Radical Torah

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Rabbi Peter Stein

Over the last few years, I have come to understand that the laws, teachings and exhortations of the Bible can be summed up in one central idea: What the Bible is trying to teach us is how to build a sustainable society. Specifically, it is trying to teach us how to build a society that is economically, ecologically, socially and spiritually sustainable.

These four criteria are the lens through which we must view everything we do. They are the measure by which we must evaluate every choice we make, whether it is a personal decision, such as where to settle or how to eat; a decision at work, such as what kind of product to market; or a political decision such as land use, taxation or trade policy. Everything is subject to the test of sustainability.

When evaluating a decision by these measures, we must ask many hard questions. I would like to suggest just a few in each area.

When considering if a choice is economically sustainable, we must ask basic questions about propriety and scale and responsibility, the most basic of which is ‘Can I afford this?’ or ‘Can our society afford this?’ We must ask: ‘Will this decision create greater equality or greater inequality?’ ‘Does this choice strengthen the essential connections between ownership, profit and responsibility or does it further abstract these notions, severing these essential connections?’ And most importantly we must ask: ‘How much is enough?’

When considering if a choice is ecologically sustainable, we must first remember the intimate and essential connections between all parts of God’s Creation. Then we must ask: ‘Will this decision lead to greater health for human communities and the natural surroundings on which they depend or will it destroy their health?’ ‘Can this decision be repeated on an on-going basis without degrading the soil, plants, animals, air and water?’ ‘Will this decision deplete the abundance God has blessed us with or enhance it?’

Social sustainability addresses some of the most emotionally and politically charged issues we know, most of which our society is not prepared to deal with. We must ask: ‘Will this decision increase segregation by race and class, or will it reduce it?’ ‘Will it create communities in which people of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds live together in close proximity and relate as neighbors and equals?’ ‘Will this choice create opportunities for reconciliation and sharing and trust, or will it promote division, fear and distrust?’

Finally, we must inquire if our choices are spiritually sustainable. This is the most difficult of the four to conceptualize, but I think it can be explained in two ways. On the one hand, it is the sum-total of the other three. If our decisions are not economically, ecologically and socially sustainable, they will not be spiritually sustainable. If we make decisions that perpetuate economic injustice, degrade God’s Creation or provoke social tensions, there is no way that we will be on good terms with God or ourselves.

But spiritual sustainability is more than just the sum of the other three. It has its own meaning and its own set of questions. When considering if a choice is spiritually sustainable, we would ask such questions as: ‘Is it beautiful?’ – for the soul needs beauty to survive and flourish. ‘Will this increase my material needs and dependencies or reduce them? – for a spirit reliant on ever more material goods will never be satisfied. ‘Is it meaningful?’ – for if we spend our time doing things that are void and worthless, we will not feel good about ourselves. And finally: ‘Is it humble?’ – for while we were meant to create and aspire and achieve, if we do so without bounds of humility and propriety, we will suffer despair when we one day, unexpectedly, reach our bounds.

These are the questions we must ask.

And we must be very clear about their implications: if we do not choose what is sustainable, then we have chosen what is unsustainable, and what is unsustainable, by definition, will not last. These questions will be hard and they may make us uncomfortable. They may call into question many of the comforts and material standards to which we have grown accustomed. We may not like the answers we find to these questions. But they are the right and necessary questions.

Rabbi Stein can be reached at peterdstein-at-yahoo-dot-com.

Cross Posted on Jewschool

Parashat Tazria- Metzora used to make me really uncomfortable. I bristled at the notion that bearing a daughter creates twice as long a period of impurity as bearing a son. I couldn’t relate to the alleged correlation between eruptive conditions and spiritual impurity. The obsession with pure and impure seemed basically unrelated to the Judaism I know and love and practice.

Over the last year, though, I’ve started to understand this question of taharah and tumah (loosely, and arguably poorly, translated as “purity” and “impurity”) in some new ways. What changed my sense of these concepts (and, by extension, this double-wide Torah portion)? Joining my shul’s chevra kadisha (volunteer burial society), and doing an extended unit of CPE.

In other words, coming into direct contact with sickness and with death.

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The banners, signs, posters and bumper stickers scream “silence=death.” The flyers, handouts, posters and bulletins urge silence as a spiritual path and possibility. What is one to make of the silence that follows death? The silence that follows horrific and tragic death? When God is the author of the homicide?

Leviticus 10:1-3 Now Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before God alien fire, which God had not enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from God and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of [lifnei] God. Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what God meant when God said: Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, And gain glory before all the people.” And Aaron was silent.

