Ki Tavo 5772: More Light, More Selihah

One of the things that connects us most to the High Holidays is the set of melodies that we associate with this time of the year.  

From “Kol Nidrei” to “Avinu Malkeinu” to “BeRosh Hashanah Yikkateivun” and so forth, these tunes are strongly associated with the themes of the holidays: teshuvah, tefillah, tzedaqah (repentance, prayer, and charity), malkhuyot, zikhronot, shofarot (kingship, remembrance, shofar), and of course the opportunity to seek atonement, purity, and redemption for the coming year.

An often-overlooked melody that is nonetheless widely known is what we referred to in Cantorial School as the “selihah” mode.  Selihah means “forgiveness.”

 

Usually, selihah mode is used for passages that have to do with selihah or selihot, that is, asking for forgiveness.  Starting tonight, when we begin the recitation of selihot, and continuing particularly on Yom Kippur, when we recite the selihot prayers several times during of the course of the day, we assume the musical posture of asking for forgiveness from God to complement our obligation to ask for forgiveness from those around us.

As such, this melody should ideally serve to remind us about the need to think about teshuvah, about repentance (insert Pavlov joke here).  It should help “get us in the mood” for the start of the New Year, which we want to enter pure, with a clean slate.

There is only one more week before Rosh Hashanah.  That’s right!  One week! I hope that everybody has already put some thought into those things for which we need to seek forgiveness, and not just the lunch menu for Monday afternoon.  But while much of the focus of this period is on individual teshuvah, there is also, I think, an obligation to national teshuvah.  Teshuvah for the Jewish people for things that we have done this year.

Usually, a sermon draws on the day’s Torah reading and connect it to us, our lives, our families, and so forth.  I am going to take a little diversion from that pattern and instead draw on today’s haftarah, the prophetic reading that followed the Torah reading.

One major theme of today’s haftarah is light.  As you may have noticed, today’s was the sixth haftarah of consolation, the sixth of seven such haftarot that fall between Tish’ah Be’Av and Rosh Hashanah that trace the redemption of Israel after the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.  The themes of these haftarot, all drawn from the book of the prophet Isaiah, hint at the coming High Holidays - they attempt to reassure us that God has not forgotten us, that we can be redeemed, that our return to God will herald a new age with new opportunities.  

The opening verse of the haftarah invoked the theme of light with a clause that we know from the Friday evening piyyut, Lekha Dodi (Isaiah 60:1):

ק֥וּמִי א֖וֹרִי כִּ֣י בָ֣א אוֹרֵ֑ךְ

Qumi, ori, ki va orekh
Arise, shine, for your light has dawned.

This is but one of several references to light in the haftarah.  Light is also a common theme in rabbinic text and particularly kabbalistic text, and in tefillah, in Jewish prayer.

But light is also a theme in everyday Jewish life.  In particular, something that Isaiah points to in the third verse of the haftarah (Isaiah 60:3):

וְהָֽלְכ֥וּ גוֹיִ֖ם לְאוֹרֵ֑ךְ וּמְלָכִ֖ים לְנֹ֥גַהּ זַרְחֵֽךְ׃

Vehalekhu goyim le’orekh, umlakhim lenogah zarhekh.
Nations shall walk at your light, and kings at the brightness of your rising.

The “you” here is us; our light is meant to inspire others.  We refer to this principle as Or Lagoyim, a light unto the nations.  As Jews, we must be Or Lagoyim. We must behave in an exemplary manner in the eyes of the rest of the world.  

Why? Because we the Jews are meant to be an inspiration to the world. Because God gave us a template, the Torah, for living properly.  And because we cannot afford to fan the flames of anti-Semitism. We cannot give our enemies support/fodder by giving them examples of our bad behavior to cite.

Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, seized upon the principle of the Jewish people and the Jewish State as being Or Lagoyim.  He said:

History did not spoil us with power, wealth, nor with broad territories or an enormous community lot, however, it did grant us the uncommon intellectual and moral virtue, and thus it is both a privilege and an obligation to be a Light Unto the Nations.

This is one reason that the symbol of the State of Israel is the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum that was used in the Temple in Jerusalem.  It is incumbent upon all of us, kelal Yisrael, the totality of all those included in the Jewish fold, to be Or Lagoyim, to fill the world with light.  As such, we have all the more reason that in this season of teshuvah / repentance, we as a people need to be asking for selihah.  

I mentioned in this space a few weeks back the incident in downtown Jerusalem where a gang of Jewish youths attacked Arab teens, seriously injuring one.  A crowd of as many as 100 bystanders watched, and nobody attempted to stop these boys, even from kicking the victim when he was down and already clearly injured.

