Yom Kippur 5769: The Art of the Albuquerque Turn

“I knew I should have made that left turn at Albuquerque!”- Bugs Bunny

Bugs Bunny may be an odd choice to teach us about t’shuvah, but that classic quote does much to teach about repentance. Then again, so does Rodin’s sketches and Debussy’s music. Before artists as diverse as Friz Freleng, Rodin and Debussy teach us a lesson in t’shuvah for the Day of Atonement, Let’s look at the word for t’shuvah.
We read in the Netana Tokef prayer that on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. Yom Kippur is our last chance before that seal is placed on the decree for the year. The prayer concludes with the statement that repentance, prayer and charity cross out the bad decree. So of the three, what is repentance, t’shuvah? In Hebrew, the root word is Sh-V-B, meaning in Biblical Hebrew to turn particularly to turn back or return. Yet the Hebrew does not really tell us where we are turning. Only by context can we tell and thus it could mean either towards God or away from God. It is in the Rabbinic Hebrew more than the Biblical that Shuv means to repent or return to God.
Our lives are like traveling on a road with many exits, entrances and crossroads. It is up to us to figure what is the way to get to our destination and what isn’t. Bugs Bunny’s comment used in many of his short animations presents a good way of thinking about what we are doing on Yom Kippur and T’shuvah for the rest of the year. Bugs in most of these scenes pops up expecting to be somewhere really good and fun like Las Vegas, yet ends up in a situation that is trouble. Invariably, Bugs pulls out a map and then realizes he should have taken that left at Albuquerque. Bugs Bunny being a cartoon character and one who can outsmart almost any opponent can work his way through the situation. For most of us real humans, that is not so easy. Many try with far less successful or funny results than a cartoon rabbit. Instead of being in the conflict that ensues, however funny, Bugs failure is that he does not do t’shuvah, the simpler answer to the problem. The simpler answer is to turn around, go back to Albuquerque, then make that left turn. That the gag line shows up so often tells us he never does.
Every day in lots of small ways and sometimes in big ways we hit a crossroads. We can turn right or left, we can keep going. Sometimes we follow the right path sometimes the wrong one. Often at the crossroads we already know we’re on the wrong path when we make the turn, only to be confirmed later with a bad outcome. Yet the thought of turning around or even changing direction bothers us. Sometimes there is no turning around. In those times we could stop, look at our maps or ask for directions, then find a new path towards our destination. Often we have this commitment to not turning back, which the Talmud describes

R. Assi stated, The Evil Inclination is at first like the thread of a spider, but ultimately becomes like cart ropes,[Sukkah 52a]

While it may be easy at first to break away, the commitment itself to the sin make it difficult. Notice the thinking here. Like Bugs, we try to pull away hoping to break the thread of spider or the cart rope. The thing with rope of any type is it is only good if you pull with it. Push towards the rope’s end makes it meaningless. We can get caught up, but often the solution is t’shuvah, coming back the way we came.
But how do we know when we are in the wrong place, or what we should turn? How do we often miss the turns in our lives? As Bugs keeps making the same mistake, Bugs is no answer here. Artists and musicians do give us answers. A major problem with a lot of people’s ability to draw is, strangely enough, idolatry. Much of the biblical text is about the sin of idolatry, and often that sin leads to all other sins. Yet what really is Idolatry? It is objectification, turning what we see into an object that we venerate. In art, this is a big problem because we venerate the object so much we draw a symbol for the subject of our artwork, not what is really in front of us. When asked to draw a house we invariably draw a pentagon for example. When we draw an eye we draw two curved lines and one or two round ones inside. These are symbols, not something that looks like the house I live in or and accurate representation of my eye. We learn this very young that things are objects. Teachers reward young children for drawing a pentagon as a symbol of a house, not what the house looks like. Like some abstract painting full of symbol, we can read symbols, but there are no recognizable features we see with our own eyes, which is why the caption of MOM, DAD My DOG SPoT always accompanies such drawings. The result according to most art educators is that when people try for more realistic drawing they can’t because they’re stuck in drawing the symbols, the idols before their eyes
The solution to more realistic drawing is one many artists have used over the years. While the sculptures of Rodin are what most people remember him for, he also did a lot of drawings. A friend of mine recently became enamored with those drawings, and in a bit of inspiration I tried my hand at the style Rodin used. Rodin in these sketches was not getting complicated with details but drew the contour and negative space around the figure. Instead of drawing the model, he drew the space around the model. It is one of the earliest exercises in any drawing class, and the idea is to get the budding artist to stop drawing symbols by not looking at the symbols at all – just the place where the air meets something solid. While the picture is also not realistic, the result is a change in how we look at the world. A table is not a rectangular slab with legs but a series of shapes showing where the space is. Similarly, Claude Debussy famously said that great music comes from the space between the notes, a phrase often repeated by many musicians after him. For the artist, it is space around the objects, not the objects in it that tell us more about our world.
We often look at the object and not the space around the object – We objectify things. While this does have advantages, it also makes us not see the picture clearly, because we deal with the object not what is really in front of us. When we do this with people, we believe that behaviors will be according to what that object should do, not who the living person really is.
Often such drawing is an important exercise in contrast. There is a Hasidic story that tells of the Maggid of Kotznitz not giving a rich man a blessing because he eats so modestly. The Maggid explains to his puzzled students that if a rich man eats like a poor man he will have no sympathy for the poor. As long as the rich man eats only bread he might think that the poor can live on stones [Gates of Repentance p.234]. We have to see that a person is in need of help in order to help. Similarly, we often do not understand personal boundaries. Instead of recognizing personal boundaries, we exploit and hurt people, sometimes not even meaning to. That too brings on sin, and we make the wrong turn. To find those boundaries, look at the places where there is space in our relationship with this other person. Crossing that space without permission might lead to a boundary violation. If one understands that space the relationship strengthens.
Looking through the list of confessions in the liturgy, I notice how many of these sins are about making people into objects, mere symbols of their true selves. Not just boundaries happen in space, but all relationships. We relate to people in space, not in form. By knowing space we have the map, the one we can read not to make that wrong turn in Albuquerque. If we see the space of the relationship change, then we can know we need to do some backtracking or diverting to get back on course with that relationship. Yom Kippur is a point where we can look around and check all of those relationships; we can look at that map and decide where we want to go from here. Then we do t’shuvah, we turn from our present course toward better relationship. Unlike Bugs Bunny, when we get to Albuquerque, we know to turn left.

Parshat Vayelech /Shabbat Shuvah 5769: Tashlich, Seagulls and a Mid-Holiday Rant

There is one thing about paying customers, you never want to piss them off. It’s what makes the job of the prophet so annoying – you’re not making money at this gig and no one listens to you. As we’ll read next week at the end on Yom Kippur, only Jonah had some clue of the bind he was put in, and wanted out of such a game so fast, he flees in the third verse of the book. Prophecy or anything where you have to rebuke people is never popular. For that reason a lot of people, like Jonah, avoid it. I really should avoid it too, but I’m going to indulge for two reasons. First anyone reading this is probably not the people I’m talking about. Secondly, part of T’shuvah as I talked about last week is getting a few things off one’s chest.
If anything set me off it was standing on a cold pier on a cloudy day feeding the seagulls. If you live on a very large open body of water, you probably realize that the Tashlich ritual is not about casting away your sins into the water so fish can eat them, as much as feeding the seagulls. Much like the classic scenes in Finding Nemo, those birds as white as angels break that illusion in their stupid single mindedness. I can just hear them saying:

Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.

I usually do Tashlich alone, the morning of the second day of Rosh Hashanah before I set out for services. This year I was asked by my rabbi to lead. For whatever reason, nobody came. So when I thought I was doing something for the community, I ended up just taking a very long walk to the lake and performing tashlich by myself the seagulls, and a very startled duck. With the bread that was representing my sins, I did not just throw the sins away, but some negative thinking as well. Maybe throwing away such thinking is more appropriate than the mere sins which we ask forgiveness for on Yom Kippur. Tashlich is more about changing the pattern of thinking so we do not sin again. We take something we could eat ourselves, infuse it with the darkness within our selves and throw it away. But will our sin come back? We read in this week’s portion with Moses and Joshua standing before the pillar of cloud:

16. And the Lord said to Moses, Behold, you shall sleep with your fathers; and this people will rise, and play the harlot after the gods of the strangers of the land, where they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them. 17. Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them; so that they will say in that day, Are not these evils come upon us, because our God is not among us? 18. And I will surely hide my face in that day because of all the evils which they shall have done, in that they are turned to other gods.[Deut 31]

God then tells Joshua:

23. And he gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge, and said, Be strong and of a good courage; for you shall bring the people of Israel into the land which I swore to them; and I will be with you.[Deut 31]

Joshua’s going to need that encouragement; he’s going to do his job only for it to fail. He probably feels a lot like Jonah, knowing how futile his job is. Even someone as optimistic and full of faith on God as Joshua, an optimism that got him and Caleb alone into the land in the first place, has got to feel the pessimism.
There is an environment in a synagogue that I find different during much of the High Holidays. I found a lot of people feel the same way about the High Holidays. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Admonishment of Conservative rabbis in 1953 rang through my mind the first day of services.