The scene is the dedication of the tabernacle. Following a week of learning the details of the tabernacle and the service, on the eighth day, Aaron, the high priest, finally moves to dedicate the tabernacle. With the help of his sons, he performs the service—the slaughtering, the sprinkling of the blood, and finally the placing of the appropriate cuts of the sacrifices (one for himself, one for all Israel) on the altar. At the expected moment, fire comes forth from God and consumes the sacrifices from upon the altar. This is the moment of God’s appearance in the Tabernacle. All the people fall on their face and praise God. (A sure sign in TaNaKh that God is in the house is that people fall on their face.)

Immediately following this moment of exalted joy, Aaron’s sons brought fire into the Tabernacle. This was their job (Leviticus 1:7). This day however Moshe had not explicitly commanded that they bring the fire (Rashbam). Somehow this triggered God’s wrath or this just triggered the sacrifice machinery and they were “consumed” in the same way that the sacrifices were consumed.

We read of the exchange between Moshe and Aharon. Moshe opens with: “This is what God meant when God said: Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, And gain glory before all the people.” The commentators are, as usual, divided. Rashi, following a midrashic tradition, says that this alludes to a statement God made when initially commanding the building of the tabernacle. “and there I will meet with the Israelites, and it shall be sanctified by My Presence [bi-khvodi].” Read, rather, “it shall be sanctified with those who honor Me [bi-me-khubadai].” According to this tradition, Moshe tells Aharon that he was aware that the Tabernacle was to be sanctified with a death. He thought that it would be either his or Aharon’s death. It turns out that it was Aharon’s sons’ deaths. The point, however, is the same. Aharon’s silence, it would seem, is acquiescence.

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Usually I send out a pre-Passover teaching. This year what came to me came only at the seder, so I’m sharing it now.

Here are two takes on the Passover seder’s message, reflecting on Yachatz, the moment when we split the middle of three matzahs into a bigger and smaller piece, and then say “This is the bread of poverty our ancestors ate…All who are hungry come and eat, all who need come and make Pesach”:

In my family going back to my great-grandfather’s seder, we always used whole, round hand-made matzahs. At Yachatz, he would take the middle matzah and break it very carefully into one big piece like a dalet (imagine an open-mouthed Pacman) and a small piece that is maybe 1/4 or at most 1/3 of a circle (you can’t do this so easily with machine-made because of the rectilinear perforations). This year when I held up that smaller very broken-looking piece and recited “Ha Lachma Anya - This is the bread of poverty”, the words “Let any who are hungry come and eat” struck me in a new way . It’s quite a stark image - according to our words, we aren’t inviting all those hungry people to share in the feast that will follow, or even to share the afikomen that makes up the bigger half. The invitation is very literally to eat a fragment of a broken matsah that wouldn’t even be enough for one person.

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In this week’s parshah, Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu offer God an “alien fire” that God did not command them to offer to Him. Proceeding their offering, they are consumed by a fire from God, and they die.

I have heard/read this story many times, and each time I read it, I never know how to interpret it. Traditionally, there are many different readings of the story. Some say that Nadav and Avihu were drunk at the time, and it is inappropriate to sacrifice to God while drunk. Later in this Parshah it is stated that there is a prohibition against being intoxicated when entering the ohel moed.

Other interpreters believe that Nadav and Avihu sinned by having too much ambition. The 19th century commentator, Shimshon Rafael Hirsch claimed that Nadav and Avihu sinned in not consulting their elders, or the tradition, and making themselves the authority figures in the situation. Other commentaries say, similarly, that Nadav and Avihu wanted to become the highest leaders of the nation and so they took worship into their own hands to show that they were ready to replace the current leaders, Moshe and Aaron.

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This week’s parshat Sh’mini may contain 2 enlarged letters, depending on whether or not you are using a Chasidic Sefer Torah.

The first is Vayiqra/Leviticus 11:30 – the large Lamed in ve-haLta’ah, “lizard”.

…and the gecko, and the land-crocodile, and the lizard, and the sand-lizard, and the chameleon.

This large Lamed was not approved by “Midrash Rabah Aqim”, but was added later by some Kabbalist rabbis.

The second enlarged letter is found in Vayiqra/Leviticus 11:42 – the large Vav in gachOn, “belly”.

“Anything going about on its belly, anything going about on all fours, up to anything with many legs, among all swarming-creatures that swarm upon the earth: you are not to eat them, for they are detestable-things!”

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Parashat Shemini contains one of the most striking short stories in all of Torah: the death of Nadab and Abihu.

Now Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before Adonai alien fire, which He had not enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from Adonai and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of Adonai. Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what Adonai meant when He said: / Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, / And assert My authority before all the people.” / And Aaron was silent. (Leviticus 10:1-3)

It’s a harrowing tale, particularly for those of us who favor the occasional liturgical innovation. Orthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch famously drew an analogy between Nadab and Abihu and Reform and Conservative leaders who presume to make changes in Jewish tradition. It’s easy to read this as a parable of why Jewish religious practice needs to stay the same: because the Holy Blessed One smites those who dare to make changes in the determined order of things. Easy…but simplistic. And limited. And arguably incorrect.

