Vayakhel 5768: Art, Halacha and Shabbat

This week we have Moses first giving the instructions for creating the Mishkan he learned on Sinai, employing the people to help in the construction with Betzalel as lead craftsman and architect. The people enthusiastically help out in its construction, so much so Betzalel has to ask for the donations to stop. At the beginning of week’s portion Moses speaks of the mitzvah of Shabbat, and includes in it a specific prohibition.

1. And Moses gathered all the congregation of the people of Israel together, and said to them, These are the words which the Lord has commanded, that you should do them. 2. Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you a holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the Lord; whoever does work in it shall be put to death. 3. You shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the Sabbath day. (Ex 35:1-3)

In Torah there are only two real prohibitions, and by consequence of someone’s actions a third. In Exodus 16:22-30 we are told essentially God doesn’t cook on Shabbat and no one is to gather Manna on the seventh day. In this week’s portion we are told not to light fires. Numbers 15:32-36 had a man put to death for collecting sticks on Shabbat. Beyond this we have no Torah injunction of what we are supposed to do and not do on Shabbat.

We have in the later prophets and writings prohibitions on stamping grapes and commerce both with other Jews and with non-Jews. But the actual rules are still sparse. To understand what can happen in this circumstance, let me give a parable. Once on a lonely mountain, a princess and a prince met and fell in love. Yet after that moment the princess was taken away to a castle with walls impossible to get into. Before she was taken away she told the prince to send her messages through a very small hole in the wall. The prince gets to the castle and knows to roll up a small bit of paper and stick it in the hole to the courtyard on the other side. But he wonders what he should put on the paper, if anything at all. He remembers his moment with her and writes of her hair and her eyes, and other bits about that moment in time.

In the same way do we take a mitzvah, like Shabbat and infuse it with a greater structure, in order to turn the mitzvah, the love note to God, into more than a slip of paper, to really say “I love you.” Our writing on that note is known as the halacha, the rules that exist around the mitzvot in order to perform them. They are essentially of human origin, and in a few cases of the original oral law, believed to be transmitted to Moses orally by God. Moses then began a line of oral transmission up to the time of the rabbis. Yet no oral chain is ever exact, and there is the human hand in what we do have. The rabbis, using this and Torah, came up with a set of ways, halacha, adapted from both to fit their circumstances. Halakah undoubtedly has a human hand. They are the words on that love note, words we get from our experience as recorded in Torah.

For Shabbat for example, the rabbis took this the beginning of this week’s passage, which has nothing to do with anything else in the passage, and figured the reason it was there was to imply that it was all of the work necessary to build the Mishkan, which is referred to as malakah. Since God ended from all the malakah that he made [Gen 2:1] it must be human malakah that was prohibited on Shabbat, as defined by the Mishkan building project. On that basis the rabbis came up with thirty-nine primary prohibitions of work on Shabbat. But since they came up with primary prohibitions, it figured that there were secondary prohibitions, subcategories of those thirty nine which provide us with even more prohibitions.

I’ve been thinking lately about one of those possible subcategories of prohibitions, which in a strict sense I may be violating. Indeed I violate many. There’s no question I violate a direct mitzvot by driving an internal combustion engine to synagogue on Saturday mornings. So it’s surprising that there is a small thing that I think a lot about: Painting on Shabbat. It is part of my ritual practice of Erev Shabbat to sit in a restaurant, pull out my watercolor box, paints, and a photo reference and paint. I’m so serious about this I break other halacha just to do this. When last year I was given a choice between going to services and painting, I picked painting. I’m not sure sometimes if it’s a ritual practice or a guilty pleasure.

There are all kinds of issues with painting. Some are not just Shabbat prohibitions either. With my love of figurative painting, there is one that I find particularly interesting:

Our Rabbis taught: The writing under a painting or an image may not be read on the Sabbath. And as for the image itself, one must not look at it even on weekdays, because it is said, Turn ye not unto idols. How is that taught? — Said R. Hanin: [Its interpretation is,] Turn not unto that conceived in your own minds. [Shabbat 149a]

Not only looking at a painting is prohibited, but reading its caption on Shabbat! Yet here the issue is clearly idolatry. Many images with captions are not of a secular nature, and the caption may be prayer to other gods. So the first issue is that painting images of any kind as mentioned in many places are considered idols. More to the point on Shabbat we have this prohibition:

