And through them, we are learning more and more about ourselves. We learn, for instance, that we are more entertained by involvement of our imaginations than by passive viewing and listening. We learn that we are better taught by experience than by memorization. And we learn that the traditional distinctions-- the ones that are made between art and entertainment and education-- don't always apply.</blockquote><br />It went on like that, and it inspired me to get into software development and even write my first published program. I wanted to be one of those guys. They called themselves "software artists" instead of programmers. I got my BA in computer science because of that ad. I have the suspicion a lot of us did.<br />I found the real world, just as Electronic Arts found out, doesn’t share that vision. They sold out to a corporate mentality, and I found life behind the keyboard not what I thought it would be. So I ended up going into technical support, and from there to training and masters in Education. From there I went into foodservice sanitation training and took a hobby of biblical Hebrew translation into a master’s degree in Jewish studies. I took up drawing and painting. All the time I have been seemingly moving away from programming.<br />It takes a very unique person to blur the lines between art, education and entertainment. It takes a unique person to write anything that inspires the active imagination. I’ve been wandering for decades in another wilderness gaining those skills.<br />The closeness of the population data from the beginning of the journey to the end, only 1820 people, three tenths of a percent change in population, suggests something too. The stability of the population might also tell us how stable we really are. This may be about change, but paradoxically there really is little gain or loss in that change. It is all there in potential, we just have to release it. The guy Sweetie barely noticed in college is the same one she’s marrying in summer, though they might not seem the same. The journey I’ve been on did empower me.<br />AS the Israelites will find out in the coming portions of Torah the journey is not pleasant, but in the end, as I will definitely feel under the Huppa this summer, it is worth the effort.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-23327975283867924942011-09-08T09:58:00.000-05:002011-09-08T09:59:59.355-05:00Bhukotai 5771 a Nice ApocalypseThis was supposed to get out two days ago. Saturday we read if we are good, we'll get the good stuff. If we are bad, well things are going to go very bad. In a strange coincidence, this Saturday May 21st some people believe is also supposed to be the apocalypse. I have some opinions about all this. <br /><br />This simplistic idea of quid pro quo has a lot of problems. It is not clear from the text exactly what brings on this <br /><br />3 If ye walk in My statutes, and keep My commandments, and do them; 4 then I will give your rains in their season, and the land shall yield her produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. 5 And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time; and ye shall eat your bread until ye have enough, and dwell in your land safely. lev 26<br /><br />The great and good things continue, but there is a catch:<br /><br />14 But if ye will not hearken unto Me, and will not do all these commandments; 15 and if ye shall reject My statutes, and if your soul abhor Mine ordinances, so that ye will not do all My commandments, but break My covenant; 16 I also will do this unto you: I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever, that shall make the eyes to fail, and the soul to languish; and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.<br /><br />It gets worse: disease famine, and exile are all in the cards depending if people repent or not. BUt even in exile there is the chance of return. <br /><br />There lots of questions about such a simplistic system. Do good, get good. Do bad get bad. As I wrote a few weeks ago, a death to a close relative is one of those things that frames this as nonsense. When bad things happen to good people, none of this is helpful or meaningful. I wanted nothing more in my life than my mom at my wedding, and only a few months from the date of the wedding, that was snatched from me. When such a thing happens, it's hard to believe in such a simple system. <br /><br />In contrast, the claims of some fundamentalists that the end of the world is May 21 have me thinking. the whole idea of a violent end time is odd to me. I'm not the only one -- the Rabbis in Tractate Sanhedrin couldn't come to any conclusions about the end times either. There is not a lot that makes sense about it. What I find particularly interesting is the idea that there is some kind of justice at the end of the world -- those who are good get good, those who are bad get bad. Of course those proclaiming the end are the "good ones." <br /><br />Of course the current crop are also the same people who put a government in place that wants to make absolutely sure the widows and orphans of the world are totally and completely ignored in their needs. This is against the words of the same prophets they figure out their prophecies of a May 21 end of days. National economic health is more important than the poor. Isaiah and Jeremiah probably would not agree with that, and this weeks portion in it's literal context would seem to say treating the poor well leads to economic health, not the converse. <br /><br />As a reader of comedic science fiction, I have liked what two authors have said about the destruction of the universe. Douglas Adams wrote that if we ever made sense of the universe, it would be immediately destroyed and replaced with a more inexplicable one. This may have already happened. Terry Prattchett in his parody of the apocalypse <i>The thief of time</i> follows the idea that every second the universe is destroyed and remade. Interestingly in the same novel, the keys that saves the universe from a an ultimate doom is a milkman with a curious past, one of the Horsemen of the apocalypse's granddaughter, and a lot of chocolate truffles.<br /><br />A year ago I could have written more definitively, but the tragedy of this year in my life makes me far more cynical. A god who would not let my mother live is a god sadistic enough to go through with such thing as an end of days. Yet, even as a write that, I cannot believe that is Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu. Much of the Bible makes no sense if it is. <br /><br />There is a Hasidic tale which I cherish about the coming of the messiah. It concerns an abbot of a monastery who was at the end of his rope. His monks were always fighting, the place was a mess, and the grounds unkept. Not knowing what else to do he went and talked to the Baal Shem Tov, in a desperate hope he might be able to give him some insight from Heaven. The Baal Shem Tov considered for a moment, then said: "I have it on good authority that one of your monks is the Messiah, though I do not know which one." THe Abbot went back with this information, and told the monks. Strangely things changed. the garden was kept, the halls was cleaned and no one fought. The abbot found that when everyone thought the messiah might be dwelling among them they treated each other with respect. I believe the BESHT knew it was not one, but all the monks were the messiah. When we all treat each other with that level of respect, when we see everything as an aspect of God and not an aspect of our own arrogance things change. <br /><br />Given the end of the rebuke in this weeks chapter it is not clear if all the mizvot need be violated. God seems to concentrate on the sabbaticals and jubilees. <br /><br />33 And you will I scatter among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you; and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste. 34 Then shall the land be paid her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye are in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and repay her sabbaths. 