We have developed the habit of praying by proxy. Many congregants seem to have adopted the principle of vicarious prayer. The rabbi or the cantor does the praying for the congregation. In particular, it is the organ that does the singing for the whole community. Too often the organ has become the prayer leader. Indeed, when the organ begins to thunder, who can compete with its songs? Men and women are not allowed to raise their voices, unless the rabbi issues the signal. They have come to regard the rabbi as a master of ceremonies. Is not their mood, in part, a reflection of our own uncertainties? Prayer has become an empty gesture, a figure of speech. [MGSA, 101-2]

On the days where we stand in judgment, we pray the most soulless prayer of all because we don’t pray from our hearts. Avinu Malkeinu and Netana Tokef are performances and recitations not personal gut-wrenching spiritual pleas for our soul. I believe the rabbis cantors, organ players and choir all are in their own way praying their prayer, but lost in their incredible performance and personal prayer is the congregational prayer. Lost even more because the majority of the congregation doesn’t want to pray. They show up because it’s the one thing they do all year. That is all they do all year, yet they expect the same performance year after year. Any change comes with criticism. At my synagogue one of the most emotional moments in the service does not even exist in the liturgy, but is an additional reading from Ezekiel, one that has had a lot of criticism. Yet it is these same people whose dollars keep the synagogue alive. In one sense this empty spiritual day called Rosh Hashanah I in the prayer book is there to let me pray spiritually the rest of the year.
I do not believe like Heschel, that kavvanah, spiritual intention, is near extinction the rest of the year, only on these few days. Even the second day of Rosh Hashanah is such a different experience. Here is a much smaller congregation of people who really want to pray. Even when someone forgets to turn off the air conditioning on a 50°F day, it’s still warmer in the glow of being spiritual. I feel part of the prayer community instead of an audience.
Yet what I do fear is something Heschel did not imagine in 1953. The traditions as they are now might keep those who had gone to services every year once or twice a year for decades coming for those same old traditions and tunes. It is those same people I fear about as the numbers of walkers, wheelchairs and oxygen tanks found in the synagogue increase. Even that source of income for synagogue operations is running out as the Angel of Death does his task. In looking at the lack of spiritual meaning in the Rosh Hashanah service, I wonder if we are replacing the loss. If there is no spiritual value in this, the supposedly greatest moment of the Jewish year, why would the young people come to synagogue the rest of the year? The answer of course is most of the younger don’t return on their own for there is nothing there for them – at least not on that one day they show up. By the time they have families, it's too late.
Like Joshua’s mood getting his new position as leader and telling him he’ll do a good job but things are going to fail anyway, I contemplated this while walking back from the lake on that cloudy cold day. I threw my pessimism into the lake for the seagulls to chew on. Like Joshua, when he was in a minority of two to virtually everyone else, he kept his cool because he knew it was not him but God that would help get the job done. Standing near the banks of the Jordan, Joshua must have felt like this: both pessimistic but optimistically faithful.
Yom Kippur, from Kol Nidre to Havdalah will be only slightly different. There are personal practices that allow us to personally bring meaning. Fasting is of course the most obvious. Fasting is not as much about punishing ourselves, as having the discipline the Kavvanah, the intention not to eat. Yom Kippur I will fast. If I can make myself do something that is required by my body, how much more so can I make myself stop doing things destructive to my body and soul? Yet for tashlich, why did I not have anyone fill the tummies of seagulls and fish? Everyone wanted to fill their own bellies instead. The disciplines that come with spirituality are seen as an inconvenience, not a way of discipline and connection. Yet the prayers will be just as empty, only filling with meaning sometime when my belly is at its most empty.
The most meaningful service for me these Days of Awe will be the one this Shabbat – Shabbat Shuvah. This is probably one of the least attended Shabbat services of the year, since everyone is “serviced out.” It is the Shabbat where we think about our lives and where we are going. We pray an additional liturgy that we do not any other day of the year. For the first time ever, it will be out of a new siddur built on a foundation of Kavvanah. All of this in the deeply personal, intimate environment of the prayer community I have week in and week out. I wish all those young people would skip Rosh Hashanah and come to Shabbat Shuvah instead. For this, they might stay and thrive in the prayer community.
Sadly all I hear instead is those seagulls, young and old, of every movement saying

Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.

Rosh Hashanah 5769: Facebook and the Goy Letter

I’ve been watching with amusement many of the news feeds I have on social networking sites like Facebook all of the rabbis scrambling to write their most important sermon of the year. I am partially amused because I started Shlomo’s Drash for Rosh Hashanah 48 hours before Rosh Hashanah, so I’m in the thick of this too. Fortunately I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and the outcome of my piece doesn't change the course of thousands of lives, unlike those with a smicha. I also want to start in an odd place – Christmas.

I don’t remember the first time I got one, but it was somewhere around twenty years ago. A friend of mine from college, who is an ordained minister, started sending a letter updating everyone about her life over the past year. It was always fun to read and find out what she was up to in her Christmas letter. Yet I was startled one day when I received from a rather non practicing Jew of my acquaintance a Christmas letter again updating everyone on the changes of her life and family. While I understood the letter from the minster, from another Jew it just seemed a bit weird. I’ve never felt completely comfortable with that letter, which until now I often privately called “the goy letter.”

That was until the year I received during the days of awe another letter like the first two from a dear friend and fellow congregant. Strangely enough, it lost its goyishe feel in its timing. It was then I realized what makes this letter comfortable or uncomfortable is the timing. When at the end of a religious year it is a taking stock before the New Year. It is actually a religious act. I would feel just as uncomfortable with my non practicing Jew genuflecting as I do with that letter, yet I don’t with the congregant and the minister.

I think that letter is the whole point of Rosh Hashanah, and my congregant friend had it right on the mark. The Days of Awe are the time when we take stock of who we are. We note what we have done wrong and what we really want to do right in the next round. I have often in this Rosh Hashanah D’var written that I’m not comfortable with a name written in one of two log books called the Book of Death and the Book of Life. Instead I believe we all have our own books. It is neither the book of life nor the book of death but the book of fully living. Everything we do and are exists in this book. The results of the past year are just a chapter in this book. That chapter may be full of stuff to read or boring, it may have cliff hangers or it may contain that rather dread ending THE END. While that might be a bad ending, what is worse is blank pages meaning we never really lived in this past year. I often like to wish someone “may you be inscribed in the book of fully living.”

That letter is particular impacting me this year for a very modern reason. A friend of mine tempted me into starting to use Facebook, and to say the least I’m addicted. For those not familiar with Facebook, it is one of many of the social networking tools available on the internet. Essentially you are given a web page. All you have to do is fill it with stuff about your self. One can log pictures, videos, and of course text. People write about their lives one small thought at a time. The object of all this is to connect with others. The Facebook database allows finding other people you might know in a variety of ways. Then you electronically ask them to be a Facebook friend. Once they agree, you have access to read all the stuff in one’s page, and communicate publicly on their “wall” or more privately via internal e-mail.

Through Facebook I come across a lot of people I used to know including a lot from my college days. Like my friend the minister, I have been writing repeatedly my story over and over again of the last twenty years. Yet after that introductory letter to a new Facebook friend who was an old acquaintance, things get into the swing of reading each other’s status messages. Status messages are nothing more than single sentence messages publicly broadcasted to your friends telling them what you think or what you are doing. It is of course voluntary. Some friends are chatterboxes and let you know a lot, or give their opinion constantly. Others are more silent. But from reading those messages you have a constant stream of seemingly trivial information about a person, which gives a texture different from the update letter. Such texture is so rich there are other services like Twitter which do nothing but update statuses.

I’ve been thinking lately that the holiday letter is much like the High Holidays, while Facebook is our day to day experience of the mitzvot. One is comprehensive, and grandiose the other simple small and very personal. We write not on keyboard or pen and ink, but with actions and deeds. For some their entire experience is that letter. For others, including myself, the richer experience is the status messages, in the periodic prayer of more regular services. It allows me to be in relationship with others. When they need a friendly presence I can be there for them – if not personally at least in communication electronically I can comfort them. When I need someone, there can also be there some one for me.

While I could debate which is better the letter or status messages, there is a third possibility that is so sad and tragic it is the thing we all should work on in some part of our lives.

This year, for the first time I traveled to Israel. While there were many memorable moments, there was one that blew me away – the hippodrome in Caesarea. It was neither the horse races nor the architecture that I was thinking about. It was a man who most likely stood where I stood on the sand of the arena overlooking the Mediterranean. His name is Simon b. Lakish, though known throughout the Talmud as Resh Lakish. Before he was one of the greatest sages in the Talmud, some claim he was a gladiator. If he was, it was on this field he most likely fought, the horse racing field turned into a gladiatorial arena by his time. We also know that R. Eliezer b. Hyrcanus spent his last years there as his bier was being carried from this town to his birth place of Lydda. [Sanhedrin 68a] Resh Lakish and R. Eliezer had a lot in common though living about a century or so apart. Both had a brother in law they spent much of their lives getting along with, indeed had a deep friendship. Yet a small matter broke that friendship and they would not talk to one another. Bitterness and pain would curse them till their dying days.