On the heels of this, just this past Monday, vandals set fire to the main entrance of the Trappist monastery at Latrun, right on the main highway to Jerusalem, and spray-painted on the exterior wall, “Jesus is a monkey,” and the names of recently-evacuated settlements.

The monastery dates to 1890, and the twenty monks that live there produce wine and live mostly in silence.

Now of course, we do not yet know who perpetrated this, and certainly Israeli police are investigating.  But it seems likely that this crime was committed by radical members of the pro-settler movement, and particularly part of a series referred to as “price tag” attacks. The most prominent of these attacks, you may recall, was the burning of the mosque in the Israeli Bedouin town of Tuba-Zangariyya last October; in June, there were several incidents, including the burning of another mosque near Ramallah, and vandalism in the mixed Jewish/Arab coexistence village of Neveh Shalom, also near Latrun.  The so-called “price tag” label has been found spray-painted on some of the sites; it is a threat from the radical fringe that Israeli and Palestinian society will have to “pay” for the evacuation of settlements for the sake of peace.

If the vandalism at the Latrun monastery was another in the series of “price tag” attacks in retribution for evacuation of illegal settlements, we as a people have much for which to atone.

Ladies and gentlemen, they are us.  Those on the fringe, those vandals, they are our cousins. And this is not acceptable.  

Yes, all of these incidents have been condemned by everybody, left and right. Yes, there are bad apples in every barrel.  But these bad apples are ours, and the damage they do to the image of Judaism and Jewry to those outside of our tradition is irreparable.  This is a classic example of what my grandparents would have called in Yiddish a shanda fur di goyim - a shameful act in the sight of the non-Jews.

In this season of teshuvah, in which our collective repentance is as essential as our personal repentance, we have to ask ourselves, in this time of reflection and teshuvah, what have we done to enable these criminals?  What have we said? What have we thought?  What have we left out?  What are we doing that has allowed them to think they can get away with it and that it is even honorable?

Our tradition teaches us that the destruction of the Second Temple at the hands of the Romans in 70 CE was brought upon our nation due to our having committed the sin of sin’at hinnam, causeless hatred.  The innocent, God-fearing Christians and Muslims who have suffered at the hands of our people are victims of this same transgression, and we cannot tolerate such grave injustice in our midst.

The prophet Isaiah predicted that our redemption would make us Or Lagoyim, a light unto the nations, not a shanda.  The perpetrators of these “price tag” attacks, and their ideological supporters, should be cut off.  This is not us.  And right now, as we close in on the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance, we need to be chanting in the mode of selihah.

After all, shouldn’t the world hear about the good things that Israel and the Jews have brought?  Shouldn’t the nations hear about the culture, the technology, and the academic achievement with which the State of Israel nourishes the world community?  Shouldn’t the anti-Semites of this world be required to answer to the democratic principles upheld by the Jewish state, its protection of personal liberty, its free and critical press, its commitment to the rights of everybody in Israeli society, including Israeli Arabs, women, gays and lesbians, and other minority groups?

How can we, as a people, offer up the absolute worst offenses against others, attacking the holy places of other religious traditions, for the entire world to see?  Ladies and gentlemen, we must maintain the upper hand by maintaining our respectability, by not sinking to the level of the enemies of peace.  We must uphold Isaiah’s vision of Or Lagoyim, of being the nation to which others look for inspiration.

Tonight begins the recitation of the selihot prayers, and with that the onslaught of musical hints at the coming potential for repentance and redemption.  We will hear tonight an intricately-crafted musical experience that is designed to get us in the mood for teshuvah. 

And we should all be chanting in selihah mode.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, Sept. 7, 2012.)

"Rabbi, Is There a Blessing for a Curse?" Making Food Holy Again - Ki Tavo 5771

It seems that I have been left with no choice but to talk about God. Again. Those of you who were here two weeks ago might recall our discussion of theodicy, that is, various theological approaches to why there is suffering in the world. And some of you may have seen a short piece I wrote right before Hurricane Irene hit, about how storms, floods, and earthquakes should not be understood as punishments from God.

But here we are in Parashat Ki Tavo, where the dominant theme of today’s Torah reading is two lengthy litanies of blessings and curses, reflecting the Torah’s central theological stance, which is:

א. If we do what God asks of us, then we will receive blessings from on high.
ב. If we do not do what God asks of us, then we will be cursed.

Simple, right! Reward and punishment, right there on the parchment in black and cream.