35 As long as it lieth desolate it shall have rest; even the rest which it had not in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it.[leviticus 26]<br /><br />verse 43 repeats this. It is not only respect for people, but a healthy respect for the environment as well. We are taken off the land so the land heals from our abuse. This was only for over plowing. What of bleeding it dry of its resources and then taking all those substances and emitting them into the atmosphere? The Earth is the Lord's the psalmist exclaims, do we have the right to exploit what is the Lords? <br /><br />The rabbis debate with no definitive answer if the messiah will come at the end of days when the world is thoroughly wicked or thoroughly good. I for one, believe it is when we are all good, for the messiah as a person will be redundant -- we all will be one with God of our own free will. We are far from that day as we cannot even decide what is "good." this week's rebuke was aimed at the whole nation, and even more so all humanity. Yet somehow, I still believe that there will be a time when we finally understand that lesson.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-27273512110500182962011-09-08T09:57:00.000-05:002011-09-08T09:58:07.830-05:00Behar 5771: Sabbaticals and ArtThis week we read about the sabbatical system,<br /><blockquote>2 But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath unto the LORD; you shall neither sow your field, nor prune your vineyard. 5 That which grows of itself of your harvest you shall not reap, and the grapes of your undressed vine you shall not gather; it shall be a year of solemn rest for the land.[Leviticus 25]</blockquote><br />Before the nightmare of January and my mother's death I left off this column essentially in a mid-life crisis. I've been asking myself a question: What am I going to do with myself? The death of my mom puts this even more into perspective, as I now fear for my current job is not as permanent as I once thought it was.<br /><br />It is interesting that the Sabbatical is a rest for the land, but not a rest for a lot of other things. It does not say to rest one's plow for example, though that would seem to be an obvious extension. One cannot plow the field but one can get the plow to work better in a year. The ox that runs the plow isn't mentioned either, but might well gain from a little rest to make more oxen.<br /><br />The tools of creating the harvest for seven years are renewed and maintained in this process. Drainage ditches, fences, and other infrastructure projects are far from forbidden. The sabbatical or <em>shmita</em> year requires trust in God in the way we will feed our selves, but also gives us the opportunity to get done all that stuff we need to improve and have another good six years.<br /><br />In modernity we are not all land farmers. Indeed, what the <em>shmita</em> year does not seem to think about is craftsmen, fishermen and shepherds even in its own day. These get no sabbatical year. Even farmers have found a way around the sabbatical year, and "sell" their land to non-Jews for the year. There is that poetic idea of stopping for a year, and improving our farm that seems to get lost in such cases.<br /><br />But I like that idea of a human sabbatical, one I wish I really could do: Get my "farm" ready for the next six years. Take a full year off to intensely improve myself and get myself the skills I need for whatever my current or next career requires. Like many, I've tried to work on the infrastructure of my life while still doing my regular work. I got two Master's degrees because of that, but it was an exhausting process. I'm doing it again, thought the fate of my program is in doubt, and I need to decide if I will be the last to graduate in my program, or change paths. On top of all that I have been taking non-credit classes non-stop.<br /><br />I am a little discouraged that neither the masters in education or the masters in Jewish studies bore financial fruit. I am not paid to be either an educator or a Jewish scholar. I am not paid to be an artist either, or at least yet. My current career path however is pointing in that direction. I remember after taking four years of Hebrew deciding to start doing it for credit, and I ended up with a master's degree. After years of non-credit courses in art, I'm wondering if this will be the pattern again. Deciding if I want to be want to be an artist, animator or video game designer is still up in the air, but it is the direction I am headed. But this time, I am running up against the problem that courses are during the work day. How nice it would be to think of nothing but school for a whole year, and really re-design myself to be the best re-designed person I can be. It would be nice to have a sabbatical where I did nothing but learn for a year. But of course our economy is not set up that way.<br /><br />It may not take one sabbatical to re-design a whole farm: it may take many. I'm scared my current career track in art and graphic design, wont work like the last two attempts. But then, it may be that I needed all three to do something spectacular. Sabbaticals require faith that there will be fruit and grain for the year, we leave it up to God to do the farming. I have to leave it up to God to see what happens, and If I am destined to become an professional artist.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-50616625476714506672011-09-08T09:54:00.001-05:002011-09-08T09:56:32.871-05:00Emor 5771: On Being Angry at God on Mother's dayI'm Back, and with a new look. Actually a new blog as well.<br /><br />I moved from Blogger to WordPress for a bunch of reasons,(and if you are readin this on Blogger now posting on both platforms) most of all to consolidate the stuff I have on my website with the Blog - and thus handle maintenance with everything better, easier and with some other nice features.<br /><br />A friend of mine encouraged me to write again, and I have just completed a witting project which topped out at 30,000 words. Thing is, I enjoyed that experienced of writing, so when my friend made that suggestion, it tipped the scales and here I am again.<br /><br />This weeks portion Emor, is kind of appropriate to be a re-introduction to Shlomo's drash.<br /><blockquote>And the LORD said unto Moses: Speak unto the priests the sons of Aaron, and say unto them: There shall none defile himself for the dead among his people; 2 except for his kin, that is near unto him, for his mother, and for his father, and for his son, and for his daughter, and for his brother; 3 and for his sister a virgin, that is near unto him, that hath had no husband, for her may he defile himself.[Leviticus 21]</blockquote><br />It was an irony that over a decade ago, first day I walked into a synagogue to go to services after my long self-imposed exile from Judaism was the same day the Rabbi's mother died. As someone new to the congregation, I did not know how to respond,and what would be considered respectful. I did go again to that synagogue, and became a quite active member there for a time. But I never gave a thought to how a religious leader, or for that matter any individual handles a death of immediate family.<br /><br />Now my mom is dead for four months and I understand that passage bit more. Interestingly the Torah reads in Hebrew for the end of Verse 21:1 לנפש לא-ייטמא בעמיו., and doesn't mention death. Two more literal translations are <em>don't defile yourself with your people</em> or for<em> flesh/soul don't defile with your people</em>. Targum Onkelos has על מית לא יסתאב בעמיה which does include the word dead. Verse 21:2 contextually makes it clear we are talking about death.