I went into detail about the oven of aknai incident in my Drash for Nitzavim 5766. The short version was over the permissibility of a oven with interchangeable parts, R. Eliezer was excommunicated and all of his judgments made invalid by his brother in law Gamaliel II. There was bitterness between the two, so much so that R. Eliezer’s wife, Imma Shalom made sure her husband was not alone so he could not pray for the death of her brother. Once she was quickly interrupted.

[On her return] she found him fallen on his face. ‘Arise,’ she cried out to him, ‘you hast slain my brother.’ In the meanwhile an announcement was made from the house of Rabban Gamaliel that he had died. ‘Where do you know it?’ he questioned her. ‘I have this tradition from my father's house: All gates are locked, excepting the gates of wounded feelings.’

Wounded feelings were also at the heart of another pair. R. Johanan and Resh Lakish. Their story begins with an act of t’shuvah, the evil Resh Lakish changing his tune:

One day R. Johanan was bathing in the Jordan, when Resh Lakish saw him and leapt into the Jordan after him. Said he [R. Johanan] to him, ‘Your strength should be for the Torah.’ — ‘Your beauty,’ he replied, ‘should be for women.’ ‘If you will repent,’ said he, ‘I will give you my sister [in marriage], who is more beautiful than I.’ He undertook [to repent]; then he wished to return and collect his weapons, but could not.[Baba Metziah 84a]

Resh Lakish becomes an incredible scholar, though one day he and R. Johanan get into a heated argument about the point in manufacture where blades are can become spiritually contaminated. In a crass statement, R. Johanan mentions Resh Lakish’s sordid past, and thing go downhill from there, both men incredibly hurt and unwilling to forgive the other.

Resh Lakish died, and R. Johanan was plunged into deep grief. Said the Rabbis, ‘Who shall go to ease his mind? Let R. Eleazar b. Pedath go, whose disquisitions are very subtle.’ So he went and sat before him; and on every dictum uttered by R. Johanan he observed: ‘There is a Baraitha which Supports you.’ ‘Are you as the son of Lakisha?’[i.e. Resh Lakish] he complained: ‘when I stated a law, the son of Lakisha used to raise twenty-four objections, to which I gave twenty-four answers, which consequently led to a fuller comprehension of the law; whilst you say, "A Baraitha has been taught which supports you:" do I not know myself that my dicta are right?’ Thus he went on rending his garments and weeping, ‘Where are you, O son of Lakisha, where are you, O son of Lakisha;’ and he cried thus until his mind was turned. Thereupon the Rabbis prayed for him, and he died.[ibid.]

Without his friend, brother-in law and colleague, R. Johanan, the redactor of the Jerusalem Talmud, dies in grief so deep it drives him insane. Their relationship made Johanan a better person, one who was able to make the brilliant rulings he is famous for. Without Resh Lakish he falls into nothingness, half of his soul ripped away by his own anger. Such anger is not just for one generation but many. In a corollary to this story, we hear another.

On another occasion R. Johanan met the young son of Resh Lakish sitting and reciting the verse, The foolishness of man perverted his way; and his heart frets against the Lord. (19:3) R. Johanan thereupon exclaimed in amazement: Is there anything written in the Hagiographa to which allusion cannot be found in the Torah? The boy replied: Is then this verse not alluded to in the Torah, seeing that it is written, And their heart failed them, and they turned trembling one to another, saying: ‘What is this that God hath done unto us?’(Gen. 42:28) R. Johanan lifted up his eyes and stared at him, whereupon the boy's mother came and took him away, Saying to him, ‘Go away from him, lest he does to you as he did unto your father’. [Ta'anith 9a]

Resh Lakish’s Son and wife both show their bitterness in their own ways against R. Johanan. The Sister of R. Johanan in a very direct way, and the son and nephew of Johanan in a battle of wits, citing a verse in Genesis about the cruelty of brothers. The bitter feud only ends in death.

These stories are not about poor little shlubs but the best and brightest of the Talmud. They are there to tell us a significant thing one we must think about not only between humans but between ourselves and God. Communication is important. Saying how we feel is important. Most of all, not letting those feelings dwell in silence is important, for they will burn a deep black hole that will only leads to sadness and destruction. We must express ourselves and our stories, our chapters in the book of fully living.

Often the goy letter is superficial, how the kids are doing, how many cars and houses we have, where we went on vacation. It gives us more of a status than the Facebook status message. The problem with the status message, and daily communication in general, is while it often has more of our soul in it, it is in such small amounts it is imperceptible. R. Johanan and Resh Lakish only blew up at one another over a small matter, yet underneath there was something building that needed to explode, and when it was lit by a small spark it ended both their lives. Neither lived in the book of fully living ever again.

The letter to our friends and the letter to God during the High Holiday season need to be the release valve. Often we are clueless about what underneath the surface is dwelling. Sometimes we do but are afraid to admit it. In our very public setting of public liturgy we can try to find and release those feelings that have been building over a year both to Man and God. On a daily basis, like twitter and Facebook, we need to express those feelings, both by really talking to people we have wronged and who wronged us, or to God in our daily or Shabbat prayers. In do so we try to work it our before either become a powder keg.

Imma Shalom noted well that the gates of hurt feelings are never closed. God always hears them. What we do with them is the important thing. We can be destructive or we can be reconciliatory. To work towards reconciliation is not to be weak, but requires a deeper strength to truly resolve the problem instead of placating one party. Placating only buries the problem for an explosion later as the resentment continues and increases

As a writer and speaker, I’m never exactly sure who I have offended or hurt by my works in public settings, in my speech and in my writings. As a prelude to this season of repentance, May I ask for forgiveness to all who I did offend. I’m sorry I hurt you if I did. I’m not prefect, but I will try better next year not to do the same.

And may you all have a great exciting and wonderful chapter in the book of fully living for 5769!

Parshat Nitzavim 5768: That you may live

I wanted to write something else this week, but I've been thinking environmentally lately, for a lot of reasons.

One was a major reason I never got to write a Shlomo's Drash last week. Due to the sloppy seconds of a hurricane, the nearby rivers flooded. Apparently while leaving its banks, the Des Plaines River decided to visit a switching box for telephone and internet to my office, silencing all landlines for days. Throughout the Mississippi river valley and of course the coast of Texas, there were incidents of flooding and damage far worse than ours. Yet in many of these places the damage from mold has only just begun, both to buildings and to the people living in them. I have a friend and colleague who was a relief worker from Katrina, who still suffers from a severe mold infection she picked up getting food facilities operational in the aftermath of Katrina.

Another reason is a phrase from last week's portion Ki Tavo in Deuteronomy 28:27.

27. The Lord will strike you with the pox of Egypt, and with the swellings, and with the scab, and with the itch, from which you can not be healed.

It mentions many diseases and during our usual Saturday morning Torah discussion after the Torah service, a physician in my congregation noted how powerless it seems physicians were in this scenario. I countered with an interesting thought: this is about not curative medicine but preventative. This is a matter of environmental health. Many of those diseases start with waterborne parasites and bacteria and lack of care for the water supplies.

This week we read

19. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live; [Deuteronomy 30:19]

I've thought a lot about that in terms of our environment. Much of what I do for a living is making sure what is in the natural world around us does not hurt us. As terrifying as a tiger lion or rattle snake looks, such animals are no where as dangerous or kill as many people as Tuberculosis or HIV, which are completely invisible. Such is true with bacteria like species of Salmonella and Shigella or the parasite Entamoeba histolytica. These are found in contaminated waters and foods which look perfectly edible or drinkable, yet they kill millions yearly.

I thought of Snow this week in all the flooding. Not the white stuff but the man, John Snow. Another friend and college will be on sabbatical in England this year. My first question to her was “are you going to The Pump?” In my profession as a health inspector, we may inspect thousands of water pumps, but there is only one Pump. Near 39 Broadwick Street in London is the pump that in 1854 Dr. John Snow and Reverend Henry Whitehead deduced was the source of a cholera outbreak, one of the first to connect water supplies with the disease. By removing the handle and preventing people drinking the water, they ended the outbreak which claimed the lives of 616 people.

A white powder that wasn’t snow was also on my mind – powdered melamine. It’s all over the news feeds I read. In china, Close to 13,000 children have been hospitalized and close to 40,000 more have been affected due to the practice of not adding enough milk to infant formula and covering up the lack of protein by adding melamine. The material has been collecting in infant’s kidneys causing painful kidney stones.

19. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live; [Deuteronomy 30:19

From the heavens come rain which falls and finds their way into rivers. From some of those rivers water seeped into the earth, making water tables and aquifers. From wells dug into the ground, like the inhabitants of Broadwick Street in the 1800’s, some get their water. As I write this, I’m looking at the blue water of Lake Michigan, the source of my drinking water, which too has had it problems with Cholera and Salmonella, till the lock I’m looking out upon helped to reverse the flow of the Chicago River.

Moses challenges us in Deuteronomy

15. See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil; 16. In that I command you this day to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the Lord your God shall bless you in the land which you are entering to possess. 17. But if your heart turns away, so that you will not hear, but shall be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; 18. I announce to you this day, that you shall surely perish, and that you shall not prolong your days upon the land, to which you are going over the Jordan, to enter and possess.[Deut. 30:15-18]

We are given the responsibility for the commandments. We can do them or we don’t. Many of them affect the environment around us and the people around us. We can be unethical in our business dealings, putting poison in food to make a bigger profit. We can ignore not just the widow and the orphan but the sources of water that they drink. We can exploit the soil until there are no nutrients left in it. Because it is too expensive or too much of a bother, in many ways in our world, we can not bother to put that parapet on the roof. To do any of these leads to the curses, the chemical, microscopic and some not so microscopic demons that will attack and defeat us.

