Three Journeys, or, How I Learned to Find the Love in Jewish Text - Mattot-Masei 5775

I think that Mattot-Mas’ei is an ideal parashah for moving on, because (a) it's the end of Bemidbar, and (b) it's about journeys, especially Mas'ei. And so, as Judy and I are busy packing to go (the second most-stressful lifecycle event, BTW), I have been thinking quite a bit about my own journey, and how it fits into the context of our people.

There are different kinds of journeys: those of the body, those of the mind, and those of the heart. This parashah is about all three: the physical journey of the Israelites through the desert, and the mental journey, that of the mind, as they receive the Torah and struggle to live it and learn it; and the spiritual journey, that of the heart, as they endeavor to build a relationship, a berit / covenant, with their God.

A midrash about Mas'ei, about the journeys from place to place that we read today, where all the places are identified, is as follows. God recounts the names of each of these places to remind the Israelites where they were and what transpired along the way: “Here you needed water; here you were ill; and so forth. And from this we learn that we, as Israelites and as Jews, take note of our journeys.

Because we are all on a type of journey. We never really stop moving, even when we put down tent stakes and never pull up the tent for decades.

The journey is the interesting part. “Life,” as John Lennon once put it, “is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.” I never expected to become a rabbi or a cantor. I never expected to be living on Long Island. I never expected to move to Pittsburgh. I never expected to be married to a ballet dancer who speaks Hungarian. I never expected to have a son who lives in Israel most of the year. I never expected to get to know all of you so well. I did not plan for any of these things. But they have all made my life very, very rich.

When I graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary, I thought that the most important type of journey was that of the mind. In the seven years that I spent there, I put a sizeable spike on my knowledge curve in the area of Torah, halakhah, Jewish history, ritual, critical approaches to the Tanakh, etc.

But one thing that I have learned in my eight years here, and arguably the most important thing, is that the journey of the heart is much more important. The spiritual journey is the one we need to emphasize more.

There is a school of thought out there that believes that rabbis ultimately tend to give the same sermon over and over and over: the sermon that he or she needs to hear.

And it took me a few years, but I think I discovered the sermon that I needed to hear. In fact, you can very much trace my development as a rabbi from the first sermon I gave here, on my interview weekend in March of 2007. It was Parashat Ki Tissa, and I gave what I now understand to be a very heady sermon - an analysis of the language of the episode of the Molten Calf that was rooted in a close reading of one of the verses of the parashah.

Over the last eight years I have learned that it’s nice to appeal to the mind, and sometimes a rabbi has to do that. But an appeal to the heart is much more valuable, much more welcome, and much more likely to inspire people (i.e. you). I can give the most sophisticated, deep, self-impressed reading of Torah verses, and it might be greeted with a shrug at qiddush. But I have found that when I demonstrate that the Torah can be interpreted to help us live better lives as Jews and as people, I find that the message is far more likely to be heard, understood, and appreciated.

So, for example, looking at Parashat Mattot, which we read (earlier) today, we see that it opens with a detailed explanation of some of the laws surrounding vows, nedarim. Much of the detail of the law is lost on us today; most of it is irrelevant, some of it is offensive to modern people, and furthermore, we nullify personal vows in advance on Yom Kippur when we recite Kol Nidrei as a community.

However, you might make the case that the overarching message of the passage on vows is about the power of words: how they have the potential to do good or to do harm, depending on how they are used. What comes out of our mouths should be holy - it should build relationships and not destroy them. Our words should be pure, powerful and carefully considered to make sure that they are as effective as possible in repairing the world. To do anything less is to insult our God-given ability to communicate, to besmirch the sanctity of human relationships.

And that type of appeal to the heart is far more attractive, homiletically-speaking, then the most well-executed midrashic analysis that is delivered entirely divorced from the realities of our lives. The Torah is meant to teach us lessons about how to live better, not to be analyzed dispassionately in slices arrayed on sterile glass slides.