It was taught: He who bores, however little, he who scrapes, however little, he who tans, however little, he who draws a figure on a vessel, however little, [is violating Shabbat]. [Shabbat 103b]

For a painting prohibition, it is based on one of the thirty nine primary prohibitions found in the Mishnah:

He who writes two letters, whether with his right or with his left hand, of the same designation or of two designations or in two pigments, in any language, is culpable. [Shabbat 102b]

The Mishnah in the name of R. Yose, continues by clarifying this. While one mark does not convey meaning, two marks convey meaning. During the building of the Mishkan, that they marked the boards with the two letter abbreviations of the tribes as they worked to match up boards correctly. There is another text, a bit earlier concerning building which might also be significant in terms of its general principle:

If one builds how much must he build to be culpable? He who builds however little, and he who chisels, and he who strikes with a hammer or with an adze, and he who bores [a hole], however little, is culpable. This is the general principle: whoever does work on the Sabbath and his work endures, is culpable. [Shabbat 102b]

The general rule might apply to paintings. Paintings are permanent, and thus endure. It looks like there's not much chance for me to follow a halacha of painting.

I could make a philosophical argument of course, one many in the liberal Jewish community have made at one time or another. Basically it’s based on that definition of Malakah again, this time defining it as occupation. Shabbat is to rest from what you do for a living. If one gets enjoyment from something that does not have to do with your living, then go ahead and do it and enjoy yourself. An extension of this argument is that Shabbat is the witnessing of creation. God spent the six days creating the world, and on that seventh, sanctified day, we are to stop and appreciate it. An artist takes that creation and appreciates it by putting it on paper or canvas.

However, there’s something about creating a halakic argument that exempts painting that makes the act more sacred. Part of that is to follow a part of the tradition that the argument above does not: rabbinic thinking. The rabbis for many reasons found exemptions and ways around problems which restricted too much. For example, our prohibition on kindling a fire. The Karaites, who rejected the rabbinic authority, came up with their own halacha that no fire were to be lit on Shabbat. You spent from sunset to sunset on Shabbat without light and heat. The rabbis were far more lenient. If you lit the fire before sundown, gave it enough fuel to last a while and then didn’t touch it again, it could continue to burn throughout Shabbat. They then took that precedent and applied to several other circumstances where things began before Shabbat but were completed during Shabbat.

One takes from these and other sources and tries to come up with an argument, based on precedent of the classical sources, to create an exemption. Like the case of the fire, that one may not add more fuel, there may be stipulations and restrictions even to the exemptions.

Given the texts mentioning the prohibitions, there are two texts which might help in providing an exemption. The first is the rebuttal to the Shabbat 103 passage above:

R. Simeon said: [He is not culpable] unless he bores right through or scrapes the whole of it [the skin] or tans the whole of it or draws the whole of it! [Shabbat 103b]

The other, mentioned in two places, describes God as an artist, based on the prayer of Hanna:

There is none holy as the Lord, for there is none beside thee (I Sam 2:2). R. Judah b. Menashia said: Read not bilteka, ‘beside thee’], but read lebalotheka [‘to survive thee’]. For the nature of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not like that of flesh and blood. It is the nature of flesh and blood to be survived by its works, but God survives His works. Neither is there any rock [zur] like our God(ibid.). There is no artist [zayyar] like our God. A man draws a figure on a wall, but is unable to endow it with breath and spirit, inward parts and intestines. But the Holy One, blessed be He, fashions a form within a form and endows it with breath and spirit, inward parts and intestines. [Megilah 14a, Ber 10a]

Taking these texts, can we come up with a halakic exemption for painting, or art in general? This week, I’m not going to tell you here. Vayakhel is half of a double portion. On non-leap years, it is paired with Pekudei. This year, is a leap year and they are read separately, so in that spirit, I’m going to do the same thing and split this commentary into two parts, using a verse in Pekudei (Exodus 39:32) to help out. But I’ll give you a few hints. The major hint is the questions I ask myself when I get into a situation like this. Think about these this week, the sequence I thought them up, and how I could use the passages above to come up with that answer and next week, I’ll give you my answer:

1. Should I do art on Shabbat?

2. Is Art Work (vftkn)?

3. When is Art Work (vftkn)?

4. Is building the Temple really work?

5. Are there loopholes in that Mishnah?

6. What are the distinctions between my art and building the Temple?

7. Under what circumstances could art be done on Shabbat?

8. What restrictions would I have to have the exemption?

Parshat Yitro 5768: The Torah of the Everyday

This week, moving towards Sinai, Moses’ father in law Yitro catches up with the Israelites bringing Moses’ sons and wife with him. Yitro explains the concepts of delegation and bureaucracy, and then the people get ready for the Ten Commandments, which take up the last part of this portion.