To do the commandments we must obey them on many levels if we are to live healthy. It is not God’s punishment, but our own foolishness that brings cholera outbreaks. We must remain diligent against the attackers. Moses says there is no real cure for this stuff. As we have learned with antibiotic resistance, there is only prevention; there is only the fence around the Torah.

Writing the Drash for Nitzavim means the end of year 5768 and the beginning of 5769. While I fell into this life through a series of odd coincidences and what I thought of as curses, the prevention of disease, Environmental Health, is my life calling and the biggest blessing in my life. 5769 will be a year where that will be true more than ever as I step up to several new tasks on the national level. How we treat the environment and how it treats us determine a lot of our own health.

As 5769 begins, remember to choose life.

Ki Tetze 5768: What is Environmental Health?

At the end of a nonstop string of commandments this week we read two rather interesting and contradictory commandments. We are to remember Amalek did to us [Deut 25:17], and we are to erase the memory of Amalek [Deut 25:19]. How can we do both? I believe the answer is woven throughout this week’s Torah reading, but its key is rather simple:

8. When you build a new house, then you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you should not bring any blood upon your house, if any man falls from there. [22:8]

What does a biblical enemy have to do with a railing? First let’s look a little closer at Amalek, who first show up in the Book of Exodus not long after the Israelites cross the read Sea out of Egypt[17:8-16]. They begin their pattern of picking on the rear, on those who cannot defend themselves. We later read in I Samuel 30 of an Amalekite Attack in the settlement of Ziklag, where David had settled to keep out of Saul’s way. David and all his troops go to war, and while gone, Amalek raids Ziklag and takes all the women and children. Yet when David attacks the Amalekites, he makes easy work of them. The Amalek of the Bible attacks the weak and defenseless.

I interpret the modern Amalek as disease. Salmonella enteritis, Aspergillus flavius, Bacillus anthracis, E. coli STEC, Shigella sonnei, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Vibiro cholera are just some of the soldiers of Amalek, be they bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi. Most often these soldiers attack the weak or when we leave ourselves defenseless. Like David, who forgot to leave a garrison, when we are not diligent they strike, often taking lives as easily as someone falling off a roof.

Like that rooftop terrace, the easiest, best way to keep people alive is to prevent them from falling off. According to Torah, it is preventative actions that are key to survival. We as Jews believe that preventative actions are so important, not only do we do things like put railing on roofs, but put fences around the Torah itself, preventative actions to prevent transgression. Prevention works. Had David left a few good men behind, Amalek would not have attacked. Even if they did they would have been easily defeated. We have such soldiers in the modern war against Amalek. They are called Environmental Health professionals. When I’m not writing Shlomo’s Drash, I happen to be one.

Many people get Environmental Health mixed up with environmental protection. Environmental protection I usually define as protecting the environment against us, while environmental health is protecting us from the environment. Environmental health professionals instruct people how to make what is contaminated into what is pure. We as EH professionals try to prevent contamination, so that the people will live and not die. We include indoor air quality experts, epidemiologists, and wastewater treatment specialists. Many of us, including myself are involved with food protection. If those soldiers of Amalek do get loose and start to cause trouble we find them and do our best to contain them. Much of this is reminiscent of a good chunk of the book of Leviticus in chapters 11-16 which talks about such contamination issues from bloodborne pathogens, mold infestations of homes, sexually transmitted diseases, and even what most biblical translations call leprosy, which more likely was fungal infections. Leprosy is once again mentioned in this week’s portion:

8. Take heed in the plague of leprosy, that you observe diligently, and do according to all that the priests the Levites shall teach you; as I commanded them, so you shall take care to do.

In a sense Environmental Health is the role of Levitical priests with a strong science background. Ancient peoples did learn important lessons in public health. There is one passage in this week’s portion which particularly interests me. When in military maneuvers against an enemy, there is a commandment to have latrines:

13. You shall have a place also outside the camp, where you shall go out to it; 14. And you shall have a spade among your weapons; and it shall be, when you will ease yourself outside, you shall dig with it, and shall turn back and cover your excrement; 15. For the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp, to save you, and to give your enemies before you; therefore shall your camp be holy; that he should see no unclean thing in you, and turn away from you. [23:10-15]

The Talmudic Rabbis take this further:

R. Johanan also said: If one desires to accept upon himself the yoke of the kingdom of heaven in the most complete manner , he should consult nature then wash his hands and put on tefillin and recite the Shema’ and say the tefillah: this is the complete acknowledgment of the kingdom of heaven.[Berachot 15a]

Fecal contamination is a major cause of foodborne and waterborne illness. In these two passages from the Torah and Talmud, it is clear that cleanliness and good hygienic practices are holy acts. The rabbis elevate washing ones hands after defecation to the same level as the morning prayers. Interestingly, the spade is not a mere vessel or implement but specifically called a weapon. It is the weapon used against the modern and probably the ancient Amalek. Preventing disease by keeping away what causes disease is a mitzvah. Environmental health’s duty is to do exactly that.

What I do for a living may not be considered some holy job like a rabbi. But in teaching people to wash their hands, cook their food well, store their food below 41°F and wash everything in sight, I am doing something holy, and something sacred. By telling people not to store something on the floor, to close up holes that mice or rats can crawl through, I am installing that railing on the roof.

As I learned when I taught a session on kashrut at my national professional meetings, Jews are a tiny minority in Environmental Health. Yet I also learned that day the Torah has much to teach us about EH. For me, my life in Environmental Heath is not just a profession but a mitzvah handed down by God to Moses at Sinai.

To remove the memory of Amalek and to remember Amalek is not contradictory. It is the role of those of us who keep disease from ever striking. We can get to place where we forget the horrors that disease causes on us, because disease is no longer there. We must get there with constant diligence against disease, and the ever changing, mutating, evolving pathogens that make up the army of Amalek.

What is Environmental Health? It is a mission from God.

Parshat Shofetim 5768: How is War like Dating?

The long list of Mitzvot continues this week. Among them are the rules to be read prior to the engagement of an overwhelming enemy:

2. And it shall be, when you have come near the battle, that the priest shall approach and speak to the people, 3. And shall say to them, Hear, O Israel, you approach this day to battle against your enemies; let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, nor be you terrified because of them; 4. For the Lord your God is he who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.

After this speech, another is given, disqualifying some for service:

5. And the officers shall speak to the people, saying, What man is there who has built a new house, and has not dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicates it. 6. And what man is he who has planted a vineyard, and has not yet eaten of it? Let him also go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man eats of it. 7. And what man is there who has betrothed a wife, and has not taken her? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man takes her. 8. And the officers shall speak further to the people, and they shall say, What man is there who is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go and return to his house, lest his brothers’ heart faint as well as his heart.

When I read this last week, I read an interesting commentary in the Second edition Plaut Torah commentary about the need to keep people with anxiety out of the troops, so as not to sabotage the cause. Again these are soldiers who are up against seemingly overwhelming odds, enemy troops with not just infantry, but mounted soldiers. Targum pseudo-Jonathan calls the enemy “proud and powerful peoples.” Unfortunately when I sat down to write this, I didn’t have my copy of the second edition Plaut handy. So I started digging in the more classical commentaries, seeing if anyone else said anything. It turns out they all agree with the commentary given by the Mishnah and Talmud on the subject. There are two opinions, one from Rabbi Akiba, and one from Rabbi Yosi of the Galilee.

R. Yosi had the more predominant opinion, to the point that the Targums, Maimonides and Rashi all agree with him, based on the last case:

R. Jose the Galilean says: ‘fearful and fainthearted’ alludes to one who is afraid because of the transgressions he had committed; therefore the Torah connected all these with him that he may return home on their account. [Sotah 44a]

The person leaving the army committed some sin. There three other cases were really excuses to get this guy out of the army. The Aramaic translations, the Targums add that there can be cases where a transgression might be about houses fields or marriage, such as a forgetting to post a mezuzah on a new house before going to war (Ps-J). But why is the fearful and fainthearted so dangerous?

Rashi and Maimonides turn to Akiba’s literal approach:

R. Akiba says: ‘fearful and fainthearted’ is to be understood literally viz., he is unable to stand in the battle-ranks and see a drawn sword.

As Rashi explains

He should return lest he die, for if he does not listen to the words of the priest, he deserves to die.

The priest anointed for battle just said that there is nothing to worry about. The guy who didn’t heed that according to Maimonides “does not properly trust in God” and therefore he won’t be protected in the war. In the heat of battle his faithlessness might spread to the rest of the troops, and that is fatal for the entire army. Yet such a fearful person might also be afraid to leave the army due to his embarrassment. R. Yosi of the Galilee’s thus explains that the other three reasons give him a cover to leave without the embarrassment of being labeled a coward.