<br /><br />In particular, the priest as we read elsewhere is not to be in the presence of anywhere where there is death or the dead. But the exception was made that a priest could see the body of their deceased immediate relative. I understand now how upsetting and world-changing such an event could be. To be forbidden from mourning and burying one's relatives is a horrible thing. To do so in a person who handles dangerous things, or with great responsibility, needs to have some way of setting things right and mourning. Seeing one's loved one last time, saying goodbye is very important. Indeed Aaron's family has already gone through this, with the death of Aaron's sons.<br /><br />I remember my Grandmother's death, where I was not allowed to mourn. I wanted to be part of the minyan for my grandfather, but I choose not to wear tefillin when I pray in the mornings, which I did every morning back then. While My grandfather is not Orthodox, we prayed in an Orthodox minyan who insisted in me wearing tefillin. My refusal meant I was not part of a minyan -- actually the tenth person. It hurt me as much as my grandmothers death that Jews thought I was not Jewish. That they took my atheist brother-in law strapped the tefillin on him and counted him as the tenth hurt more - tefillin were the indications of being Jewish, not kavvanah, nor keeping even more kosher than most of these people (I was vegetarian at the time) nor my own daily Davven, nor my Torah study. The dirty looks as we davvened that morning never left my memory. It hurt so much that I stopped davvening every mornings, and tefillin became not just something I didn't wear for my own reasons, but a hated object to me.<br /><br />I realize everybody has their traditions. Talmud goes out of its way to remind everyone of that repeatedly. It is a mitzvah to bind a sign on your hand and put something between your eyes. If this mitzvah alone, strapping some leather on, makes one Jewish in that congregation, then that is what makes someone Jewish. I just keep away from their services, and find someone who respects who I am. I believe this is one of those situation where it is not those in attendance but their rabbi (who wasn't there at the time), the one who leads and teaches them that is guilty of anything. I'll let this be decided between Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu and this Rabbi. Yet this same rabbi I'll admit taught me an interesting tradition i did not know until mt grandmother's death. There is tradition from the time of death to the time of the funeral, a mourner is exempt from mitzvot, since he or she has no good sense of judgement. We all had bad judgement and stubbornness back then, both congregants and me.<br /><br />As upset as I was about being labeled not Jewish while my grandfather, mother and aunt were sitting shiva, I was also upset about something else as well. My grandmother would never see me married. I am, in some sense the failure of the family. I was the one who didn't get married and have kids like I was supposed to on the time table i was supposed to. That was even more upsetting -- failing her expectations, though I know very well back then and now I had not found someone who would make a good marriage back then.<br /><br />We no longer have a Temple, and so the idea of taamei, ritual defilement, is very different today. The mitzvah of permitting a priest to defile himself for his mother father, children and siblings, is different too. Those who are close mourn differently than those who are more distant.<br /><br />WhenAaron's sons Nadab and Abihu died, Aaron stayed silent. When discussing this a few weeks ago, I made an observation I wouldn't have made even a year ago. Aaron stayed silent for the same reason Job remained silent: so he wouldn't curse God. Job was even urged by his wife to go ahead and curse, but he refused. I happen to be angry at God, and I'm not keeping quiet. In the case of Aaron at least, he knew the name of God. As we read at the end of the protion blespheming with that does get you killed. I don't know that name, so my anger is different.<br /><br />I want to scream at God still for taking my mom. I know everyone eventually dies, but just to give her a few more months, one more year. When she was sick and in a coma, I prayed not to extend her life indefinitely, but to get just one more year -- for her to be there for my wedding, to see with her own eyes the joy of Sweetie and I as husband and wife under the Huppa. My last real conversation with her was a detail about our wedding plans. Twenty minutes later she fell ill, and was in a hospital till she took her last breath three weeks later.<br /><br /><a href="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/200805080859_israel_2351_l15.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-292" title="mom and me at the wall" src="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/200805080859_israel_2351_l15.jpg?w=300" alt="" height="225" width="300" /></a><br /><br />We had plenty of miracles to be sure. She survived the condition that put her in the hospital in the first place and the historically extensive surgery which was a success. SHe came out of a coma once. But the miracle of her being happy at Sweetie's and my wedding, standing or sitting next to us wasn't to happen.<br /><br /><a href="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/200805080910_israel_2356_l15.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-291" title="At the wall" src="http://shlomosnewdrash.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/200805080910_israel_2356_l15.jpg?w=225" alt="" height="300" width="225" /></a><br /><br />So I've spent the last few months not just feeling like I failed, but God sadistically snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. After all that prayer, particularly the heartfelt prayer I did at the Wall in Jerusalem, God did bring me the love of my life. Yet All that prayer seems to be wasted for the three weeks I did nothing but pray fr my mo to survive this ordeal. All I have wanted for years is all of my family at my wedding. Selfishly I wanted what every one of my family's generation got, yet I'm the one not to get it.<br /><br />I've been so angry at God for the death of my mom, for taking away a rock of stability in my world. It's been hard to think lately, and I could not even write this blog for months. It's been hard to go a pray, even though I am obligated to say the Kaddish, which I do when I go. It seems God failed me this year,and I'm so angry with no way to show it. Singing praises seems so hollow and empty.<br /><br />I finally did yell at God -- with bacon cheeseburger. For the first time in over a decade I ate beef and pork with cheese. While I might not keep glatt kosher, I do not eat milk with red meat. But in a sign of protest, a way of yelling at God I broke one of the mitzvot, what I have described in the past as love notes to God, I keep so dearly. To make the point I did not just order it and eat it, I said a hamotzi over it. I kept every other rule, even a few I don't normally. but then I went and ate it the sandwich, which actually, being from a fast food restaurant, was tasteless. That was my protest.<br /><br />Oddly, when I got back to my office I found out I have the largest tax bill I have ever had from the IRS. I'm still not sure what that means.