And that is the sermon that I needed to hear. JTS, bless her soul, is the Jewish ivory tower. I learned to think critically about Jewish text. I learned to review and interpret textual oddities by checking extant contemporary manuscripts. I learned about the evolution of Jewish law and custom through the lens of Jewish history. I learned to read and interpret high-minded Jewish philosophers like Buber and Heschel. I learned to read Akkadian in the original cuneiform. In short, I took a journey of the mind.

But what I did not learn is what I feel the Jewish world, and particularly the Conservative Jewish world needs. And that is a wee bit more heart. I was preparing to be too much the Scarecrow and not enough of the Tin Man.

But Rabbis, and Jews in general, should be talking about love. We should be talking about repairing the world. We should be demonstrating that our tradition teaches us how to live in a way that is better for us as individuals, better for us as a people, and better for the world as a whole. Because it is. We are Or Lagoyim, a light unto the nations. We have the potential to bring everybody the message that our bottom line is not measured in dollars or in trinkets or in how many degrees we have acquired, but in the quality of the relationships we build, within and without. As Paul McCartney once put it, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” (Can you tell I'm a Beatles fan?) That’s what mitzvot are all about. We have the potential to increase the love in this world by acting in it, by reaching out beyond ourselves.

When we study Torah, we acknowledge that there are shiv’im panim latorah, seventy faces to the Torah, that is, seventy ways (at least) of understanding every passage, every word, every story, every mitzvah, and so forth. (OK, so maybe not seventy, but that’s just rabbinic-speak for “a whole bunch.”)

There are many ways of understanding our foundational text, and the way we approach this text, referred to rabbinically as “Talmud Torah,” we must take as axiomatic the idea that no single approach is the lone correct understanding. Talmud Torah includes the seventy faces. And among those faces are those of the heart and those of the mind.

So while it makes sense to study Torah from both the rational perspective, the cool, removed, just-the-facts-ma’am position, as well as from the spiritual perspective. We should not merely ask, “What does this mean?” but also, “What does this mean to us?” And this takes a whole lot more work. So while the standard commentators (Rashi, Ramban, ibn Ezra, etc.) usually try to resolve issues within the text by working through the challenging language, the midrashic approach seeks to humanize the text by telling stories. And Hasidic tales tend to go even further by seeking the personal angle - how might we learn from this to emulate the acts of piety and selflessness of which Hasidic lore often speaks.

It took me a long time to figure out that the journey of the heart is where it’s at, since my own inclination is to be analytical. (If my wife would let me I'd be going for my 6th degree in something...anything... I love that Ivory Tower.) But Talmud Torah for the modern audience has to hit us where we live: to answer questions like this:

• What do I want my children to learn about life?
• How do I make a difference in this world?
• Why is this world so much more complex than it used to be, and how do I navigate the complexity?

And so forth.

These are all essential questions that we might often overlook if they are not staring us in the face. And that’s why the most important mitzvah in Jewish life is Talmud Torah (see Mishnah Pe’ah 1:1, etc.). You can light all the Hanukkah candles you want; you can daven with passion while fasting on Yom Kippur; you can gorge yourself on matzah and sit in the Sukkah and make sure your boys are circumcized and your doorposts have mezuzot and on and on, but until you commit to learning the precious words of the Jewish bookshelf, you cannot fully appreciate the richness and value of our tradition. When I pray, I speak to God. When I study, God speaks to me.

Bottom line is that I learned here in Great Neck the value of the third, and most important, Jewish journey. And I am going to exhort you to step up to the plate: the beit midrash awaits.

Don't be afraid to take that journey. Embrace it. That is the way we move forward, the way that we discover who we are.

I found my voice here at Temple Israel. I found my stride, my legs. I discovered my hands, and the good works that I could do for others. My true passions were revealed to me here.

This stuff actually works.

Talmud Torah keneged kulam. The study of Torah weighs more than all of the other mitzvot combined. Keep learning, and asking “What does this mean to us?” You are not taking a physical journey like we are (though Pittsburgh is a great place to visit - just sayin'). But I hope you will all keep moving forward, and work hard to bring everybody else in this community along with you. Keep moving.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 7/18/2015.)