Thinking about it, cowardice might be fatal even before battle, for the Torah continues:

When you come near a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace to it.[Deut 20:10]

There is disagreement between the medieval French commentator R. Solomon b. Isaac better known as Rashi and the later Sephardic commentator Moses Maimonides, who is sometimes known as the Rambam. Both debated as to whether this is limited to discretionary wars or was for any war. Rashi, basing his opinion on the Talmud, believe only discretionary wars, and Rambam disagrees. However in light of the pronouncements above to the troops, I wonder if both misses an important point, the one the second edition of the Plaut commentary might have been hinting at.

Coming up to enemy troops or fortifications and asking for peace is not easy nor does it seem very wise. However if done with complete confidence one might just get way with it. Anyone with that much confidence must know something we don’t might be one thought running through the enemy’s mind. Yet, if there is any doubt, the opposition will see it. The one soldier with the lack of faith can spread faithlessness like a disease, and it will be visible. The enemy will exploit that weakness, attack and despite assurances from the priest anointed for battle, the bloodshed begins.

These thoughts of bloodshed are not particularly exciting. However the blood shed that I see like this happens on a mental and emotional level all the time. It is on the minds of a majority of single men who want to retreat from the field of battle either through excuses or fear. And that battle field is the world of dating.

At a simplistic level, this shouldn’t be very hard. A guy walks up to a woman, says hello and asks her out on a date. They go out on a date or two, and might find they do not like each other enough and so go their separate ways. If they like each other, then things get closer, and hopefully lead to a committed intimate relationship.

Yet a possibility of a breakup always looms. The dealing with breakup and rejection is only one of many emotional problems which make dating even more difficult than this simple model above and turns it into a battle ground. There are a variety of sources for this setup, all mixed together. One core element is a consumerist society telling us that buying a certain product will make us successful in romance. Of course the sports car, lipstick or deodorant doesn’t help. Indeed to sell the maximum amount of product, the product must be set up to fail, so more will be bought. In reality only the promise of success is sold in order to keep people buying more products.

They system in order to work requires a built in failure. The one targeted to create the failure is women, who when they wonder why they seem not to get a man, will be told to buy new products. That failure comes from requirements of what a man should be, and many of those requirements come from the same places selling the goods. Furthermore, women are looking to avoid men who might harm them that have something disturbing about their personalities which make them creepy.

In our society, we have been set up that women have virtually every opportunity to reject men, and men have to spend their entire relationship making sure they don’t. It is like the battle situations mentioned in this portion. Women have all the weapons and soldiers to fight a war, men don’t. Women have all the defenses too, all the walled cities. While physically women may not be as capable as defending themselves, there are societal norms, and emotional and mental models which defend women far more than men. For a woman in the dating world, the guy who can get through all those defenses is a valuable partner. But most men cannot, indeed they have been programmed to fail. Granted, once things become a relationship the game is very different, but getting that far is not easy from men. Often women thus stay lonely or give up and settle for something less than what they really deserve.

Men know they are set up to fail. It is just like a small army walking up to a walled, heavily fortified city. Fear is going to be in those soldiers minds. Approach anxiety looms, the fear of getting defeated with not only a rejection, but a slap on the face, a drink thrown at them, or even a jealous boyfriend or overprotective relative coming around the corner to beat the pulp out of them. All of those hurt the man, and often the anxiety will be so strong as he will not approach. Besides my own experiences with this, I’ve heard story after story of the choking effect of approach anxiety. But that is only the beginning, as the performance anxiety of not getting rejected after that point is always there for the man.

There is of course a way out of this: declare peace. The Torah in our portion gives this as the first thing one must do when approaching a city. In the classic text on strategy The Art of War 6^th century BCE general Sun-Tzu believe that waging peace is the best war, the one with no casualties on either side. But how does one wage peace? With confidence, which really no one ever really expects. In terms of combat, there is a remarkable statement made by Moses in the Midrash about walled cites and open camps:

How can you tell their strength? If they dwell in camps, they are strong, for they rely on their own strength. If they dwell in strongholds they are feeble and their hearts are timid. [Numbers Rabbah XVI:12]

The people who don’t need defenses, and don’t look defensive when they approach and ask for peace are perceived as incredibly strong. The key element women are looking for in men is strength. Masculinity and internal strength are so associated with each other there is even a word for courage relating to the male genitals. It does take balls of steel to approach women sometimes, but confidence is the one thing that short circuits the whole game. An army approaching a city can be terrifying if they have the confidence to win. The high priest’s message was critical. As those medieval scholars Rashi and Maimonides said, only those who believed in the miracle of going into battle and coming out unharmed were unharmed. Anyone without that kind of faith dies. Anyone around who could create doubt would be detected by the opponent.

All excuses and all fear needs to be removed from the front lines. I’m with Akiba here and take things literally. Thinking about anything but the engagement ahead could be fatal not just to the person who is distracted, but to the entire army. Fear of attacking and fear of defending will also cause people to lose heart in the ranks. In that critical moment when we wage peace, we must look completely confident. I really don’t know if this really works in war, but in the battlefields of relationships, it is a critical lesson.

Parshat Reeh 5768: What are Curses and Blessings?

This week our portion begins:

26. See, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse;[Deuteronomy 11:26]

For the last few weeks or so I’ve been wondering something: what exactly is a blessing and a curse? The answer from the biblical text seems simple:

27. A blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day; 28. And a curse, if you will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which you have not known.[Deuteronomy 11:27-28]

It seems obvious, yet it also seems a little unjust. It presents the dilemma many have asked: what happens when bad thing happen to good people? In this simple version, there’s only one answer: you did something bad. The Midrash gives a parable of a king who holds a gold necklace in one hand and Iron chains in the other and asks his servant: make a choice of how I am to handle you.

Many have also asked these questions about big events, like 9/11 or the Shoah. I’m more interested in smaller, more personal events. We’ve all have them – they may be very small things like a bad day, to more significant events, such as an auto accident, and disability, or other tragic trauma to our lives.

I have disabilities I genetically inherited from my grandfather. I also have had two rather traumatic events in my life, leading to other disabilities. Looking at these events against what I did wrong just doesn’t make sense. So I’m left asking: why did these things happen to me?

I was contemplating this last Friday afternoon, frustrated with many of these problems in many spheres. The easiest one to talk about is my summer long frustration with two problems I was born with: motor hand coordination problem and color blindness. When I was young I frequently flunked art and got horrible grades in handwriting. The classic story which I’ve told many times was the time I was ridiculed in front of the class for coloring Abraham Lincoln’s face sea green, since I couldn’t tell the sea green from the peach crayon. Even in my first graduate school, when I did my comprehensive examinations, I almost failed due to my inability to write fast and legible enough to complete the exams.

To think I was taking a life drawing and painting class this summer when I had such horrible experiences is amazing. I have learned to use watercolor, and most of my issues can be addressed in that media. When I switched to pastel and Acrylic for this class, my past came back. While I can make color by laying two colors over one another in watercolor, picking out a specific pastel stick, or mixing my own colors was not so easy. It was near impossible. I thought about that last night as I was panicking in the middle of mixing the right skin mid-tone color. I’ve though about that on many occasions when I am unable to perform some function or another. Like I said I’ve had a lot of those happen recently and some not as innocent as what color to make a face.

So I was feeling down on myself last Friday, when I started to listen to an interview with Sean Stephenson on a podcast I subscribe to. Stephenson was born with a bone disease which does not let his bones grow. Indeed they are extremely brittle. Most die in childhood, though Stephenson has survived and is now in his thirties. Because of this, he has only grown to three feet high and is confined to a wheel chair, always concerned about breaking his fragile as glass bones. He told the interviewer the story of when his life changed around. He was in fourth grade and it was Halloween, the only day of the year he wasn’t stared at like a freak. Unfortuantely, he accidentally broke his leg. Crying “Why did this disease happen to me?” his mother responded by giving him a choice: this could either be a curse, or this could be a gift. It was up to him to decide. It was for him a defining moment.

Stephenson told another story in the interview of a girlfriend who broke up with him. She complained to him that had the mind he has been in a different body, she would have loved him. He retorted back “my mind is because of this body.” Many times our world has things in it which seem negative. Though our own effort and God’s will, curses may be turned into many positives. The first time I experienced it, was in a high school elective of fencing for my PE class. My lack of coordination made it difficult for me to catch or throw balls, run, or do many of the athletic things most kids take for granted. I often was the kid who nobody wanted to pick because I was so inept at sports. That was until senor year of high school when I took the fencing elective. Another way I am not ‘normal’ is I am left handed. Picking up a left handed foil I ended up going undefeated against a class of right handed students who had no defense against me. I ended up coaching fencing in college.

But I look at my paintings, including that acrylic one I did finish last night, and I can be proud of my work. As I have learned from my teacher I have turned my colorblindness to my advantage. When I paint, I do not think that this thing has to be green or this thing has to be yellow. I think this thing need to be dark and this thing has to be light. I don’t get tripped up by color as do many students. I get incredibly methodical in my mixing of colors. Ironically, being colorblind means my pieces are glowing and fresh with color. A curse is really a blessing – but only because I made it so and learned color theory.