<br /><br />Defile is quite an odd word for the text the week, but I understand it. If one believes in God and struggles to figure out what is God's actions and what are our own, if one struggles with the nature of prayer and the sacred, it is very hard to reconcile why people die when they do, particularly when it is someone very close to you. I do not believe the text means the defilement that a priest gets from being around or touching the dead but the defilement that leads to crazy thinking, of breaking rules that were sacrosanct only a little while ago. Some we are too distraught to care we break, some we break intentionally to vent our anger at God. The Torah tells us here that's it's okay, it human to be that way when a partner, a mother or a father, a daughter or a son dies. We hopefully will heal and go back to our normal activities. But until we do, we are given leeway.<br /><br />My mom loved my writing this blog. So it is only fitting that I start it again on Mother's day, since I cannot get her anything else.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-11130392379735265202011-02-14T14:49:00.003-06:002011-02-14T15:00:24.415-06:00Baruch Dayan HaEmet, My Mom.I haven't written in a while, and since some might wonder what happened who are not familiar with me face to face, I thought I'd write something today.<br /><br />Two days after I posted my Last Column, My mom was admitted to the Emergency room, for what was thought to be a heart attack. It turned out to be a lot more -- a neurological emergency. She was rushed to a better hospital, and came thought the surgery pretty well. But then in the hospital, she had something like a stroke and she fell into a coma. After a few days she did awake.<br /><br />After what we thought was the beginning of a recovery, she fell back into a coma again. This time she would not come out of it. Two weeks ago, I saw her draw her last breath, and depart this world at age sixty-seven.<br /><br />My mom was the best mom I could have had. She was a traveling companion as well as a mom. She was not the "cool mom" but something more. She was the mom everybody wants to bei their mom. Generous caring and loving. She would listen to you no matter who you were.<br /><br />She loved to read and not only dreamed the adventures she read but did them, in style. Together we went to Africa, Hawaii, Alaska, Israel, Jordan. We walked across the equator together, then crossed it again a few weeks later in a boat headed between the Galapagos Islands. With my sister she visited Egypt and turkey. With my dad, most of Europe, east and west.<br /><br />My sense of art is from her. She was not an artist, but a wonderful crafts person. She loved building and furnishing Dollhouses. The one she has worked on for years was a museum, each room different but spectacular. There was needle point, and collecting antique Wedgwood pieces.<br /><br />She also in her later years had her spiritual side, and was the one who so support my own spiritual journey which led to this blog. She was the one who commented more than anyone else, often in private e-mail to me as she began and continued her own spiritual journey.<br /><br />I'm gonna miss her. I loved her so much.<br /><br />I'm understandably broken up and have no interest in writing. It may yet be some time before I write again. I thought you show know.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-85867275493730422762011-01-07T14:55:00.004-06:002011-01-07T16:01:44.029-06:00Shemot/Vaiera/Bo 5771: Moses, Akiba and the Midlife CrisisLast week was my birthday. It doesn't completely explain why I haven't gotten into writing Shlomo's Drash for a while, but it needs to be said. I turned 45 last week. I've been thinking about someone who turned 80, and the last three parshiot, the beginning of Exodus.<br /><br /><blockquote>7. And Moses was eighty years old, and Aaron eighty three years old, when they spoke to Pharaoh. [Exodus 7]</blockquote><br /><br />There is a Midrash which tells us that Moses died on his birthday, the Seventh of Adar [b. Megilah 13b] Torah is not much about the first two thirds of Moses' life, it is about the last third. Midrash has been written by everyone from the Sages to Cecil B. DeMille filling in that timeframe of eighty years, the text tells us of his birth, that he was raised by a daughter of Pharaoh, and of killing the Egyptian. The story tells us he fled and lived in Midian as a shepherd and family man, until he came across the burning bush. But that is all it says to account for eighty years of life.<br /><br />Who was the younger Moses? There are legends that he became king of Ethiopia for a while, and that his engagement to Tzipporah was a series of trials and test by her father. The most enduring legend has to do with his age of a hundred and twenty at his death. [Deuteronomy 34:7] We know the last forty years were spent from the time he faced Pharaoh through the Exodus from Egypt, the time in the wilderness, to his death overlooking the banks of the Jordan River. The rabbis split Moses' earlier eighty years into two pieces: for forty years he was in Egypt, and for forty years he wandered as an exile, settling in Midian at some point.<br /><br />The legend of Moses' life is intertwined with three of the greatest rabbinic sages who reportedly lived to 120: Hillel, Rabbi Yochanan b. Zakkai and Rabbi Akiba. These sages’s story also breaks into three parts, which Aggadah also breaks evenly into three parts.<br /><br /><blockquote>The years of six pairs were equal: Rebekah and Kohath, Levi and Amram, Joseph and Joshua, Samuel and Solomon, Moses and Hillel the Elder, R. Johanan b. Zakkai and R. Akiba. Moses spent forty years in Pharaoh's palace, forty years in Midian, and served Israel forty years. Hillel the Elder came up from Babylon at the age of forty, served [i.e. studied under] the Sages forty years, and served Israel forty years. R. Johanan b. Zakkai engaged in commerce forty years, studied Torah forty years, and served Israel forty years. R. Akiba was an ignoramus forty years, studied forty years, and served Israel forty years.[Genesis Rabbah C:10]<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Sometime After forty, our bodies change. Our reproductive abilities start to wane, though our desire to use them may not. Our biological function is complete, yet we have our social function. The social function acts very differently than the needs of merely passing genes. But how do we do this? What is our role if not biological?<br /><br />Midlife and midlife crisis in my mind are synonymous they are the answer to that question. Usually when we think of a midlife crisis we think of someone far too old trying to reclaim a youth they no longer can have. It’s stereotypically the sports car and fling with a younger member of the opposite gender. But I think a more general and far more constructive way of describing mid-life is the time when we re-define our role as a human being. Granted part of that might be wanting to go backwards, but it’s a lot more about going forwards, dropping a lot of the baggage we no longer need and moving forward into the future, where we propagate memes instead of genes.<br /><br />Monday morning I put on a sweater that didn't fit. Partially it was the several pounds I've put on my frame since I bought the sweater many years ago, but that was minor. If clothes make the man, then this sweater didn't fit me because it no longer made the man that is me. Rummaging through my closet for another sweater, I ended up cleaning the sweater shelf out -- many of the sweaters didn't fit. I didn't even have to put them on to know that.<br /><br />For the past month, I have been thinking about my future and figuring out where I'm going to be when I'm eighty. Am I going to be like Moses? Am I going to be like Abraham? Thinking about both of those I have to remember the question the Hasidic rabbi Zusya was so scared of on his death bed. When he reached the afterlife, he was not afraid of being asked "Why were you not Moses or Abraham?” Instead he was terrified of being asked "Why were you not Zusya?"