I had a lot of interesting and positive comments last weekend concerning my comments about Roller coasters, Disney and applying them to Torah. I seem to do things a little differently than others, and definitely off the beaten path. I’ve been thinking about what I do differently and how it shapes not only what I write here but what keeps me writing when I could be doing so many other things.

This week, we have the setup and the delivery not of the Mitzvot, but the identity statement of He who will Give the mitzvot to Israel. Every part of the Ten Commandments will be restated in a far clearer way later in the Torah, much of it in the next portion Mishpatim. What we have here is a summary, and an introduction to the relationship between the mitzvot, God, and the Jewish people.

1. And God spoke all these words, saying, 2. I am the Lord your God, who have brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 3. You shall have no other gods before me. 4. You shall not make for you any engraved image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5. You shall not bow down yourself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; 6. And showing mercy to thousands of those who love me, and keep my commandments.

Past this point the commandments we have more concrete ideas: Shabbat can be explained the way Philo of Alexandria explained it. A person rested can be more productive the other six days. The rest is simple ethics. Thus we have three parts of Decalogue. We have the exclusive relationship with God, the witnessing of God’s creation on the day of rest, and the rules to be civil to one another. Yet all of them are about the first part, the relationship with God. We do these things to be in relationship with God. How we define and perceive this relationship differs among individuals and communities.

I recently was at an Orthodox home for Erev Shabbos. For the traditional D’var Torah at the dinner table, halakah for Shabbat was recited out of a very thick book of halakic rulings. Based on the rules derived from the Mishnah’s prohibition against harvesting during Shabbat came a ruling of not using a Hammock, for fear of knocking anything off the tree, and thus unintentionally harvesting. I actually understand the rabbinic thinking here, and do appreciate it. So I took the next step and asked another question: What if the tree is dead? With a little searching on our host’s part he found out that at least for hammocks it didn’t matter if the tree was alive or dead, and though the derivation wasn’t clear, it was probably based on dead produce or branches falling off the tree. Along the way, we found out that you can sit on a dead tree stump but not a live one, though some authorities believe you can only do that in summer and not winter when you can tell the difference between a live one and dead one.

Several of the guests who were not very religious at the table later mentioned to me they didn’t get such hairsplitting. Nor did they understand the seemingly contradictory nature of first restricting then finding loopholes to that restriction. But for me it makes sense if you make certain assumptions. The most vital of those assumptions is the nature of the relationship between God and Man. For those who religiously follow Halakah, they need to follow the mitzvot explicitly, even when not given full directions to do so. Yet, to completely restrict ourselves in every case leaves us unable to do anything, including fulfilling other mitzvot. This is much like a pattern of relationship where we love our partner so much we would do anything for them, even when we are not completely sure what they actually said or wanted. Such is the nature of Halakic Torah.

On the other hand there is a pattern I’ve seen in my experience in Liberal Judaism. During many discussions I’ve had in Reform settings, the same questions keep coming back. What is the nature of divine revelation, or does it even really exist? Why do bad thing happen to good people? Even though those are the hard philosophical questions; the “hard portions” to talk about are those which are all halakic. Stories are good stuff, Halakhah is avoided in discussion. Theology or in Hebrew Aggadah dominates discussions and belief. This has been true since the inception of the Reform movement, and while traditional elements are bringing back some things, such as a more traditional prayer service as exemplified by the new siddur Mishkan Tefilah, the core of this way of relationship is discussing the nature of the relationship. It is like two people dating who always go out on dates and spend the entire time talking about what their relationship is, and whether it really exists. They never bother to get around to holding hands, kissing or really enjoying the company of their love.