The True Value of Torah - Shavuot 5775

A curious news story crossed my computer screen last week. My rabbinic alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary, which some of you may know that I truly love, has been in a difficult financial position for some time, and has decided to sell off some assets for the sake of easing their budget deficit. Among the items that they are selling is a treasure from JTS’ vaunted Rare Book Room: a fragment of an original Gutenberg bible.

It’s eight leaves of one of the first books ever printed by Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, in the year 1455. This fragment was donated to JTS in 1922 by the Schiff family, Jewish-American financiers of the early 20th century, who purchased it from a rare-book dealer who broke the original copy into pieces to sell it for more money. This particular fragment is the Latin translation of the Book of Esther, and it’s in excellent condition. Sotheby’s expects that it will fetch between $500,000 and $700,000.

Dr. David Kraemer, the librarian of JTS and a former Talmud professor of mine, says that selling the item is not a real loss to JTS because, since JTS is primarily focused on Jewish studies, these pages from a Christian translation are not of much use in the JTS library, and that this fragment has more or less been sitting on a shelf, “collecting dust” for more than 90 years.

The story is interesting, but I think it opens up a wider question that is entirely appropriate for Shavuot: What is the value of Torah? (And, just to be clear here, I’m not limiting the discussion to merely THE Torah, i.e. the five books of Moses, but all the Tanakh and all the interpretation that flows from it).

When I think of studying Torah, which is, according to the Mishnah, the most important mitzvah of all 613, I don’t think of dusty scholars in rare book rooms handling ancient texts with tweezers. On the contrary: you can go into any Judaica shop in the world and purchase brand-spankin’-new editions of the Tanakh with contemporary commentaries, which will be sitting right alongside the ancient and medieval interpreters, volumes of the Talmud and midrash and halakhic works and bookshelves upon bookshelves of perspectives on Jewish text, all reprinted and reprinted. There are, as the Talmudic maxim goes, shiv’im panim laTorah, 70 faces to the Torah, meaning that there are many ways of reading every word, every verse. But really, we have only yet uncovered maybe 28 of those 70. We have not even found half of the perspectives on Torah.

We continue to interpret for today. The Torah is a living document, both a testament to our historical roots as well as a contemporary perspective on our lives. While we in the Conservative movement have traditionally understood that to mean contemporary approaches to halakhah (e.g. As when the movement permitted driving to synagogue on Shabbat, even though doing so is a clear violation of the long-settled traditional halakhah / laws of Shabbat observance), there are other, less circumscribed ways to read Torah for today. These ways may be far more valuable to the average Jew than academic discussions about the details of halakhic observance.

So let me give you an example of the real value of Torah. Last night at our Tikkun Leyl Shavuot, Danny Mishkin and I spoke about an idea that should be obvious when we are talking about Torah: immediate relevance.

Why is this important? Because we are living in a world of limited time, limited focus, and the ubiquitous sentiment that if it’s not relevant and/or beneficial to me, I’m not going to invest my time in it. It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that each of us has only 140 characters in which to make our point, but it’s not too far from the truth. Long form is getting to be a harder and harder sell, particularly to our children. And this is a challenge for Jewish tradition, particularly for tefillah / prayer.

But it is a challenge we must face boldly. Times change, and Torah has never been left behind; it is an eternal tradition. (By the way, Gutenberg and others were printing books for a couple of decades before the Jews decided to accept printed works. The first Jewish printed books were volumes of the Talmud produced in Italy in the 1470s, but we soon got over our skepticism about the new technology. That is happening once again as part of the paradigm shift which we discussed last night. Judaism is catching up with the rest of the world. Ein kol hadash tahat hashemesh, says Qohelet. There is nothing entirely new under the sun.)

Here is an item of immediate relevance, one which we discussed on Saturday evening. We study Torah because it helps us make decisions and guide our lives (Pirqei Avot 1:14):

אם אין אני לי, מי לי; וכשאני לעצמי, מה אני; ואם לא עכשיו, אימתיי.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am for myself alone, what am I?

And if not now, when?

Take a moment to reflect on these words.

What does it mean to us? Is it about the balance of personal commitments vs. communal contributions? Is it about trying to make a living in a dog-eat-dog world? Is it about balancing family and work? Is it about the natural give-and-take of human relationships? Is it about managing one’s anger? Is it about monetary charity, or donating your time?