While the rest of the section reviews many mitzvot, this one line may be at its heart. How we view and act in the world may change what happens to us. We can see anything for good or ill. It may be a blessing or a curse. The mitzvot is a tool for keeping us in the right frame of mind to see things as blessings. When a date who was non religious asked me about some mitzvot mentioned in this week’s portion, kashrut, I told her it was important to me not because it was a rule forced on me but because it was a way of making my life a bit more holy. Granted, I’m not the most observant when it comes to kashrut. Kashrut for me means I’m looking in the world for blessings, not curses. When I say all the blessings of the morning service, I notice more blessings around me, from a beautiful painting on my wall to an interview of Sean Stephenson showing up exactly when it did. Some of my supposed curses, like Stephenson, gave me opportunities that others don’t have to grow and build my self in ways I never could have imagined.

Curses and blessings? Maybe only God knows. Or maybe God only gives challenges and it is up to us to make them a curse or make them a blessing.

Parshat Eikev 5768: God: Fear, Love or Awe?

Moses continues his speech, with plenty of admonishments to go around about previous failures. In mid-speech he says something most of us are familiar with:

12. And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, 13. To keep the commandments of the Lord, and his statutes, which I command you this day for your good? (Deut 10:12-13)

What is this thing we call the fear of God? A lot of people call themselves “God fearing,” but what does that mean? In a patriarchal sense it may mean we believe in a God who is ready to mete out punishment. Yet at the same time we read in the Shema to love God, with all our heart soul and might. Deuteronomy 10:12 here paradoxically tells us we are to both fear and love God. How do you do both?
As students of Hebrew will tell you the word in Hebrew for fear, yarei’ also means awe. As beginning students of Hebrew will also tell you, they often get the word for fear mixed up with the word for seeing, ra’ah. The reason is grammatical. Hebrew most often uses a three letter root as the basis for a verb. Verb conjugation is the addition of letters to this three letter root. There are problems with this system, however, as some three-letter roots use consonants that are considered weak, either due to their use as a semi vowel like vav (v or w) or like yud (y). Another reason a word could be weak is that it contains a guttural sound, some of which are so un-pronounceable they have become silent letters like the aleph and ayin, or close to silent like the hay(h). For the purpose of Verb conjugation, the roots of Yarei (YRA) and ra’ah (RAH) are doubly weak, the reish being the only letter that can stand on its own in any conjugation, so words tend to get confused for letters disappearing in the conjugation. Add to that the letter yud (Y) is used for the future tense and things get confusing fast.
Such confusion has led some language theorists to believe there was a proto-Hebrew with a two letter system. Many of these semi vowels and weak gutturals which present problems pronouncing were themselves modifiers of the biliteral root. This allows for a certain amount of word play. Rabbi Akiba once quipped an interesting lesson on marriage doing this. The word for man in Hebrew is spelled Aleph-Yud-Shin (ish) and woman Aleph-Shin-Hay (ishah). If one were to remove God (Y and H as a god name) from the relationship, all that is left is fire Aleph-Shin (aish).
Last night, I had an odd thought staring off into space towards a painting I did of Akiba’s commentary. I realized that Y and H surround the root Reish-Aleph in the words fear/awe and see. Is there a connection there?
I believe there is. We read in Proverbs:

5. A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain to wise counsels; 6. To understand a proverb, and a figure; the words of the wise, and their riddles. 7. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; but fools despise wisdom and instruction. [Proverbs 1]

8. Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate you; rebuke a wise man, and he will love you. 9. Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser; teach a just man, and he will increase in learning. 10. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and the knowledge of holy matters is understanding. [Proverbs 9]

Proverbs also tells us about scorners:

24. The proud and haughty, scorner is his name, acts in arrogant wrath. [Proverbs 23]

To learn we must perceive, we must see what the world is like. There are two ways of learning: One where we continue to support our own conclusions by finding new evidence that we are right and one where we delve into the unknown. One requires arrogance, one requires humility. IN the first of many paradoxes we must learn, whoever looks at the world and realizes how small he really is and how little he really knows is the wise one, a deep sense of humility about learning. The beginning of such wisdom is the fear of the Lord, knowing how great and vast God is compared to us, looking at the world and seeing more than can ever be explained rationally.
We can learn from God, and God is always teaching us, and telling us the path to walk. Is the phrase to “walk in his ways” different than “to keep his commandments?” I think so. One might think it is the difference between mitzvot and ethics, as did the early Reform Movement. Yet I think it is two aspects of God reflecting on ourselves. There is the God who personally and directly, yet subtly affects each of our lives every day, telling us how to live our lives in subtle ways. There is also the God who is far away and has left us a set of rules to follow with our free will for all time. God is so vast, infinite and omnipotent that both are true simultaneously. The scorner can only arrogantly believe his one model to be true and never understands this. To realize how terribly little one knows is a terrifying thought. Hence the Fear and the Awe, a fear so great the scorner scorns it, replacing God with his neat little illusion of a world.
Models are never the same as a real thing. A plastic model airplane of a 747 might look like a real airplane, but it will not fly. Another model airplane such as a cheap balsawood model might fly, but look nothing like a real passenger jet. Both are too small for human passengers. Like the passengers on a model airplane, for the scorner there is one thing they always leave out of the details of their models, because that too is rather scary: Ahavat Hashem, the love of God. They might intellectualize it, but they’ll avoid feeling it, for to feel it is to do the other thing true lovers do: love back equally. Such a love of God takes many forms from a deep emotionally spiritual state to our adherence to the mitzvot as love notes to God. For one who has a view of the world with limits and boundaries, such a world must be frightening. Even to the wise such a world is frightening, but in the acknowledgment of not knowing and the joy of learning, the wise embraces instead of rejecting the Divine, with all his heart, soul and might.
When one clings to God with Ahavat Hashem, the world changes and the hand of God is everywhere, Message abound in signs found in the everyday. A red flower on a billboard might contain a message about your future. A random song on the radio or a bird might help you with a decision. A freak thunderstorm might be trying to tell you something. They, as is every human being, plant animal and rock are part of God. As such the hand of an infinite, transcendent, yet personal God in way we cannot comprehend plays out messages to us in our lives, maybe in dreams events and omens. All we need to do is trust and love God, then observe. They will be there.
I spent ten years of my life as a “scorner,” or so I thought. It turns out the opposite was true. I went east into Taoism and Zen because my Ahavat Hashem could not be fulfilled by an institutional Judaism which was more about rules than Ahavat Hashem. I was told what Yirat HaShem, the fear of God was by teachers and Rabbis, and it was a very limited model based not on Divine existence but the most childish form of human experience: a parent scolding a naughty child. Yet in returning I have learned that Yirat Hashem is the beginning of wisdom, realizing how awesome God is and how much I have yet to learn, more than I ever will. In that knowledge is Yirat Hashem and Ahavat Hashem, for they really are the same thing.

V’ethanan 5768: Six Little Words, One Big Idea

This Shabbat is also known as Shabbat Nahamu, the Sabbath of comfort, whose name is taken from the Beginning of this week’s Haftarah portion.

1. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

2. Speak comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry to her, that her fighting is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. [Is 40:1-2]

This Shabbat always happens the Shabbat after Tisha B’Av. I quoted a story last week which works as a great metaphor for Tisha B’Av:

R. Ashi made a marriage feast for his son. He saw that the Rabbis were growing very merry, so he brought a cup of white crystal and broke it before them and they became serious. [Brachot 30b-31a]

Our world is shattered on the Ninth of Av, much like the crystal goblet. We are all in pieces. Yet in the theme of comfort there are six little words

Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad!

4. Hear, O Israel; The Lord is our God the Lord is One! [Deut 6:4]

When our souls are still recovering from being in a thousand broken pieces, were are told that God is One. The Socino translation gives a common version that this means one god, a statement of monotheism. In a more mystical and universal bent, I take this as more than that. God is a unity of all things. God is transcendent – God is Life, the Universe and Everything – and then some. Shattering a glass seems to be a loss, yet in the unity of the ONE there is no such thing as loss or gain, just change. It was not a complete catastrophe on the Ninth of Av. Things will regenerate says the prophet Isaiah in the Haftarah.

But what do we do to get to such regeneration? How do we do it? Deuteronomy continues:

5. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6. And these words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart; 7. And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. 8. And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. [Deuteronomy 6:5-8]

This is such a profound idea we must keep it close to us and not only think of it intellectually, but live it. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Quest for God writes:

He who loves with all his heart with all his soul with all his might does not love symbolically…When a person is appointed honorary president or honorary secretary of an organization he is serving symbolically and is not required to carry out any functions. Yet there are others who actually serve an organization or a cause.