<br /><br />Right now, I feel if I would be asked that question, I would have no answer because I am not me. I realize there is no answer, only living one's life so that fearful question is never asked. In the last few years so much has changed in my life. I have a job so nebulous it literally sulks on the corner of the organization chart. Like Zuzya's question, another question I fear is the question "what do you do.?" because I really have no idea. I think I am trying to create products for a profession I have so little knowledge of. I often feel like a blind painter being instructed by the sighted how to paint a copy of the Sistine ceiling. Late in my life I have found the love of my life, and I'm still trying to figure out how to have a relationship with such a strong, brilliant, beautiful woman. But I have never been this far in a relationship before, and I am often stumbling my way through. Like Moses off in a desert by himself, I feel very lost with no idea of direction.<br /><br />Moses at the beginning of midlife dressed like an Egyptian and acted like an Egyptian, so much so we read that Ruel's daughters refer to him as an Egyptian[Exodus 2:19]. Yet we read this week of a Moses with a strong identity to Beni Yisroel, enough to coordinate a mass exodus from Egypt, and enough to convince the people to perform the ritual we will call today the Passover Seder. It was in midlife I believe he learned what he need to move from his youth to the leader he was in old age. So too with Rabbi Akiba, who never left the academy from forty until sixty four according to the Sages. When he left, he was a sage himself.<br /><br />Moses learned in midlife by being a shepherd. Akiba who started life as a shepherd, learned by being a student, and then a teacher. Both became phenomenal leaders, as did Hillel and Johanan ben Zakkai. Midlife is the time to realize you are not young anymore, and it's time to have a very different identity for the rest of your life. It's time to find it, and find who you will be in that time left on the planet.<br /><br />I look at life and think there may be two ways to live a life the one of Solomon and the one of Moses. The rabbis mention that the three books of the Tanach written by Solomon are written in three stages of life: The Song of Songs is the joyful optimism and sensuality of Youth, Proverbs the widsom of the middle years, and Kohelet the bitterness and futility of old age. As wise as Solomon was, Solomon supposedly died at fifty two, with his last words bitter and futile ones, though he was not very old. In my mind, this is a path of Kohelet as a life burnt out, who did everything for gain, and not for something greater than gain. Yet Akiba and Moses seem so different than this, and aspire to a different path. There is the passion of youth, the change of middle age, and the leadership, the Sageing, of a very ripe old age of 120.<br /><br />Even though we have no choice as to the day of our death, we still have a choice: the road of Solomon or of Akiba and Moses. I have had the privilege of meeting a few sages in my life. There are those who I wish I had met as well, but there are some I wish I had met, like my fiancé's mentor before his passing away last year. I have met those who live, if that is any kind of living, their last years bitter. I would rather be a sage with a full life than bitter and angry at the world. I do not know where the next thirty five years will take me. Will I make it to What the Perkei Avot calls “the age of strength?” I’ve made a few decisions that point me in some directions I hope will send me down the road of Moses and not the road of Solomon. Somewhere along the line I hope I learn enough about myself and do enough not to have to answer the question "Why were you not Shlomo?"Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-45589884531474113492010-12-20T07:37:00.004-06:002010-12-20T07:51:02.314-06:00Vayehi 5771: Grandparents RememberThis week we have the end of the story of Genesis, which ends with death. First we have the last years of Jacob's life, his blessing to his sons, then his death and burial. This is followed by a rather short section showing Joseph doesn't exact revenge on his brothers, he sees three generations of his children, and then dies, with a promise to be buried in the land of his birth, but that won't happen for quite a while.<br /><br />One of the joys I take in doing midrash is taking a seemingly innocuous verse and look at it carefully. Some of the throwaway verses can lead in unexpected directions if one know how to look. For example, In this weeks portion we read an interesting verse:<br /><br /><blockquote>23. And Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third generation; the children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were born upon Joseph's knees. [Genesis 50]</blockquote><br />Two questions come to me about this verse immediately: Why is Machir mentioned? Why specify the Third Generation? Machir is found next in the genealogies of Numbers 26, where the Gereration who will enter the land is enumerated.<br /><blockquote> 29 The sons of Manasseh: of Machir, the family of the Machirites--and Machir begot Gilead; of Gilead, the family of the Gileadites. 30 These are the sons of Gilead: of Iezer, the family of the Iezerites; of Helek, the family of the Helekites; 31 and of Asriel, the family of the Asrielites; and of Shechem, the family of the Shechemites; 32 and of Shemida, the family of the Shemidaites; and of Hepher, the family of the Hepherites. 33 And Zelophehad the son of Hepher had no sons, but daughters; and the names of the daughters of Zelophehad were Mahlah, and Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah.[Numbers 26]<br /></blockquote><br />A chapter later the Daughters of Zelophehad approach Moses to challenge of Halakah:<br /><blockquote> 1 Then drew near the daughters of Zelophehad, the son of Hepher, the son of Gilead, the son of Machir, the son of Manasseh, of the families of Manasseh the son of Joseph; and these are the names of his daughters: Mahlah, Noah, and Hoglah, and Milcah, and Tirzah. [Numbers 27]<br /></blockquote><br />There is a verse in Torah which does mention both Egypt and the Third generation.<br /><blockquote> 8 Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite, for he is thy brother; thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian, because thou wast a stranger in his land. 9 The children of the third generation that are born unto them may enter into the assembly of the LORD. [Deuteronomy 23]<br /></blockquote><br />The descendants of a marriage and an Israelite does not enter into the congregation until the third generation.We of course have read earlier that Joseph's wife is Egyptian:<br /><blockquote> 45 And Pharaoh called Joseph's name Zaphenath-paneah; and he gave him to wife Asenath the daughter of Poti-phera priest of On. And Joseph went out over the land of Egypt...50 And unto Joseph were born two sons before the year of famine came, whom Asenath the daughter of Poti-phera priest of On bore unto him. [Genesis 41]<br /></blockquote><br />If you believe that The Torah of Sinai was known to the patriarchs, this becomes a problem. Joseph intermarried an Egyptian and thus according to Deuteronomy 23:9, Neither Menasseh nor Machir are part of the congregation.They were officially not Jewish. This dilemma apparently had been thought of by some Tamudic-era Rabbis. The Perkei of Rabbi Eliezer and the Targum Yonatan b. Uzziel have a commentary about Asenath that solves the problem. Asenath was Dinah's and Shechem's daughter, and only adopted by Poti-phera. There is little evidence of this,it is mere midrashic commentary, but it does solve the problem. If Asenath was part of the family by matrilineal decent, her children would be part of the congregation. Of course, there is the other answer, which our verse suggests. Joseph lived long enough to see Gilead born, and see the descendants of his that would be included in the congregation.