Then there is the third kind of relationship what I would call the Everyday Torah. Many people, mainly mystics, have seen it before. Yet, I believe it is far more approachable than some esoteric mysticism. My first exposure to it was not Jewish but as a core value of Taoism. It is fundamental to Lurianic Kabbalah. The Baal Shem Tov certainly knew of it and based much of what he did on it. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Yiddish poetry sings of it. Probably of all movements the Renewal movement has the most consistent elements of this type of relationship. But maybe it is King David who sings of it most succinctly:

The earth is the Lord’s and all that fills it

The world and those who dwell in it

For he has founded it upon the seas,

And established it upon the rivers. [Psalm 24:1-2]

In this view there is a bit of holiness in everything, a bit of the divine in every part of our reality. The late Carl Sagan liked to talk that “we are made of Star stuff.” In this relationship, There is only God-Stuff, and everything is made of God stuff. God is everything and then some. Because the human mind needs to divide things to understand them, the “then some” part we call God, “the divine,” or the “worlds above.” The concrete part we can sense call “this world”, or “the worlds below.” We are in relationship with everything as we are in the relationship with the divine. One bittersweet way of looking at such a relationship I can find in my apartment, reminders of my late grandfathers (may their memory be for a blessing) On my desk, there are some letter openers and a big paperweight paperclip that used to sit on my Grandfather’s desk from as early as I can remember. Not far away is the talit katan and siddur of my other grandfather. In seeing those objects I remember my grandfathers and I get back into relationship with them. There is a tie I still have that I was given by an ex-girlfriend on Sweetest Day. I remember her every time I wear it. This often is the relationship we have with the Divine, as something that is not here, as transcendent, but there are reminders in our lives that if we see them we remember. The whole point of tzitzit is exactly that, to remember [Numbers 15:39]. Yet I believe not only in objects of holiness like tzitzit or an Eternal Light do this. Anything, a sign on a passing truck, a song on the radio, a bit of overheard conversation, we can remember God this if we only we make the effort.

Of course my ex-girlfriend is not the tie, and my grandfather is not a paperclip paperweight. To treat my tie like a girlfriend, buy it flowers, treat it to chocolate on Valentines Day, or even sleep with it would be outright insane. To say these objects are the person is wrong. That is idolatry, and that is the danger of misunderstanding this relationship, something I have seen on occasion. This is so much the case, God after saying “I am” in the Decalogue states not to get into this crazy thinking.

You shall not make for you any engraved image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5. You shall not bow down yourself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

This is the relationship with the transcendent God. Yet Torah of the Everyday, like many mystic systems has no problems with paradox. God is both imminent and transcendent. God’s imminence means that every thing and action emanates God’s holiness out – it is not just reminder, but a conduit of the holy. It is the still small voice Elijah heard at Sinai [I K 19:12], a tiny spark in the sunshine, a small vibration. The Noise, vibrations and light of our secular world, tends to mask the holy world right there in front of us. Every action and every object is Torah and Midrash in this view, everything Divine Revelation and Miracle. They are not the thunder and fire of Sinai. Our experience is more like Elijah’s experience at Sinai, God was not in the fire. Instead God-expreience is very small or taken for granted but the experience is alwys there. We just have to get used to looking for it, and even then it’s difficult at times unless we make it habit. I’ve learned to see some of these, seeing roller coasters as Midrash or Harley-Davidson riders as a commentary on how to treat Torah. I often rely on such experience in writing this column, and in my view of holiness in general.

I have talked about Everyday Torah this week very inadequately falling back into that theology mode for some thing I usually do wordlessly. This is not about words but perceptions of the world around us, of perceiving what is really there. To help us in this, God mandated on Sinai a weekly practice day:

8. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9. Six days shall you labor, and do all your work;

10. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger that is within your gates; 11. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and made it holy.

Shabbat is there not only to rest our bodies but for us to witness creation, to see the Divine in the mundane. It’s the weekly exercise in getting the Torah of the Everyday into our everyday lives, when it is so hard to practice such things the other six days.

I believe there is not one right relationship to God of these three, nor is there one right blend. Since I’m taking a painting class right now I’d compare it to painting with the three primary colors, blue, red, and yellow. We can use them pure in places or blend them to make oranges violets and greens, even blacks. We might thin them to paler colors, or we can darken them. We put those colors to canvas or paper in different shapes and styles of painting. In our painting of Life we use these all together to make a masterpiece. The skill is to know which colors to use in what balance to achieve this painting, which is as unique as the individual.