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JPost reports,

Avinoam Magen isn’t sealing off his hametz this year. Nor is he is burning or trashing it. Instead he’s using the Pessah holiday to make a statement about coexistence.

A resident of the Ofarim settlement, he asked Nauaf Khalaf, an acquaintance from the neighboring Palestinian village of Rantis, to help him distribute food to families in need.

[…]

“If there are children who are starving we should help them,” he said.

Full story.

The past two articles I wrote for Radical Torah, here & here, explained the small Alef at the end of the word Va-Yiqra (He called), & the diminutive Mem at the beginning of the word moqdah (firewood).

These two parshiyot work together to provide us all with a glimpse of Olam Ha-Ba (The World that is Coming).

There are other Alef & Mem combinations that represent pairs of redeemers. For example: Efrayim and Menashe were the first pair of brothers in the whole dramatic Biblical narrative to have a good relationship. Up until them, all brothers descending from Abraham suffered from terrible sibling rivalry & lived in deeply dysfunctional families. It isn’t until the end of Sefer B’reyshit/Genesis that two brothers are worthy of Israel’s brakhah, the knots of broken kin having been untied, B”H. A good relationship between family is a necessary element of redemption, which is why we bless our sons each Friday night that they may grow to be like Efrayim & Menashe.

Aharon & his brother Moshe were empowered by G@d to bring us up from Egypt. Esther & her uncle Mordechai were likewise another Alef-Mem pair empowered to save us from genocide in Persia. In the future, says the haftorah we read on Shabbat HaGadol last week, our saviours will be Eliyahu Ha-Navi (Elijah the Prophet) & the Moshiach. Of course, G@d is the only real redeemer, & is named, among other things, Avinu Malkeynu (our Father, our King) as well as Mageyn Avraham (shield of Abraham).

It’s interesting to note that Alef & Mem, when put together as a word, spells eym (mother), eem (if, in case, when), & om (nation). It’s even more interesting that the gematria of the Alef-Mem word is 41, the same as for Eli (my G@d). The Redeemer.

May we all have a chag kasher ve-same’ach & be fully redeemed this Pesach.

SocialAction.com has a great collection of Passover readings on social justice issues. Check it out here.

Reb Arthur, at the Shalom Center, has a large collection of writings on Passover: You can view them all here.

Also, on Jewschool, Radical Torah’s contributing editor Sarah “Shamir” Chandler has compiled a list of online Passover resources, including some social action related materials. You can view the complete list here.

The Haggadah is about telling a story that can transform us. It’s a seder because we order the different meanings of each symbol by arranging them from slavery to freedom, or as the Talmud says, “from g’nut/degredation to shevach/praise”. Most of the time there are four meanings, going from slavery, to leaving Egypt, to entering the land, to looking forward to redemption.

Any important symbol or verse that appears in the Hagadah more than one time is ordered in this way - hence it’s a seder, an “order”. Matzah is explained four times, there are four children, in order from lowest to highest (wise is the lowest stage), we explain the verse, “Because this God did to me by bringing me out of Egypt,” four times . The different meanings, taught through verses and explanations and through eating itself, are always ordered from the most difficult to the most liberated.

However, there’s one important symbol that we don’t explain even once: the charoset.

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For gay and lesbian Jews and their allies, parshat Acharei Mot contains some of the most infamous passages of the Torah, but the preceding two, Tazria and Metzora — usually read together as a “double portion” — contain some of the most obscure. In these portions, we learn about the laws of leprosy (actually tzaraat, a skin disease similar to it but different in various ways), seminal emissions, and menstruation; here we are told the detailed method of sin-offerings and wave-offerings, and the methods of purity and contamination. Few people spend much time poring over the vivid anatomical and biological details of Tazria-Metzora. And yet, how can we understand the meaning of the Levitical sexual prohibitions without a sense of their immediate context?

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Shavu’ah tov! I’d intended to post this before Shabbes, but as I only just got back from here, yesterday, well…

Parshat Tzav Sefer Va-Yiqra/Leviticus 6:2 reads:

Tzav et-Aharon v’et-banav leymod zot Torah ha’olah hi ha’olah al moqdah al-hamizbey’ach kal-halailah ad-haboqer v’eysh hamizbey’ach tuqad bo:

“Command Aharon & his sons, saying: This is the instruction for the offering-up - that is what rises up on the firewood on the altar all night, until daybreak, while the fire of the altar is kept blazing on it:”

In this pasuq/verse, the Torah tells us the sacrifice should remain on the altar all night. The word for firewood (or furnace), moqdah, is written in the Torah with a small letter Mem. This Mem teaches us that the fervor we must cultivate is not the open, flaming kind, but the white heat of the centre of the brand. The centre of the Earth.

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