Each of us might see something different in this mishnah. But I would suggest that this is one of hundreds, or maybe thousands of quotables in Jewish tradition that would be worth keeping on a mental index card, and pulling out whenever you are faced with the challenge of choosing yourself over others, or vice versa. And these decisions come up every day, many times a day for all of us.

Hillel’s words are a mantra of balance, of figuring out where to put our energy and focus in this time-poor, over-stressed, over-stuffed world. This piece of wisdom is immediately relevant. I can use it to improve myself and my life, particularly if I refer back to it in the moment of need.

You cannot put a dollar amount on any word or page of Torah. It is truly priceless. OK, so some pages are worth more than others. But it is possible to glean personal meaning and yes, value from every page of commentary, halakhic analysis, midrash, and so forth.

This is the true value of Torah; it reflects back to us who we are, and compels us to change our behavior for the better.

So, while JTS might be selling off rarities for a few quick bucks, the real worth of those eight leaves, which tell the story of the Jewish woman who challenges authority, maintains her identity in a potentially hostile, non-Jewish environment, and leads her people out of danger, is not to be found at Sotheby’s. The intrinsic value is not the impression of the Latin words by the world’s first printing press. It is in the content, the meaning, and the lessons that we learn from Esther and Mordecai and the Jews of ancient Persia.

What makes Torah valuable is that every word means something different in each person’s mouth, mind, heart and hand, and that it brings those things together to improve our lives and repair this broken world. Furthemore, what makes it truly priceless is that it is completely ours, and every perspective it gives us is true. As we chant after a passage of the Torah is read in the synagogue:

… אֲשֶׁר נָתַן לָנוּ תּורַת אֱמֶת וְחַיֵּי עולָם נָטַע בְּתוכֵנוּ.

… asher natan lanu Torat emet, vehayyei olam nata betokheinu.

… who gave us the Torah of truth, planting within us life eternal.

Our Torah of truth gives us eternity as a people because Torah itself is eternal, and as long as we continue to (in the words of Ben Bag Bag, Pirqei Avot 5:24) “turn it over and over,” we too will continue to reap its benefits forever. It is both immediately relevant and timeless. And that is its true value.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, the first day of Shavuot, May 24, 2015.)

Unaffiliated, but Potentially Engaged - Korah 5772

When I was in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I took a philosophy course that examined contemporary spirituality.  The professor, a somewhat non-conventional rabbi, Rabbi Alfredo Borodowski, emphasized that the primary struggle of religion in our day is to bring meaning to people’s lives.  Some of the questions that we ask are:

What does our tradition teach me?  
How can I apply it to my life today?  
I only have so much time and so much energy, so if I am going to pay attention to anything, it better be meaningful.  What can I possibly gain from paying attention to Jewish life?

This search for meaning is bound up in our character; it is the reason that we are called “Yisrael,” the name given to our patriarch Jacob as “one who struggled with God and with humans” in Genesis 32:29.

Our job as a Jewish community is to answer the question, “What does this mean to me?”  Yes, we must offer many points of entry.  Yes, we must be open, welcoming, and accessible.  But even with all that, we have to offer deep, serious, meaningful content alongside the opportunity to interact with God.

It’s not enough, for example, for a synagogue to offer services on a Saturday morning and merely expect that people will show up, no matter how wonderful the sermon or the cantor’s vocal pyrotechnics.  For people to come, even those who grew up going to shul, there has to be some meaning to it.

It’s not enough to encourage 7th-grade students to continue on into the Youth House Hebrew High School program after they have completed their Bar/Bat Mitzvah.  Those kids have to see that there is some value, some personal meaning in continuing their Jewish education, and their parents have to see this as well.  We have to demonstrate that value, teach that meaning.  If we do not, they are not coming back.

It’s not enough for me to stand here before you and talk about the essential mitzvot / commandments of Jewish life, like the observance of Shabbat and kashrut, without making a case for how doing so will mean something to us as individuals and the community.  Otherwise, such suggestions will not be heard.