I have a great deal of trouble with the idea, as the traditional theology might suggest, that my parents both contracted forms of cancer because they did something wrong, or that the righteous victims of the Holocaust were reincarnated souls of our ancestors who had sinned in building the Molten Calf at Mt. Sinai, as was suggested recently by former Israeli Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef.

Many of us struggle with this theology; the biblical character Job struggled with it, the rabbis of the Talmud, which is the primary source of the rabbinic commentary that more or less created Judaism as we know it, struggled with it, and I do too. The rabbis point to evidence that suggests that the world simply does not work this way.

Or does it?

Sometimes our actions yield results that they deserve. I think that there are some things that actually work according to what the Hindus call karma, the idea that what goes around, comes around. We also find the kernel of this idea in Jewish tradition. In Pirqei Avot 2:6, we read the following:

 אף הוא ראה גולגולת אחת צפה על פני המים; אמר לה, על דאטיפת אטיפוך, וסוף מטיפייך יטופון

“[Hillel] saw a skull floating on the surface of the water, and he said to it, ‘Even if they have drowned you because you drowned [others], those who drowned you will themselves be drowned.’ ”

What goes around, comes around. Sometimes we get what we deserve, says Hillel.

Returning to the blessings and curses in today’s parashah, it is worthwhile to note that many have to do with food. For example, among the blessings we find:

“Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.” (Deut. 28:5, Etz Hayim, p. 1149)
“The Lord will give you abounding prosperity in the issue of your womb, the offspring of your cattle, and the produce of your soil.” (28:11, p. 1150)

And among the curses: “If you plant a vineyard, you shall not harvest it. Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it.” (28:30-31, p. 1152)
“Though you take much seed out to the field, you shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it.” (28:38, p. 1153)

And others that are barely mentionable in polite company. In the world of our ancestors, food was life. If you had a good harvest, you lived well. If you had a poor harvest, you starved. Hence the gravity of these statements.

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I am teaching a class in the Youth House (our Hebrew High School) this fall, a class for which I have been in some sense preparing for at least 20 years. It’s called, “Food for Thought,” and it is an examination of issues surrounding food today and how these issues are connected to Judaism and Jewish principles. The most obvious connection between food and Judaism is that of kashrut, the dietary laws, but that is a secondary consideration of this class. There is so much more to talk about - like the following Torah commandments:

Bal tashhit - Do not waste (Deut. 20:19-20)
Tza’ar ba’alei hayyim - Prevent cruelty to animals (Deut. 22:6)
Lo ta’ashoq sakhir ani ve-evyon - Do not oppress a poor and needy laborer (Deut. 24:14-15)

We read all of these from the Torah within the last two weeks, and there are more. These are principles that should be considered in food production and consumption, and the point of the class is to raise awareness of how these issues play out today. We are so far from where our food comes from that it is easy to forget that it does not appear magically in supermarkets, neatly bagged and shelved. The story behind the food, however, is a part of the meal, and arguably references the blessings and curses I just mentioned. We will conclude the semester by producing a well-considered meal for the Youth House banquet in December.

In preparation for the class, I have been reading all sorts of interesting things about the food we eat. But a funny word crossed my desk this week, one that gets less funny the more you think about it. That word is, “shmeat.” As in, “Meat, shmeat.”

Shmeat, a contraction of “sheets of meat,” is a meat product that is cultured in a lab from animal cells growing in a nutrient broth, essentially the carnivore’s answer to in-vitro fertilization. So-called “tissue engineers” have done this, and are refining the product such that it might be in the near future a product that could be eaten, just like actual meat. But it will be healthier than meat, since its chemical composition can be carefully controlled, and will not come with any of the ethical problems that some people have with eating meat from animals.

The idea of shmeat appeals primarily to scientists who are looking for solutions to the problem of how to feed the world’s population, and also sounds good to environmentalists who are concerned about the problems that mass food production creates, like greenhouse gases that cause climate change, contamination of groundwater from pesticide runoff, and the breeding of resistant bacteria from agricultural overuse of antibiotics.

Let me tell you something that may alarm you: In 50 years, the world’s population will be 9 million people. In order to feed all those people, we will need to produce 70% more food than we do today, on the same amount of agricultural land.

Already, we live in a world of mass production of food, where chickens are bred to be mostly breast and thigh, where tomatoes are picked green and artificially reddened, so that they will make it to the store shelf and still look good, and where the standard banana breed, the Dwarf Cavendish, is in danger of being wiped out by an incurable banana blight.

But let’s face it - the idea of consuming meat grown in a laboratory hardly sounds appetizing. The technology of shmeat is not yet ready for mass production, but it probably will be in a few years. (It will be an interesting question regarding whether or not there can be kosher shmeat; I'm not ready to deal with that yet.)