What was it that the prophets sought to achieve? To purge the minds of the notion that God desired symbols. The service of God is an extremely concrete, and extremely real, literal and factual affair. We do not have to employ symbols to make Him understand what we mean. We worship Him not by employing figures of speech but by shaping our actual lives according to His pattern. [Heschel 1954, 132]

The Shema is not a symbolic thing but something that is to be lived, to be done. The Torah requires us to recite these words twice a day in all of our being, heart soul and might. This means we are required to recite them with deep concentration according to the Talmud:

Our Rabbis taught: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Up to this point concentration is required. So says R. Meir. Raba said: The halacha is as stated by R. Meir. [Brachot 13b]

To say the words Hear Oh Israel we must do so with an incredible sense of attention, one the Talmud literally calls Kavvanat Ha- Lev, an intention of the heart. The rabbis spend much of the second chapter of the Talmud Tractate Brachot discussing this issue of Intention. The Mishnah that starts this section reads:

If one was reading in the Torah [the section of the Shema’] when the time for its recital arrived, if he had the intention he has performed his obligation. [Brachot 13a]

This seems like an odd occurrence, how often does one happen to be reading Deuteronomy 6 at the time one is supposed to be praying? But the Mishnah is here making an important distinction. Reading something and giving something attention with intention are two different things according to the rabbis. There are two Hebrew terms used to distinguish between these two: Keva, the regular structure of the prayer, and Kavvanah the intention of prayer. Abraham Joshua Heschel described the problem with these two:

THERE IS a specific difficulty of Jewish prayer. There are laws: how to pray, when to pray, what to pray. There are fixed times, fixed ways, fixed texts. On the other hand, prayer is worship of the heart, the outpouring of the soul, a matter of devotion. Thus, Jewish prayer is guided by two opposite principles: order and outburst, regularity and spontaneity, uni­formity and individuality, law and freedom. These principles are the two poles about which Jewish prayer revolves. Since each of the two moves in the opposite direction, equilibrium can be maintained only if both are of equal force, However, the pole of regularity usually proves to be stronger than the pole of spontaneity, and as a result, there is a perpetual danger of prayer becoming a mere habit, a mechanical performance, an exercise in repetitiousness. The fixed pattern and regularity of our services tends to stifle the spontaneity of devotion. Our great problem, therefore, is how not to let the principle of regularity impair the power of devotion. [Heschel 1953]

Prayer need both. Without the regularity and structural support of keva we soon lose energy to pray spontaneously, and stop praying. The uniformity of Jewish prayer, the prayers we find in the prayerbook, is the Keva. The personal passion that we pray with is the kavvanah. The keva of six words is rather simple; it is the kavvanah of those words which the rabbis of the Talmud were insistent concerning the Shema.

Yet even they had problems defining what that intention should be:

Our Rabbis taught: The Shema’ must be recited as it is written. [i.e. in Hebrew] So Rabbi. The Sages, however, say that it may be recited in any language. What is Rabbi's reason? — Scripture says: and they shall be, implying, as they are they shall remain. What is the reason of the Rabbis? — Scripture says ‘hear’, implying, in any language that you understand. [Brachot 13a]

Such debates of course continue about what language the prayers should be written in, and the same two positions remain. The thing about Kavvanah is that it is personal. There is no right answer for a congregation. When the answer becomes a congregational answer or a movement’s answer, it is no longer Kavvanah but Keva. Rabbi and the Sages debate other points as well, such as should things be said out loud or silently. But most interesting is the idea of greeting someone while saying the Shema. One must pray with enough attention that under normal circumstance while reading, you will not greet anyone. If there is a danger or there is the need to greet someone due to the high amount of respect afforded that person, then one may stop reading. But only between paragraphs can some stop and greet someone.

While rabbis could argue at this incessantly, the question remains how do we as individuals find our own sense of Kavvanah? How do we in a sense connect spiritually and with intention? Many of the traditions, such as not only closing your eyes, but shield your eyes with your hand, are traditions which are there as ways of enhancing our own way of finding intention. But there are some things that are more personal. When the kavvanah is right for a person it is something that they never forget.

Shlomo Carlebach in his early years purportedly “raided” Hindu ashrams looking for wayward Jews to return to their birth faith. Often he would sing the Shema in the middle of the ashram, and noted who looked up. Most Jews who leave Judaism for Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, and even the odd label Spiritual but not religious don’t forget the Shema. Indeed many I believe leave because as Heschel pointed out, the Keva got in the way of the kavvanah. They are looking East or elsewhere for the Judaism of the Shema, which was lost in the Keva of the modern synagogue service.

So what is the proper Kavvanah for the Shema? This is one of those posts where I have no answer. I know what works for me, but that might not necessarily work for you. It’s nice, however to share ideas, to find out how someone else thinks about how to do the liberating spontaneous Kavvanah. This works better in discussion, and that discussion I will have in my Torah Study session during Kahal services at Beth Emet in Evanston this Saturday. You are welcome to attend.

Devarim/ Tish B’Av 5768: These are the Words

This week we begin the book of Deuteronomy, which is sometimes called the Mishneh Torah, or repetition of the Torah, as described by Moses. Instead of Cliff's notes, Deuteronomy is Moses' Notes of the Torah. We are at the Jordan, across from Jericho. Deuteronomy is also Moses' last address before his death. In this week's portion, Moses summarizes the journey from Egypt to this point. Interestingly he mentions the episode of the spies in more detail than the rest. While some of those details differ from what was written in the book of Numbers two things are significantly similiar:

26. However you would not go up, but rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your God; 27. And 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. 28. Where shall we go? our brothers have discouraged our heart, saying, The people are greater and taller than we; the cities are great and fortified up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakim there.

The people’s murmuring is the same as Numbers'. The second part that is the same is God’s final reaction, though adding an interesting detail:

34. And the Lord heard the voice of your words, and was angry, and swore, saying, 35. Surely there shall not one of these men of this evil generation see that good land, which I swore to give to your fathers, 36. Save Caleb the son of Jephunneh; he shall see it, and to him will I give the land that he has trodden upon, and to his children, because he has wholly followed the Lord. 37. Also the Lord was angry with me for your sakes, saying, You also shall not go in there.

According to his text it is the incident of the spies which causes Moses not to enter the Promised Land, not the striking of the rock. But according to Numbers Rabbah, Moses and the people not entering the Land was only the first round of punishment.

This alludes to the punishment which you received as a heritage for future generations. For Israel had wept on the night of the ninth of Ab, and the Holy One, blessed be He, had said to them: ‘You have wept a causeless weeping before Me. I shall therefore fix for you a permanent weeping for future generations.’ At that hour it was decreed that the Temple should be destroyed and that Israel should be exiled among the nations.[Numbers R. XVI:20]

The Midrash gives as its proof text Psalm 106:24-27

24. And they despised the pleasant land, they did not believe his word;
25. And they murmured in their tents, and did not listen to the voice of the Lord.
26. And he lifted up his hand against them, to make them fall in the wilderness;
27. And to make their seed fall among the nations, and to scatter them in the lands.

While our texts in Deuteronomy and Numbers explain verse 26 as a punishment, it does not explain verse 27, which does not happen until the time of the destruction of the Temple. Therefore, according to the Sages this must refer to the Ninth of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second temples, and a whole slew of bad events for the Jews.

With precision set by the Sages’ calculations for the calendar, of The Ninth of Av always occurs after this week’s Portion is read for Shabbat. This year it occurs immediately on the heels of Shabbat. Sitting in the dark, reading Lamentations Saturday Night I’ll think a lot about the story that supposedly caused the destruction of the second temple, the story about a man named Bar Kamza [Gittin 55b]. A simple mistake in party invitations brought an enemy instead of a friend to a party. Because the host threw this man bar Kamza out of the party after seemingly inviting him, Jerusalem and the temple was destroyed. The host of the party feared Bar Kamza would talk about their why they were enemies. But Bar Kamza was hurt by the words of the host’s refusal. As the Talmud continues It has been taught: Note from this incident how serious a thing it is to put a man to shame, for God espoused the cause of Bar Kamza and destroyed His House and burnt His Temple. [Gittin 57b] An exchange of words destroyed the Temple.

Our portion this week is the word for words in Hebrew, Devarim. Words can be building blocks or forces for destruction. We can use constructive words to be constructive. We could do the opposite and say something destructive bringing a destructive outcome. But one does not follow the other. There are cases where we may say something constructive but its outcome is destructive because of miscommunication or conflicting agendas. Finally there are cases where we say something destructive to bring about a constructive result. This last case we know as rebukes. Much of Deuteronomy is a verbal rebuke by Moses to the Israelites, and this portion is particularly stinging as Moses enumerates the many failures of the Israelites in the wilderness, in the hope that when Moses is gone, they will not make the same mistakes again. Yet rebukes are not something one can do casually. They need to carry a sense of authority and creditability with them. The rabbis in the first chapter of Deuteronomy Rabbah give multiple explanations of the beginning to Deuteronomy. All of them are about the rebuke, and how to do it right. In several places Moses is compared to Balaam. If, according to this comparison, someone’s reputation and behavior is usually the opposite of their communication it helps the veracity of the statement. Balaam blessing instead of cursing the people lends credence to the blessing. Moses’ rebuke to the people is from a man who saved that people from God’s anger on multiple occasions. Secondly, a rebuke from an honest man carries more credence than a hypocrite. Moses was the most honest of men, one who did not take even a donkey from the people. This lends creditability compared to someone who broke the rules himself. It isn’t easy for everyone to rebuke. Do it wrong and you hurt someone. The party’s host and Bar Kamza show that to the extreme.

What the rabbis don’t talk about rebuking is one other way of showing authority and changing people’s behaviors. There are people who used to do a certain thing, say robbery, and then learned it was a bad thing to do. So they repent, stop doing it and start doing good. They know this sin or transgression well, but can show from the insider’s perspective how wrong it is to do from the knowledge of their own experience. Some can go to other robbers, talk in the language and experience of robbers and convince robbers to stop robbing. Such people are in a very literal sense masters of repentance. They are not only ones who can repent, but one who can get others to repent not by rebuke but by sharing their story.