***

Perhaps some of you saw the results of a demographic studythat came out two weeks ago, funded by the UJA-Federation of New York.  The conclusions were not surprising, although the Jewish newspapers spun it as big news. Among the major findings were the following: New York Jewry saw a small uptick in population, and most of the growth was in the Haredi / “ultra-Orthodox” sector.  Jews in the metropolitan area are on the one hand growing more rigorously traditional and on the other more unaffiliated, and particularly less identified with the Conservative and Reform movements.  

To be fair, this study does not represent the entire region -- only NYC and Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk counties.  As journalist J. J. Goldberg pointed out in the Forward, the 1.5 million Jews counted excluded about 500,000 who live in NJ and Connecticut, and those numbers skew more heavily non-Orthodox.  

(By the way, while it is true that Orthodoxy saw growth since the last study in 2002, it might be worth noting that Haredi families average something more than six children per family.  Conservative families have an average of 1.5 children.  I’ll leave the math to you.)

The biggest point of concern from my perspective, however, is the dramatic growth of the category known as “Other.”  More than a third, 37% of area Jews, identified themselves as something other than Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox.  Those categories include “just Jewish,” “something else,” “no religion,” non-Jewish religion (but respondent is Jewish), “traditional,” “Sephardic,” “cultural,” “secular,” and other answers.

(from forward.com)

But what do these numbers mean?  Aside from the obvious conclusion that the non-Orthodox movements are shrinking (which, by the way, has been true for several decades), the more accurate observation is as follows: We must be doing something wrong.  Why are younger people who grew up in our movement not joining synagogues or signing up their kids for Hebrew school or even identifying themselves as “Conservative” when a pollster calls?  Maybe it’s because we are expensive, and Chabad is cheap.  Maybe it’s because we stand for Israel in a world that has grown hostile to the Jewish state.  Maybe it’s because assimilation has led our people astray.  

Or maybe it is because we have not made an adequate case for why the non-Orthodox Jewish experience is meaningful.

You see, Orthodoxy has a strong, built-in meaning machine.  It’s what much of our tradition says over and over: buy into the system, accept the yoke of halakhah, and it will be good for you.  I know people who have left the non-Orthodox fold for frummer pastures because it all seems so simple: do what we tell you and it will all make sense.  Much of Orthodoxy includes with that the very simple condition of not asking questions that probe too deeply, such as, “Why are women excluded from Jewish rituals?”  Or, “Why must there be only one path to God?”

But our message, the Conservative Jewish message, reflects the richness of humanity and the complexity of the Jewish textual discourse.  Life is not black and white, and neither is rabbinic literature, or for that matter, the Torah.  There is always a dissenting opinion; there is always room for debate. The Talmud teaches us that women can be called to the Torah in synagogue and wear tallit and tefillin.  Conceptions of God by modern philosophers such as Abraham Joshua Heschel or Martin Buber are as relevant as the Torah’s multiple perspectives.

To arrive at the meaning, however, you have to dig deeper, says the Conservative movement.  It is not enough just to recite the words of tefillah / prayer quickly and accurately, it is just as important to understand them, and to re-interpret them for our times.  There is more meaning in mindfulness than in performing rituals by rote.  

I find meaning, and I hope that some of you do as well, in careful analysis, in familiarizing ourselves with these ancient texts and making them come alive. I also find meaning in asking the hard questions: “How can I believe in a God that allowed the Shoah to happen?”  “How can I accept the stories of the Torah at face value when they sometimes contradict scientific principles or archaeological evidence?”

Disagreement is an ancient tradition, and should be encouraged.  Tolerating multiple opinions was something that came out of rabbinic tradition, and is even highlighted as being “leshem shamayim,” as having a Divine purpose. As we read in Pirqei Avot, the book of the Mishnah dedicated to 2nd-century rabbinic wisdom on life and learning:

Avot 5:17:

כל מחלוקת שהיא לשם שמיים, סופה להתקיים; ושאינה לשם שמיים, אין סופה להתקיים.  איזו היא מחלוקת שהיא לשם שמיים, זו מחלוקת הלל ושמאי; ושאינה לשם שמיים, זו מחלוקת קורח ועדתו.