That is what I try to accomplish every week. By the time I’m done writing these words every week, I take a dab of the scholarly Halakic mind immersed in a variety of classical texts and blend with some Aggadah. With those ranges of colors I paint over a glaze of Everyday Torah, then highlight again with parable from more everyday Torah. In the end I come up with a picture, one that defines me and my world. Often I’ve been told how personal my Midrash is. Actually everyone’s Midrash is, I’m just a bit more obvious about that. Rashi, Maimonides, and Judah HaNasi put their personalities and biographies into their works as much as I have, it’s just we rarely look for their hidden bios since they lived so far in the past. Torah has been called the blueprint of the Universe. The Ten Commandments this week are the abstract of that blueprint. Shlomo’s Drash is my dynamic blueprint of Shlomo’s World. Hopefully this week’s column is also my abstract of what I want to do – Live Torah fully.

Let me end with an invitation, which really is what Shlomo's Drash is, though an invitation rarely accepted to my knowledge. I invite everyone to write Midrash of the everyday, to see all the relationships we have with God and express them to others. Do this not to change other’s opinions as much as to report what one’s own unique perception brings to the Torah of the everyday. We each make a painting, Let us build an art gallery together.

Blessings and Midrash to all.

Parshat Shimini 5767: Of Cows and Love Letters

Leviticus 9:1 - 11:47

This week, we have three major parts of our portion; we continue the sacrifices started in last week’s portion. It is the eighth day of sacrifices, and everything goes so well God performs a wonder and fire from the Lord devours the sacrifices. But things then turn tragic. Two of Aaron's sons offer alien fire and are consumed by the fire of the Lord themselves. The rest of Leviticus 10 then gives the aftermath of this tragedy and a prohibition against priests making sacrifices while intoxicated. We end with the laws of prohibited and permitted animals for eating, the basis of the kosher laws. Those start in chapter 11 with

1. And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying to them, 2. Speak to the people of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which you shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.

While much of what we’ve read from the book of Leviticus has been mitzvot that has been rather impractical in post temple times, in the next few chapters of Leviticus many mitzvot will deal with public health. This all starts with the backbone of the kosher dietary rules in Leviticus 11.

Yet this is not the first time we have heard of the rules of kashrut. Two of its most significant rules were given earlier:

It shall be an everlasting statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that you eat neither fat nor blood.[Lev 4:17]

The first of the first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.[ Ex 23 19]

As a public health and food safety professional I can appreciate those like Maimonides who see health issues in kashrut. But in my religious life I see things very differently. The way I deal with kosher as a Jew has a lot less to do with health and a lot more with the mitzvot. When we look at the mitzvot we can categorize them in many different ways, but one of the easiest is of course as the negative (i.e. don’t) and positive (do) mitzvot. Of course, we have both in this parsha. For example here is the positive mitzvah of eating red meat:

What ever parts the hoof, and is cloven footed, and chews the cud, among the beasts, that you will eat. [Lev 11:3]

Torah then tells us the negative mitzvot of eating red meat, with examples.

4. Nevertheless these shall you not eat of those that chew the cud, or of those that divide the hoof; the camel, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 5. And the coney, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 6. And the hare, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 7. And the swine, though its hoof is parted, and is cloven footed, yet it chews not the cud; it is unclean to you. 8. Of their flesh shall you not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they are unclean to you.[Lev 11:1-8]

The examples in verses 4-7 are actually underlining the negative mitzvah. It makes sure we know that if only one of the conditions is true, it is still prohibited. Positive and negative mitzvot in the simplest sense tell us what is permitted and what is prohibited. Yet one might ask if this means I have to eat a steak at every meal. Not quite. There are really three states for a mitzvah instead of just positive and negative. We can split positive into two categories, permitted and obligatory. “Observe the Shabbat” is obligatory for example. Eating red meat is permitted, though only under the obligations of an animal with split hoof and chews its cud. While you have to observe the Sabbath you don’t have to eat red meat, you could eat chicken or tofu. Thus we have three categories of Mitzvot: obligatory, permitted, and prohibited. Much of Jewish law since Sinai has been trying to determine which of these categories any specific act happens to be.

We then take the mitzvot, and find the halakah, the ways we accomplish those mitzvot. And this leaves many schools of thought of how to find the halakah and whether each of the halakah are obligations, permissions or prohibitions.