But what gets the robber to make such a realization to change into such a master? There are two parallel stories which I tend to think of in this respect, the source of a venerated Jewish tradition:

Mar the son of Rabina made a marriage feast for his son. He saw that the Rabbis were growing very merry , so he brought a precious cup worth four hundred zuz and broke it before them, and they became serious. R. Ashi made a marriage feast for his son. He saw that the Rabbis were growing very merry, so he brought a cup of white crystal and broke it before them and they became serious. [Brachot 30b-31a]

The shattering event of something valuable gets people’s attention and they look at the world differently instantly. Such acts could be of destruction, as in these cases. Yet such acts, verbal and non-verbal can backfire. R. Ashi’s attempt to make his students serious at a wedding is now the sign to start the party at any Jewish wedding: the breaking of the glass by the groom.

One of the saddest kinds of backfiring of all is the one that is not even paid attention to. Outside of Orthodoxy, the 9^th of Av is not observed by most Jews, let alone known. Tisha B’Av’s function may be very well set on the calendar not for the wimpy murmurs of the Israelites in desert, but as a precious shattered glass. It is the start of the season of repentance. We have only a few weeks to prepare ourselves for the High holidays. Like the robber who might have gotten caught or shot as his defining moment to give up his illicit profession, the completely depressing day known as the 9^th of Av is that crystal-breaking moment when we realize we need to take stock and begin the cycle of repentance that will lead to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is not a punishment at all, but a chance for redemption.

Moses rebukes in the weekly portion. The Jewish world is shattered on the 9^th of Av. In the broken pieces, we begin the process of re-building through our repentance and the ability to help others by sharing our story of what we did wrong and how to do it right. That rebuild is not easy and is often a seemingly lonely process. Next week, in response, we are given a little help in six little words.

Parshat Masei 5768: The Last Commandment.

This is the last portion of the book of Numbers. In this week’s portion we start with a summary of all the places the Israelites visited during the journey. God then gives Moses the boundaries of the territory of Israel. Moses appoints representatives for each tribe to receive the lots. Levi, who has no land, is given forty eight cities, of which six are cities for refuge in the case of accidental homicide. The procedures for the case of accidental homicide and the legal procedure for homicide cases are enumerated. Finally, the tribe of Manasseh has an objection to the ruling made for some of their own tribe, the five daughters of Zelophehad.

3. And if they are married to any of the sons of the other tribes of the people of Israel, then shall their inheritance be taken from the inheritance of our fathers, and shall be given to the inheritance of the tribe where they are received; so shall it be taken from the lot of our inheritance. 4. And when the jubilee of the people of Israel shall be, then shall their inheritance be given to the inheritance of the tribe where they are received; so shall their inheritance be taken away from the inheritance of the tribe of our fathers. [Num 36:3-4]

The daughters had made an objection earlier that as their father died before having sons, and the inheritance chain was through sons, then the daughters would lose the inheritance of their father. The resolution was to allow in the case of a father who had no sons but did have daughters to let the daughters inherit. The elders of Gilead, relatives of the Daughters have brought this objection because such a system presents the problem of diluting the family and tribal holdings.

The resolution to this objection is rather simple:

5. And Moses commanded the people of Israel according to the word of the Lord, saying, the tribe of the sons of Joseph has said well… 8. So every daughter, who possesses an inheritance in any tribe of the people of Israel, shall be the wife to one of the family of the tribe of her father, that the people of Israel may enjoy every one the inheritance of his fathers. 9. Neither shall the inheritance move from one tribe to another tribe; but every one of the tribes of the people of Israel shall keep himself to his own inheritance.

With this commandment and the daughters of Zelophehad’s compliance with this mitzvah, we end the book of Numbers with a concluding statement.

13. These are the commandments and the judgments, which the Lord commanded by the hand of Moses to the people of Israel in the plains of Moab by the Jordan near Jericho.[Numbers 36:13]

Thus the commandment for daughter who inherit to marry within their tribe is the last commandment. This last commandment in the book of Number is remarkable in many ways. It contains a rather curious expression Moses commanded the people of Israel according to the word of the Lord.

Part of the curiosity is the rare forms of commanding used here, and only in this sequence in this verse. Moses, not God, first of all is doing the commanding. He is doing this commanding by the word of the lord, which is literally by the mouth of the Lord.

By the Mouth of the Lord is rare except for the book of Numbers. In Hebrew it is usually part of the expression al pi Hashem b’yad Moshe. Literally it means by the mouth of the Lord by the hand of Moses. It’s literal connotation is the dictation of the Torah, God spoke and Moses used his hands to write it down. It may also mean God gave a commandment and Moses executed it. One such use is the counting of the tribes at the beginning of the journey, but there it is often accompanied by another phrase: as God commanded. But in the last commandment, it’s not God doing the commanding, but Moses. One way of understanding this is a comment by the Talmudic sages:

Our Rabbis have taught…‘By the hand of Moses’ refers to the Gemara. I might include also the Mishnah; therefore it reads ‘that ye may teach’. [K'rithoth 13b]

By the hand of Moses means the Oral law, but a very specific one. The classic statement of the oral law is found in the Perkei Avot:

Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the men of the Great Assembly. [Avot 1:1]

According to tradition, this was an oral transmission of the stuff that explained the details of the written Torah. After the destruction of the Temple, it was compiled into the book we refer to as the Mishnah. A work expanding on the Mishnah with both new rulings to reflect new living patterns, explanations for the rules of the Mishnah, and a lot of stories for illustrative purposes became known in Aramaic as the Gemara. The Gemara along with the Mishnah is the work we refer to today as the Talmud.

This was not the first time Moses commanded something. Back in Exodus we read:

4. And all the wise men, that did all the work of the sanctuary, came every man from his work which they made; 5. And they spoke to Moses, saying, The people bring much more than enough for the service of the work, which the Lord commanded to make. 6. And Moses gave commandment, and they caused it to be proclaimed throughout the camp, saying, Let neither man nor woman do any more work for the offering of the sanctuary. So the people were restrained from bringing. [Exodus 36:4-6]

Moses stops the donations of materials to the Mishkan. He evaluated the situation by himself and came to a ruling. The stopping of the Mishkan donations and the last commandment, though backed by the word of God, was a judgment of Moses, not the direct commandment of God. It was Gemara: human and not divine derived rules to live by.

The last commandment was also the result of an objection to an objection. It could have been just as easy to blindly obey the original rule. But neither the daughters nor the elders of Gilead did. They saw a legitimate problem in the commandments, and brought it up for discussion. One solution led to another problem, and then that problem has to be resolved. This became the pattern of rabbinic thought. Once again look at the rhetoric used in the rabbinic statement:

Our Rabbis have taught…‘By the hand of Moses’ refers to the Gemara. I might include also the Mishnah, therefore it reads ‘that ye may teach’. [K'rithoth 13b]

The rabbis qualify themselves due to a possible objection that “by the hand of Moses” includes both parts of the Talmud, Mishnah and Gemara. They state that a proof text qualifies this and excludes the Mishnah. This passage is actually part of a bigger argument about whether one should study teach, or make rulings in the Law while intoxicated, and as such was part of a much bigger objection and question. That was part of a bigger objection itself and so on.

The last commandment was not as significant in its content but in its process. It is the idea behind rabbinic thinking: everything you need to know is in the Torah, yet some things are not written down. There will be times where things contradict or cause problems with the text. It is our duty as to question them, take from the ancestral sources and resolve the problem. Such thinking expands the texts and reveals new ideas which can be added to the body of thought. It is that thinking more than anything else that has kept the Jewish people alive to the present day.

For the book of B’midbar we have been looking at the text in terms of internal change from being in a place of slavery to getting to some personal goal or accomplishment in ourselves, we looked at the resistance that can occur to such goals and in the last few parshiot, how we need to prepare for the Promised Land. Some comments to me describe this process as a transformation from child to adult, which I find very wise and true. The last thing we need to learn is that the world is not static, but dynamic. Things change and our rules and boundaries will need to change with them. Moses and the miracles of God in the wilderness, what we might call parental support and protection, are not coming with us. We have to think on our feet like adults. We need to understand a process to make such changes. The last commandment, the last oral one, in B’midbar does exactly that. Things will change and there will exceptions and exceptions to exceptions. When necessary, change them in the spirit of the texts that came before you.

We do not enter the Promised Land in the Torah nor in the book of Numbers. We are lead to the banks and have a short crossing over yet to do. The land has yet to be fought for, as we will learn in Joshua, and starting with Judges all the way through the rest of the prophets, there is always a fight against idolatry among the people. The last commandment may be fighting Idolatry too or more accurately, Idle-atry. Part of the problem of Idolatry is one does not have the chance to grow and change, as all is in the hands of a capricious god. There is no incentive or even concept to do so. Progress is an alien concept to the pagan. Learning is meaningless. Learning’s use to create something new to adapt to changing conditions is meaningless too because nothing changes in their world view. But we must learn, as the law must be derived from the precedents of our ancestors, our true inheritance. It should not be derived from not our own emotional whims nor the emotional and manipulative arguments of outsiders.

We have come to the end of the journey, only to find that it never ends, just starts new chapters, and new books. Now we have the tools to take on those adventures.