Every disagreement that is for the sake of heaven will stand; every one that is not for the sake of heaven will not stand.  What is a disagreement that is for the sake of heaven? One between Hillel and Shammai.  What is a disagreement that is not? The one concerning Korah and his sympathizers.

The disagreements between Hillel and Shammai, two schools of thought referenced in the Talmud, are usually about finer points of halakhah / Jewish law.  (A classic dispute, one that I know that is taught in our Religious School, is how to light the Hanukkiah, the Hanukkah menorah.  Shammai says to start with 8 candles the first night, and to lose one on each successive night; Hillel says that we should start with 1 and go to 8, as we all do today.)

Korah, however, brought together a group of malcontents merely to struggle against Moses and Aaron, claiming an unfair distribution of power. In pleading his case before Moses, he said:

כִּי כָל-הָעֵדָה כֻּלָּם קְדֹשִׁים, וּבְתוֹכָם ה'

For all of the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. (Numbers 16:3)

In other words, we are all endowed with some of God’s holiness, says Korah. What makes you guys, Moses and Aaron, so special? Rashi concurs, offering that all the Israelites stood at Mt. Sinai together, not just Moses and Aaron. Korah is advocating for a share in leadership that he thinks that he deserves.  

On some level, Korah is right: we all do have a share of the Divine.  We all stood at Mt. Sinai.  We all received the Torah.

And this is still true, by the way.  Regardless of the validity of Korah’s claim on leadership, and regardless of what synagogue we choose to attend or join or not, there is no question that we all have a share in the Torah, a share in holiness.

In today’s complex, multi-layered Jewish world, we do not necessarily disagree about the meaning of the text.  More pointedly, what we disagree about is the “how.”  How do we create holy moments?  How do we relate to Jewish law?  How do we observe?  How do we make our tradition relevant?

This is, in fact, the essential mahloqet leshem shamayim, disagreement for the sake of heaven, of our day.  This disagreement an essential part of who we are. Remember that we are Yisrael, the ones who struggle with beings Divine and human.  We challenge ourselves as much as we challenge God.

But we cannot let this dispute distract us from our holy task -- that is, bringing meaning to all those who enter this building.  As Rabbi Howard Stecker pointed out to me the other day when we were discussing this, what were the people doing while the leaders were arguing?  Did Korah’s dispute pull Moses and Aaron from their holy work?  Perhaps that is precisely why the Mishnah labels this as an un-heavenly debate.

**

The fifth line on the chart, the one that we do not see, is the line of the “Unaffiliated, but Potentially Engaged.”  Or maybe “Unaffiliated, but Still Seeking.”  That line is also on the way up.  It may not include all of the Unaffiliated, but it certainly includes some proportion of them.  

And that is where we come in.  Those are the ones who might enter this synagogue, and even stick around, if:

1.  If they are greeted and welcomed properly.
2.  If they make connections with others in this building.
3.  If they get a personal boost, a shot of meaning, out of the time spent at Temple Israel of Great Neck.

That third item, conveying the meaning of our brand of Jewish life, is the most difficult of all, because we set the bar higher in terms of understanding.  We dig deeper, and that is hard to convey in 140 characters or less, or even in the context of a Shabbat morning service that is already chock-full.  

But that’s where we should aim.  Let’s talk about why women and men can be understood as equal under Jewish law.  Let’s talk about how modern perspectives on the Torah add to our understanding.  Let’s teach that it’s not all or nothing, glatt or treif.  Let’s engage with those questions that bring meaning to who we are as modern people, as modern Jews.

Thoughtful analysis of Jewish ideas couched in a friendly, easily-accessible format that includes a healthy dose of spiritual openness is one thing that will bring those in that other category in. That’s where we need to focus our energies.

In the wake of the UJA study, plenty of commentators lamented the disappearing center of the New York Jewish community. I say, bring it on. The center is still here, but we have to work harder to pull others in with us. All we have to do is make it meaningful, and that invisible line of the Potentially Engaged will start to creep back down.  

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 23 June 2012.)