The Jewish tradition has a way of finding the halakah, by deriving it from the biblical text, and from other halakot. But at its core, it isn’t the result of the mitzvah which is important but the deed, the act of doing it. As part of Jewish thinking we are searching for God, and as Heschel points out, God is in a search for us. When God asked Adam “where are you?” in the Garden of Eden, he was not asking Adam, he was asking Humanity. Like the protagonists of the Song of Songs, Jews and God are unrequited lovers searching and pining for each other. They might find each other for moment, then the moment is gone. It is like a princess who is kept hidden in a castle, except for a little crack in the castle wall. Her lover, who she can rarely see, tries to slip love notes through the crack in the wall, just saying “I love you” to let her know he is still there. But she might not be at the crack at that time so she only sees the love note on the ground in front of the hole. If he can slip enough love notes at one time the two lovers can know each other are there and peer at each other through the crack, a tiny glimpse of each other. So too we try to slip love notes to God. Those notes are the mitzvot. We do the mitzvot because they are like a list of the things that we know please our partner.

In orthodoxy, the halakah of those mitzvah are set, primarily in the codification by Joseph Caro and Moses Isserles. The rules are rigid and all must conform. Yet we all write love letters differently. Circumstance changes as do people. While it does create simplicity in following halakah, I do not agree with codification. Until the arrogance of Maimonides to codify the Talmud, there really was no codification. The rabbis declared that only in dire emergencies could a prophet declare a new mitzvah. Halakah was fluid, agreed on by a teacher and a community, which is why the Talmud wrote the minority opinion alongside the majority ones. Several places in the Talmud we are told to follow the custom of the local community, which then give the minority practice of eating chicken with milk of R. Yosi of the Gallilee, who reckoned that hens have no milk and are thus permitted [Shabbat 130a]. Yet later codification would take the majority view as immutable law, and Chicken with cheese was banned forever.

Fundamentalism often takes a stringent ossified view of the Law, while there may be a lenient fluid view of halakah as well. For me however, I think the halakah should remain fluid, but should be based on the works of the past. Our ancestors put a lot of thought effort and experience into their innovations of halakah, one I do not think should be ignored. While we may not come to the same conclusions, we must use the same methods.

As an example we can once again take the issue of eating red meat. I am not a vegetarian, nor do I have any social action or environmental agenda to my diet. I also never want one, because it would diminish what I am doing. I do not eat red meat purely as a love note to God. I did in essence prohibit it, but not from an ethical standpoint but a stringent use of the following negative mitzvah:

17. It shall be an everlasting statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that you eat neither fat nor blood.[Lev 4:17]

While the traditional Jew is slightly more lenient in their halakah, I am more stringent, prohibiting red meat on the basis I cannot remove fat and blood to the extent there would be none in the food and still keep it edible. So I simply skip red meat from my diet. It was with such a strict interpretation of the requirement for two witnesses in a capital punishment case that the rabbis pretty much minimized the death penalty to non-existence. On the other hand, I do eat poultry, and in accordance to R. Yosi’s lenient halakah will allow dairy with my chicken. In most of my love notes to God, my performance of the mitzvot, I have done the same kind of finding my own halakah. Even if I derive it from classical sources, what I end up with may not be anything near conventional.

Yet in some I do not derive my own. When I am in my prayer community I follow the communal halakah. My own halakah and traditions can be strongly unconventional. When praying alone, I pick the tunes and the liturgy. When praying together I use the communal liturgy and the communal halakah. There is stability and continuity to the communal setting, a very stable foundation for the rest of my practice, which may disagree in fundamental ways with the communal. The foundation may be used by more than me, and to build other personal halakot, yet tying all of us down to a place where it remains authentically Jewish.

I often wish that foundation, that religious community was also more of the meeting and study place to exchange ideas about halakah, but I’ve yet to find such a place. Some may have the knowledge but ossify the halakah, some are fluid with the halakah, but are either ignorant or reject the knowledge. I’ve never found somewhere with both.

I do not fully know what God intended with the mitzvot, how we really got them or even if they should all be followed. All I can do is follow as many as I can for no other reason than following a single mitzvah I try (but don’t always succeed) in reciting every morning: V’ahavta et Hashem b’kol l’vavcha…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your might. I do this because I love God and desire to be close to God, and know that a paradoxically transcendent but lonely God feels the same for me. The more Mitzvot I do means the more love notes I send. When I say the Shema, or decline a hot dog, I am really saying the same thing.

God, I love you.