<br /><br />One part of this verse provides an interesting entry into the issue of who is a Jew and How Egyptians fall into the schema . The mention of Machir, however provides us with a pointer to the genealogy of Gilead, Menasseh's grandson, one of those born on Joseph's knee. Gilead's descendants will include the Daughters of Zelophehad, who will successfully challenge the rights of inheritance of property to sons only.<br /><br />I then find a third question about the verse. How were Joseph's great-grandchildren born on his knee? Did he hold their mother while she gave birth? Here I look to one of my favorite Talmud quotes.<br /><br /><blockquote>R.Samuel b. Nahmani said in R. Jonathan's name: He who teaches his neighbor's child Torah, Scripture ascribes it to him as if he had begotten him. [Sanhedrin. 19b]<br /></blockquote>Joseph taught Torah to his descendants. I doubt it was Torah mi Sinai, but the ethics, and wisdom he learned in his life, the connection to God he had even in the darkest pits and dungeons he taught to his children, his grand children and his great grandchildren. He knew his mistakes, and the mistakes of his brothers and father. He didn't want to have them make the same mistakes again. Six generations later, five women descended from Joseph would not be at each other's throats like Joseph and his brothers, but work together to change things. The Daughters of Zelophehad, make a strong case for a change in the rules as there were. They use the system of justice, not trickery or murder or any of the other foul tricks we find in Genesis. They learned the lesson.<br /><br />Joseph was thirty when he was summoned to Pharaoh [Gen 41:46] Between thirty one and thirty seven he was a father of Ephraim and Menasseh [41:50] and he died at 110 [50:22], leaving somewhere around seventy five years he was a parent. For the majority of those he was a grandparent, and great-grandparent. Parents may be good at providing sustenance for the bodies, but Joseph spent his later years making sure the souls of his descendants were nourished as well.<br /><br />Why is this verse important? You do not need to believe Joseph knew all of Torah to realize Joseph did teach Torah to his Grandchildren. After Joseph dies, there is none of the games between siblings we find in Genesis until the time of David, and there for very different reasons. I find that critically important to the world around us. Our future is in our future generations. It is not just in having children, but teaching them the lessons we have learned over the years. Otherwise they forget the lessons, experience, and wisdom of the past. Many times parents have a hard time doing this while supplying the clothing shelter and other physical needs of a child. It is a role for others who are not involved in those roles: Grandparents, teachers and other role models. I was reminded that this week in a world we are never to forget that Shoah, I saw a few individuals so horribly forget those lessons, and try to spread that forgetfulness and the consequential hate to others. Yet I saw a few who one would have expected to go along with this bunch of right wing extremists, but instead find their actions detestable -- because they still remember the Holocaust. Next week, we see what happens when one forgets. We meet the Pharaoh who did not know Joseph, and he enslaved the Israelites. But as much as the taskmasters tried to subjugate them, the Israelites remembered. As we will see int the the book of exodus, without remembering, they never would have been redeemed, for they never would not have cried out to God.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-17695676417828276662010-12-01T10:26:00.004-06:002010-12-01T10:44:14.554-06:00Mikkeitz 5770: Joseph, Hanukkah and AIDSHanukkah, the festival of lights most often falls late in December, and close to the solstice. As part of the eight Days of Hanukkah, the new moon occurs, leaving us with a holiday with little to no Moon and the least amount of Sun. This year it is early, but begins on one of the darkest days in another way. December 1 is World AIDS Day, and I have a hard time separating starving cows from HIV. In this week's portion, Pharaoh starts by having a dream:<br /><br /><blockquote>1 And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river. 2 And, behold, there came up out of the river seven cows, well-favored and fat-fleshed; and they fed in the reed-grass. 3 And, behold, seven other cows came up after them out of the river, ill favored and lean-fleshed; and stood by the other cows upon the brink of the river. 4 And the ill-favored and lean-fleshed cows did eat up the seven well-favored and fat cows So Pharaoh awoke. 5 And he slept and dreamed a second time: and, behold, seven ears of grain came up upon one stalk, rank and good. 6 And, behold, seven ears, thin and blasted with the east wind, sprung up after them. 7 And the thin ears swallowed up the seven rank and full ears. And Pharaoh awoke, and, behold, it was a dream. [Genesis 41]</blockquote><br /><br />After finding no one to interpret the dream, The chef cup bearer remembers Joseph in prison, and Joseph is called before Pharaoh. After telling Joseph the dream, Joseph delivers both the good news and the bad news:<br /><br /><blockquote>29 Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt. 30 And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land; 31 and the plenty shall not be known in the land by reason of that famine which follows; for it shall be very grievous. [Genesis 41]</blockquote>Joseph’s solution would have many a bible-thumping Tea Partier screaming "Socialism!" Levy heavy taxes on grain production during the time of plenty and store all that grain, then distribute it during the famine. Joseph in seeing the dream realizes something most people do not: this famine will affect everyone. If the grain isn’t stored it is not just the poor who will starve but so will the rich. Indeed, everyone in the region will starve.<br /><br />Joseph is involved in setting the economic policy of one of the two superpowers of his time. Sitting in Synagogue last Erev Shabbat, listing to one of my friends give an excellent D'var Torah, I began to not think of economics, but public health. I had just read a rather startling report From Human Rights Watch about the American South. their report, Southern Exposure highlighted the overwhelmingly large numbers of AIDS and HIV cases in the American South. The epicenter of HIV infection in the United States is not New York or San Francisco, but Dixie. Inadequate healthcare and education are contributing to a dangerous situation.<br /><br />Surprised by this, I did some checking in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control website, and found the recently released data for 2008 Notifiable diseases. Combing through that data the magnitude of the problem struck me. Almost Half the Reported AIDS cases were from the three southern regions of<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOX21gf5pk6mgfh0Y7pq2NkSBs6Wc5zavEd3jHYweTTcOg6XGBg-sjfcbsdVdRvcDV0I3mW1j1tkfz-UoLQADUjPMctdI_iwuom-tAy8U00-YhLIYj-JMt8XGByRUxhsGRPTs01Q/s1600/AIDS+2008.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 202px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOX21gf5pk6mgfh0Y7pq2NkSBs6Wc5zavEd3jHYweTTcOg6XGBg-sjfcbsdVdRvcDV0I3mW1j1tkfz-UoLQADUjPMctdI_iwuom-tAy8U00-YhLIYj-JMt8XGByRUxhsGRPTs01Q/s320/AIDS+2008.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545752765917984706" border="0" /></a> the united starts, the area from Maryland on the northeast to Texas on the southwest.