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

A new version of the Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach is available, for the first time in two years.

I look forward to the day when a haggadah which is feminist and poetic, aiming to integrate traditional texts with new and living insights, doesn’t seem radical. For now, maybe using a creative, homegrown haggadah is one way to help that reality arise, bimheirah v’yameinu. If that’s a notion that interests you, here’s one option.

The Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach, version 6.0 [.pdf download, 2.6M]

Thoughts, feedback, commentary always welcome and appreciated. Wishing y’all a good journey through the waning and waxing of the moon until Pesach arrives.

Shalom and welcome to Tikkun Tips, a monthly nugget of eco-Jewish thought from your friends at the Teva Learning Center. Nearly three weeks ago we celebrated the holiday of Passover by gathering around the table and retelling the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. The path from slavery to liberation. Many of us also spent the weeks leading up to Passover in a frenzy, thoroughly cleaning our homes and looking for any last remnants of chametz, or the bread products from which we are commanded to abstain for the weeklong celebration.

Many Hasidic Rabbis have drawn metaphorical lessons from the Passover story and the rituals associated with it. One commonly taught idea is that the Hebrew name for Egypt, Mitzraim, comes from the root tzar, or narrow. Egypt was a place of narrowness for our people; slavery was more than a physical reality, it was a state of mind as well. The exodus from Egypt was a move from a place of narrowness to the expansiveness of the desert, the freedom of openness.

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Yesterday at our Shabbat morning minyan, I noticed a particularly large number of parents and children. Over here was an adult woman helping her elderly mother by pointing along to the transliteration in the siddur. Over there was a man with his four year old in his lap, his tallit falling down across her shoulders. There was also one family with three generations present: a member celebrating his sixtieth birthday, his parents who attended for the occasion, and his son who chanted Torah in his honor.

As it was Shabbat Hagadol (”The Great Shabbat,” the Shabbat which falls before Pesach) I thought of the special Haftarah we read for this occasion, Malachi 3, which ends with the classic passage:

“Lo, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the awesome fearful day of the Lord. He shall reconcile parents with children and children with parents…”

The image of reconciliation in these verses are meant to evoke a sense of the messianic era ushered in by the prophet Elijah. I couldn’t help but think yesterday, as I looked around our sanctuary, that we were all getting a little taste of messianic days right there in our modest little minyan.

Children, of course, are central to the Pesach story. The Torah commands us to teach this story to our children, and the seder includes numerous pedagogical exercises that help us instill its sacred meaning and relevance: the youngest child asks the Four Questions; we read about the four different kinds of children who respond differently to the seder experience; we add songs at the end of the seder in order to keep our children (hopefully!) interested and engaged. On a somewhat darker level, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the seder story also includes notable examples of children in peril. In particular, Pharoah’s decree to kill all newborn male children drives home the tragically familiar truth that it is inevitably children - the most vulnerable members of society - who are the first to bear the brunt of communal persecution.

This is for me one central but too often ignored lesson of the Pesach story: the sacred imperative to protect the rights of all our children. It is an imperative that goes to the very survival of society - for the very future of communities and nations are directly related to the extent to which they safeguard the well-being of their youngest members. (In this regard, I am intrigued by the full text of Malachi 3: “He shall reconcile parents with children and children with parents, so that, when I come, I do not strike the whole land with utter destruction.”)

Alas, in the 21st century, our global community is failing their children miserably. According to Human Rights Watch:

The global scandal of violence against children is a horror story too often untold. With malice and clear intent, violence is used against the members of society least able to protect themselves - children in school, in orphanages on the street, in refugee camps and war zones, in detention, and in fields and factories. In its investigations of human rights abuses against children, Human Rights Watch has found that in every region of the world, in almost every aspect of their lives, children are subject to unconscionable violence, most often perpetrated by the very individuals charged with their safety and well-being.

Here at home, the National Center for Children in Poverty estimates that

Twelve million children live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level—which is about $16,000 for a family of three and $19,000 for a family of four. Perhaps more stunning is that 5 million children live in families with incomes of less than half the poverty level—and the numbers are rising.

The Children’s Defense Fund offers the following sobering data:

- A baby is born without health care every 52 seconds;

- A child is abused or neglected every 35 seconds - 906,000 a year.

- Over 3/4 of youths in detention have untreated mental health disorders.

- A child drops out of school every nine seconds of the school day.

- One out of every three Black baby boys born in 2001 will spend time in prison during their lifetimes.

If we do believe that Pesach compels us not only to teach our children but to keep them safe, then facts such as these should awaken us to resolve and inspire us to action. Please click the links above and find how how you can help make a difference this Passover.

May we find the means to reconcile ourselves to all our children; may we ourselves bring the Messiah, speedily in our own day.

From the Jewish Funds for Justice– a guide to including discussions of immigration in your seder.

Chag Sameach!

Through April and into May, “Passover” has been happening in the streets of America.

It has been coming not from a written book, but from the hearts and minds and legs and prayers of a people. It is happening in Spanish and “Spanglish” more than in Hebrew.

Two million people in the streets against a Pharaoh who is saying “Let us make it a criminal act, a felony to be punished with prison at ‘hard labor,’ to live in the United States without a document. Let us make it a felony to feed or heal or educate or comfort these criminals.

“Let us build a wall, with guns to kill anyone who dares to cross - just as the ancient Pharaoh ordered the murder of the boy-children of this folk whose name, “Hebrews,” meant “the ones who cross over”; the wetbacks.

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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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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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Like many Jews my age, I was raised on the stories of my great-grandparents’ immigration struggles—my great-grandfather waking at dawn to study Talmud before spending the day working as a peddler; my grandfather and his two brothers doing homework together in the room they shared in their family’s tiny apartment in Dorchester, Massachusetts; and the labor struggles at the cap factory where another great-grandfather worked. When I was eight years old, my father took the opportunity of one of my first visits to New York City to introduce me to Union Square and to the story of Emma Goldman. Later, I heard teachers and rabbis speak with pride about the Jewish community’s involvement in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

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Heeb N’ Vegan’s Michael Croland provides numerous tips and resources for vegans celebrating the Passover holiday.

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