Why am I telling you about this? (Other than to raise the question of whether shmeat is a blessing or a curse?)

I am telling you this because I’d like to raise in your minds this question: As consumers and as Jews, what are our responsibilities vis-a-vis food production as we sail into an overpopulated, underfed future?

Furthermore, since both our tradition and our culture emphasize the importance of food and its spiritual and emotional power, how can we as Jews face the coming wave of manufactured, food-like products, or the food science methods that have produced factory farms, bypassing the traditional agricultural integration that farmers have used for millennia, or the overfishing of our seas, or the fact confirmed by law-enforcement officials in the State of Florida, that there is outright slavery, that’s right, forced labor taking place in the tomato plantations there? (Google “tomato slavery” if you don’t believe me.)

Are we not taught that eating is a holy act? That food preparation requires adhering to a set of Jewish laws called kashrut that elevate our food? Do we not say berakhot / blessings before and after eating for that very purpose? I do not have time to address those questions in depth.

But I do have one suggestion that might be helpful: We have the power to turn curses into blessings. We have within our hands the ability to make choices that change the karma, to alter the cause-and-effect cycle.  If we support a system that favors the bottom line at the expense of respect for God’s Creation, we’ll get what we deserve.

If however, we make educated choices about consumption, and work within the system to produce positive change, then we may be able to honor the complexity of the natural order and still take on the challenges of feeding the billions of new neighbors that will be joining us in the next few decades.

So how do we accomplish this?

1. Consider where your food comes from, how it was produced, how it was harvested. How far did it travel to get to your plate?

2. Strive to find sources that are sustainable, that minimize human impact on the Earth, that seek to lessen the collateral damage. When possible, buy fruits in vegetables in their proper seasons, when they come to you from nearby farms rather than from Mexico and China.  Join a CSA ("Community Supported Agriculture" program) if possible.

3. Remember also that while we all love low prices, that supporting sustainable growers costs more of our personal income, but lowers the cost to the world. Paying extra pays into the future, benefiting not only the people who grow and harvest our food, but also enables local, organic, and fair-trade producers to expand their crops and compete with the conventional growers. The real cost of a tomato is far more than what we pay at the supermarket.

We have to, quite literally, put our money where our mouths are.

The holy moment of berakhah, before and after eating food, is intended to raise our awareness. Hamotzi lehem min ha-aretz - Praised are You, God, who brings forth food from the Earth - this is a reminder that eating is not just about us. It’s also about the partnership with God.

Seek the holy choices. We can thereby turn a few curses into blessings. This is the lesson of Parashat Ki Tavo, and the lesson of the upcoming High Holidays as well: that we have the power to change outcomes.  What goes around, comes around.

Let me add that, as the fall unfolds, I will be putting web-based resources up on my blog so that you can read and learn more about these issues. Watch for it.

Shabbat shalom.

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 9/17/11.)

Elul 17: Transforming Curses into Blessings

Have you ever paused to consider the blessings and curses in your life? Read this sentence, and then close your eyes for 30 seconds to do so. Go ahead, try it!

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We all have things that we appreciate, and circumstances that we could do without. Parashat Ki Tavo, which we are reading this week in the Torah, delineates in alternatively abundant delight and horrific despair the good things that will happen to us if we follow God's mitzvot / commandments, and the terrible things that will ensue if we do not. It is in fact notable that there is no middle ground - it seems to be all or none.

The reality, however, is that we all have a share of blessings and curses in our lives, often (but not always) independent of our behavior. The Torah's theological stance does not necessarily align with contemporary ways of understanding God and our lives.

Nonetheless, we are now in the latter half of the month of Elul, leading up to Rosh Hashanah. This is the month of heshbon ha-nefesh, self-reflection with an eye toward spiritual inventory. Perhaps the essential question of Elul is, how can I transform myself such that some of the curses in my life become blessings?

Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah!

****


This post is one in a series of thoughts for Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah; I am trying to post one every day of the month, except for Shabbat Here are links to the previous posts:

Elul 16: Things to Remember in Elul

Elul 15: New Year of the Soul

Elul 14: Translating the Self

Elul 12: What's Ten Years?

Elul 10: Teshuvah Three-Step

Elul 9: Vidui and the "Jewish Science"

Elul 8: The Two Types of Forgiveness

Elul 7: The Sounds of Elul

Elul 6: If you had only one request from God

Elul 5: High Stakes Accounting

Elul 3: Teshuvah Inventory Questions

Elul 2: The Spaces In-Between

Elul 1: Resonances of the Shofar

Rosh Hodesh Elul: What's more important than electricity?


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