<br /><br />While the Southern Exposure report mentioned the lack of needle sharing programs in southern states as one contributing factor, I wondered if there was another issue besides the drug abuse issue. Indeed the report mentioned the lack of adequate sex education, particularly in the use of disease and pregnancy preventing measures. With more digging I compared it to the numbers for other sexually transmitted diseases. Compared to Syphilis for example, and adjusted for population, similar patterns appear. Comparing rates for Gonorrhea, the South Atlantic region has almost double the case rate as the Pacific or the Mid Atlantic regions.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-CExj25KtmtRBeIvNYDvqYQYqT00bxKVizlxKY4O3-LVk7T2LQXK5QxhHeCrw2muBAJN2LWJ4tZUq9dkuy6VUN-U38zBNSSA_oBxmBElHW2nLMOd0xGJaYfzejEp-ksczoHKh1w/s1600/Syphilis+AIDS+2008.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 447px; height: 176px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-CExj25KtmtRBeIvNYDvqYQYqT00bxKVizlxKY4O3-LVk7T2LQXK5QxhHeCrw2muBAJN2LWJ4tZUq9dkuy6VUN-U38zBNSSA_oBxmBElHW2nLMOd0xGJaYfzejEp-ksczoHKh1w/s320/Syphilis+AIDS+2008.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545752975134658514" border="0" /></a><br />Key to that is the poor state of sex education in this region according to the report:<br /><br /><blockquote>The states in the South with the highest rates of HIV, sexually transmitted disease, and teen pregnancy are not ensuring that students receive comprehensive, evidence-based education in sexuality and HIV/AIDS. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi do not require sex education at all; of these states, only Alabama requires HIV/AIDS education be taught in the schools. Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina do require sex education to be taught in the schools, and North Carolina recently replaced its abstinence-based education policy with the Healthy Youth Act, legislation that requires local schools to teach evidence-based information approved by experts in sexual and reproductive health. However, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina all require that where schools teach do sex or HIV/AIDS education, abstinence before marriage shall be "stressed" or "strongly emphasized." … The discussion may include contraceptives but only if such discussion includes a discussion of the risks (failure rates, diseases not protected against). In no case shall there be a demonstration of how condoms or any other contraceptives are applied.[http://www.hrw.org/node/94476]</blockquote><br /><br />As alarmed as I am at this, I also remember an strangely humorous aggadic passage discussing the tension involved in Sex education.<br /><br /><blockquote>R. Kahana once went in and hid under Rab's bed. He heard him chatting [with his wife] and joking and doing what he required. He said to himself: One would think that Abba's mouth had never sipped the dish before! He said to him: Kahana, are you here? Go out, because it is rude. He replied: It is a matter of Torah, and I am required to learn.[Berachot 62a]</blockquote><br /><br />Both Rab and Kanaha are right. It is rude to be a voyeur, but Kahana wanted to know how to be holy in the act of sex, only to find it needs a lot of passion and joy. In context with the Gemara passages before this one, it becomes clear, that everything from toilet habits to sex are a matter of Torah, and we are required to learn from our teachers. Rab does not give lessons in the academy about sex, and students have to observe his personal habits to find out. Yet there are some Talmudic passages that do give instructions. There is even a few sex manuals written by Medieval Rabbis such as the Ramban. While their choices and directives were not as liberal as those today, knowing how to make love properly was not only important but a holy act.<br /><br />Yet the majority culture has this tendency to portray sex as dirty and sinful, and only abstinence is sacred, reflected strongly in government policies in the South. More than a thousand years ago, Jews realized abstinence doesn’t work, yet the majority religion still can’t figure that out. Neither are they willing to protect their flocks from disease – The knowledge of prophylactics is forbidden knowledge, even for adults. In doing so they shield young and old from knowing what choices they have which will spare their lives from life threatening disease. Many religious institutions, heedful of “be fruitful and multiply” doom their believers to a slow painful death. While the CDC numbers do place a large amount of the current cases in the South in poor African Americans, like the famine of Pharaoh and Joseph, this can easily spreads to the privileged people as well. They too are ignorant of precautions, and while they might not be infected with HIV, herpes or gonorrhea might be in their futures. <br /><br />There is a way to stem the tide of infection, a variant of Joseph’s storehouses. It is a active and strong public health and public education effort. We know it works. Regions that were the epicenter of the HIV infection are now much smaller infection sources than the south. Good education in at-risk communities have slowly reversed the infection rates.<br /><br />Joseph and Pharaoh were not slouches. They both understood there was times when Government needs to take care of the needs of the public. Economic policy is just one way of course that we can help people. A comprehensive way of healing the sick, and preventing them from becoming sick is also critical. Yet it is sorely lacking.<br /><br />Torah is the tree of life, and in doing so addresses all aspects of life, even good sex. It does not hide from it, but puts it in a perspective that makes sense. For Rab, sex was a fun joyous thing to do with his wife, as though it was his first time every time -- it was far from dirty or sinful to have sex and enjoy it. But there were responsibilities involved, and Rab and Kahana took those seriously as well, as their halakic rulings show well. The majority culture’s insistence on avoiding sex or making it sinful tragically hides those responsibilities, and bans talking about it in places where the most good can be done: our public schools, the media and clinics.<br /><br />The dark and cold of December 1 is both world AIDS day and it is the beginning of Hanukkah. The darkness of the day is not just the Darkness of AIDS and the numbers of people it kills or debilitates yearly it is the darkness of public health, who I expect will be far dimmer after the recent elections. It is the darkness of those so stigmatized by a disease they will not get tested or treated. It is the darkness of the GBLT young people who cannot get constructive information about who they are, and thus make some very bad decisions, or have bad decisions made for them. It is the darkness of "sex is bad, don't do it" while still heeding a genetic programming in our bodies we cannot fully control.<br /><br />I fear the darkness not just for sexually transmitted diseases, but for those that are more easily transmitted by food, water and air. The system to control AIDS is not that much different than those for other diseases and their public control. Education, surveillance, and the ability to mitigate the spread of disease is the same for almost any disease. Like Joseph feared, I believe we are setting ourselves up for the seven lean cows, who will eat the seven healthy ones. This will not just be a one demographic, geographical ethnic or otherwise: No one will be safe from disease.<br /><br />Yet this is also Hanukkah, the festival of lights and the miracle of the light that did not go out even in the time of darkness. While many will merely think of it as a Jewish Christmas, at its core it is an anti-assimilation holiday, celebrating we are different and want to live differently. It celebrates where a people did not want to follow the majority religion but live their lives according to Torah. It reminds me there is always a light cutting the darkness. It reminds me that we as the inheritors of the Talmud and Torah need to be there helping the sick and preventing illness through good education and good example. We need to support a strong governmental system of education and disease prevention. In that way can we be a light unto the nations in a time of darkness.<br /><br />Decades after AIDS and HIV entered the scene, we are on December 1 around the world both Pharaoh and an imprisoned Joseph, deciding if a dream and warning signs are enough to act. May we all have the wisdom of that Pharaoh and choose wisely. May we have the discernment of Joseph to act wisely for us and for the future generations.Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20478793.post-44292584913448856272010-11-28T19:28:00.001-06:002010-11-28T19:28:12.844-06:00Vayishlach 5771: Struggling with Yourself.One of the most memorable scenes in the Book of genesis is Jacob's midnight wrestling match: <br /><br /><blockquote>25. And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. 26. When he saw that he could not prevail against him, he touched the socket of his hip, and the socket of Jacob's hip became dislocated as he wrestled with him. 27. And he (the angel) said, "Let me go, for dawn is breaking," but he (Jacob) said, "I will not let you go unless you have blessed me." 28. So he said to him, "What is your name?" and he said, "Jacob." 29. And he said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, because you have strived with God and with men, and you have prevailed." 30. And Jacob asked and said, "Now tell me your name," and he said, "Why is it that you ask for my name?" And he blessed him there. 31. And Jacob named the place Peniel, for [he said,] "I saw God face to face, and my soul was saved." [Genesis 32]<br /></blockquote><br />This passage has many questions which one could ask. Who is this man Jacob struggles with? IS he even a man? Based on 32:31 we can assume that at least Jacob thinks this is a divine messenger, if not God personally. His new name also points to such a conclusion, that he was striving with God. Rashi notes there is a tradition it was Esau's guardian angel. Some commentators will say it is Esau, others one of the archangels, such as Michael or Gabriel.<br /><br />There is a tradition concerning the angels insistence of leaving before dawn. The purpose of the angels was to sing praises to God. Since he was struggling with Jacob he was going to be late and unable to fulfill his purpose if this wrestling match continued. The rabbis are also clear the praises are those in Isaiah 6:3: <br /><blockquote><br />ג וְקָרָא זֶה אֶל-זֶה וְאָמַר, קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת; מְלֹא כָל-הָאָרֶץ, כְּבוֹדוֹ. <br />And one called unto another, and said: Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.<br /></blockquote> <br />What the rabbis cannot agree on is how this is said. Either one set of angels says קדוש, "holy" another set says the next "holy" and a third say "Holy is the Lord of Hosts." But some of the angels might say it every morning, some might say it once and never again. While debating this point, the talmudic Rabbis insist the people of Israel are superior to angels as Jews say all three praises every morning as part of the Morning Amidah. <br /><br /> I believe Jacob was fighting with Jacob and God at the same time. At the core of this fight was Jacob's resistance to go home. Resistance is what keeps us from doing what we want to do and what we have the potential to do. Self doubt, a lack of conviction and confusion lead to resistance, which causes laziness, procrastination, and finding excuses for not moving forward. I'm very familiar with resistance, it tries to prevent me from writing every day of every week. I certainly got me for the last three weeks. Resistance delayed one d'var, and this crunching another one from ever getting written. It's a hard fight, and one I constantly need to do, just as I'm trying to finish this very late once again. I'm sure each of us can think of a situation where we didn't get done what we would have liked to, and somehow irrationally wasted time instead of being constructive. <br /><br />By this, I don't mean Shabbat rest of course. There is a time and a place for recharging the batteries. But how many time does someone surf the web during the workday instead of getting their tasks for the day done? Such a thing is resistance at work. Its those places we do waste time when we really shouldn't. We could be more efficient, but we don't. <br /><br />The angel was really Jacob's resistance. He knew he had to get out of Padan Aram, but going back is not easy, particularly on the news his brother, who is out to kill him, is on his way with 400 soldiers. As I once commented his gift of sheep may have been a delaying tatic. Horseback soldiers and sheep don't get along very well- randomly moving animals make it hard to charge in a fast straight line. His positioning of his sons may have had some merit in their ability for battle: Levi and Simon, who later in this portion will commit wholesale murder against the town of Shechem to avnege the rape of their sister is near the front. Jacob is not a warrior, and he knows it. He's never fought, but thought and tricked his way out of every situation he is in. Brute force is not his way. <br /><br />When showing brute force against your own resistance, you deadlock. You still don't get anything done but waste energy fighting the resistance, yet that resistance has a weakness -- it hates being seen and identified, for then we see how ridiculous it really is and easily defeat it. So too with the angel -- It really doesn't want to be seen, but Jacob does see him face to face, and when he does he realizes he is strong enough to face his brother. Rashi's comment about the angel being Easau's guardian angel comes from a midrash which gives a parable of a king who trains his son not to be afraid of wild animals with a tame lion. Afterwards, feral dogs don't bother the prince. So too with Esau's angel: if he was defeated, so could Easu. Or put another way: if one can defeat our dire expectations of an issue, how much easier when we encounter the real thing? <br /><br />One of our biggest enemies is ourselves and our negative thinking, the thinking of "I can't." Jacob was victim to this, but spent the night before his encounter with Esau fighting this negative impact. I have found in our modern world there is a lot that tries to tempt human beings into believing they cannot do on their own, they must have some external force do for them. Commercialism tells us that a new television set, car or brand of beverage will be the external force that lets us do what we cannot otherwise do. Some believe this external force is drugs or alcohol, only to fall into a downward spiral of addiction. This is false thinking. God could have done the same as the Red sea and drowned Esau the way he drowned the egyptians. He did not flash-flood the Jabbok river and wash away Esau, but instead got Jacob to do some hard, painful thinking. We need to do the struggle within our selves, not let an external force, including God do it for us. <br /><br />The phrase "yes we can" is a little tarnished right now, but it is still true. As any grammarian will tell you, "We" requires more than one "I." When I am not believing "Yes I can" then the phrase is really "Yes, they can." We must first believe in ourselves as individuals and then as a collective. Jacob had to believe in himself before he could transmit that ideas to his sons. His sons understood it in their own ways. Ruben and Judah will make mistakes, and try to make up for them. Joseph will too, and as we will read in the next few weeks, Joseph and Judah will only have themselves and God to depend on in some very difficult situations. <br /><br /><br /><br />Shlomohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03934013715579218407noreply@blogger.com0